The home furnishings industry, if you’ll excuse the expression, is scared silly. Virtually every product that you plug in, sleep on, dry yourself off with, put your clothes in, eat on, and generally use in your home comes from someplace […]
“Double, double toil and trouble,” wrote Shakespeare, and I can’t think of a better description of the situation at Ralph Lauren Corporation. “Double, double,” refers to two leaders in two short years. On February 2 the company announced that then-CEO
What’s Brewing Over at Ralph Lauren, and It’s More Than Ralph’s Coffee Read More »
Imagine if Home Depot and Whole Foods decided to open a store together…and got Deepak Chopra to run it. What you’d have is something not all that dissimilar from TreeHouse, a new home improvement store that opened for business in
A TreeHouse Grows in Dallas Read More »
Each day brings news of big changes in Washington, and both denim brands and retailers are anxiously trying to make sense of what it all means for them. The lack of clarity will affect the value denim produced in Mexico
How Patagonia is Rewriting the Rules of Denim Read More »
Much has been written about the decline and the forecasted death of retail brick and mortar in this country. Additionally, a lot of time and effort has been spent on diagnosing why this is occurring. Everyone from strategists to economists
Why the Consumer Is so Frustrated with Retail Today Read More »
Even by its own blistering-pace standards, it was a busy week of goings and comings at The Estée Lauder Companies. In announcements timed mere days apart, it apprised the industry that it would shutter its year-old bid for the millennial
Robin Lewis, CEO of The Robin Report kicked off the program with an opening visual of a tsunami about to wipe out the entire legacy big box and department store sectors, Lewis went on to rivet attendees with one ominous
Department Stores: From Complacency to Urgency Read More »
My good friend Mike Gould, former Bloomingdale’s CEO, often reminds me of a statement I made several years ago that he keeps using as an apt description of all businesses that thrive on innovation: “Risk-averse fashion is an oxymoron.” Just
The Nordstroms See the Future and Want to Own It Read More »
Ever-emerging new technologies and new financial realities, constantly changing consumer preferences and ruthless competitive challenges make effective transformational leadership a retailing management imperative. While maintenance of the status quo may have worked in the past it’s a deadly practice now.
The Transformation Trap Read More »
Many of you may remember Rodgers and Hammerstein’s iconic 1949 musical South Pacific and a song that rings as true today as it did nearly 70 years ago. “You\’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, You\’ve got to
Tuning Up Diversity Read More »
