RPW 6-3-08

Retail Paradox Weekly

Retail News Analysis by RSR Research

6/3/2008

Leading Retail Investors Look to Assortments, eCommerce, and the 'Wisdom of the Crowd'

By Steve Rowen, Partner
6/3/2008

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Citigroup’s second annual Retail Tech Conference in New York City. Heading up Citi’s retailing/broadlines, food & drug and home improvement investment research, Deborah Weinswig and her team put together an impressive program of speakers. The goal of the day was to provide a forum for investors to learn more from technology vendors about where investments are being made, especially in tough economic times. But Weinswig and company managed to squeeze in no fewer than seven retailer presentations as well, including Macy’s, Saks, JC Penney, Urban Outfitters and Coach.

One of the more candid sessions I saw came from... More

If You Could Start from Scratch, What Would You Do? One CIO Gets the Chance

By Brian Kilcourse, Managing Partner
6/3/2008

In RSR’s recent research on the future of business application delivery in retail, our findings reinforce what every CIO knows, that the multi-generational nature of the application portfolio requires a big percentage of developers to focus on maintenance, rather than on new value adding development. This reality is pushing retailers to consider new application delivery models.

What’s not so obvious but perhaps more important from the analysis is that... More

Big Week for Multi-channel: Nordstrom Goes Cross-channel, BN Goes Mobile

By Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partner
6/3/2008

We could have had our pick of multi-channel stories this week, and provided pithy commentary on most all of them. But the two announcements that really jumped out at us were Nordstrom announcing a roll-out of “Buy on-line, pick up in stores” and Barnes and Noble rolling out a mobile commerce (mCommerce) site tailored for Blackberry and Windows Mobile users.

The gist of Nordstrom’s announcement was that the company... More

Managing Customer-centric Assortments: A Case Study

By Nikki Baird, Managing Partner
6/3/2008

At Manhattan’s User Group event, Momentum 2008, merchandise planning and the importance of connecting planning to execution was much in evidence. And one of the most interesting discussions of the week was on the impact of customer centricity on merchandising. One panelist in particular talked about her unique planning organization, which represents both an extreme of granularity in merchandise planning, but also demonstrates the impact that granular customer-centric planning (and by this I mean approaching unique by store at the category or item level) could also have on more traditional retailers.

The retailer was... More

RSR Featured FastFact:

Large retailers (those generating the equivalent of $5B or more in annual revenue) differ from all others in that they the manage gross margin percent closer to equivalency between channels, suggesting that they view the e-channel more as an extension of their store operations, than as an outlet for excess or different merchandise. The inference is clear: larger retailers (who not coincidentally have operated multi-channel offerings longer than other retailers) are more focused on using alternate channels as “lead generation engines” for their total offering, whereas under-performers think of the e-channel as a virtual “Bargain Alley.”

To read the full report, click here.