Love Affairs in Melbourne-Chapter 275 - 270: A Dazzling Entrance (9)

Yan Ling and Yan Yan had reached a consensus: after the Haute Couture Fashion Week in July 2015, all 36 existing Y·Y boutiques would have a "grand reopening."

The streetwear sections would still only operate for half a month; for the remaining half, nothing would be sold except shoes.

It was still streetwear, but the store would go through phased openings.

To smooth over the "reopening," starting from the last two months of 2014, the "business hours" of each Y·Y store had already begun to regularize.

Those that opened for the first half of the month would always do so; those that opened for the second half would stick to that schedule.

For six months straight, they opened on the same day each month.

Originally, fans complained about Y·Y’s irregular hours. Now that it had become fixed, more people were complaining, feeling that the fun of "blockade and gamble" was lost.

What fans of other brands were like, Yan Yan had no clue.

But as for Y·Y’s fans, despite the complaints, the fandom remained strong.

The real situation was simply that the more they griped, the hotter the brand got.

Y·Y had a "true love fan" who repeatedly graffiti’ed the walls of a store in New York; he queued up way ahead each month, waiting for the walls to be painted white, watching the white diminishing and the "permanent" graffiti increasing—yet none of his works remained.

This fan, who had not yet become a special design consultant, went online and accused the creative director of being blind.

His scolding skills were top-notch, his tirades rhythmic like rap—a composition of six or seven-hundred words without a single repetition.

After a good rant, he would return the following month to paint, and if his work still did not make the cut, he would resume his scathing critique.

Not only did his rants make the Y·Y brand more popular, but he himself also became a social media sensation.

The more he criticised, the hotter the brand grew; yet this was good fortune that came without fundamentally changing the brand.

The shops still only operated for half a month, sticking to the original business model.

Yan Ling had conducted market research and found that switching from opening half a month to every day might result in the loss of a large segment of fans.

After all, the "open when we feel like it" attitude was Y·Y’s intrinsic "street ethos."

Yet the step they were taking now was a necessity for Y·Y.

When the business was small, being wilful was acceptable, but if it continued to be wilful after growing, it would be difficult to truly expand.

Selling nothing but shoes for half a month seemed much simpler and easier than managing the streetwear’s full range, but that was just superficially.

Although Master Y was an incredibly stylish and well-built robot, many of Y·Y’s streetwear items were actually one-size-fits-all to simplify management.

If not for this practice, it would have been impossible to have exclusive one-off sizes.

But while clothes could be one size, shoes could not.

Oversized clothing might be worn as a "dress," and with accessories or hats, properly styled, it could still exude a unique charm.

However, selling shoes in the same manner, expecting size 35 feet to fit into size 45 shoes, was not wilfulness but sheer business incompetence.

Balancing small caprices with a major business was a brain-cell consuming task.

Especially since the design director had hardly any time to spare for Y·Y.

Clothing designs could be crowdsourced from various designers, but not shoes.

In Yan Ling’s vision, Y·Y should select some "classics" from past clothing pieces that received the most requests for reissue, and then unveil shoe lines based on those versions.

Clothing could come in a wild variety, but the shoes would only offer classic designs.

The benefit of selling classics was that styles could be preselected and produced domestically, allowing each store to sell the same shoes.

This approach could lead to mass-produced shoes, eliminating the need for countless new designs every month.

Make a buzz selling clothes for half the month, make a profit selling shoes the other half.

Yan Ling’s thoughts encapsulated Yan Yan’s own; focusing on making good shoes and good money was the solid principle.

However, the concept of "classics" was good but didn’t provide enough fan participation.

Moreover, each Y·Y store had its unique set of classics due to the brand’s peculiar mode of operation.

Even with the classic concept, if Yan Yan were to design all the shoes, it still wouldn’t be time or effort efficient.

Moreover, if a style couldn’t be sold in every store simultaneously, it still couldn’t be considered a mass-produced shoe.

After completing Maison Yan II’s first official Haute Couture show in January 2015, Yan Yan took a day and a half to ponder how to efficiently push Y·Y’s shoes to the market.

But the Haute Couture event had exhausted Yan Yan, and after contemplating the Y·Y shoe situation briefly, she fell straight into sleep.

And once asleep, she slumbered for nearly 20 hours in an undisturbable deep sleep state.

The worried assistant considered several times whether to call an ambulance, suspecting she had fainted.

Once Yan Yan finally awoke leisurely, she realized that she had precious little time left to devote to her "illegitimate child" Y·Y.

She had intended to rummage through Master Y’s database for elements that could refine some commonalities among Y·Y’s most popular shoe styles.

Street fashion and Haute Couture are two different worlds.

Street fashion’s foremost requirement is trendiness; extracting common traits from popular designs by trendy designers immediately strips away any individuality.

Yan Yan pondered and discarded her idea, placing the historical data of Y·Y behind her.

After a good sleep, inspiration suddenly struck Yan Yan.

She didn’t spend much time contemplating; she just started sketching the design.

Yan Yan conceived a pair of sleek, monochromatic shoes with the most fashionable look and the most comfortable feel, using the lightest materials.

In this design, Yan Yan channeled all she had learned in the shoe industry over the past few years.

The shoes were great in every way, except that the color scheme was too monochrome; despite their stylish shape, they lacked the street brand’s quirky, distinctive temperament.

Once finished, Yan Yan immediately sent the design to Yan Ling, instructing him to produce a sample.

Despite the lack of streetwear feel, she imperiously stated that she was still very sleepy, had no time left to make changes, and that this was the only shoe style for the year; the factory needed to expedite production.

Hearing about one shoe style per year, Yan Ling thought he had misheard. His cousin seemed to become more capricious with age.

However, after looking at the draft, Yan Ling understood Yan Yan’s intention.

Shaking his head, he finally grasped why many genius inventions originated from human laziness.