Here is a small piece of fashion news that says a lot about where retail is heading: Karen Millen, the womenswear brand that closed its last physical stores seven years ago and went online-only, is returning to bricks-and-mortar. The brand is planning a new flagship on London’s Oxford Street, with more locations to follow. After nearly a decade of betting everything on e-commerce, one of the original online-only converts has decided that a website alone is not enough.
Karen Millen is not an outlier. Across the industry, brands that spent years closing stores are quietly reopening them, and pure-online players keep experimenting with pop-ups and showrooms. The reason is simple: shopping is not a purely digital activity. People still want to see fabric, try a fit, and walk out with something in hand. Retailers spent a decade treating physical stores as a cost to be eliminated, and now they are discovering that customers treat them as a feature, not a bug.
But here is the part the retailers would rather not talk about. The return of the store does not solve the problem that actually made customers angry: price. Stores are expensive to run, and every square foot of rent, staffing, and lighting gets folded into the price tag. That is why the same dress costs dramatically more in a boutique than it does before the brand name goes on it. Whether you buy online or in a store, you are still paying for the brand’s entire overhead — the store just moves where that overhead gets collected.
The smartest shoppers have figured out a third path that skips the argument entirely. Instead of choosing between a website and a store, they buy where the product is made. The factories that produce clothing for Western brands sell on platforms like Taobao, Weidian, and 1688 at a fraction of the retail price, and a purchasing agent will buy on your behalf, inspect the items (product and package photos included, more on request), repack everything into one parcel, and hold it free for 300 days until you are ready to ship.
Karen Millen’s return to the high street proves the channel debate is not going away. But you do not have to pick a side. You can simply skip both channels and buy at the source, where the markup has not been added yet — and let the retailers keep arguing about which storefront to sell it to you from.