Quick fashion: Legacy brands race to match instant delivery demands.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Fashion retailers are speeding up deliveries to keep pace with instant-gratification shopping driven by quick-fashion startups, with established players and newer brands taking sharply different approaches.For example, brands such as Biba and The House of Rare have adopted a more calibrated, infrastructure-led strategy rather than a rapid overhaul of existing store networks. “We’ve been doing this in a very soft way but not necessarily from the same stores because that affects the customer experience,” said Siddharth Bindra, managing director of Biba.Bindra said using retail stores as fulfilment hubs for rapid delivery creates operational constraints, particularly given store sizes and layouts.

“We don’t have very large stores; they are anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 square feet. So that’s not the right efficiency,” he said.Instead, the brand is evaluating a hub-based model in cities with higher store density, enabling faster deliveries without disrupting in-store operations.

“If we do it, it will be through proper hubs in cities where we have four to five stores, where we would start with quick commerce and accelerate it,” he said. This could enable same-day or two- to three-hour deliveries.The House of Rare, which houses Rare Rabbit (men's urban fashion) and Rareism (women's fashion), is adopting a similar approach, evaluating city-level fulfilment hubs in markets with higher store concentrations to enable faster deliveries while keeping retail outlets focused on walk-in consumers.The strategy reflects a broader attempt among legacy retailers to balance speed with experience, rather than treating stores as interchangeable logistics nodes.