No Turn On Red

Office Depot has announced that they are closing 112 under performing stores over the next three months. In addition, they are slowing their expansion plans for 2009. Three stores are closing in my area. Office Depot joins Circuit City, Linens N Things and Boscov’s as retailers who have closed up shop in Monmouth County.

Last year, Office Max closed all but one of their locations in my county. With Office Depot leaving, this leaves Staples as the only national office supply chain with more than one location here.

Kohl’s has announced that they’ve entered into an agreement with Iconix Brands to become the sole distributor of Mudd Apparel. Starting in July of 2009, Kohl’s will oversee the product design and manufacturing of the Mudd line. Kohl’s currently carries the Mudd line in Juniors and Girls apparel, sleepwear, jewelry, accessories, and footwear. While the deal does not include the exclusivity to the footwear line, this deal expands on the success that Kohl’s has seen with the exclusive Candies’ brand license within the same departments.

In other Kohl’s news: Former Kohl’s executive vice president, Thomas Kingsbury, has been named the new president and CEO of Burlington Coat Factory. Kingsbury was previously the CEO and president of the Filene’s/Kaufmann’s division of May Department Stores. Kingsbury joined Kohl’s after Federated Department Stores acquired Department Stores.

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The other day I talked about the use of educational content in e-mails versus the use of strict promotion/sale content. Customers may go to your site to find a specific product, but they are more often going to your site to fill a need or find a solution to a problem. Educational content is needed, especially on the web, to guide customers to the products that they seek based on the problems they are trying to solve.

With this in mind, I’m impressed by the simple homepage feature that Lands’ End has on their site. The concept is simple: customers are looking for outerwear and the site is guiding them to the type of outerwear they need based on the climate that they live in. It’s a real simple concept that works well, from the user perspective:

I think apparel retailers often over look the types of problems that they are actually solving with their clothing. Focusing on fashion, trends and styles is very important but don’t overlook the utility of what you sell.

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