Ooh La La is one of Fresno’s oldest boutiques, starting in 2007. Photo contributed.

Back to school is one shopping season retailers hope will begin the long work of putting 2020 behind them.

When the pandemic hit and stores closed their doors, it froze 2020 fashion trends, says Farla Efros, president at HRC Retail, an advisory group with presence throughout North America. Apparel is a complicated industry with designers deciding fashion trends 18 months before garments hit shelves.

With so many people working from home, clothing choices made by customers were made first out of practicality, with leisure and athletic wear putting formal wear down on the queue.

Of all the industries affected by the pandemic, apparel was uniquely complicated by disruptions in supply chains and consumer methods of shopping. And while retailers are still clearing out their 2020 inventory, Efros says fashion won’t be back to normal until 2022.

Without “essential” designation, many clothing stores were the last to reopen.

Big-box clothiers with expensive storefronts essentially became warehouses, Efros said.

Throughout the pandemic, retailers had trouble keeping the right inventory levels. Every customer age range seemed to catch on to online shopping.

Efros said the pandemic has normalized online shopping and it won’t be going away any time soon.

The owners of Ooh La La, a clothing boutique with locations in Clovis and Fresno, are closing their Fresno location — not because of a lack of sales, but rather to focus on e-commerce, said co-owner Norma Haynes.

When the pandemic hit, Haynes, her husband and sister brought their merchandise home and took pictures of everything to post online. They found customers all over the country ordering their clothes. It was so successful they brought on another employee to head up their online marketing and visibility.

They’re transitioning all of their employees at their location at the Villaggio Shopping Center to their new warehouse in Fowler to focus on order fulfillment.

Retailers are going to have trouble knowing what consumers want, said Efros. Many designs were tabled. The question is whether those designs will end up on racks and shelves in 2022 or be simply tossed aside.

“[Designers] never stopped,” said Efros. “It was just a matter of sourcing the goods and actually having consumers want to purchase the goods.”

Athletic and leisure wear took center stage throughout the pandemic with stay-at-home orders shifting consumer focuses to comfort. Premium athletic and leisure wear made up 65% of the clothing market in 2018, according to Million Insights, a market research company. Technavio, another market research company, forecast a 4% growth from 2020 to 2024.

Haynes said comfort has even found its way into formal wear, something she calls “casual luxury” — lounge outfits that can be worn on a night out.

Dresses were hot this year, she said. In 2021, they didn’t buy as many cocktail dresses, focusing rather on dresses that could function either casually or formally.

Haynes hopes holiday shopping will be big this year, but she’s still cautious. Uncertainty around Covid has her hesitant about what to buy.

Efros expects people are ready to begin buying formal wear again, but the rise of the Delta variant has Haynes wondering if investing in those clothes is the right move.

This week marked the beginning of the fall purchasing expo shows in Las Vegas and Georgia. Haynes didn’t go this year because of Covid concerns, but she said vendors accommodated her, showing her what they were showcasing.

Clothiers will still be reducing inventory all the way to the holiday season, said Efros, perhaps even to 2022.

Jennifer Walker, owner of Peyton’s Attic in Old Town Clovis, said she doesn’t do the volume of big box retailers, which helped her from keeping too much inventory on the shelves. After making a transition to online and doing customer appointments, she was able to move her 2020 inventory, she said. Getting her website up and running was very time consuming. What Walker still experiences are delays in getting orders in. Orders can take as long as a month whereas before she could get them in a week. There was a big drop-off in demand for office wear before and she’s starting to see it pick up.  

At Ooh La La, Haynes is purchasing for fall right now. Even in 100-degree weather, they’ve begun bringing in jackets and sweaters because if they wait too long in ordering, the best items will have already picked clean by larger retailers.

Their increased online presence also changed the way they order. They usually only buy six items per style, but they’ve begun ordering more duplicates to meet demand. Before those six items might sit for a week before being sold out, but online, they move a lot quicker.

“It’s amazing how fast they get snapped up,” said Haynes.