No Turn On Red

With the disappointing Holiday season behind us, the layoffs and retail store closings are continuing to mount:

Today, Home Depot has announced that they are closing their line of Expo home design centers and trimming support staff, resulting in 7,000 reduction in staff. With both home sales and the economy down, shoppers aren’t looking for high end home design solutions right now. The retailer is quick to note that the layoffs will not impact any customer service positions at the Home Depot proper chain.

It appears that their Expo stores weren’t performing well during the housing boom, so it’s no surprise that they would be doing even worse during the current economic conditions.

Another victim of the housing slump is Williams-Sonoma. On Friday, the retailer announced an 18% reduction in their workforce. In addition to stores being effected by the layoffs, the retailer will also close a call center in Pennsylvania and a distribution center in Memphis. I think the high end housewares stores have been hurt badly by both the economic downturn and mid-market retailers like JCPenney and Kohl’s.

Starbucks, who closed 600 stores in 2008, is expected to eliminate 1,000 jobs at their corporate headquarters and reducing district managers and field employees. The published report, prepared by investment firm McAdams Wright Ragen, speculates that these layoffs will happen in early February and won’t effect store-level barista positions.

And don’t forget that last week Circuit City announced that they are closing all US operations with job losses effecting up to 35,000 people.

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Working in the e-commerce field, I often find myself looking at other retailers to gather ideas on how to best present various elements of e-commerce sites. From design to information architecture, I find it fascinating to see how different retailers tackle the same problems in different ways. I’m often looking at different retailers and constantly looking for changes, no matter how small, and trends in e-commerce design.

I always wanted to see a site that broke down e-commerce stores into their different elements. I wanted a resource that would allow me to see the various ways retailers display their products or style their “Add to Cart” buttons. There are sites that break down general web elements (see: Elements of Design) and sites that highlight e-commerce design (see: Carted Up), but still no resource that broke down the individual elements.

Of course, this is where I looked to do something about it.

Today, I am proud to announce the launch of ecommr. ecommr is a collection of screen captures of e-commerce design and interface elements. From product listing pages to e-mail newsletters, ecommr is a resource to view all of the individual pieces that make up the e-commerce puzzle. Right now, there are 87 elements from more than 20 retailers.

No Turn On Red won’t be going anywhere. I will use the content on ecommr as a jumping off point for larger discussions and spotlights of trends or patterns through e-commerce. Those discussions will take place over here while I try to keep ecommr editorial-free and keep conversations in the comments of each posted element.

I hope others find this as interesting as I do. I also hope that other people within the industry can get some use out of it, like I know I will. If you have any feedback, comments, or helpful advice, please let me know.

Again, the site is launched and available now at www.ecommr.com.

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Last week, Kohl’s discussed some of their holiday marketing strategies with the press. They plan on increasing their spending to capture a larger share of the dwindling holiday sales figures, with increased emphasis on direct mail, e-mail campaigns, and online-only sale prices.

Going into the holiday season, the retailer, which has seen Web sales increase by more than 50% so far this year, is making a big push online as well. It plans to send email blasts out to 15 million shoppers — more than double the number that it had on its electronic mailing list last year — and it’s offering one or two specially discounted items on Kohls.com every day through Christmas.

Their website has started advertising these online-only specials on their homepage, with a callout that went live this week (apparently):

This is a very interesting shift in marketing for the retailer that has, until now, always offered consistent pricing in-store and online. Their marketing campaigns even advertised this fact and, for years, coupons that were sent out to customers, in direct mail, were also good online.

Kohl’s needs to be aggressive in order to increase their market share this holiday season. This is a perfect opportunity for the retailer to utilize a service, like Twitter, to advertise these special, limited-time promotions. It is obvious that they want to aggressively promote these deals as they they are utilizing prime screen real estate to push the deal. It even appears that they already have a Twitter account, although with zero posts. They should be using this to promote the daily deals and reach more people, one-on-one.

The usage of the service would be simply – they’d just need to follow the example that other retailers have set to announce daily deals. I look at the Amazon MP3 Deal of the Day and Woot.com as two examples of retailers using the service to effectively promote daily deals.

Maybe the first step, for a retailer like Kohl’s, is the use the service to promote daily deals and then they can evolve into using the service to engage customers in conversation. I think there is always more room for retailers to use Twitter to reach their customers.

What do you think?

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Another mixed month for retail sales.  While some retailers rebounded and look to go into Back to School on a positive note, it was another dark month for some mall and teen retailers.

Wal-Mart beat expectations with a 5.8% increase in June (showing 6.1% increase at their US name-brand stores and a 4.6% increase at their Sam’s Club locations). Target ended up in positive territory with a 0.4% uptick in same store sales. Costco showed a 9% increase, Kohl’s beat estimates with a 2.3% increase, and even mall retailer Aeropostale showed gains with a 12% increase in June.

The month was not as kind to mall and teel retailers such as Gap (company down 7%), Abercrombie (down 3%), and American Eagle (down 11%).

June’s numbers have been posted to Retail Numbers, which allows you to chart and track the retail industry monthly same-store sales.

More coverage from Fox Business and the Associated Press.

Photo above from Flickr user James@mannequindisplay. com, used under Creative Commons.

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The holidays have come and gone. The six day work weeks are over for me. For two months, I was spending upwards of 65-70 hours a week out of my house, due to work and the associated commute. The chaos that is the holiday season in retail did not leave me much time to blog, as you have seen. But that is all behind us and now the industry looks towards returns, inventories, markdowns, home/white sales, and trying to get back into shape for the new year.

Everyone is getting ready to release their December results this week. After a year that was mostly up for a lot of folks, how is December going to fair? Mild weather across most of the country and high(er) inventory levels has prompted analyists to downgrade several major retailers. I’m really interested to see who the winners and losers are this Holiday season.

Was there a must-have item this year that people clamored for? I didn’t really see anything.

Was it the TMX? How many of those dolls were actually produced and sold nationally? It seemed like more made it to Ebay than to actual store shelves.

Maybe it was the PS3 or the Wii? I don’t know how much electronic retailers like Best Buy will have really benefitted from those systems, due to low supply and the fact that their numbers for FY2005 include the Xbox 360 launch. One of my contacts at Target tells me that every time they got a shipment of a new game system, their camping/outdoor department benefitted the most from the sales of tents, chairs, and other supplies for the people waiting 3+ days outside for the new systems.

Anyway, for the time being I am back and hope to amuse you with some of my thoughts on this crazy industry.

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Another one of my exciting weekly rundowns of quick things going on around the retail industry:

Maybe I need to put on my tin foil hat, but I’m not a fan of one test currently going on in Florida. Coast to Coast convenience store in Tampa is currently testing in-store payments via biometrics. That’s where you put your finger into a scanner and your fingerprint is connected to your debit account information. Makers of the system, Pay By Touch, say it is a secure alternative to carrying cash or credit cards. Critics of biometrics say that the system can be defeated with gummi bears. Is this the future of retail payments? I hope not! I use my debit card for a majority of my purchases – but as much as I embrace technology, I don’t know if I am ready to link personal information in to my fingerprint. [story via Slashdot]

ManagersRealm writes about the new Home Depot customer service plan that they have launched. I talked about this the other day – they’ve earmarked $30m to give to stores and employees who provide great customer service. Is it going to work? Probably not. It seems that Gary Bourgeault shares this opinion and offers up some ideas on how the company could improve service.

J.Crew prepares for their IPO this week. Looking to raise $280 million through this stock sale, how will Wall Street react? I’m thinking investors will love this stock – a first quarter profit increase of 60%, the launch of the kids’ store, crewcuts, and the development of a new women’s store, Madewell. J.Crew has enjoyed a great turnaround over the past two years and this IPO is just another step forward.

Gap Inc. has announced three more locations for Forth & Towne, all in the Los Angeles area. All three will be opening sometime in the Fall.

Speaking of new stores, looks like Kohl’s has officially put out their list of new stores opening in October.

In somewhat lighter news, I hear a crew over at a local hardware store chain was loading pallets when they knocked into the sprinkler system, causing a minor flood. What better place for there to be a plumbing problem than at a hardware store?

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The May comp store numbers for the retail industry:

In the mall: Abercrombie up 3.0, Aeropostale down 1.1, American Eagle up 11.0, Ann Taylor up 12.0 , Hot Topic down 6.0, Limited Brands up 7.0, and Pacific Sunwear down 2.6. Gap as a company was down 6.0, however the break down between companies is interesting. Gap North America was down 5.0, Gap International is down 13.0, Old Navy was down 8.0, but Banana Republic is starting to show signs of a turnaround with a 3.0 positive comp.

In the department store sector: Dillard’s up 3.0, Federated up 9.2, JC Penny up 11.1, Kohl’s up 3.1, Nordstrom up 7.8, and Saks up 5.7.

In the battle of Target v. Wal-Mart and warehouse stores v. warehouse stores, Target was up 5.7 & Wal-Mart was up 2.0. Sam’s Club was up 4.0 while BJ’s Wholesale was up 4.2 and Costco was up 10.0.

Generally a pretty positive month across the board. Gap continues to struggle and Kohl’s is curiously one of the few companies with positive marks that didn’t beat investor estimates. Pacific Sunwear was down 2.6 after a fantastic April in which they posted a 14.0 positive comp.

Minyanville posts a good roundup of the May numbers, covering some retailers I didn’t cover here.

Interesting month and a good start to the Summer season in retail.

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