We had a feeling Target’s collaboration with Lilly Pulitzer was going to be a hit and it turns out, after barely launching, it already is. Reports are saying that much of the collection sold out this weekend, and due to high demand, there are scores of unhappy shoppers who couldn’t get their hands on all the preppy printed wares.
Of course, people who were hoping to fill their real and digital baskets with goods from the collaboration were sorely disappointed – in fact, Mashable says that the Lilly Pulitzer collection was already sold out online Sunday morning. Customers expressed their frustration at how quickly the collection sold out.
Don’t call it a collection if it will only be available for 5 minutes on 1 day – that’s called a flash sale @Target #LillyforTarget
— Allison Lothrop (@AllisonLothrop) April 19, 2015
I just saw a mother eating the entrails of another mother in the middle of the store. #LillyforTarget
— Andrew Woods (@JimJarmuschHair) April 19, 2015
Could not be any more disappointed in @Target than I am right now. I’ll never have anything #LillyforTarget
— Taylor Frost (@taylorjoyyy) April 20, 2015
Thoughts on #LillyforTarget: I have never seen so many Republican women so upset about the workings of the free market
— Diane C. (@diantics) April 19, 2015
Target has said that it is not restocking the collection, so any leftover scraps you find in stores and online is what is left of the collaboration. The hashtag #LillyforeBay has started to crop up on social media, now that eBay is pretty much the only place you can get many of the sold-out items. And they ain’t cheap. In fact, a quick search of eBay shows a beach chair and hammock set on sale for well over $1,000 (one of the higher end sales), which is a huge rip-off considering the beach chairs were priced at $60 for the collection and the hammock was just $150. Talk about a markup!
We even found a Lilly for Target plus-size dress going for $350 – which is even more expensive than what mainline Lilly Pulitzer asks for its dresses. The most expensive Lilly Pulitzer dress currently on the website is $348. Granted, the $348 dollar dress doesn’t come in plus-sizes, but at this point, it looks like many customers will be paying almost as much if not more for the Target collaboration than they would if they just shopped directly from the Lilly Pulitzer store – and we bet the shopping would be infinitely less stressful if they did.
But for all the troubles that came along with the collection, you can go to bed tonight knowing that Target just made a whole lot of money off this collaboration. Isn’t it always nice when corporations get the money they deserve?
