The Holy Grail for any brand or retailer is customer loyalty. In the Arthurian legend, search for the mythical grail promises its finder divinity – even immortality. Customer loyalty as retail grail is magic for a company. It extends the lifetime value of the customer, builds a steady stream of repeat purchases and can turn the customer into a brand evangelist who spreads the word. But just like the mythical grail, loyalty is hard to find – it exists in the hearts and minds of its beholders. Identifying the Ephemeral Because loyalty is so …
Experience
The Shape of Things to Come
To the terror of millennials everywhere, Gen Z has officially canceled the skinny jean. Denim’s wider silhouette is only eclipsed by the flamboyant nature of today’s styles. The post-pandemic consumer mindset is defined by post-traumatic growth, or “the positive psychological change that is experienced as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life circumstances." Experiencing Fashion PTSD Post-traumatic growth can result from circumstances such as war, climate change, loss, or a global pandemic. A single incident can change the …
A Disconnect with Americans’ Fascination with Wellbeing
It isn’t only Belinda, the beleaguered spa manager in HBO’s smash summer hit The White Lotus, who’s finding it exceedingly challenging to cater to the whims of stressed-out guests right now. According to findings of the 2021 ISPA U.S. Spa Industry Study, a recent survey of more than 2000 American spa owners, the total number of U.S. employees fell by more than 20 percent last year. While it would be easy to attribute that fall-off to an overall decline in revenues and spa visits during Covid – each of those two vectors plummeted by a hefty …
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Macy’s, Target Add Yet Another Chapter to the Ongoing Toy Story
The toy market is once again – sorry, folks – in play. With recent moves by Target and Macy’s ahead of the critical fourth quarter surge in holiday-driven business, the toy and playthings category is shaping up to be as much in flux as it’s ever been in the past few years. Supply chain logjams, price increases and pandemic uncertainties only promise to exacerbate all of this. Toy Story: Last Chapter Of course, all of this comes in the context of the biggest development in toy retailing over the past 30 years: the demise of Toys’R’Us in 2018. …
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New Experiences and Stores Post-Covid
Despite the fact that Covid-19 and the Delta variant are still creeping around the nation, enough people have received vaccines that highly-vaccinated regions are "opening up" and "getting back" to pre-Covid life – mostly sans masks and social distancing. The trouble is retail has to come to terms with the fact that everything was not copacetic before the world shutdown. Great Expectations Reuniting with shoppers might feel so good, but the bloom might be off the rose quickly if shoppers aren't offered approaches and experiences that …
Immersive Retailing Is the Next Big Thing
Even as many retail companies have been working to reimagine their physical stores with experiential elements ranging from in-store events and interactive displays to entertainment, a whole new wave of businesses are now starting up where the entertainment itself is the main attraction and it’s what’s being sold. Merchandise becomes an afterthought. From Van Gogh art installations to Harry Potter VR trips to life-size recreations of Friends TV show sets, the new buzzword in the retail business is rapidly becoming “immersive.” Whether it will …
La Samaritaine: A Dazzling Makeover
Here’s one for the century. The reopening of La Samaritaine in Paris redefines the whole concept of a department store. In fact, “department” is immediately antiquated and irrelevant in this new marketplace model. We recently caught up with Kevin Roche who was charged with overseeing the retail planning and design of the massive LVMH project to reimagine and reinvent a centuries-old retail business. Roche explains, “I spent seven years overseeing the store planning, design, and construction of La Samaritiane. This was in addition to …
Nontraditional Brands Break into Retail
Retail discovery has yet another channel, this time it really is a channel … well actually a streaming service. Experimentation in customer discovery is extending beyond social commerce into the greater media sphere. June 2021 was a busy month for Netflix's ecommerce projects. The streaming giant cut the virtual ribbon on The Netflix Store, an outlet for limited edition collections based on Netflix programming. Also in June, the platform debuted the resplendent limited series Halston and launched the adjacent Halston X Netflix eveningwear …