Full disclosure: I did not set foot in a store this season. In normal times, my in-store holiday shopping mood toggles between energized and irritated. Wandering through a crowded, slightly overheated store, dragging a coat with a bulky scarf-stuffed sleeve looking for inspiration is a trial, but there have been moments when retail kismet struck. During holiday 2019, I experienced such karma at Nordstrom’s New York flagship, achieving a satisfied shopper’s dopamine hit, and walking out with several gifts. A Nothing-Like-Normal Holiday 2020 In …
Amazon’s Superpower
Unintended consequences of Covid-19 are that it’s easier to find a captive audience and we now regularly spend time waiting in lines. In the spirit of making lemonade out of Coronavirus lemons, I decided to conduct a quick, socially distanced, unscientific poll outside a Brooklyn Trader Joe’s where my husband was queued up. My question was, “What kind of a business is Amazon.com?” Of the 11 people who took out their earbuds and talked to me, nine of them said basically “online retail.” Another said, “A company that should be broken up because …
Rerouting Retail
In 2015 NIKE opened a Community Store in Brooklyn; It’s not in Williamsburg or Dumbo, it’s in Flatbush. Flatbush is hardly an international retail mecca. In fact, the store is near the last downtown stop, at the end of the number two subway line. The NIKE Community Store model has expanded to include downtown Detroit, Ivy City in D.C., mid-city New Orleans, South Chicago, Portland Oregon, East Los Angeles, and the newest location, which opened in August of 2020 in the Watts neighborhood of L.A. The game plan of breathing authenticity and local …
The Retail Outlook? Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Stanford professor and author of the bestseller Mindset, Carol Dweck describes grading students as a young teacher. If a student was not progressing toward the expected learning outcome, rather than a failing grade, the mark given was a not yet. Holiday shopping is now underway, and 2021 fast approaches, are the signs for retail signaling recovery, or are they indicating not yet? Divergent Outlooks Green shoots have appeared. Goldman Sachs has raised its 2021 GDP forecast to 6.2 percent from 5.6 in anticipation of broad vaccine distribution …
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Fashion Moves Out of This World
The pandemic continues to unravel both our social lives and social fabric, but changes are not limited to the corporeal; our social media lives are changing too. Gaming has become global, communal and interactive. An August 2020 eMarketer survey pegs the number of digital gamers in the United States at 174.7 million or 52.5 percent of the population. Amazon just introduced a gaming platform called Luna which will stream more than 100 popular video games and will integrate with Amazon-owned Twitch, the live-stream gaming platform. Stastia breaks …
The Indefatigable Walmart Gets a Piece of TikTok
In the game of musical chairs that has been the TikTok acquisition, Walmart and Oracle are still seated as the music stops although they may on be stools, make that stools with a leg missing. Walmart has hung in there after first dancing with Google, then Microsoft, and now Oracle, but with each change of partner, the jackpot Walmart was reaching for diminished in value. Tik Tok posted on Twitter that “Oracle will serve as a trusted tech partner responsible for hosting all US server data”. The Tweet continued, “We are currently working with …
The Quarantine Data Dearth
My shopping patterns have changed, have yours? Nozzle, a British consultancy that specializes in Amazon sales optimization released a report on recent Amazon search trend results. The insights reveal the top search terms. The lead searches for June in the U.S. were: Facemasks Lysol wipes Reusable facemasks Other popular items in the top ten include hand sanitizer and desk chairs. The July numbers were broken down differently, but the top two items were identical to June. Our consumer behavior has been flipped on its head. This …
“Wanna Chat…With A Brand?
Let’s shift our gaze from the current moment where an undercurrent of uncertainty colors everything. It is easy to feel like we are treading water both professionally and personally, but if we look outward, things are changing at a rapid pace. As I have heard repeatedly in recent weeks, this pandemic has accelerated shifts that were already underway and/or, a decade’s worth of change has rained down on our society in fewer than six months. One area where this is especially true is the integration of voice-activated smart speakers into our …