Mulberry Is Banking on Cheaper Bags

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Despite reporting a whopping 74% collapse in full-year profit due to its failed luxury repositioning, Mulberry is still optimistic about the future. The Guardian reports that Mulberry's new lower-priced bags helped total retail sales rise 17% in the past 10 weeks.

"In spring/summer 2014, 45% of our bags were under £1,000. Today, about 71% are under £1,000, and that will increase to about 80%," Mulberry's chairman Godfrey Davis told the Telegraph.

The brand's Mini Lily bag has been leading the charge. "The under £500 [bag category] numbers about 5% [of the collection] at the moment and it's shortly to be around 16%. We've come up with some really good-looking small versions of our bags, and they've been really popular. There are some really nice things in there coming in the shops in the next two or three months," Davis said. WWD reported that Mulberry is also going to align the price of its shoes and ready-to-wear with the bags to make it more "relevant" for the brand's core shoppers.

Meanwhile, excitement is building about Mulberry's new creative director Johnny Coca, who joins Mulberry from Celine in July. But don't expect to see anything from Coca immediately. "It would be impossible to welcome someone with his creativity and his talent and oblige him to show something that he had had no time to design and prepare. So we won't have any show in September, we might do a small event just communicating Mulberry, but not a specific collection, we will have no product coming out in September for ready-to-wear," Mulberry CEO Thierry Andretta told the Telegraph.