H&M Selling Other Fashion Brands on its Website to Better Compete

H&M is tackling the competition in fashion by selling external fashion brands on its central website in Sweden and Germany, with plans on the table to add additional labels and geographic markets, according to media outlets.

The new brands were added to hm.com at the start of March to better compete with eCommerce markets like Amazon, Zalando and Asos. Brands available on the site have grown to 13 labels for womenswear and 15 for menswear, in addition to about 20 labels in H&M Group’s growing portfolio of brands, which includes &Other Stories, Arket, Weekday and Monki. A little more than one-third of H&M’s sales were generated online last year.

External labels on hm.com are featured in a section called H&M with Friends and include Lee, Wrangler, Fila, Superdry, Crocs, Eastpak, Aimn, Kangol, Chimi, Houdini, Ecoalk and Buffalo.

“Both Sweden and Germany have a long tradition of catalog shopping, and in Sweden we launched our e-shop in 1998, while in Germany the e-shop has been operating for 15 years. This is why we started our test with these two markets, and we will gradually add more markets online,” H&M’s management told FashionNetwork.com.

See also: H&M Stokes Fast Fashion Fight With $1B Plan to Double Sales, Slash Waste

H&M Group CEO Helena Helmersson said the company is vigorously working to double sales and slash carbon emissions by 50% no later than 2030, PYMNTS reported. The company is also planning to open stores in Ecuador, Kosovo and Cambodia, and expand online to Belarus, Colombia, Kazakhstan and more.

The H&M e-shop operates in 54 online markets and 4,800 physical stores in 72 countries. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Hennes & Mauritz was founded in 1947 by Erling Persson and is currently run by his son Stefan Persson and Helena Helmersson. It’s the second-largest global clothing retailer, behind Spain’s Inditex, the parent company of Zara.