I recently participated in a retail webinar on wellness. My main message was that retailers limit themselves if they think of wellness just in terms of products consumers use, wear close to their body, put on their skin or decorate their homes with. All retailers, nonessential and otherwise, have been massively disrupted during the nationwide coronavirus shutdowns. Upon reopening, if they ever do, retailers have an unprecedented opportunity to reevaluate and reassess every aspect of their businesses, not just how to reassure their staff and …
Luxury, Post-Covid
Letting no crisis go to waste, the MBB big-three consulting firms - McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company - have all come out with their post-coronavirus predictions for the luxury market. I've spent hours digesting their reports, including interviewing Bain's Claudia D'Aprizio, who is arguably the world's leading authority on the luxury market, trying to get a clear picture of what to expect coming out of this global pandemic. Loss Leaders All MBBs are predicting dramatic 2020 losses for the ~$300 billion …
Coronavirus Has Pushed A Rapidly Growing List of Retailers to the Edge
With consumers' heightened awareness of the danger of being in confined places with strangers, it is highly unlikely they will flock to stores and malls even once they reopen. Anxiety and a healthy paranoia are likely to linger - possibly for a long time. Ever since March 14, America has been effectively closed for business. That was when the Trump administration declared a state of emergency and called on Americans to practice social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus. As a result, retail establishments classified as …
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Starbucks Wuhan Success Story
The United States has hit the pause button on the economy literally. On March 16 President Trump asked Americans to call a halt to their lives as usual for the next 15 days. Then on March 23, he hinted the shutdown could end on Easter, April 12. But increasingly it looks like it will extend even longer, because the rate of infection has yet to level off, let alone decline. As a result, many of the nation's governors decided more "social distancing" was required, not less. Non-Essential by the Numbers Five of the nation's 11 most populous …
How to Revive Malls After the Coronavirus Lifts
The coronavirus has cast a pall over malls, adding insult to injury for many of the nation's malls already under siege. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, Director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said, "Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness." During her briefing, she outlined three …
Amazon’s Luxury Folly
No question, every successful entrepreneur has a certain amount of madness and the more successful they are, the madder. Using that measure, Jeff Bezos, who dreamed a bookstore could become the world's largest retailer, must be the craziest of all as he tops the list as the world's richest person, just ahead of another mad man Bernard Arnault, who leads the luxury juggernaut LVMH. We have come to recognize that madness, in this case, is actually brilliance. Battle of the Titans Earlier this month, Arnault knocked Bezos off his wealth pedestal …
Harnessing Retail’s Girl Power
We've all heard the statistics: Women account or influence between 70-to-80 percent of all household spending. In retail, women outnumber men on the sales floor by a ratio of 2:1. The Mom Project Labs (MP Labs), the research and insights division of the Mom Project which helps businesses build a better workplace for mothers, studied how to use the intersection of those two statistics - more women shoppers and more women retail sales associates - to help retailers build stronger, more resilient and engaging retail experiences. "Because …
Can Lululemon Be to Men What It Is to Women, Or Does It Even Matter?
Back in 2014 when Lululemon introduced its first line of men's wear, it had a lot of people scratching their heads. At the time, Brian Sozzi, at-the-time chief equities strategists at Belus Capital and a contributor to Men's Health, felt the brand was too tightly aligned with women and that it faced an uphill battle to attract men. "I have never been helped by a male store associate at Lululemon and the brand seems to mostly attract women," he said. "It's seen as a very pro-female brand and that is intimidating to men." Yet pivoting to men's …
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