I find myself agreeing with many of these, but the one I am just not understanding is Chloe. I see Chloe on sale quite a bit (one site was even selling the Edith for around $500 recently!) and while they make very nice bags, I admit I am a bit suprised to see people ranking it above Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, and
Fendi (as well as others.)
OK, here's my take on the situation (for what it's worth!)...
The fact that there are lots of Chloe bags on sale, is not due to the brand being unpopular (quite the reverse, in fact), it's because; a) certain designs have reached saturation point, b) the newer designs aren't rated as highly and c) due to the previous seasons' enormous demand, the stores have over-ordered.
When Phoebe left, Chloe decided to play it safe, by continuing to produce
a lot of variations on Phoebe's, very popular, designs, rather than introducing too many new ones for A/W '06 - '07. This, as well as the less attractive new designs, led to a slight fall in popularity, as the fashionistas began to move on (and/or use their older chloe bags, instead!).
When a brand is/has been very popular, stores tend to over-order. The buyers have to place orders months in advance and so it's always a bit of a gamble.
Having said it's a gamble, even if a brand, or design, is becoming less popular with wealthy fashionistas, there will still, inevitably, be a large number of people who loved the original designs and the quality, but who couldn't afford to buy them at full price (or not as many of them as they'd have liked, anyway!) and these people will still pounce on the discounted bags.
This makes bags by a popular designer/design house, even one on the way down, far less of a gamble for retailers, than those by a designer/design house that looks very promising, but that has not yet become very popular.
An example of over-stocking - most US stores' websites I visited back in A/W '03 - '04 (Phoebe's best season, IMO) had no Chloe bags, whatsoever and even by S/S '04 they had, at the most, one (NM had a green, metal Mesh Hobo, if I remember correctly!); so they, presumably, realised that they had missed out on the beginning of the boom in popularity and from then on, ordered an ever increasing number of bags every season, until in A/W '06 - '07, they had a
very large number indeed!
Bags by less popular designers are generally stocked in far lower numbers and so, even if they don't sell at full price, there are, obviously, less of them to put on sale at the end of the season.
So, just because there are more bags on sale, it doesn't necessarily mean that the designer has been unpopular, up to that point, anyway; often, quite the reverse.
You may well be right about Chloe's future popularity, though. We'll just have to wait and see how things progress with the newly appointed CD...
