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Why Are Handbags So Important?

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The Robin Report - HandbagsFunctional, Personal Statement, Self Expression, Fashion Accessory, Status Symbol?

The correct answer I believe is: “All of the above.” I’m not a handbag person, per se, although I own several. I don’t think of status so much when I buy a purse, yet I realize that, in addition to function, which for me means not too heavy and enough room for my stuff, I am conveying something about myself when I tote around my handbag. As Nora Ephron said in her very funny essay, I Hate My Purse, “…your purse is, in some absolutely horrible way, you…”

Whether real, fake, or my new favorite, ‘luxury pre-owned,’ handbags are an expression of who we are and where we belong in social, economic and fashion terms. As our most visible fashion accessory, our handbag is both functional and symbolic, conveying to others the tribe to which we belong. A form of self-expression and signal of personal style, handbags are also an entrée to luxury and glamour. One may not be able to afford that penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue; or, the private tented safari in Africa; but, one could, perhaps, feel a part of that world with say, a Louis Vuitton bag. [Read more...]

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Posted March 20, 2013

Y Do I Care?

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ydoicareAnd Why You’d Better Care About These Five Words of Activation

Brands love me. They find me in the recesses of my social interactions and they ask (read: incentivize) me to be their brand ambassador. Who am I? I am any Millennial/Gen Y, and broke as we are reputed to be, we are quickly (like in the next five years) about to start outspending your other favorite customers, our parents, the Baby Boomers. And brands (not all, but definitely the ones we will be interacting with for years to come), are quickly taking the initiative to not only put themselves where we are, but also to make themselves known as one of us.

You might ask, “How do they do that? How does Nike become a twenty-something?” I will tell you how: they speak to us like we speak to each other. Because for the first time, your brand is in conversation between posts made by my own twenty-something friends. And how better to relate your brand to me and my friends than by using terms we use, or that excite or interest us. Clearly, I am not talking Internet-speak (LOL)—I am talking activation words; words that convey to us who we want to be; how we understand the world to be; or even how we would like the world around us to become. Because those who understand the way Gen Y ticks, understand that more than anything else, we are an aspirational generation. Helping us aspire—feeding your brand vocabulary with words or concepts we aspire to—activates us as customers that want to interact with your brand, both socially and commercially.

I’m going to share with you five words of activation that have the potential to activate your Gen Y or Millennial customer, and why knowing what each one means and why it matters will let them know you know the “Y.” [Read more...]

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Posted February 12, 2013

Sleight of Hand

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The Touch, the Feel — but Not the Performance — of Cotton

The recent ruling by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to fine four retailers, including Amazon.com and Macy’s, for mislabeling textiles made from bamboo rayon as simply “bamboo,” underscores the seriousness with which the government is enforcing truth and clarity in labeling. Some onus, however, is also on consumers, some of whom are largely unaware of recent fiber substitutions in traditionally cotton-dominant apparel—a shift that can impact the care and thus, perceived value, of their purchases.

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Click to Enlarge

The ubiquity of cotton in apparel and home textiles has made it the fiber to beat, or at least the one to imitate. Manufacturers of synthetic fibers and some wood pulp rayons have become adept at duplicating the tactile softness long associated with cotton. To consumers, cotton is a known quantity, especially where the feel, or hand, and laundering are concerned. Many consumers have discovered, to their dismay, a sleight of hand in the form of fiber substitutions in traditionally cotton-rich apparel. [Read more...]

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Posted February 11, 2013

A New Strategic Growth Opportunity

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The Robin ReportWhere will retailers find their next big growth opportunity? Supply chain advantages are maturing and lifestyle marketing is no longer novel. For national retailers, beautifully merchandised stores are located in about every mall and on every street corner in the country.

Furthermore, retailers are frustrated by their inability to get more return on the huge investments they make each year on labor, real estate, product, and marketing. Traditional approaches to growth are no longer working as well as they used to. To get better results, we need to think in new ways and operate differently.

The Next Big Opportunity: “Operational-ize” the In-Store Customer Interaction

Retailers, reluctantly, have a ‘gut feeling’ that their customers are not getting a consistent in-store brand experience. Most executives are disappointed in the customer interaction capabilities of store teams. At the same time, customer expectations continue to increase as shopping options expand. Most of us can recall at least one positive in-store experience. Apple stores certainly deliver them regularly. The store team focuses on you from the moment you enter the store. There is a governing manager ensuring your connection is made properly. A skilled associate interacts with genuine curiosity, not in a pushy way. You are provided relevant information about the products you are interested in. The experience adds value to the product and the brand.

Sadly for most consumers and retailers, memorable customer experiences are the exception and not the rule. [Read more...]

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Posted December 10, 2012

Under Pressure

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Those of us with memories of 1950’s kitchens may remember pressure cookers: a heavy metal pot with a rubber gasket that we were always told was a bomb and a really good way of killing vegetables. I have not seen a pressure cooker in an American kitchen for 30 years. Even my foodie royalty friends don’t have one. And unless you took Home Economics in the 1950s or 1960s, you probably have no idea how this supposedly dangerous appliance works.

Yet across the developing world, it is a primary tool of kitchen liberation. The old bomb we feared, as stories of exploding pea soup splattering grandma’s kitchen wallpaper, has been re-engineered. Pressure cookers are widely available in Walmart and on Amazon.com, in all varieties.

The principle of the pressure cooker is simple. In a compressed environment, water vapor, or steam, can be raised to very high temperatures without burning its ingredients. The steam is forced through the food, cooking it cleanly and quickly with no loss of flavor or nutrition. Thus, you can put a cup of water and three potatoes in a pressure cooker, and seven minutes later, you are eating spuds. Brown rice doesn’t take an hour; it cooks in 15 minutes.

In any cuisine that is based on legumes and grains, from hummus in the Middle East to dahl in India, cooking has traditionally tied women to the kitchen for hours every day. Even if basic staples are made once or twice a week, the preparation and cooking time involved often precludes a woman who is caring for a family the ability to also hold down a full-time job. A good pot of beans can take two to four hours to cook; having a pressure cooker can cut weekly meal prep times by more than half. [Read more...]

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Posted December 9, 2012

Multichannel Breakthrough: Segmentation Powers Insights into the Empowered Shopper

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The Robin ReportAs with all new approaches, the best innovations in the digital marketplace occur not as a result of reinventing the wheel, but by integrating and retooling existing assets. Things become truly exciting for the merchant in the combination of insights derived from spending behavior with insights derived from transaction analysis—in time as well as virtual space. By including the insights from real-time transaction data, behavioral models of different segments of e-shoppers can help to extrapolate that a device that has clicked on these specific links is likely to make purchases in certain market sectors within a specified period of time. At MasterCard, we are creating a breakthrough for merchants in segmentation by bringing our own enormous anonymized data set to bear on the task of identifying shopper segment behaviors. By applying insights on spending behavior to our partners’ online populations using common geo-demographics, our partners are able to identify online shoppers with a high propensity to spend in a given industry in the next 30 days. [Read more...]

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Posted October 23, 2012

A Private Story

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(The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Innocent)

He’d been an interesting but troubled friend in my youth. Tom had arrived at our fancy New England boarding school as a shy eighth grader interested in books, politics and music. He told us that his father, who was a 63-year-old New England gentleman farmer when he was born, had been T.S. Eliot’s roommate at Harvard. That story was beyond the construction abilities of 1960’s teenage braggadocio, so we believed him.

The Robin Report - PrivacyDuring the spring of our junior year his father died, and Tom lost it. He failed his final exams and was told he had to go to summer school to keep up with his class. He returned in the fall and promptly dropped out. In our yearbook we put a picture of Tom holding up a dime (the cost of phone call back then) and a seven-digit telephone number.

The late teenage years can be a very troubled time. Paired with the political and social climates of the era, Tom’s issues were not unique, just early. Ten percent of our boarding school graduating class that year was dead within a year of leaving school, mostly due to suicide. It was the goody-two-shoes guys that went first, having been shocked at how different the world was from what they’d been led to believe.

I graduated and promptly rented an apartment for the summer in Boston where I had a job with a publishing company on Beacon Hill. Halfway through the summer, by what circumstances I don’t recall, Tom turned up at my door with his pregnant girlfriend seeking a place to crash. They stayed in the apartment until my lease ran out in the end of August. She found a job, he didn’t. As I left for my freshman year in college, they moved into the back of Tom’s aging farm Jeep. I didn’t see them after that. That was 42 years ago.

I am not big on reunions. I went to my high school’s 20th and got asked by some sniveling Boston Brahmin where I “summered,” and realized I had not fit in back then, much less now. I did have a conversation with someone about Tom. Over the next 20 years I crossed paths with the same person three or four times. Each time we talked about him. [Read more...]

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Posted September 9, 2012

Exploding the “Fit” in Corporate Culture Makes the Impossible, Possible!

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An interview with Tanya Shaw, Founder and CEO, Unique Solutions and Judi Richardson, Executive Vice President of Corporate Culture, Professional Development and Quality Assurance

Robin Report: Tanya, you are in the midst of rapid growth as a company – increasing staff by 1000% in a year, and have moved from one location to 65 in nine months, to over 200 by the end of this year. What has your corporate culture strategy been through the past year?

Tanya Shaw: You hear stories of small companies growing too fast — I knew we needed the right people in place to lead key pieces of our tremendous growth. The foundation for that team’s success is to create the right corporate culture to reach short-term targets and long-term vision. And we feel we have a unique and transformative strategy.

Judi has been critical in helping to build our corporate culture. Working together, we have developed our philosophy— not about seeing people as a fixed cost — but rather, harnessing and maximizing human creative potential to add value and create a meaningful new corporate culture model. True collaboration is about actively creating relationships; inviting people to move from a single vision to shared vision; and recognizing and encouraging each individual’s constructive contribution.

RR: Judi, what is Tanya onto here? Why is corporate culture so crucial to the success of Me-Ality’s rapid growth?

Judi Richardson: We read everywhere about the importance of culture; for Me-Ality, I see it as “leaderfull” mindset working together to create the environment for executing strategy with focus, agility and innovation. We work smart to increase the quality of awareness as well as conscious intention — and what I call transformative momentum — while always ensuring alignment with our corporate imperative. [Read more...]

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Posted July 17, 2012

Controlling Creation to Consumption: It’s Time

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The Robin ReportThe mantra of the old school merchants has always been “… at the end of the day, success is all about product, product, product.”

Well, several years ago that myth was shattered and the ante was raised in the apparel game by the likes of Zara, H&M, Mango, and Forever 21. And, at the time, most of the industry didn’t really understand that these four brands were redefining innovation and consumer connectivity through the redefinition of the value chain process. In fact, at the time, it’s quite possible the brands themselves did not understand the full force of their “game-changing” process. One thing they did understand, however, is that you can’t win in the apparel game solely by creating unique new styles every season (which today is just the price of entry) or launching another celebrity brand just to achieve competitive parity.

They learned very early on how to process the ubiquity and speed of communications combined with high tech- driven, transparent, seamlessly integrated, rapid-response and totally controlled value chains directly connected and instantaneously responsive to consumers (in fact driven by consumers). They learned how to design or knock off, and deliver the hottest new looks overnight. And, not just overnight on a seasonal basis, but on a weekly basis.

Process Innovation = Superior Product Innovation

Call it “fast fashion,” “disposable fashion” or whatever you want. But what’s happening in this not-so-new-anymore business model is that it matches twenty-first century technology with what obsessively consumptive twenty-first century consumers really want. And that’s more, more, and more, faster, faster, and faster. Hey, it’s the McDonald’s thing! They want quantity over quality! Right? [Read more...]

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Posted May 3, 2012

The Jobsian Era is Upon Us: The Art and Science of Retailing Converge

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Steve Jobs did not create either the art or science of retailing, but he quintessentially defined its convergence. Therefore, I think it’s appropriate to attach his name to this era we are just now entering.

Let me be very clear. This is not, I repeat, not another story about Apple’s incredible retail experience. And, it’s not just about how Jobs, who didn’t graduate from college, understood the technology well enough to know how far he could go in creating its “art,” its magnificent design along with the ease and fun of its use for consumers.

It’s about how Jobs, and his right brain artistic skills, happened to either start technology’s third iteration, the era we are now in, or at least crystallize and accelerate this convergence of art and science.

The first phase, some 30 years ago, defined the early use of the Internet and all of its contiguous technologies, unleashing globalization, and unlocking incredible efficiencies and speed in the “back end” of the supply chain. The next evolution was its explosive generation and delivery of information and the early beginnings of e-commerce 20 years ago. And, now, what I call the “Jobsian” era, converging art and science at the “front end” of the supply chain, connecting consumers with compelling experiences. [Read more...]

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Posted March 12, 2012

Detroit’s Disconnect Problem and How to Fix It

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The Robin Report - Detroit DisconnectAs goes General Motors, so goes the nation. Uh, Oh! The problems in the mirror are closer than they appear.

The recent Clint Eastwood Super Bowl commercial notwithstanding, the auto industry is still clawing its way back out of the recession.

There’s an estimated 90 million vehicle production capacity worldwide, and stable demand at 60 million vehicles. Many experts still believe there are too many dealers relative to demand, particularly as more foreign brands enter the market. There are now 3 or 4 times as many import brands than there are domestic brands. Volkswagen and other import brands are committed to being more aggressive.

“Government” Motors (aka GM), Ford and Chrysler have been experiencing a disconnect with their dealerships for some time now. The auto dealerships, all privately-owned businesses, are not sophisticated marketers, and for the most part, get little guidance from the corporate types in Detroit when it comes to the retail end of the advertising process. The past few months have seen some positive sales numbers for Ford and Chrysler, but not GM. [Read more...]

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Posted March 11, 2012

Amazon…From Earth’s Biggest Bookstore To The Biggest Store on Earth?

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The Robin Report - Issue 11 - AmazonJust like the original “Pacman” of the earliest video games, chomping through all of the pac-dots to victory, Amazon appears to be rapidly chomping its way to becoming the biggest store on earth by taking on every product and service category within its reach.

While Amazon’s first slogan “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” did describe the business they were in, it did not describe the vision of the business they are becoming. That vision, as defined by Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, had no boundaries, and apparently still does not. Books were always just the beginning in Bezos’s mind.

Furthermore, one might say that it is Amazon, not the Internet, that is changing the face of retailing today by changing the way consumers shop and buy. If the Internet is a fundamental globally disruptive, game-changing event, then Amazon is its most disruptive pioneer.

The company has singlehandedly changed consumer behavior: “running an errand” replaced by “going online;” instantaneous price-shopping from one location; actually bringing retail closer to a perfectly competitive marketplace. Amazon also paved the way to meteoric e-commerce growth for all other retailers by making consumers comfortable with it. Conversely, Amazon has already put Borders and other retailers out of business. Who’s next? Or who will be forced to completely change its model in order to survive?

Indeed, the Internet by itself is just a tool, albeit one for which its uses are still being discovered, with Amazon leading in such discovery. Bezos has stressed the point that Amazon must provide enormous added value to change consumers’ shopping behavior. In fact, early on he called the Internet “a primitive infant technology.” By now, of course, Amazon has taken that technology light years beyond its infancy, but, would concede there are light years remaining for its growth.

So, how big is Mr. Bezos’s vision of the “biggest store on earth?” Who knows? And I would suggest that even he does not have a volume number in mind. Currently, Walmart holds the “biggest” position, at almost $450 billion, against Amazon’s $34 billion in 2010. However, one must note that “Pacman” has grown a blistering 300% since 2006, (vs. Walmart’s growth during the same period of 21%), and is expected to hit about $50 billion in sales in 2011. And, while Walmart has 200 million visitors a week, Amazon is now hosting over 300 million per month, based on comScore estimates, and saw its traffic rise by 15% on Black Friday weekend. Amazon now has an over 20% share of total worldwide e-commerce traffic. Also, more than half of Walmart’s revenues come from groceries and other nondiscretionary items, categories that Amazon has not even attempted to break into. [Read more...]

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Posted January 24, 2012