Boutique clothing and tech brands reap huge benefits from festival goers

For brands targeting trendy millennials, it’s always Festival Season. According to new data from Slice Intelligence, a Coachella state of mind is exactly where they should be, as festival-goers spend 10 times more on boutique fashion brands than the average online shopper.

URBN was on to something when it decided to name its Free People brand clothing and accessories after the white-hot Coachella music festival. Slice data shows its brands are benefiting handsomely from these fashionable music revelers. The move may have gotten them into some legal hot water, but festival goers do spend more on boutique fashion brands, especially on BDG (sold exclusively at Urban Outfitters). Other favorite brands include Topshop, New Look, and Herschel Supply Co.

Athletic fashion and tech brands are also seeing big returns on festival goers, who spend nearly four times as much as the average e-commerce buyer on Nike products, and nearly double on Apple products. Their rivals, Adidas and Samsung, see proportionally smaller returns with festival shoppers.

Millennials are by far the largest demographic of festival ticket buyers, making up more than half of all ticket sales for each individual festival. The Made in America Festival is the leader of the pack with 62 percent of ticket buyers being millennials, followed closely by Coachella, at 61 percent.

Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) has the highest percentage of students across any festival that we measured. Those with “some college” experience make up 42 percent of their ticket buyers – far more than any of the other festivals we measured. Keep in mind, EDC is the only festival of this bunch that is 18+, yet somehow 26 percent of its ticket buyers have a high school education or less.

These festivals take place all over the country, and though people come from all corners, most festival attendees come from within the region. Outside Lands, for example, sees the majority of its buyers come from San Francisco and Los Angeles but if we look regionally, that percentage grows considerably with 93 percent coming from the western United States. Lollapalooza—the most centrally-located of the festivals studies-- has the most even distribution of ticket buyers with 51 percent coming from the Midwest, 21 percent from the South, and 20 percent from the West.

With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.