By now you’ve heard the news that leading luxury brands are bringing in cash hand over fist. LVMH, with its Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Fendi and newly acquired Tiffany brands, reported “record first half performance” with revenues up 56 percent over same period in 2020 and organic growth up 11 percent compared to 2019. Its Fashion and Leather Goods segment did even better, up 38 percent over 2019. The news led to hyperbolic headlines including in the Wall Street Journal, “Luxury Shares Soar as Louis Vuitton Shrugs Off Pandemic,” as it …
Strategy
The Great Fragmentation and AI: The Case for Neighborhood Shops
If you think of yesterday’s “mass market” as a nice glass bowl, that market today has shattered into a thousand small fragments of glass. This was the opening sentence in Chapter 4 of my co-authored book with Michael Dart, Retail’s Seismic Shift, published in 2017. Easy Come, Easy Go Do you remember the “must-have toy,” or must have latest fashion trend, (probably triggered by John Fairchild splashing the “miniskirt” across the front page of WWD), or the hot jeans brand of the moment? Or how about the many other examples across consumer …
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Is J.Crew Adapting, Or Abandoning its Signature Style?
J.Crew was one of the most beloved brands of the early aughts. But the preppy retailer fell hard and fast, filing for bankruptcy during the height of the coronavirus crisis last year. Many have been pontificating that the money moves J.Crew made led to the company’s $1.3 billion dollar debt. But in this case, it isn’t all about the Benjamins. The company failed to continue attracting customers during the recession. J.Crew’s 2020 bankruptcy comes down to the fact that the brand’s offerings didn’t reflect the cultural zeitgeist of the of the …
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The Retail Workforce of the Future
Millennials and Gen Z make up around half of the global workforce. Many are frontline retail workers whose jobs were impacted during the pandemic. Whether they were laid off, suffered reduced hours, or had to switch from a nonessential retail job (such as cosmetics sales) to an essential one (such as stocking shelves at an Amazon warehouse), there is nary a next-gen whose career trajectory wasn’t deeply impacted by the last year of lockdowns. Job Insecurity Slows Frontline Employee Loyalty The pandemic showed frontline retail workers the …
Will Shopify Solve Amazon’s Antitrust Issue?
The easy answer to whether Shopify will solve Amazon’s antitrust issue is no, but the more nuanced answer is hmm. Amazon's FTC investigation does not challenge the giant's behavior in the ecommerce retail sector. While Amazon is clearly the market leader, Walmart, Target, Best Buy and others are close competitors. The People Want to Know The Amazon antitrust challenge currently under consideration encompasses third-party merchants who sell on Amazon. The inquiry assumes that Amazon is an essential conduit between the merchant and the …
Five Macrotrends That Will Drive Traditional Retail’s Big Comeback
For the better part of a year – ever since the onset of Covid-19 – the doomsday diviners of retail have held center stage, pushing the narrative that brick-and-mortar retail will never come back, or if it does, it will surely be in some new, emasculated form that will be virtually unrecognizable to a time traveler from 2019. “Malls throughout America are suddenly running out of time,” exclaimed a recent USA Today report on the state of retail. Rhode Island’s Providence Journal went even further, stating that “the coronavirus pandemic will not …
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Betting Big on Going Bigger
The other afternoon on Dateline White House on MSNBC, Nicole Wallace mused with a female guest about what will happen when they can go outside again. Their consensus: They need elastic-banded pants. Their knowing smiles suggest we all will expand our wardrobes. After a year of relying on figure forgiving leggings, t-shirts and hoodies, entering the once and future world of wardrobes frozen in the amber glow of our year-ago closets may come as yet another shock to our already traumatized selves. Yet it must be said, our year of living Covidly …
So, You Think You Know Ikea?
If you continue to think of Ikea as that Swedish -- or is it Finnish? -- retailer with those humungous stores on the outskirts of town, lightweight furniture with funny names that is often difficult to put together...and the home to tasty little meatballs, you might want to rethink that opinion. Swedish Export Over the past several years the Swedish retailer -- and yes, they are from Sweden -- has undergone a remarkable transformation that has put it in the forefront of not only progressive retailing but also progressive thinking when it …