I took a trip to the mall on Saturday, as I already talked about. After jotting down a few thoughts I had after going into a few stores, I wanted to give a little more space to Gap.
First, I’ll just put it out there - I love the Gap store that I stepped in to on Saturday. It is not the same Gap that we’ve seen in seasons past. It is exciting, fun, and I think the merchandise might also be good enough to buy.
At the beginning of June, news started to come out about the re-launch/re-branding of Gap. I shared some thoughts I had then - see: Gap’s Makeover. Concentrating on four shops within the store (denim, t-shirts, active, and “clean”), Gap is looking to create a shopping experience that is fun, as well as easy for the customer to shop.
I think that they may be getting it right.
Walk in to your local Gap store and looks different. Using their trademark blue as the base color, they’ve opened things up with a lot of intricate visual elements balancing large, colorful, retro-inspired graphics & marketing materials. Each zone of the store is compact and easy to shop. On each side of the store (men’s & women’s), they have three small rooms/shops leading into the bigger, open, denim area in the back of the store. On the men’s side, t-shirts/polos leads into a room of khakis and wovens, leading into a room with accessories and the remaining summer clearance, leading into the big denim area. Similar thing on the women’s side: t-shirts and polos leading into wovens and kkahis leading into activewear leading into the denim room.
Simple, simple, simple.
They’ve rethought the merchandise and they’re rethought their shopping experience. They’ve reorganized the merchandise categories, making it easy to find what you’re looking for.
Increased signage and excellent use of mannequins make the experience an exciting one (even having mannequins outside each dressing room, allowing them to showcase more and more outfits). Add in some nice finishing details, including a glass table that is full of literally hundreds of buttons from denim jeans, make it a polished, thought-out concept.
The new styles of clothing showcase their carefully thought-out retreat into stylish basics. Denim, denim, denim, and the new styles are a good balance of trendy and basic.
Will customers respond? Like others have said, it is going to take more than one season to make a turnaround. But this could be a step in the right direction. The buzz that I’ve heard from some is that there are good things in store for this retailer.
My only complaint? I’m not a fan of the merchandising of their denim wall. It appears that they are organizing everything by size, and not by color/wash. This is something I noticed at the end of last season in their stores. All of the jeans are together by style (straight, boot, loose, etc) and then sized - mixing all of the color/washes together. So you go to the shelf for 32×30 and then look through until you find the color/wash you want.
Although it makes an interesting looking wall, I don’t know if it is practical for the customer to shop. I want to find the color I want (dark wash, for example), and then find it in my size. When there are several washes of the same cut together, it seemed hard to find exactly the one I wanted. While I was there, I did overhear one customer remark on the same thing.
Or maybe, to their discredit, the walls were really badly merchandised & recovered when I was there! But it seems too neat to be bad recovery - it seems intentional that all of the washes/colors are mixed. Maybe someone with better knowledge of this can comment on this?
Other than that, great visit to the Gap. Keep an eye out for them and see if customers respond to their Back to School campaign.
Last week I talked about a trip to Old Navy and how their new merchandise mix and merchandising looked for the Back to School season. See also: First look at Old Navy.
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