The holiday shopping season is almost here, and with it comes the flurry of deals and discounts.

While for consumers, discounts are a welcome feature of the fourth quarter, they’re a mixed bag for brands. Frequent heavy discounts, along with stiff competition from major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon, which can afford deep cuts, mean brands that want to sell full price face an uphill battle.

This was a theme of the discussion at the Glossy & Modern Retail Leaders Dinner hosted in collaboration with Global Payments on October 14. A gathering of leaders from a variety of fashion and beauty brands discussed the risks of overreliance on discounts and how they’re training their customers to not only shop when items are heavily discounted.

One executive, who currently leads direct-to-consumer for a large designer fashion brand, said her former employer, a celebrity-backed fashion brand, is leaning heavily into discounts around the holidays. Her current brand, she said, is trying to move in the opposite direction.

“It’s really about sustainable business and making sure that you’re in market when it’s time to be in market, but you’re not saturating the market with discounts,” she said. “And right now, we’re seeing so much discounting, and we’re trying to train our customers out of that habit.”

She also said the fashion industry’s seasonality makes it particularly susceptible to the perils of too much discounting. It’s harder to sell suede when it’s 100 degrees out, so brands often mark things down out of season to clear out extra product.

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