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On this week’s Modern Retail Rundown, the editorial team starts by discussing a new lawsuit filed by American Eagle against Amazon, in which the retailer alleges that counterfeit versions of its Aerie products are being listed on Amazon. Meanwhile, publicly traded e-commerce startups Grove Collaborative and Stitch Fix have provided updates on their latest progress in narrowing losses and becoming profitable.
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Soccer is having a moment, and that has meant online destinations like Soccer.com are seeing newfound growth.
But according to Soccer.com CEO Mike Moylan, this has been a long time coming. When Lionel Messi signed with Inter Miami last year, bringing the Argentinian soccer star to the United States, it was clear that the sport was becoming a mainstream pastime for Americans. But there were times before that also brought soccer to the mainstream U.S. -- including when the U.S. women's team won the World Cup in 1999 or when David Beckham joined the LA Galaxy in 2007.
Ever since the U.S. hosted the World Cup in 1994, "[there] has been sort of the meteoric rise of soccer from an interest perspective," Moylan said.
Moylan joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and discussed the rising U.S. interest in the sport and how the company has grown and changed.
Soccer.com has been around since 1994 (technically, it began before that as a catalog business, but it acquired the single-word domain in 1994). It's been a destination for people to buy the jerseys of their favorite players along with equipment like soccers and uniforms for leagues.
But as soccer has continued to grow in popularity, Soccer.com has grown out other parts of its business. This includes white-label partnerships with organizations like FIFA as well as stadium tie-ins.
For now, Soccer.com is focused on capitalizing on the current U.S. soccer fervor. And it is already in the throes of planning for the next World Cup.
"That moment in time will define soccer in the United States," he said. -
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On this week's episode of the Modern Retail Rundown, the editorial team dives into some of the updates announced at Amazon Accelerate, the company's annual sellers' conference. Then, we discuss two prominent bankruptcies: Tupperware and Red Lobster. The Tupperware news was just announced this week, and Red Lobster has emerged from bankruptcy with a new owner.
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"I'm like a dinosaur," said Reggie Milligan.
While literally hyperbole, there is some truth to his claim. Milligan is the founder and CEO of Mantry, a male-targeted food subscription box. Mantry, which is available in the U.S. and features up-and-coming American brands, has been around since 2012 -- it experienced the precipitous rise of subscription boxes and its fast decline. But the company is still around, still seeing growth and has some plans for expansion.
Milligan, a Canadian entrepreneur, joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the rise and fall of the subscription box industry. He was one of the first in the space, and Mantry got prime media placements in magazines like GQ and shows like Good Morning America. But in 2017, he said, "the bottom fell out."
While Mantry has received acquisition offers over the years, he's focused on continuing to bootstrap the company and still sees growing demand -- especially during gift-giving seasons. And Milligan also believes that while his business won't become a billion-dollar unicorn, the subscription brands that focused on profitability and speaking directly to their customers are the ones that can be around for decades.
"A lot of the smaller bootstrapped ones that were always profitable along the way kind of stuck it out," he said. -
On today's Modern Retail Rundown, the staff kicks things off with the latest on Big Lots' Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, including a private equity takeover bid. With a valuation of $2 billion, Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty is reportedly pausing plans to sell the 4-year-old company given the current instability of M&A activity. Finally, Amazon sent out a notice to sellers that it plans to sell ad space for its AI assistant Rufus, which launched in beta in early 2024.
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Many department stores and apparel retailers are facing industry headwinds. But one New York-based retailer has been able to buck the trend.
Menswear retailer Rothmans has been around for decades, and continues to see sales grow every year. It's also become a well-known destination for media personalities and entertainment industry designers.
It also helps that Rothmans is in a part of retail that's especially hot right now. "I don't know if I'm the first to say this, but menswear is the new womenswear," said Ken Giddon, the president and owner of the company.
But it's not enough to just be selling products in a popular sector. According to Kiddon, vibe and assortment are even more important. "I would say the key is hospitality. Think of it as a restaurant or a hotel," he said.
Similarly, while other stores focus on trimming down their inventory, Rothmans has gone the opposite way. "As a small business, we watch our cash flow very carefully, but we believe in inventory," he said.
Still, Giddon said, being ahead of the trend curve also helps. "People care about what they're wearing now, and young people are so into it," he said. "That's probably one of the benefits of social media." -
On the Modern Retail Rundown this week, the staff discusses three retailers' latest growth roadmaps. First, Walmart Marketplace announced a new partnership with sneaker bidding site StockX. Then, the founding Nordstrom family is bidding to buy out the retailer to take it private. Finally, nearly a year after Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy, the now privately-held drugstore has a new CEO and plans to operate fewer stores.
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Croissant believes it has found a way to get more retailers and brands excited about resale.
The business isn't a resale platform, per se. Instead, Croissant users can go to any retailer or brand's website and see a guaranteed resale value price that they would recoup if they bought the product new and then resold it to Croissant sometime later.
"We describe ourselves as the first shopping tool that provides guaranteed resale values at the point of sale and beyond," said co-founder and CEO John Howard. He joined this week's Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about how it's growing its offerings and reaching new customers.
Croissant works in a few ways. It works directly with retailers, in which, on their e-commerce listings, they publish both the retail price as well as the guaranteed buyback price. Croissant also has an app and browser extension that automatically provides buyback values for products that aren't within the company's existing retail partners.
The idea, Howard said, is that "it's not just the out of pocket money that you're spending up front that should be as part of your purchase consideration." Instead, "a lot of what we buy is a value-retaining asset that has ongoing value after you purchase it." In essence, Croissant is letting shoppers know that they could probably make some money back on a higher-ticket item.
According to Howard, conversion rates go up when shoppers see an item's estimated resale value. But, for now, the focus is on getting more people onto the Croissant platform. That involves marketing, including on new channels like Substack, to make sure people know about the program.
"We're benefiting consumers," Howard said. "And we're benefiting the resale ecosystem, writ large." -
On this week's Modern Retail Rundown, the staff discusses the issues plaguing Dollar General as it tries to lure bargain shoppers with its low-priced products. Lululemon's stalled growth in the U.S. also shows that the company isn't as economy-resistant as it has been over the last few years. Meanwhile, Foot Locker is scrapping international growth in favor of cost-cutting to improve profit margins.
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Liquid Death is masterful at going viral. But the man leading its marketing team doesn't like it described as such.
"I hate the word viral," said Dan Murphy, svp of marketing at the canned beverage brand Liquid Death. In his mind, it's not precise enough.
Liquid Death, by all accounts, is a viral product. Its very concept is meant to make people laugh and share. The company is best known for its canned water products that appear like beer cans. And as it gained prominence, the viral campaigns continued -- most recently, for example, Liquid Death ran a giveaway offering a lucky customer a fighter jet.
But what Murphy was focused on wasn't virality but eliciting an organic response. "We needed people to walk down the beverage aisle and see a thing and stop," he said.
Murphy spoke at last week's Modern Retail Marketing Summit and dove into how the brand approaches its campaigns and is so successful at getting people to engage with it. This week's Modern Retail Podcast is a live recording of the conversation. He shared many tips of the trade. For one, he said, "we're entirely in-house."
The other part that's so important, Murphy said, was to hire people in comedy to create comedic campaigns.
"We don't have people with traditional marketing backgrounds in the creative group," he said. "It's people that are Adult Swim writers and wrote for movies and wrote for The Onion." -
This week’s Modern Retail Rundown starts by unpacking why price cuts are drawing shoppers back to Target but not Macy's. Next, Peloton is slowly digging itself out of the red through price cuts and new revenue-generating initiatives. The company's latest strategy is to charge a $95 activation fee on pre-owned bikes and treadmills purchased through resale marketplaces. Finally, Chick-fil-A is reportedly counting on creating unscripted shows for its own streaming service as part of a bigger marketing push.
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Walmart is heavily investing in new technology and trying out new programs and processes to be more consumer-friendly. Helping lead this charge is Jon Alferness, the big-box retailer's chief product officer.
What does Walmart's chief product officer do? In his words, he "[acts] as a nexus point to bring together [employees across teams] -- whether it's folks in design, engineering or business science -- to solve customer problems that deliver against the business goals and the business outcomes at scale." Essentially, if there's a big project that requires many different teams, Alferness is likely helping spearhead it.
Alferness joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about his approach to the role, Walmart's latest product updates and his philosophy to buzzy emerging tech like artificial intelligence. He dove into how he approaches big product launches that transcend departments, as well as the data and research he uses when launching a new endeavor.
The tying bind behind all of this is that new products need to solve for a real need. When it comes to AI, for example, the product can't exist for its own sake. In fact, in his estimation, a new AI project shouldn't even have the technology in the name.
"From my point of view, it's not important to say, 'Hey, so we built such and such product, now powered with AI,'" he said. "I don't think customers care one way or another. I think they just want their problem solved." -
This week’s episode of the Modern Retail Rundown unpacks the latest retail sales in the U.S., which were better than expected. Next, beauty brands are self-funding their businesses and seeking government loans as venture capital dollars dry up. Finally, the team discusses takeaways from this year’s eTail East conference in Boston.
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Nail salon and nail care brand MiniLuxe wants to make its employees "mani-millionaires" through franchising.
MiniLuxe has been around since 2008, but in the last year has introduced a new model to open more locations via franchising. Right now, the company has a little over 20 locations around the U.S., but it has plans to increase that by the thousands via franchising.
Its co-founder and CEO, Tony Tjan, joined the Modern Retail Podcast this week and spoke about the company's ambitions.
"There is no other industry that employs as many hourly trade workers and trade women workers as nail care, outside of domestic cleaning," Tjan said. "That's that's the why. The how is along three Cs: we need to be clean, we need to celebrate craft and we need to be creative."
With that, the company has built out its own system of nail salons that uses its own products. It also boasts paying workers higher wages and offering them company equity. Now, to help the company grow even more, the hope is to use franchising to reach a new level of scale MiniLuxe has yet to see. -
This week’s episode of the Modern Retail Rundown kicks off with a Reuters report of Mars allegedly looking to acquire Kellanova, the parent company of Cheez-It and Pop-Tarts. Over at resale platform ThredUp, the company has made the decision to pull out of the European markets and focus on its U.S. business. Finally, employees at an Apple store in Maryland receive their first union contract two years after voting to unionize.
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Revo is not a new company, but it's now in the process of reintroducing itself to more people.
The performance eyewear brand first launched in the '80s selling fashionable sunglasses with science-backed sun protection. Over the years, the brand got sold to many big players, including Ray-Ban and Essilor Luxxotica. But in 2018, an eyewear company called B. Robinson -- with the help of some outside investors -- decided to purchase Revo.
"It didn't have the same level of investment and the same level of support that it has had as an independent brand," said Cliff Robinson, the CEO of Revo, as well as the chief executive of B. Robinson.
Now, the company is in growth mode once again and just opened its first U.S. store in New York -- less than a year after opening a store in Barcelona.
"The growth has been coming from all these different sectors," said Robinson. "We're seeing growth in optical stores. We're seeing growth in the golf channel. We're seeing growth in the winter market with both goggles and sunglasses at resort areas. We're seeing growth from resorts and hospitality."
Robinson joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the new strategy with Revo and what's ahead. The focus now is on reintroducing people to the brand. They may remember it from decades ago, but now the company is trying to get front and center. With that, it's been working with athletes -- including the U.S. sailing team.
According to Robinson, Revo has always had the chance to become a true eyewear leader. "We felt there was this really great opportunity to breathe some additional life -- breathe some additional TLC -- and really make Revo the independent brand that it had been previously," he said. -
On this week’s episode of the Modern Retail Rundown, the staff begins with a recap of some food establishment earnings, which include growing sales at Chipotle and Starbucks' continued slump. This week also saw Etsy’s announcing its first-ever membership program to incentivize shoppers with perks. Finally, a new report from Semafor outlines how former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is still indirectly involved in the company through joint investments in olive oil.
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Nespresso's U.S. marketing strategy is about going beyond the coffee machine.
"We, first and foremost, are a coffee brand," said Jessica Padula, Nespresso's vp of marketing. She joined the Modern Retail Podcast and spoke about the brand's growth plans in the U.S.
Nespresso has had retail locations for years. But the brand -- best known for its pod-based coffee brewing system -- has always tinkered with the model, testing out new markets and concepts while sunsetting others. According to Padula, the focus of Nespresso's new retail projects is to showcase the brand's coffee prowess.
"You want to go a level deeper," she said.
For example, some locations have begun offering master classes to teach customers about the origin of some coffees. The hope is to make the coffee and its quality top of mind, according to Padula. "Sometimes, since the machine is what you lead with, that often gets in the way," she said.
With this, Nespresso is testing out new types of retail concepts and looking into new locations. This includes updates to major markets.
"Newness in New York is definitely coming," Padula said. -
On this week's episode of the Modern Retail Rundown the staff starts out with an analysis of the pending Kroger and Albertsons merger, which is now on hold. This week also saw LVMH-backed L Catterton reportedly approaching toy maker Mattel for a potential acquisition. Finally, Amazon returns are overwhelming retail drop-off points like UPS and Staples -- so much so, the store employees now refer to customers with these returns as "Amazombies."
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Tecovas wants to be more than just about cowboy boots. The nine-year-old company has big plans to become a high-end Western wear lifestyle brand.
"Initially, it sort of was known as the Warby Parker of cowboy boots, if you will," said CEO David Lafitte on the Modern Retail Podcast. "We've tried to sort of migrate the positioning of the brand into more of a premium lifestyle brand."
Lafitte -- who previously held C-suite positions at Deckers -- has been leading Tecovas for the last two years, and his mandate has been to expand beyond its cowboy boots roots. That includes expanding the brand's apparel line as well as growing its retail footprint. The company, which has locations in 20 states, adds between 10 and 12 store every year. By 2023, it had 33 locations and is on track to open 11 stores this year.
The stores, according to Lafitte, are integral to Tecovas's success. For one, the locations are experiential playgrounds -- most have liquor licenses and they all focus on one-to-one connections with customers. What's more, the stores present a way for new customers to learn about Tecovas and its products.
Right now, apparel represents around 20% of Tecovas's revenue. The brand is focused on growing that -- as well as growing its overall women's business.
Along those lines, as Tecovas continues to expand, it is going into new areas that aren't necessarily associated with Western culture. It is opening a location in Boston, for example, and is keeping an eye out for another East Coast spot.
"We've been looking in New York. We want to find the right spot," said Lafitte. "I'd like to be in Soho." - Visa fler