Where everybody knows your name. The “new shopkeepers.”

More and more the retail world is bifurcating. At one end of the spectrum, you have the high-efficiency players. Great prices, endless assortments, super convenience, built for speed. Amazon, Walmart, iTunes, Home Depot. You get the picture. While each go about it slightly differently, their world is mostly a mass market one. Customer segmentation means [...]

Read Full Post »

The end of e-commerce

We’ve gotten pretty used to talking about e-commerce and brick & mortar retail as if they were two entirely separate things operating in parallel universes. In fact, industry commentators often treat the “on-line shopper” as some sort of new species. Yet more and more the notion of e-commerce as a channel unto itself is collapsing. [...]

Read Full Post »

When the last 15 years happens to you

If you are in retail, the last 15 years or so have brought enormous change. Let me call out a few profound shifts: Winning business model bifurcation: Price and dominant assortments at one end (Wal-mart, Amazon); remarkable experience and assortment curation/product differentiation on the other (Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton). The result is death in the middle. [...]

Read Full Post »

Let’s get digital…digital

The first wave of digital retail was either about brands with a history in catalog merchandising putting up a basic e-commerce site (Williams-Sonoma, Lands’ End) or pure-plays picking off products categories that early adopters could readily embrace (Amazon). The market dealt harshly with models that could not execute a basic direct-to-consumer formula, targeted a product [...]

Read Full Post »

Shrinkage. Be prepared for more cold water.

Yesterday Best Buy announced its plans to shrink its U.S. big-box square footage by 10% to compete more effectively with Amazon and other digital competitors. Expect to hear more announcements like this–at least from those retailers who get how hard the winds of change are blowing for brick and mortar retailers. Physical retail is not going away, [...]

Read Full Post »