The noise about an encroaching takeover by retail robots be damned. Turns out consumers are delighted to conduct their shopping in the company of flesh-and-blood sales staff, as old-fashioned a concept as that might be. Or at least the millennial quotient is. Sixty-six percent of millennials find store employees “extremely important” to their shopping experience, […]
The start of a new school year is an excellent time to flip some new leaves with your merchandising efforts. Here are some ideas to get you launched: Give your customers room to breathe. Leave plenty of room down your aisles and around your corners (at least four feet between fixtures and six feet between […]
Let’s say you had more than 700 multinational clients whose daily movement of more than a million products (10 to 50 times the number of items even the largest retailer has in its product catalogue) you had to oversee, discerning and categorizing every last classification? Could you do it? Possibly. But it would take a […]
The concept of “merchandise planning” is among the murkiest in the retail lexicon. Everyone struggles to understand its limits and component parts. That makes it tricky to define. Here’s a primer on the stuff. What is merchandise planning? Merchandise planning is the process whereby retailers look to efficiently leverage inventory investment. Merchandise planning offers retailers […]
Signing a lease for your first (or your latest) retail enterprise can prove a daunting occasion. This written agreement between landlord and business tenant is a binding document, after all. And it commits you to an arrangement with another party that can be complicated and prone to misinterpretation. Here’s some data points on the things. […]
The advent of the digital mannequin and the hype surrounding its sexy promise notwithstanding, the old-fashioned flesh-and-blood (as it were) mannequin continues to reign supreme in the consumer marketplace. Indeed, a new report on these retail staples paints a picture of a thriving scene for these fashion-forward stand-ins. The global mannequin market was estimated to […]
Masters of all trades make for good retail operators. After all, a widely cast net and a broad scope of functional facilities suit such a professional well. But it’s nevertheless important to let yourself off the hook from the expectation that you know it all. Retail outsourcing isn’t a new idea, but its inherent wisdom […]
It’s tricky enough to navigate the retailing landscape what with the furious pace of advancing technology and the multiple channels along which one might conduct business today. But this scene is further complicated by emerging legal and moral issues such as how to respond sensitively to mental health in the workplace and the increasing imperative […]
So-called millennials make up the generation whose favour all marketers and retailers currently aspire to curry. At once terrifically misunderstood and patently simple, this cohort of young people is a box of potential just waiting to be unpacked. Born roughly between 1980 and 2000, the count of millennials—or Generation Y—arguably exceeds that of the much-ballyhooed […]
Retail geography is the study of where to locate retail stores in an urban setting according to where consumers are located, how the streetscape physically unfolds around them and what the demographics of the area suggest people might purchase. The subject has been a component of evolving urban landscapes since there have been evolving urban landscapes, […]