Fashionistas or Freeloaders? Hundreds Camp Outside Megamall for H&M Opening

Swedish retail line H&M had just opened last Friday, October 17. The opening day was quite unusual because hundreds of people were queuing outside the store even the day before. Wow! We didn’t know this brand was that über popular! When the event ended, however, the place was once again quiet – it is now just another regular featured at the mall.

The store was set to open on Friday, 9 am, yet as early as the morning of Thursday (or was it the night of Wednesday?), close to a hundred people were already lining up outside the boutique’s entrance in SM Megamall. By 3 pm on Thursday, Twitter user @JVenM tweeted a photo of the long queue and mentioned that he was already the 122^nd person in the line.

You could just imagine how many people were lining up shortly before the store opened on Friday!

What’s all the hype, anyway? It’s not like there aren’t many clothing boutiques and top-of-the-line retail outlets in Manila already. You can even find great choices from department stores, at Greenhills, at Baclaran (a no-no for fashionistas?), or at any other shop in the malls!

Perhaps because H&M was something new – a newcomer to the scene is always treated with a party. Yet so many stores have opened in the past that didn’t get this much attention from the metro’s best fashionistas.

The VIP event

The night before the opening, H&M held a invite-only event for the country’s VIP, including popular stars, several fresh faces on showbiz, prominent lifestyle and fashion bloggers or magazines, and socialites.

Did the GCs matter?

Reports of the long queues at the H&M store opening were met with skepticism by many netizens. Many unforgiving netizens slammed those who lined up a day before the opening as ‘social climbers’ or ‘freeloaders’ who just wanted to show the world that they are part of the ‘in’ crowd yet were really just lining up for the GCs (gift certificates).

What’s with the GC’s, anyway? Well, H&M promised days before the opening day that the first in line would receive a P6,000 GC while the next 199 customers will receive random amounts up to P5,000! Superb, isn’t it?

The GCs certainly contributed to the reasons why people queued up a day before the scheduled opening.

There were also lots of freebies, food, and tokens for the shoppers to enjoy.

Now, we were wondering, if the store wasn’t handing out such tantalizing GCs, would there be long queues beforehand? The event has long finished, so we’ll never really know. Still, despite the store just handing out GCs to the first 200 customers, it was believed that some 1,500 people shopped at the H&M that day. Quite a feat for a boutique, we might say.

Perhaps the fashionistas really wanted to be the first in the country to own H&M clothes, then.

So, were those who called the early bird fashionistas ‘freeloaders’ just jealous that they weren’t able to get their hands on the GCs? Perhaps yes; perhaps no.

In all this, what really mattered is that the store clearly got what it wanted: hundreds of new customers and free exposure on social media – both from those who gave their time to wait in line for hours and those who were just waiting on the sidelines, commenting about the people who were lucky enough to get the GCs.