Conventional wisdom insists the world as we’ve come to know it this past year balances precariously on a polarizing precipice: economic instability vs. the stock market’s irrational exuberance. Remember what happened to irrational exuberance? Consumer behavior today straddles a tipping point. To be clear, marketers are balancing the same divide. Poised on this teeter-totter, the key question looms: wither brands that understand and serve The New Consumer? Fairytale Moments Today’s reading of reality reminds us of the ballet version of The …
Opinion
That Was the Year That Was…and Wasn’t
The genesis of the state of the retail industry today in the U.S. began about a quarter century ago as a slowly rolling transformation resulting from the launch of the smartphone. And you could add Amazon into the mix as an accelerant. The slow roll was catapulted forward at warp speed with the onset of Covid-19 early this year. It propelled both the demise of those retailers who were pivoting too slowly or not at all, and the success of those who were strategically shifting their business models to align with tech-armed next-gen consumers. The …
Opinion: Do Prestige Beauty Brands Need to Pivot?
As an industry observer for many decades, I believe the prestige sector of the $532 billion global beauty industry is desperately working to find new ways of retaining its best customers during the ongoing pandemic -- and beyond. Now, in addition to trying to acquire new customers -- a chief goal of the last 10 years -- luxury brands are struggling to retain their base, who, because of Covid-19 safety concerns, are even more department store-resistant than they already were. With the pandemic, the major lure of department stores -- that women …
Amazon and Walmart Go Deeper into Apparel: But Why?
While retail sales of apparel were getting hammered before Covid was even part of our common vocabulary, it soared to the rank of number-one loser during the pandemic (the Work From Home phenomenon as a big contributor). According to McKinsey & Co., apparel revenue for the year is expected to drop by 20 percent to 30 percent industry-wide, and by 10 percent to 25 percent in 2021 compared with last year. Also, a big contributor to declining apparel sales pre-pandemic was the emergence of the now dominant next-gen consumer culture with a …
Amazon and Walmart Go Deeper into Apparel: But Why?Read More
For Whom the Retail Bell Tolls
Recent news headline: Retail CEO announces that luxe retail is the new normal. Another recent news headline: Real estate empresario comments on how overbuilt and expensive New York City has become. We were, of course, shocked to learn that real estate was expensive here. Any fair-minded observer can be forgiven a moment of disgust as these particular twin revisionist rationales work to fling more pixie dust on the legitimate question we face, Whither retail reality? Ghost Town It's not all Covid all the time. Think of the forced march to …
Brand Betrayal
The pandemic, in combination with the demand for racial justice, has brought out the best and the worst of the retail and fashion industries, forcing us to examine more closely the brands we give our money to. Free Pass Most of the fashion industry has, for too long, been unable to uproot itself from its deeply embedded history of racial and class biases. Suddenly, though, voices demanding change have grown louder and the industry’s day of reckoning is finally upon us. Over the past few months, as the Black Lives Matter movement swept (and …
Macy’s and Unsubscribed…Who?
I have this theory that the future post-pandemic retail landscape will be populated by the giant-sized retailers who have successfully survived their pre-Covid downward trend, as well as surviving the downward slope post-Covid. However, since the big brands have such expertise in AI and analytics to drive personalization, including localization, they will change their business models. They will only keep their giant footprints or flagships in select, outperforming urban areas and A-ranked malls (but only AFTER they have been converted into …
Shopify Who? Ask Walmart
Walmart recently sent a shot across Amazon's bow by partnering with Shopify Inc., the currently valued $88 billion, Canadian-based all-in-one e-commerce solution/tool. Shopify allows one to build a functional e-commerce store from scratch, without a designer's or developer's help. Shopify offers more than 75 million-plus products from more than a million merchants across 175 countries. So what? Amazon's 2019 marketplace sales of about $230 billion, dwarfs the estimated $61 billion revenues across all of Shopify-powered sites. And since …