Fashion specialty stores are caught in a squeeze play. Blame it on the democratization of fashion. But there’s also the proliferation of ecommerce with over $208 billion in online fashion retail sales each year. But there’s more at play here including a shift in consumer behavior post-pandemic, the rise of stylish goods in discount stores, hotter-than-ever fast fashion, and a dressed-down consumer opting into athleisure wear. As consumers work remotely (globally, 37 percent of workers have reported back to the office five days a week …
Retail Healthcare Expands
Well-being is more than a slogan. It’s becoming a consumer mandate for convenient, affordable care. Healthcare providers have responded with a range of options. On the surface, tech-enhanced healthcare has become a lot easier. Televisits are proving to be more time effective and just as helpful as an appointment with your local doctor. But is healthcare leaving a big opportunity on the table for retailers to swoop in and steal? The answer is wholeheartedly yes. Personalized Healthcare While some people like the idea of scheduling televisits …
Gender-Fluid Fashion Goes Mainstream
These days some retailers find themselves being unwittingly thrown into the political and human rights arena. If a retailer decides to carry merchandise that is unisex or gender-neutral, regardless of its position on non-binary individuals or a genderless population, it is setting itself up for push-back from some consumers. And if it doesn’t carry this category of merchandise, it is setting itself up for push-back by other consumers. The question is how well do retailers know their customers? And how comfortable are they in playing in a …
Reimagining Retail’s Future
The future of retail will be shaped by a hybrid shopping model based on the new normal of highly interconnected experiences that serve specific target markets. Local, personal, smaller, curated, and customized. The cookie-cutter approach of building more and bigger stores does not resonate with today’s consumer mindset. The pandemic has left consumers with a new set of values, a higher expectation of what service means, and very little patience when things don’t go the way they should. Here is how retail needs to evolve to meet consumer …
Quiet Quitting Is a Clear Call to Repair Employee Engagement
Quiet quitting has become a growing phenomenon thanks in part to social media, with TikTok and YouTube among the biggest influencers. But before we embark on a deep dive into the rise of one of the largest shifts ever in employee attitudes about work, let's take a step back and reflect on what our workers have been through in the past two years. It may provide some perspective. Past Tense The pandemic hit the U.S. landscape in a major way in 2020. Many businesses closed and many employees were laid off. Those who continued working had to …
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The New Rules of Work
Striking the right balance between asking workers to return to the office and providing opportunities for work-at-home has become a challenge for corporate retail executives. So far, workers have been in a position of power to make demands around schedules, but as the labor market tightens up, the employers may have more of a say in the policies of a hybrid work environment. The evidence is clear that employees want to work from home at least for part of the work week. A recent survey from McKinsey found that 58 percent of Americans have the …
Retail’s Growing Channel…Recommerce
Although companies have been talking about sustainability and the circular economy for years, and retailers have been trying to make the production process more sustainable, customers will be the driving force to make sustainability practices stick. The growing consumer demand for preowned products may the accelerator for the circular economy. Strong Revenue Growth Across Recommerce Channels Used-clothing store sales revenue was up 37 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, and 25 percent ahead of 2019. These numbers only account for retail …
Old Anti-Union Tactics Will Not Work with Today’s Workforce
Amazon workers’ recent warehouse unionization win Is one small step for workers and one giant leap for labor unions. Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who started the Amazon Labor Union, has become a hero for many workers around the country. While the feat of winning a unionization vote for the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island that employs 8,300 workers might be a small one in comparison to the 165 million workers across the U.S., it marks a pivotal moment in the history of unionization in the retail industry. The second-largest …
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