CB2 Grows Up
It’s taken a little longer than probably most people expected, but it appears that CB2 is finally entering puberty.The little kid sister to Crate & Barrel is about to mark its 18th year in business; by this point it should […]
Over the River and Through the Woods…to Black Friday We Go
The sleighs are ready and waiting for a Black Friday kickoff. But hold on a second! This is old world thinking. A retail expert, who will go unnamed, asked me, “Where have you been — on Mars? Pick any day
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Amazonification
Welcome to the Amazonification of the global economy! Or, if you’re competitor—World War A. At this point, retailers are on Amazon overload, having wrung their hands raw over the acquisition of Whole Foods and speculation about what Amazon might do
A View Into the New Normal: AKA, The Retail Renaissance
I’ve often been criticized of late as being a harbinger of “death,” namely, a retail apocalypse or even worse, a technology tsunami about to break and wipe out every old world retailer in its path. In self-defense, it does seem
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Here Comes Alibaba
I recently attended Shoptalk Europe in Copenhagen with 350 retail and retail tech CEOs and another 2,050 retail practitioners and investors who were interested in hearing what those CEOs had to say. Here are a few aha moments I had
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The Children’s Place – A Case Study For Winning
There’s such a dark cloud of bad news for most general merchandise and apparel retailers today that when I examined how The Children’s Place rose from the near-dead in 2010, made it through a tepid economic recovery, exacerbated by the
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Micro-Influencers: Can the Beauty Industry’s Obsession du Jour Actually Deliver Any Meaningful, Measurable ROI?
Dear Reader, can we be frank with each other and just admit that the only reviews that are 100-percent legit are those by individuals who have ponied-up their own hard-earned cash to actually buy the product they’re commenting or posting
Nordstrom Local: A Triple-Header: Personalization, Experience, BOPUS
The opening of Nordstrom Local in West Hollywood, California, on October 3, is a visionary move, responding to the demanding consumer youth culture. Boldly innovative and counter-intuitive, there is no merchandise in store. It is a small (3000 square-feet), fun,
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Kohl’s/Amazon – Win/Win?
Or…Is Amazon Envisioning a Future Acquisition of Kohl’s? I have to hand it to Kohl’s CEO, Kevin Mansell, and his team. The Midwestern Vince Lombardi mindset is usually associated with blocking, tackling and gaining a few yards up the middle.
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Transforming Retail to (R)Tech
Over the centuries, retail has blossomed into an industry that supports millions of store employees, tens of millions of people in ancillary industries, and hundreds of millions of customers. It is at the heart of our cities and towns, and
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