Women Shun the Maternity Smock, and Stores Race to Catch Up
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Version 0 of 1. It has been more than 25 years since Demi Moore bared her pregnant belly on the cover of Vanity Fair, but retailers are finally catching up to the fact that pregnant women do not always want to hide under a muumuu. Some pregnant women want to — gasp — flaunt it. As cultural attitudes about pregnancy have shifted, so, too, has the maternity aisle, which is rapidly looking more like a high-end boutique than the sheet section at Bed Bath & Beyond. That has created an opportunity for a new crop of online shops and specialty stores, even as traditional maternity retailers have struggled to stay relevant. “Now we see shoppers, maternity shoppers, who also say, ‘You know, I’m showing off my body. I don’t have to hide it, so I want it to be a fashion statement,’” said Wendy Liebmann, the chief executive at WSL Strategic Retail, a consulting firm. Traditional maternity companies, long dominated by the giant Destination Maternity chain, have shrunk 0.2 percent each year since 2011, according to the research firm IBISWorld. But that figure does not include e-commerce, where style-conscious retailers are targeting millennial mothers who are already accustomed to shopping online, as well as the many women who are now choosing to have children later in life — when they may also have a bit more money to spend. Online-only stores like ASOS and Hatch cater to women who want to spend $50 to $250 on a dress. ASOS, the British fast-fashion retailer, views maternity as such a growth area that it recently expanded its maternity collection into petite and tall sizes, while some traditional bricks-and-mortar stores like the Gap have moved their entire maternity collections online. Julie Allen and her husband, Robbie, plan to sell $80 to $90 faux-fur vests and vegan leather pants at Baby Bump, their two boutiques in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La. (Their slogan: “Making maternity fashion great again!”). But the couple eventually want to move the entire business online, and they are now putting, Ms. Allen says, “100 percent of our focus” into the online subscription service, Bumpstyle Box, that they started two years ago. “I think it’s going to overtake the stores,” Ms. Allen said of Bumpstyle, which at the moment accounts for about 20 percent of the couple’s business. Destination Maternity operates more than 500 stores throughout the United States, according to its latest quarterly filing. But in recent years, the company has fallen out of favor with mothers-to-be, and it is in the midst of an overhaul to make its clothes more stylish. “We’re really working hard to overcome the old stigma that maternity clothes are not fashionable,” said Anthony M. Romano, chief executive of Destination Maternity. “She really wants to dress in the same trends and fashion that she was dressing in before she got pregnant.” But while the company reworks itself, competitors like Baby Bump and ASOS are busy courting a growing number of style-conscious women who might be willing to spend more than their mothers did on maternity clothes. “When I started looking for Sonia, I was so surprised for the prices,” said Maria Gourdin, 70, of Sonia Bicocchi her 35-year-old daughter, who has a 21/2-year-old and a 5-month-old. “A blouse was $70 or $90. I’d say, ‘No, that’s impossible.’” Ms. Bicocchi, an elementary school teacher, said she opted for less expensive clothes from the fast-fashion retailer H&M, which sells its maternity line online and in select stores. “I knew I wasn’t going to wear it a long time.” Ms. Bicocchi represents one end of the increasingly bifurcated retail spectrum, in which customers are choosing the low-end or high-end options while eschewing the traditional middle-of-the-road retailers. Rosie Pope is catering to the high end. At a recent fashion shoot in downtown Manhattan, Ms. Pope fingered a rack of stretchy sweaters and skinny jeans in the latest washes and styles. The goal, as Ms. Pope described it, was to offer on-trend clothes with discreet adjustments that flatter a pregnant silhouette: stretchy panels in the waist of low-cut skinny jeans, for example, that show off the bump and accentuate the legs. Maternity “was that thing that you found next to the granny underwear in the back of the department store,” Ms. Pope said. “That’s not what it is anymore.” Ms. Pope operates three boutiques in New York and Santa Monica, Calif., and also sells her clothes through Shopbop, an upscale online retailer owned by Amazon, as well as at Nordstrom. Her average customer, she said, is 34 in the boutiques and 30 elsewhere. But to get women to plunk down $150 on a maternity dress, Ms. Pope is also creating clothes that they might want to wear after they give birth. “Maternity is a very tiny part of the marketplace,” said Ms. Pope, who recently expanded into baby shoes and accessories. “To us, it’s the full story of motherhood, as opposed to this very short segment of time.” Nonpregnant shoppers might stay with their favorite retailers for years, whereas the average woman shops for maternity clothes for an average of 12 to 14 weeks, Mr. Romano said. As Destination Maternity has struggled, it has also tried to hook women earlier and keep them longer. Mr. Romano became chief executive two years ago, during a time of sagging sales. Over the last decade, hundreds of stores have closed and the company’s share price, including dividends, has sunk more than 68 percent, while sales have fallen nearly 20 percent to about $500 million in the most recent fiscal year. To turn the slump around, Mr. Romano has introduced graphic T-shirts, skinny jeans with elastic waistbands and three times as many leggings, in a variety of prints and colors. The athleisure trend — in which people wear flattering athletic clothing outside the gym — means more of a focus on spandex. “The millennials really like to show off the belly,” Mr. Romano said. “The funny phrase that people use around here all the time is, is it gummy? Is it soft enough, is it stretch enough?” One of the stores the company closed was its location in a busy area of Midtown Manhattan, where Christine McCarthy, a 44-year-old experimental geologist, shopped three years ago when she was pregnant with her first child. Ms. McCarthy said she was willing to spend a bit of money to find tailored, work-appropriate dresses, but she turned to the internet when she was pregnant a second time because she could not find a good selection. “I didn’t like what stores were basically telling me to do, which was to just go buy bigger, baggier things,” she said. “I’m not going to go into Forever 21 and buy an extra large dress and cinch it.” Marie George, 71, remembers when bigger and baggier felt like the only acceptable options. “My generation was the first generation that didn’t have to stay in the house when they were pregnant,” said Ms. George, whose two children are now around 40. “I remember I had this wonderful red jumper that I actually bought in the junior department, and I think I lived in that,” she said. “Most of the time, the things that I was wearing were really ill fitting.” Not so for her daughter, Rebekah George Wornow, a beauty and lifestyle expert who has 5-month-old twins. Ms. Wornow did most of her shopping online and splurged on a couple of dresses for special events. “I remember Rebekah had this striped dress that really outlined her bump, and that’s perfectly acceptable today,” Ms. George said. “I think if I had been pregnant now, I would have looked a lot better.” |