Retail Talent Trend - HK

Hong Kong is a regional service hub of retail and wholesale management for many international global brands.

Hong Kong Polytechnic University offers fashion-related studies, including bachelor's degree in fashion and textile, master's degree in global fashion management, and MBA program (fashion stream).

These unique combined platforms provide excellent opportunities to upbring and groom local fashion retailing/buying talents.

Hong Kong, a cosmopolitan rendezvous, attracts highly qualified fashion retailing/buying management professionals from all over the world.

These local and overseas fashion professionals offer deep and comprehensive knowledge of design and development, OTB management, planning and allocation management, strategic buying management, retail operations management, visual merchandising management, marketing management, etc.

They also have a unique ability to understand the cultural differences in Asia, enabling them to build market-specific, market-relevant, and consumer-relevant product assortments, operations and marketing strategies to achieve and maximize sales profitability.

With the ever-changing and dynamic fashion industry and the 2019 social activities in Hong Kong, fashion professionals have started their journey to expand their scopes into e-commerce and omnichannel management.
These new roles include e-commerce buying management, e-commerce operation management, marketplace management, graphic design, e-marketing management, etc.

E-commerce talents with HK/China/Asia Pacific focus will be in high demand. Fashion professionals are catching up and preparing to upskill and transfer their skills to welcome these new opportunities:

Digital Transformation:
Responding to the accelerating shift of consumer behaviors on digital channels in Asia, the Global Fashion & Footwear retail brands will focus their efforts on digitalization, such as Livestream selling events and innovative digital brand experience.

It will be one of their urgent priorities and key drivers in their agendas in the coming years to unlock new revenue opportunities and mitigate the challenges of brick-and-mortar performance due to disruption from COVID-19.

Asia Focus:
While Global Fashions & Footwear retail brands are navigating a volatile, disruptive, and uncertain global retail environment in the post-pandemic period, they witnessed their Asia Pacific focused business outperformed their expectations and has strong momentum in digital performance with double-digit growth.

Asia Pacific attracted the brands' attention, and they expected the Asia Pacific market to be the fastest-growing region.