Warren Shoulberg

Home Depot & Lowe’s: A Tale of Two Retailers…Two Really Good Retailers

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In an age of luxury merchandising and technology-fueled e-commerce selling, who would have ever thought that two of the most successful and admired retailers in the business make their money selling 2x4s, plumbing fixtures and gardening tools? Home Depot and Lowe's are weathering the pandemic as well as any two companies in the country, building on the wave of success they've been riding for the past several years. Happily, situated in a very sweet spot in the marketplace right now -- the home improvement and remodeling sector -- they are also …

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Livestreaming: It’s Big in China, Is the US Next?

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The future of livestreaming depends not just on who you are, but also where you are…and whether you understand exactly what livestreaming actually is. Livestreaming is a term being thrown around the retail world with increased frequency these days -- but describing it is not easy. Start with a TV shopping show like you might find on QVC or HSN. But put it on your mobile phone rather than your television. Then layer on social media functions, the ability to interact with what's on your screen in a way that's impossible on one-way electronics …

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Chip & Joanna Gaines Build Out Magnolia

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Not too long ago if you were to tell anybody that the center of the American home furnishings design world was in Waco, Texas they might have looked at you like you were…well, wacko. But despite the allure of New York, the magic of Los Angeles and the appeal of Miami or San Francisco, it's this little town in the flats of central Texas, halfway between Dallas and Houston, that has become the design mecca for shoppers. And it's only about to get more so. Waco is the home of Chip and Joanne Gaines' Magnolia Home empire that encompasses …

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At Home Finds Itself the Right Store at the Right Time

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If you're looking for a story about yet another retailer devastated by the Covid pandemic, barely surviving and on the brink of insolvency…this isn't it. But if you want something positive, about how a retailer, seemingly written off before the pandemic, has risen to the occasion and gotten back on its game with its prospects looking up for the future, welcome to the story of At Home. As recently as this past April the home furnishings Big Box store, with about 220 locations around the country -- all of them closed -- was on many people's …

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Can Bed Bath & Beyond Recover…And How Will They Do It?

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Perhaps no American retailer's fall from grace has been as swift or dramatic as has Bed Bath & Beyond's. Legacy retailers like JC Penney and Gap have deteriorated slowly over long periods of time but BBB as recently as just a few years ago was considered one of the best in the business of retailing. Its myriad of problems has been well documented: an aging and bloated physical store fleet, lack of attention to building its e-commerce business, an inefficient supply chain that hadn't kept up with modern retailing practices and an insular …

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Crate & Barrel Has a New CEO

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Here's a fascinating development in retailing: Replace a good merchant with another good merchant. What a concept. Crate & Barrel, the iconic lifestyle home furnishings retail chain announced over the past few days the departure of current CEO Needa Montgomery and her successor Janet Hayes, a former Williams Sonoma veteran with a good pedigree. As so many big retailing companies bring in operations and financial types to run their businesses, what's happening at Crate is a refreshing reminder that if the store isn't merchandised right, …

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It’s Now or Never for Wayfair

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You can find just about anything for your home on Wayfair.com. But what you can't find is any black ink. In the middle of what is undoubtably the greatest surge of online buying in the history of the business, Wayfair - the largest dedicated home furnishings e-commerce player - is racking up double digit sales gains. In the process it's seen its stock rebound from a dangerously precipitous freefall just a few months ago to its all-time high. Being at the sweet spot at the convergence of trapped shoppers moving their purchasing online and …

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Dissolved: “Partnership” Between Retailers and Their Suppliers

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In the wake of the most devastating period in modern American retailing history when the coronavirus pandemic shut down more than two-thirds of the stores in the country, the way retailers pay their suppliers has changed dramatically - perhaps irrevocably. As such, any remnants of what was once called a partnership but has been deteriorating for a long time are about to vanish completely. With their stores mostly closed and only e-commerce (for some) to generate revenue, many large national retail chains changed their payment terms, going …

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