If you blinked, you missed it: The Lilly Pulitzer collection for Target made its debut Sunday morning, and items were quickly snatched up in stores and online, selling out in a matter of minutes.
The brand is known for using floral patterns and bright colors inspired by Palm Beach, and has a huge following on the East Coast and in the South. The line to get inside the downtown Minneapolis store was hundreds deep on Sunday morning, and within minutes of opening, women's dresses and home goods were sold out; by mid-afternoon, all that was left were some floral-print nail files. On Twitter, several fans of the brand said they waited all night to make purchases on the Target website, but it crashed and they weren't able to buy anything due to this "epic fail."
Target spokesman Joshua Thomas said the site never actually crashed, but it did slow down, and was made inaccessible for 15 minutes to avoid shutting down. "We never want our guests to be disappointed," he told the Star Tribune. "We share their disappointment with the experience of shopping online. It doesn't match what we aim to provide them, which is an easy, seamless, consistent experience."
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One retail expert has a suggestion for those who walked away empty-handed: Get over it. "Customers have to realize that products are going to be in short supply," says Dave Brennan, co-director of the University of St. Thomas Institute for Retailing Excellence. The exposure to brands "works very well for Target and it works very well for the designer, but maybe not so well for the consumer because there's not enough merchandise to meet their needs."
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