Last summer, I bought a dress from a brand I couldn’t pronounce. Saw it on Instagram. Thirty percent off for first-time buyers. Clicked without thinking twice. The brand? No idea who they were before that moment. The dress? Still hanging in my closet, and I’ve been back to their site maybe four times since.
That’s the thing about discounts now. They’re not just about saving a few bucks anymore. They’ve basically become how we meet new brands in the first place. Walk through any digital shopping experience today and you’ll see it. The sale code shows up before the brand story does.
Why We Actually Click Those Discount Links
People say they’d try a new brand if the price was right. According to Coupono, around 88% of us feel that way. But here’s what’s actually happening underneath that number. It’s not really about being cheap or hunting bargains all day long. It’s more like discounts give us permission to experiment without feeling stupid if things go wrong.
Think about the last time you bought something from a brand you’d never heard of before. Chances are decent there was some kind of deal involved. Maybe not a huge one, but something. Research says 39% of shoppers have tried new brands specifically because of coupons. Not because they woke up wanting to discover something new. Because the coupon showed up at exactly the right moment.
And once they’re in? They spend more. About 25% more than people without coupons. The discount opens the door, but what keeps people around is everything else.
Prices Have Become the Introduction
Shopping doesn’t work the way it used to. Nobody’s going to the mall hoping to stumble on something interesting anymore. You’re scrolling through feeds, and algorithms decide what you see. A brand you’ve never considered appears. There’s always a hook. Fifteen percent off. Free shipping on first orders. Some kind of limited-time thing.
The price isn’t just lower. It’s the entire reason you’re paying attention in the first place.
Gen Z gets this instinctively. About 71% of them would rather wait for sales than buy things at full price. They’re not being frugal necessarily. They’re treating discount hunting like a video game. Time spent looking for promo codes has jumped 14% among younger shoppers year over year. They’re good at this.
So brands face this weird situation. You build your whole identity around quality and aspiration, but most people discover you through a markdown notification.
The Funnel Runs Backwards Now
Fashion used to follow a pattern: hear about brand, get curious, check them out, decide if price makes sense.
Now? You see the 30% off first. Before you know anything about who makes the clothes or what they stand for. Price has moved to the front of the line.
Mobile made this shift inevitable. Sixty-eight percent of coupon use in the U.S. happens on phones and apps. Browser extensions auto-apply codes you didn’t even search for. The deals find you while you’re already looking at competitors.
I know someone who runs marketing for a mid-size fashion label. She told me over coffee that their entire customer acquisition strategy starts with first-time buyer discounts now. ‘We used to think discounts made us look cheap,’ she said. ‘Turns out they’re how people learn we exist.’ She wasn’t happy about it, but she wasn’t fighting it anymore either.
What Deals Actually Do for Brands
When discounts drive discovery, brands reach shoppers they’d never connect with otherwise.
Look at Gen Z shopping patterns. This group drives fashion spending hard. Their share of clothing store sales grew 1.5% in Q4 2024 versus the year before. But 82% of them plan to buy dupes instead of originals at full price. Sixty-three percent actively shop vintage and upcycled stuff.
They have money. They’re just strategic. Deals let them test whether brands deserve their loyalty without committing everything upfront.
Same thing happens globally. Coupon use in places like Brazil and India jumped 30% last year. Fashion leads that growth. These aren’t markets where everyone already knows every brand. Discounts introduce shoppers to labels they couldn’t afford to gamble on otherwise.
Turning Trial Into Loyalty
There’s this assumption that discount shoppers never stick around. They chase the next sale and disappear. The data doesn’t support that assumption.
Forty-five percent of people using coupons are loyal customers hunting deals from brands they already trust. They’re not looking for the absolute cheapest thing. They want the best value from companies they’ve decided matter to them.
But how did brands earn that loyalty initially? Often through some discount that convinced someone to take the first chance.
Three years back, I got 25% off at this sustainable clothing company. Bought one shirt to try them out. Loved how it fit. Now I buy from them regularly without waiting for sales. The discount got me through the door. Quality kept me there.
Fashion resale programs have grown 325% since 2021 partly because they figured out this dynamic. Discount the pre-owned inventory hard, protect margins on new products. Shoppers discover brands through deals on secondhand pieces, then upgrade to buying new items at regular prices.
When Discounts Stop Being Helpful
Not everyone thinks this is great. The fashion industry operates in what some people call a ‘permanent sale’ state now. Walk down any shopping street and sale signs never really go away. Online, those banners promising 20%, 30%, 50% off have become wallpaper.
This creates actual problems. Dutch designer Joline Jolink abandoned sales completely back in 2016. Said they didn’t serve any purpose anymore. ‘Our prices are fair year-round,’ she explained. ‘Thanks to precise production and an original arrival rhythm, there’s never surplus. Sales became unnecessary.’
She had a point. When deals become the main discovery tool, shoppers train themselves to never pay full price. Why buy now when there’s always another promotion next week?
The Trap Brands Can’t Escape
Fashion companies gamble on what people want six months out. They design collections over a year ahead, produce them months before launch, cross their fingers they guessed right.
When they guess wrong, they’re stuck with inventory. Deals clear that stock before the next collection drops. But shoppers have learned this pattern inside out.
Henk Hofstede, who works as a retail banker at ABN AMRO in the Netherlands, explained it to FashionUnited like this: ‘The price-conscious consumer can find exactly where a product is cheapest with just a few clicks. Very different from twenty years ago.’
That transparency kills urgency. Why rush when you know the markdown’s coming eventually?
Fast fashion makes this worse. Shein goes from design to store in ten days. They respond to trends instantly, adjust production with demand, undercut everyone on price. Traditional brands either match that speed or lean harder into discounting.
Neither approach fixes the real problem. Discovery through deals has trained people to expect promotions constantly.
Mobile Shopping Amplifies Everything
Remember clipping coupons from newspapers? Waiting for Sunday circulars? Now deals arrive as push notifications while you’re lying in bed scrolling Instagram.
Forty-five percent of Gen Z’s Black Friday purchases happen between 6 and 9 AM. That’s thirty percent higher than other age groups. They’re not early birds at physical stores. They’re in bed, on phones, responding to alerts about flash sales.
How deals arrive matters as much as the discount itself. Seventy-three percent of users prefer coupons through apps, email links, or QR codes. The friction of finding and entering codes disappeared. Auto-apply means you get discounts without trying.
This makes deals more powerful for discovery because there’s no resistance. You see a brand. There’s a deal. One tap and you’ve bought from a company you didn’t know existed ten seconds earlier.
Social Platforms Become Stores
The line separating content from commerce is gone. Forty-three percent of Gen Z discover gifts through social media versus thirty percent overall. They research products at 39% compared to 27%. They compare items at 32% versus 22%.
But they’re not just researching. They’re buying directly through these platforms. TikTok turned impulse purchases into a feature. Twenty-six percent of Gen Z admit to making impulse buys often, up 7% year over year.
Deals power this whole system. Influencer discount codes, flash sales announced through Stories, limited-time offers expiring in hours. The urgency isn’t fake. Platforms engineered environments where deals create FOMO, and FOMO drives discovery.
Someone I know runs a small fashion brand. Her Instagram ads only work when they include discount codes in the creative. ‘We tried brand storytelling, lifestyle images, everything,’ she said. ‘Twenty percent off beats all of it.’
What Happens Next
By 2027, over 65% of voucher redemptions will happen on mobile. AI personalization means the deals you see get tailored to your browsing history, purchase patterns, even what time of day you’re most likely to buy.
Brands already use machine learning to predict which discounts work for which customers. The spray-and-pray approach of universal promotions is dying. The future is hyper-targeted offers appearing exactly when you’re ready to convert.
This should make deals even better for discovery. Instead of generic 15% off codes, you’ll get personalized offers on products algorithms predict you’ll want.
But it also means the fashion industry’s doubling down on discounting as customer acquisition. Rather than pulling back, brands are getting smarter about using deals to drive discovery.
What This Means for Fashion
The traditional model broke. You can’t build awareness through advertising alone, then hope shoppers visit your site and buy at full price. The path to purchase starts with a deal now.
Smart brands adapted. They price strategically to accommodate first-time buyer discounts without destroying margins. They use deals to introduce shoppers to their world, then deploy loyalty programs and exclusive access to keep those customers at higher price points.
The struggling brands are stuck in the middle. Not cheap enough to compete with ultra-fast fashion. Not premium enough to avoid the discount trap. They end up racing to the bottom where deals bring shoppers in but margins are too thin to sustain anything.
Fashion marketplaces like Zalando, which hit €10.1 billion in revenue across 25 European countries in 2023, understand this. They built entire platforms around deal-driven discovery, using promotional pricing to attract shoppers, then keeping them through selection and convenience.
The Identity Problem
Here’s what bothers me. Fashion used to mean something beyond price. You bought clothes because they made you feel a certain way, because they represented who you wanted to be.
When discovery happens through deals, when price becomes the first thing you know about a brand, we risk turning fashion into a commodity. Cheapest wins. Fastest discount captures attention. The story behind designs, the craftsmanship, company values—all of it becomes secondary to the number in the promotional banner.
Sixty-four percent of Gen Z consumers will pay premium prices for sustainable fashion. So there’s still appetite for something beyond just the best deal. But brands work harder to communicate that value when the entry point is a markdown.
Some get creative. They discount resale inventory while protecting new collection pricing. They use deals to drive trial of specific lines while keeping flagship items at full price. They create tiered experiences where deals get you through the door, but VIP programs require full-price purchases.
The Question Nobody Asks
What happens when deals stop working?
Consumer behavior suggests that might not be far off. Forty-six percent of online shoppers abandon carts because they couldn’t find a discount code. They’ve been trained to expect deals so reliably that absence of promotion feels like a reason not to buy.
That’s not sustainable. Eventually something gives. Either brands figure out how to drive discovery without constantly discounting, or margins shrink until only giants survive.
The middle ground might involve rethinking what ‘deal’ even means. Maybe it’s not always about price. Maybe it’s early access, exclusive products, personalized service. Creating value in ways that don’t require taking 30% off everything twice monthly.
But right now, early 2026, deals are how people discover fashion online. Algorithms favor them. Platforms reward them. Consumers expect them.
Brands refusing to participate risk becoming invisible in a marketplace where visibility starts with a promo code.
Where Things Go From Here
The fashion industry’s caught between two realities. Deals have become the most effective customer acquisition tool available. They work. They drive traffic. They convert browsers into buyers.
But they’ve created an unsustainable ecosystem where consumers expect constant discounts and margins keep shrinking.
Brands that survive will use deals strategically, not desperately. They’ll understand discounts can open doors without becoming the entire identity. They’ll turn price-motivated first-time buyers into full-price loyalists.
The rest will keep marking down inventory, chasing trends, hoping the next flash sale brings enough revenue to cover losses from the last one.
I don’t have answers. Just watching an industry transform in real-time, driven by technology, consumer expectations, and the reality that in a world of infinite choice, price often cuts through noise first.
Deals aren’t just shaping how people discover fashion online. They’re reshaping what fashion means, how brands communicate value, what consumers expect from shopping.
Whether that’s good or bad depends on whether you’re trying to build a sustainable fashion business or just trying to find a decent jacket at a fair price.
Right now, the deals are winning.
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