Retail insights at the intersection of now and next. Unfiltered. Unbiased
In this conversation, Haley Boehning sits down with Tim to unpack the story behind The Baxter Collective, a new highly-curated physical retail platform opening its first store in Rye, New York. Designed to fill the white space between the endless aisles online and the niche boutique, The Baxter Collective isn’t about reinventing the department store.
Where is Generation Z actually spending their money? As their social media profiles function like supplementary resumes, they’re spending to build their personal brands online. Young people are investing in highly considered luxury purchases to help them achieve their professional goals by visualizing the life they want to lead, or the person they want to become, on digital channels.
Economic opportunity in America is vast and wide. Aligning capital with vision, brand values, customers, managers, and partners allows for all necessary constituents to come together, perform and win. If you don’t choose the right parties to align with your needs, you risk it all. In simple terms, a bus driver whose agenda is to sell the bus won’t ultimately care about the people riding on the bus who need to get home.
Marcy is a customer-centric strategist and innovator; founder of Schaffir Consulting in 2022 she has been one of the most successful leaders in the industry at Lane Bryant, L Brands, LensCrafters, Ann Taylor, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Her leadership philosophy is based on her conviction to, “Stop waiting; start asking.”
Operationally rigorous retail is harder to replicate than it appears. It requires clear strategic priorities, disciplined assortment planning, and investment in format evolution. It demands alignment among merchandising, real estate, design, operations and the buy-in of the workforce. It requires the organization’s maturity to say no when necessary.
Every company that came along after them said they were the “Warby Parker of…whatever” and virtually every one of them failed, collapsed or morphed into a traditional business that had little if anything to do with DTC.
Join Shelley and Romain Fouache, CEO of Akeneo, as they discuss why eBay’s acquisition of Depop for $1.2 billion strengthens its core business and marks a structural inflection point.
The Barnes & Noble strategy of deferring to local taste over stock-wide uniformity and treating stores as community hubs rather than depots of inventory stands in stark contrast to Amazon’s homogenized and algorithmically curated marketplace.
Retail, which has always been a canary in the coal mine with regard to the behavior of our overall economy, will now be under even more significant pressure this year. Retail does, after all, make up some 70 percent of the U.S. economy. The guarded prognosis, widely held by many, if not most, industry leaders, becomes even more problematic with a war underway in Iran. If this conflict becomes a “forever war,” inflation could become explosive.
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