Branding the man: why men are the next frontier in fashion retail

If you blinked, you missed it. Hordes of fashionistas and just plain ordinary people bewitched by all those bold Missoni prints and colors, descended on Target stores this morning long before the 10 A.M. opening time.

At dawn, the Target website was already crashing from so many people trying to grab any one of the pieces from the sizeable collection. Compared to other collaborations (last year it was Liberty of London), the Missoni for Target collection is one of the largest, with 400 pieces in total. The collection was slated to sell at all 1,762 Target stores in the U.S. and online through Oct. 22. Whether Target will restock is yet to be determined, according to one customer service employee.

By the time we got  to the Target at the Serramonte Mall in Daly City at a little after 10:15 A.M., the shelves were completely bare and the store oddly quiet.

Staff reported that within minutes items were torn from shelves and some even damaged in scuffles that included raised fists. In housewares, a martini glass was all that was left — it had a chip on the rim.

Latecomers picked over the lonely leftovers, which included one dishtowel and three eyemasks. A women’s wide-wale corduroy coat was left hanging in the candy aisle, while a pair of Missoni print ballet flats were discarded near the umbrellas.

Two fashionable women sauntered in at 10:30 trying their best to look only casually interested: one wearing all black, a large black sunhat, and black glasses, while the other wore her own Missoni top with a Louis Vuitton Suhali bag. After a brief tour through the empty shelves, they smartly went to customer service, where carts of “go-backs” held a few discarded Missoni pieces. They fingered the baby jumpers and left.

Meanwhile at the Target in Colma, A posse of five young women were just finishing a solid two hours of trolling the aisles and were now idling before checkout deciding what to keep and what to toss. Their cart was heaped with Missoni goods from virtually every department.

Those less fortunate circled nearby like sharks, eying any items which might get tossed away. “This was worse than Black Friday,” said one sales associate. “It was just crazy in here.”

By 11 A.M., Target staff were already pulling down the Missoni displays and filling shelves with other miscellaneous merchandise from their own in-house brands. Missoni accomplished.

See what you missed. View the entire collection here.

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