Power Dressing - The Baby Boomer Woman And The Executive Woman Have Unique Needs

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.
That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"

--Jean Kerr,
author and playwright

These are facts we're sure you know!

Research shows that the baby boomer woman and the executive woman have unique needs. She'll spend more on herself now and she's more conscious of value, comfort, fit and wearability. What she wears must have an edge, but it can't be the samethings that her daughter wears.

Why bother courting the more mature ladies? Spending power.

Their children are gone, they're still working and, in some cases, they're receiving inheritances from parents. All those income streams give baby boomers a pool of discretionary income larger than any generation before, said Marti Barletta, author of "Marketing to Women" and chief executive of TrendSight Group, a marketing firm in suburban Chicago.

And because they feel younger and fitter than their mothers did at the same age, they want to spend some of that extra cash to dress better, Barletta said. She calls them PrimeTime Women.

"Baby boomer women are the No. 1, big-money opportunity for any industry but particularly for the apparel industry because so little is being done to create the kind of clothes they're looking for," Barletta said. "The concentration of spending power among PrimeTime Women is the most powerful in the mass market."

Boomer women accounted for $30.8 billion in apparel spending - nearly double the amount Gen Xers paid for clothes - during the 12-month period ending last June, according to NPD Group, a consumer tracking firm in Port Washington, N.Y.

Department stores still claimed the largest share of boomers' clothing dollars, but specialty stores lagged only 1.5 percent behind.

Though many retail experts consider Chico's the classic example of boomer fashion, a growing number of competitors are entering or expanding in the market.

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