The retail industry has been a major beneficiary of the waves of globalization iterations in recent decades. We have optimized our supply chains, barely raised prices in years, and consumers have rewarded retailers by buying far more than they need, sometimes shedding goods in a Marie Kondo inspired purge, only to go out and buy more and more stuff. Until now. Early in the pandemic, consumers experienced a shift in the staples system as our Costco, normally dense with Lysol Wipes or buffeted by mountains of toilet paper packs, became …
Strategy
Wayfair Is Getting Physical…Finally
Call it omnichannel. Call it platform neutral. Call it be-where-your-customer-is. Whatever you call it, calling it late is a very risky business strategy indeed. And that is the position Wayfair, the big online home furnishings retailer, finds itself in today as it begins – FINALLY – the arduous, time-laden and incredibly expensive process of opening physical stores. After dabbling in a test or two, a couple of pop-ups, and a wing and prayer, Wayfair will open at least three stores under two of its sub-brands this year followed by a …
Amazon Fiddles Around While Losing on the Ground
The quasi-metaphor, “Nero fiddles while Rome burns,” refers to Amazon fiddling around with test stores while two of their fiercest competitors, Walmart and Target, continue to gain both on the ground and in the digital air, so to speak. And while Amazon has declared the necessity to expand into physical retailing (understanding the omnichannel advantage), and specifically in grocery and apparel, they are moving too slowly in this flywheel-tech era. This is astounding to me given Jeff Bezos’s mantra from day-one that Amazon must “get big fast.” …
Investors Are Scooping Up Homes
When you read the headlines – and even the subheads – you’ve got to be thinking the incredible boom in the housing market is fantastic news for makers and sellers of the products that go into those homes: furniture, floor coverings, lighting, kitchen appliances and all the other décor minutiae people decorate their homes with. And to a certain extent you’d be right: the home products sector has been on a terrific run the past two years, held down only by the same supply chain issues that have stymied everything from automobiles to toilet …
Can Walmart Connect Threaten Amazon’s Lead in the Advertising Business?
Just as Amazon and the internet in general continue to disrupt and transform the legacy publishing and broadcast industries, we are in the early stages of a major disruption of the legacy world of advertising. Amazon and Walmart are two leading forces that are fundamentally changing retail marketing communications. Ad Agency Reset Amazon was among the first, and now the largest mover, among retailers to launch its own advertising agency business logging in at over $31 billion in 2021, up from $21 billion in 2020, with a 77 percent share …
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Amazon’s Gift to Shopify
For the record: Amazon, based in Seattle, WA, is a global, primarily online marketplace which sells vendors’ and their own goods to consumers. Shopify, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, is a worldwide technology platform that primarily provides the tools, (software) and instructions for small businesses to quickly and easily create their own online shops. Ranging from $30 to $2000 a month, Shopify offers sellers over a dozen services to run an online store: the website domain name; inventory and content management; payment processing and …
Is Amazon a Kohl’s Suitor?
Is Amazon a suitor for Kohl’s? If not yet, perhaps it should be. And maybe Kohl’s is entertaining the possibility. Back in 2017, I stated that Kohl’s was launching its first few Amazon in-store shops as tests to drive younger customer store traffic to make a few Kohl’s sales across the aisle when they were visiting Amazon. Five years later it is still a win/win for both brands. At the time, I suggested that the partnership could very well be viewed as a much larger, long-term, first-stage strategy of Amazon to acquire Kohl’s. In the …
Luxury’s Got a New Change Agent: Gen Z
For years we’ve talked about the 72-million strong millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996) as the next-gen customers for luxury brands. But now there is an even younger generation on the horizon, Gen Z (born from 1997 to 2012), 67 million and counting. Note to self: immigration continues to add to their numbers. Similar But Different Like siblings born in the same family, millennials and Gen Z share similarities, but the greater the age difference, the greater the differences in the worlds they grew up in. Sixteen years …