Demand at Target for Fashion Line Crashes Web Site ~ Jakarta Forum

@nytimesThe New York Times

Demand at Target For Fashion Line Crashes Web Site

Target’s Web site came crashing down on Tuesday as Missoni-loving fashion devotées invaded, scrambling to buy the high-end Italian designer’s clothes for a song.

With its limited-edition Missoni for Target line, introduced on Tuesday, and other low-price designer collections, Target has been trying to position itself as the chicest of the discount stores. Missoni’s clothing usually costs in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, but it had designed a number of cheaper items for Target, like a $40 skirt in its signature zigzag design and a $600 patio set. However, the limited-edition fashions were more limited than Target might have wanted.

In an unusual fumble for the large retailer, Target was unprepared for online shoppers’ hunger for the items. The Target.com site was wiped out for most of the day; the company said that demand for items was higher than it was on a typical day after Thanksgiving, and that is usually the biggest shopping day of the year.

“The excitement for this limited-time designer collection is unprecedented,” said Morgan O’Murray, a spokeswoman for Target, in an e-mail.

But on Twitter and other social media sites, thwarted shoppers posted furious messages and commiserated about the site’s failure, with a few bragging that they had made it through in the brief periods that Target.com was working.

Marketing experts said the blunder was amateurish, although they said it should not have any lasting effect on Target’s reputation.

“It’s a little bit embarrassing for one of the nation’s largest retailers to have a Web site that can’t support a rush — it’s not like they’re any strangers to rushes,” said Ian Schafer, chief executive of the digital marketing firm Deep Focus. “It’s saying, ‘We’re so popular we had to turn people away at the door.’ Then get a bigger place.”

The problems came just three weeks after Target, which had been relying on Amazon’s back end for its Web site, switched to its own platform. But Ms. O’Murray said the crashing of the site was caused solely by demand for the products.

The Missoni line was the latest in a series of low-price designer collections for Target. Past collaborators have included Calypso St. Barth, Liberty of London, Rodarte and Zac Posen.

All the collections have been available both online and in stores, said a Target spokesman, Joshua Thomas, and many items from the collections have sold out quickly. In the Missoni case, he said, the magnitude and immediacy of the demand was unprecedented.

The collaborations tend to bring in regular Target shoppers who are eager for a piece of glamour at a fraction of the price, along with fashion fans who like the novelty of wearing a cheap-chic piece made by a favored designer. The Missoni pieces at Target are mostly under $40, for instance, while Missoni items at Bergdorf Goodman cost up to $12,000.

Target drummed up heavy publicity for the Missoni line before Tuesday, releasing photos of the products to fashion bloggers, holding a party with celebrities and fashion editors, and setting up a pop-up shop last week in New York City, where the merchandise sold out in six hours. Even Vogue gave the collection several pages of coverage in its August issue, perhaps the first and last time that a $30 rug made it into that magazine.

By last week, the excitement was so high that the actresses Jessica Alba and Jessica Simpson, both of whom can no doubt afford full-price Missoni, were talking on Twitter about the line. “I dreamt about the Missoni 4 Target bike last night,” Ms. Alba posted, referring to a $400 bike covered with zigzags. “I want that bike too!!! So cute!” Ms. Simpson responded.

On Tuesday, Target made the Missoni products available online at 6 a.m. By 7:47 a.m., the home page was down, with a “connection timeout” error, according to AlertSite, a company that monitors Web performance. By 8 a.m., Target had put up a courtesy page that said the site problems were being worked on.

Other than a few minutes here and there, the problems continued through late afternoon. By then, Target had put people in sort of a queue, automatically refreshing the page so those who were patient could reach the site.

Even when shoppers did get through, many complained that items were disappearing from their baskets or that they were not able to check out. Alex Gagne, 23, a marketing executive in Mission Viejo, Calif., said she had stopped at her Target store in the early morning to buy some Missoni vases and shoes and spent much of the rest of the morning trying to get on the site.

“That was a nightmare,” she said. When she finally got onto the site, “at one point I was entering payment information, and it was gone.”

“Their site was absolutely, 100 percent not prepared for it,” she said.

While Target recently stopped using Amazon’s e-commerce platform to make its Web site work, analysts said Tuesday’s problems were probably caused more by unexpected demand for the Missoni products.

“It’s hard to attribute the site being down to the Amazon separation, although Amazon Web Services offers elastic computing power that would have helped with this surge in demand,” said Matthew Nemer, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who covers e-commerce, in an e-mail.

Target’s physical stores had long lines on Tuesday, and many sold out of their Missoni assortments in minutes. But it was the Web site’s problems that drew continued ire from shoppers. The actress Mindy Kaling posted on Twitter that “@target broke my heart today when I could not access their site once in 9 hours for Missoni.”

Another shopper posted: “Seriously so mad at @TargetStyle. Why did you not prepare for the Missoni for Target line?”

There were other ways to get the merchandise. Racked, a shopping blog, advised readers to call Target’s toll-free number to order items by phone. Some posters on Twitter suggested using the mobile site. And by 5 p.m., after the products had been available for only 11 hours, eBay was listing 6,600 items for Missoni by Target.