Fashion Is Done With Remote Work
Max Ma, chief executive of 7thonline, says nearly every misstep the retail planning software provider made between 2020 and 2023 can be traced back to a single culprit.“All the mistakes we made during that time — they’re all attributable to one thing: working from home,” he said. Like most companies, the New York-based firm — which counts Patagonia, PVH Corp. and Birkenstock among its clients — closed its office early in the pandemic and allowed employees to continue working from home long after the lockdowns were lifted. Ma said the setup was functional, but that relying primarily on Slack and Zoom made it easier for key details to slip through the cracks. In 2024, the company returned to a five-day-a-week office schedule.“When you’re in the same room, you can stop and ask, ‘What do you mean by that?’” he said. “Sometimes even a facial [expression] tells you certain things.”Two years ago, 7thonline was an outlier. Today, its policy is increasingly common. Over the past year, retailers from Amazon to Gap Inc. have mandated full-time returns to the office. In publishing, Condé Nast and Penske Media have moved to four-day mandates, while Instagram is set to require five days starting in February. Across fashion, three days in-office has become the baseline, with many companies planning to push further this year.Fashion executives point to familiar concerns: cultural drift, weaker collaboration and uneven productivity when teams aren’t physically together. There are other dynamics at play. In a softer job market, employees have less leverage to resist back-to-the-office mandates. And some struggling fashion companies may be using stricter in-office policies to reduce headcount without formal layoffs — effectively nudging employees to fire themselves.Whatever the rationale, how companies execute that shift matters. Offering employees a clear reason for the move — and baking in some flexibility, even if the goal is five days a week in the office, can help ease the transition. “If you’re having very positive employee morale … at one to two days a week [then] why shake that?” said Damian Chiam, a partner at executive search firm Burõ Talent. “But, if you think moving to four days is going to get you triple, quadruple the growth, then it might make sense.”Determining the ‘Why’The data on remote work’s impact on productivity is mixed. Research from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in some industries — like publishing or data processing — output can be higher when people work remotely. Other research, including Gallup’s latest analysis, suggests employees in remote roles are spending less time working — roughly an hour less per day than before — even as productivity remains roughly steady.Up for debate is whether that hour might have been spent on informal interactions — spontaneous problem-solving after bumping into a colleague in the break room — or covertly scrolling TikTok. Whatever the data shows, the debate over remote work is largely settled in fashion: beyond a narrow set of roles in areas like IT and engineering, companies overwhelmingly want employees in the office, said Paula Reid, an executive coach and president of the talent search firm Reid & Co. “The swing is towards wanting to have people in the office working as a team, developing deeper relationships, having those spontaneous conversations,” Reid said.The question is how much: if three days is the consensus, it’s not such a stretch to ask for four. Requiring five days feels more consequential. Vague justifications — “I paid for this space so show up” — are unlikely to be well received, Chiam said.Ma’s case to 7thonline’s employees was more practical than philosophical. As a software provider, the problems that surface at the margins — the bugs, miscommunications or flawed decisions that might affect a small group of users — can be harder to catch on Zoom or Slack. He believes those edge-case failures largely disappear when teams are working side by side five days a week.“We keep evolving our software so we need our developers to discuss what the customer wants,” said Ma. “They have to analyse what this customer said, compared to other customers … that’s what needs face to face interactions.” (Ma does allow a couple of hands-off roles to remain fully remote, specifically in the engineering function.)Gen Z workers are sometimes proving unexpected advocates for returning to the office. Pandemic-era stereotypes cast younger employees as champions of “quiet quitting” and “cameras off” culture, but in reality many are eager for more face time with managers and senior leaders.“Funnily enough, this whole being-in-the-office thing has been less of an issue for junior talent, because they feel that’s how their careers will grow and thrive,” Chiam said. “They want the camaraderie and the career development they missed during remote work.”It is often middle and senior managers — juggling children or ageing parents — who are more reluctant. Requiring those leaders to be present, experts say, helps set expectations for the rest of the business.What Not to DoWhile companies no longer have to yield to employees who insist on working from the beach half the year, offering some flexibility remains critical for morale — and, experts say, for staying competitive if the labour market swings back in workers’ favour.“People want to be treated like responsible, contributing adults who are going to deliver results,” Reid said. “That means that if your child has a winter concert and you want to slip out at four o’clock, all somebody’s going to care about is ‘did you get the work done? Then go.’”In practice, that’s why four days in the office has started to land as a workable compromise, Reid said. It was a tough sell earlier in the pandemic, but by 2026 many people see it as a reasonable middle ground, she said. Five days is trickier. With layoffs rising across fashion, companies may feel confident enforcing it in an employer’s market, but that confidence can evaporate quickly when the balance of power shifts, Chiam said.Another common mistake: treating return-to-office mandates as a cure-all. As fashion companies deal with slower growth, some are defaulting to what Reid describes as the “low-hanging fruit” — pulling everyone back in, full time, on the assumption that proximity alone will fix deeper issues.“If done well, it can have … a ‘we’re all in this together’ uniting feeling,” she said. “Done poorly, which is how I think most organisations do it, it can make everybody think the building’s on fire.”What matters most, Chiam said, is whether leadership is willing to model the behaviour they’re asking for. CEOs can’t be phoning it in from a vacation home while telling everyone else to show up — and they need to be realistic about how their own flexibility and job demands differ from those of the people they manage.“It’s ultimately their business, so they’re going to dictate,” Chiam said. “But, we also know that without change and being flexible, that could be your future demise.”Ma says he expects five days in office will continue to yield the best results for his business but he always leaves wiggle room to assess his employees’ needs on a “case by case” basis.“We are very flexible — we don’t tie people to their desks,” he said, adding that some of his employees have been with the company for 20-plus years. “Flexibility means we have to consider [that] everybody has their family life.”
