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MK is no LV: It’s Not Coach Either

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Is this any way to manage a Jet Set brand? Maybe, if you’re looking for a quick exit.

Listening to Michael Kors CFO Joe Parsons speak at ICR on January 16, 2013 on the Kors Jet Set aesthetic—spanning wings, wheels and water—I was reminded of the brand Louis Vuitton, also rooted in luxury travel.

iStock_000019271426MediumI make the comparison to Louis Vuitton for several reasons, beginning with its origins as a provider of luggage in the 1850s. In October 2010, I visited Paris (not just because I love to travel… and I especially love Paris) to see the installation of a Coach shop-in-shop at the Printemps flagship on Boulevard Haussmann, and do a store tour of Ralph Lauren’s new Left Bank flagship on Boulevard Saint-Germain. While I was there, I visited the Musée Carnavalet (the museum of the history of Paris). I never quite understood the fascination and demand for Louis Vuitton until I walked through the museum’s exhibit, Voyage en Capitale, Louis Vuitton & Paris.

On exhibit were the tailor-made trunks for nobility, celebrity and the wealthy. The exhibit told the brand story rooted in travel, a phenomenon that excites the imagination with the romance of new places and people, and different cultures and experiences. What holds more allure than travel? At the show, I discovered the basis of the brand’s aspirational DNA, which combines best-of-class quality and aesthetic with fashion’s excitement and superior execution at every touch point.

Is Michael Kors brand association with Jet Set travel designed to be the LV of the 21st Century? [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

QA with Eric C. Wiseman, Chairman, President and CEO of VF Corporation

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The Robin Report - Eric WisemanROBIN LEWIS So, right off the bat, how the heck can one person run a $10 to $12 billion company?

ERIC WISEMAN You can’t! VF has been, and I hope always will be, a team sport. When I look at the leadership teams around VF there’s no question that we have really talented people, but we don’t have “superstars.” What we do have is people who work extremely well together, who compliment each others talents, and who are committed to the teams success. That dynamic drives whatever success we’ve had. And, since you know me pretty well, you obviously know that I’m not capable of “running” VF….if I was I’d have a much different balance in my life.

RL So, Eric, the numbers on VF under your watch as CEO speak for themselves, and they would say you’re doing a great job.

EW For about five years now, since we’ve changed directions corporately, we’ve been executing on the right things. So, when you execute against the right things it generally works for you.

RL Going into the last half of this year against a rather negative global and U.S. economic backdrop, do you want to revise your earlier 15% growth projection for 2012, or at least hedge your bets, and if so, in what areas of the business? [Read more...]

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Posted September 10, 2012

How to Get a Bigger Share of Foreign Visitors’ Wallets

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The current economy poses challenges for all merchants, but stresses on brick and mortar stores are particularly heightened. The wave of closures that accompanied the Great Recession was only the start of a protracted move for chains to reduce their excess amounts of retail square footage; according to many retail analysts, America remains significantly “over-stored.” At the same time, the rapid and steady rise of e-commerce makes for greater displacement, with increasing numbers of Americans preferring to do their shopping from their homes or offices, or even from their phones. Brick and mortar stores, it seems, are left to duke it out for their share of an at-best limited domestic pie.

Fortunately, that domestic pie is not all there is. Foreign tourists and business travelers have been finding America to be the Golden Land — of shopping, anyway — and overwhelmingly they are not doing that shopping online but in person, in brick and mortar stores. What this means is that merchants can leverage cross-border spending to drive U.S. domestic sales as well as share growth, if they can find a way to target and keep those foreign customers. Key to building a cross-border strategy is an understanding of where to focus merchant efforts. That is, merchants must now put the same kind of effort into identifying and understanding their foreign customers as they do their shoppers here at home. [Read more...]

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Posted July 17, 2012

Why I Am Aglow With UNIQLO

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I first heard of Uniqlo several years ago when the company opened a pop-up store in Rockefeller Center. People were raving about the inexpensive cashmere sweaters. Always interested in a bargain, I checked it out. I was underwhelmed. Not enough sizes, a real mish-mash as I recall. It was dark and dreary. A dull basement space that was completely unexciting.

I returned to Uniqlo from a neutral point of view. However, this time around, the energy in the store, the sharp pricing the great overall merchandising and promotion, plus the fiber/product exclusivity, was so pro positive, that I have gone to the cheerleading side.

Over the last two years I received a couple of Uniqlo turtleneck ‘HEATTECH’ tops as gifts. These are made of a proprietary fabric that keeps you warm in winter by generating and retaining heat. The items can be worn as an under-layer or just alone. The fabric is kind of stretchy, “highly resilient and durable,” anti-static, odor resistant and designed to maintain its shape after repeated washings. And it does. [Read more...]

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Posted July 17, 2012

Furniture Sales: Going Virtual Might Be Its second Life

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With SpendingPulse retail and online sales data going back to 2005, we have been able to spot clear trends in the growth of ecommerce by sector. It has been well observed that books and consumer electronics were the first products consumers were prepared to buy online. During those early days, online women’s apparel seemed a hard sell in the absence of fitting rooms, not to mention the lack of ability to see and feel the fabric. But gradually, women began to buy some of their apparel online, eventually with less trepidation and more anticipation.

Eventually, it became the norm to buy children’s and teen apparel online, as return policies and procedures eased. During that time, few people ever believed that customers would ever buy jewelry online. Nevertheless, that changed too, and now hundreds of millions of dollars of jewelry at all ends of the spectrum gets sold that way.

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We can also see that during the recession, ecommerce spending on apparel was in positive territory even while total spending was in the red.
So with furniture, the thought of buying it online, untouched and unseen at scale in real space, on the face of it seems unlikely to catch on in any pervasive way. Yet, the year-over- year sales stats are beginning to show that more and more furniture sales are happening via the online channel. [Read more...]

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Posted June 5, 2012

The Teen Retail Space: Ripe for Deals?

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Looking for a hot retail deal space for 2012? Look no further than the teen and youth lifestyle segment.

While at first glance the sector may look extremely competitive, it in fact presents attractive deal and investment dynamics and opportunities. For many companies, the idea of operating in a private setting is quite appealing, since it provides the possibility for a turnaround without the constant short-term scrutiny of Wall Street. It also allows a rapidly growing company to accelerate its growth by deploying private capital more aggressively. For investors, the challenge is to find the company or companies that promise the right risk-adjusted potential returns.

Speaking of investing in the teen specialty retail segment brings to mind an old Rolling Stones song (yes, today’s teens still listen to The Stones): “You can’t always get what you want … but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.” So how should potential investors think about this space?

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. [Read more...]

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Posted March 11, 2012

If The Clothes Fit…The Topline Grows

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Me-Ality™ Market Insights From Unique Solutions

Who isn’t turning over every rock these days looking for growth opportunities? Apparel brands, with their almost obsessive focus on style, cost and value, might actually be overlooking one of the most important factors in the purchase equation: Fit.

Me-Ality™ 3D body scanners, which will begin rolling out to 300 US shopping centers later this year, have already begun to revolutionize the way consumers shop for apparel. After a 10-second fully-dressed scan, shoppers receive a customized, personalized shopping guide matching them with the styles and sizes of partner brand products in the mall that will fit them and their budgets. For the consumer, it means more productive and rewarding shopping trips, increasing the likelihood they’ll come back. For retailers, it brings a new and loyal customer base to their stores, increased sales, and fewer returns.

But wait, there’s more: In the process of scanning hundreds of thousands of consumers, Me-Ality realized it was collecting invaluable consumer data that could be used to help brands do everything from enhance their product development process to launch new businesses.

Read on to find out how one company added an inch…and in the process, grew its customer base by double digits. [Read more...]

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Posted October 23, 2011

As The Housing Recession Winds Down, Furniture Pureplays Can Benefit from New Analytical Tools

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Consumer Insights From MasterCard Advisors

Despite the sluggishness of the so-called recovery, industry experts are predicting a pickup in the housing market early next year. This will have broad implications for retailers of furniture, furnishings, and other home items. How retailers can prepare for this opportunity is a favorite topic for the data collectors and analysts at MasterCard Advisors, the merchant services arm of MasterCard. Here are some ways in which furniture retailers, who’ve gotten pummeled in this recession, can capitalize when the upswing occurs.

While sluggishness in the housing market and changes in the retail environment are leaving furniture merchants feeling besieged, one development is showing great promise as a powerful tool for remaining competitive.  The increased use of cards and electronic payment has led to an explosion in the amount of data now available that that can be analyzed to better understand consumer preferences.  A recent study by MasterCard Worldwide showed that the data warehouses at the cutting edge of this development are managing over 100 terabytes of information, and are seeing those numbers grow by 20 billion transactions, every year. [Read more...]

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Posted October 18, 2011

Fun Facts about Furniture

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Imagine if you crossed a car dealership with a funeral parlor. What you’d have would be a furniture store.

The retailing of furniture may not be the most archaic, antiquated and illogical form of merchandising in American business today…but it’s pretty damn close.

Anytime anyone talks about the best retailers in America, that conversation hardly ever includes a furniture retailer.

Virtually every consumer products category in America has a world-class, national retailer that dominates the category. Not furniture.

Virtually every consumer products category in America has a world-class, national brand that is instantly recognizable. Not furniture.

Think about it. Furniture is usually the third most expensive thing a person will ever buy, after a house and a car. Yet most people visit a furniture store about as often as they stop by a mortuary. With an often similar shopping experience, too. So, what you don’t know about furniture retailing could fill…well, could fill this column.

[Read more...]

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Posted September 5, 2011

The New Rules of Retail

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The New Rules of RetailLewis and Dart, in their seminal study of modern U.S. retailing, examine why and how the industry is quickly evolving — and what it will take to be successful in this new world.

Critics and industry leaders agree: The New Rules of Retail is a must-read for anyone interested in the industry. [Read more...]

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Posted May 10, 2011

Q&A with Jane Elfers, CEO of The Children’s Place

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We had the opportunity to talk with Jane Elfers, CEO of The Children’s Place, the number one pure-play children’s specialty apparel retailer. Here’s what she had to say about her first year at the company, the differences between the specialty and department store businesses, and the challenges of selling to some of the most value-conscious customers on the planet: parents of small children.

Q. Jane, you’ve been at the helm of Children’s Place for a year which has been a transitional one for the economy. Can you give us some idea of how the company has been doing through all of this? Do you think the recession is over, and if so, what will the recovery be like? What do you think about 2011 and beyond?

[Read more...]

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Posted April 13, 2011

What Are Your Customers Doing?

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Breaking the Information Barrier

Insights from MasterCard Advisors Merchant Solutions – New Data, New Perspectives

The Robin Report - Mastercard AdvisorsWhile over the past several years there has been a huge upsurge of merchants collecting and using customer data to drive retail business performance, the power of those approaches has been constrained by what might be called the three “natural limits” of in-store gathered information: target, space, and time.

That is, merchant retail data can only show them what their customers, while they are in their store, have already done.
No matter how good their analytic tools, retailers’ sales data is limited to what happens within their own walls.

Access to a broader picture of actual consumer behavioral data is changing the landscape for retailers and other merchants, and our Merchant Solutions practice has taken a lead in providing merchants with this kind of data-driven insight. The billions of transactions MasterCard processes each year give us the ability to do robust reporting, modeling and consumer behavioral segmentation.

[Read more...]

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Posted February 22, 2011