Global

Q&A With Zach Pandl, Senior Economist, Goldman Sachs

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We caught up with Zach Pandl, Senior Economist at Goldman Sachs to get a reading on the global economy, and his thoughts about our complex financial future and the implications for the retail sector. Robin Lewis: Let’s start with kind of a general macro scenario. What’s your take on what’s happening in the global economy? Zach Pandl: Really big picture view, starting in 2007 to 2009, globally, you had a very synchronized recession and then a synchronized recovery everywhere. Some places were hit worse than others. The U.S. had a pretty …

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Give a Little, Get a Lot. Or Not.

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Philanthropy and Your Brand I first heard of Toms nearly five years ago while wedding dress shopping with my niece. To judge the right length of the dress, the sales person asked what type of shoe she was planning to wear. She answered definitively, “Toms,” sticking out a foot covered in what appeared to be a fabric espadrille, “I’ve already ordered a pair in white.” Her mother and I silently poked one another as the sales person replied, “Oh, I love Toms. I have them in almost every color!” Toms was started in 2006 by Blake Mycoskie, an …

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MPOS: Moving Beyond The Hype

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As often happens in the retail technology space, hype can be distracting. Consider Square. As 2016 opens, Square is surrounded by its initial public offering hype and CEO drama. That’s unfortunate. Because retailers should be focused on what the company does and what it represents. Square, and all the companies it competes and cooperates with, make electronic payments mobile. Anywhere. Mobile point-of-sale systems (MPOS) help create the customer experience at Apple Stores, and the same technology helps the local food truck increase sales. If …

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Rx for Genuine Growth at Retail: Find, Train, Incentivize

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Bain & Company forecasts the size of the global personal luxury market at $230 billion. And it worries it will grow by only one percent this year. Bank of America says, "No! This is too narrow a definition: Think of it as Vanity Capital!" Then, BofA says, the size of the prize is closer to $4 trillion. It’s quite a range. And it’s beyond debating the right way to measure the luxury market (personal necessity or pure vanity?). Sooner or later you’re talking real money, as the cliché goes. How can genuine luxury brands monetize the lift …

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Origins

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Made In Italy “All I know is, when I see a ‘Made in Italy’ label, I want to buy it!” This is typical of comments I hear from the sophisticated fashion set I run with in NYC. Italy’s creativity, artistry, and passion speak to us viscerally on every level, from design and fabric to style and construction. ‘Made in Italy’ can even evoke visions of classical Rome, with its intelligent aesthetic, as well  as la dolce vita  – a way  of life epitomized in Italian cinema of the  1950s and the '60s. In the summer of 2014, London’s famed Victoria and …

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Applied Theory on Brazil: Notes From the Tropics

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Art, theater, and retail have all been intertwined in American culture going back nearly two centuries, to Godey’s Lady Book in 1830. As recently as the 1950s, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Sari Dienes, all postmodern artists, paid their bills by doing commercial retail design work. Not a well-known fact: Andy, Jasper and Bob did store windows; Sari did fixture design. Going back to the first retail design firms of the ‘50s, many of them started as set design businesses. Even today, restaurant and retail design …

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If It’s a Race to the Bottom, Then Who Really Wins?

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To put it mildly, the current retail climate, both meteorogically and financially, has to be one of the most dynamic we’ve ever seen. The forces of nature, distribution, and global conflict have created a new consumer behavior without historical precedent. Seventh Avenue these days looks like it’s returning from the dentist but without the benefit of Novocain. And to make it worse, it knows it has to go back tomorrow and do it all over again. Like the HBO series “The Leftovers,” the consumer seems to keep disappearing. Blockbuster Vs. …

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Retail Could Become the Hunger Games

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The world, just at this moment, is riveted by the spectacle of a precariously balanced high wire act in something approximating Hunger Games cum Circus Maximus. We are all watching. We cannot look away.  Each day comes new news and revelations. Each day comes new frightening random acts of death and destruction: Beirut, Paris, Mali -- all in one week. Brussels on lockdown. There will come a time soon when we begin to pick up the vestiges of our lives and come to grips with its transformation into our new normal. For retailers, brands, …

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