Warren Shoulberg

The Diva of Decluttering Now Wants Us to Buy Stuff…Her Stuff

By    |  

From the person who said we all have too much stuff and if you pay me some money, I'll show you how to get rid of all that stuff, comes STUFF! It's news that even the irony-challenged will have no trouble seeing. Marie Kondo, the best-selling author of the book "Tidying Up With Marie Kondo" that launched a worldwide frenzy to declutter and in the process made her a media superstar and - believe it or not - one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World according to Time magazine, has launched a line of home goods for those who can't get …

The Diva of Decluttering Now Wants Us to Buy Stuff…Her StuffRead More

The Dirty Little Secret of the Furniture Business

By    |  

Did you know there was an Ernest Hemingway collection of furniture? Or one inspired by Disney for kids? How about Oscar de la Renta? Ever see one of his sofas? The list of celebrity names and well-known designers from other fields is seemingly endless when it comes to furniture. It's also pretty much totally irrelevant. The furniture business, like so many consumer product categories retailers sell, has forever been drawn to famous names. Be they TV stars, fashion icons, athletes (?) or just plain old celebrities famous for being famous, the …

The Dirty Little Secret of the Furniture BusinessRead More

11 Lessons Learned from Target (and a few others) the New CEO at Bed Bath & Beyond Will Need to Apply

By    |  

When Mark Tritton shows up for his first day of work as the new president and CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond on November 4th he will no doubt go through the usual rituals of being the new boss. But once he's finished with the introductions, the hand shaking and directions to the coffee machine and men's room - he will most certainly have his hands full remaking one of the most troubled companies in all of retailing. Fortunately, for his sake, his experiences at his last job as head merchant at Target, his earlier career at Nordstrom and just …

11 Lessons Learned from Target (and a few others) the New CEO at Bed Bath & Beyond Will Need to ApplyRead More

To Your Health: Retailers See It as the Cure for Business

By    |  

Health'R'Us? In an age when something like 20 percent of the American population is over the age of 65, and twice that number say health and wellness is a prime concern to them, it's rather astonishing that nobody has opened a pure-play retailing operation dedicated to health. Instead what we are seeing - and seeing at an unprecedented speed and scale - is a wide swath of big box retailers deciding to focus on the business of making people healthier. National retailers from Walmart and Best Buy to Sam's Club are all introducing health care …

To Your Health: Retailers See It as the Cure for BusinessRead More

The Great Retail Test Store Scam

By    |  

So, Macy's is rolling out a test of thredUP second-hand clothing departments in about 40 of its stores. JCPenney is also testing with thredUp. Kohl's always seems to have some sort of tests going with assorted companies like Amazon, Planet Fitness and Aldi. Bed Bath & Beyond is famous - infamous? -for endless testing of store concepts, department rollouts and various merchandising projects. And all of them are to be taken with a very large dose of retailing skepticism. The truth of the matter is that when a retailer proudly announces it …

The Great Retail Test Store ScamRead More

Is Right-Tailing Here to Stay?

By    |  

To the retail lexicon that includes all manner of subsets and offshoots from e-tail to mobile retail to resale retail to re-retail, perhaps it's time to add one more: Right-tailing. The movement of both conventional legacy retailing operations and startups to focus on social responsibility has moved very quickly from a fringe thing embraced at the extremes by tree-huggers and other marginal activists to the very mainstream of the business itself. There's no mistaking that this has become a legitimate dynamic on which consumers are basing their …

Is Right-Tailing Here to Stay?Read More

Why Those Store Closing Numbers Are so Very Misleading

By    |  

The sky is falling…but it's really not. Amidst all the doom-and-gloom about the death of physical retailing and the demise of oh-so-many stores, it turns out that maybe things aren't so bad after all. A new study suggests, in fact, quite the opposite, that more retailers are opening stores than those that are closing them. It doesn't dispute that thousands and thousands of stores have closed so far this year, probably on the way to a record-setting pace. But it counters that big headline with a more intelligent interpretation of the numbers …

Why Those Store Closing Numbers Are so Very MisleadingRead More

The Five Things Bed Bath & Beyond Needs to Do

By    |  

When Bed Bath & Beyond's executives and board members were joined by investors, analysts and other observers at its recent annual shareholders meeting in suburban New Jersey, there were few certainties on how it would all play out..The company had had a radical reordering of virtually its entire board and senior management amidst severely declining performance in its stores and online. The upheaval came in response to pressure from an outside group of investors demanding changes from top to bottom in the company. Those changes were in …

The Five Things Bed Bath & Beyond Needs to DoRead More

CONNECT WITH TRR