According to The New York Times, here are three “next wave” luxury e-retailers: “Secondhand luxury (often known as the ‘recommerce market’) is fast becoming big business. The RealReal, an online marketplace that sells pre-owned and authenticated luxury items, was founded by the former Pets.com C.E.O. Julie Wainwright in 2011 and is expected to generate $500 million in revenue for 2017. It has raised $173 million in funding, and last month it opened its first store, in SoHo.”
Category: BRAND X JOURNAL
BRAND X JOURNAL
BRAND X JOURNAL How Sephora blends community & commerce
Experiential concepts test new ideas
Retail Dive: “With so many digitally-enabled processes in place, Sephora’s members-only social platform, dubbed the Beauty Insider Community, fits right in with the brand’s tech-focused image … The first of Sephora’s experiential concepts, the Beauty TIP workshops are focused on three core concepts: teach, inspire and play … A customer conversion isn’t front-and-center in these stores and that’s probably for good reason. Sephora needs sales like anyone else, but the focus of these workshops is on customer interaction and experience.”
BRAND X JOURNAL The 3 C’s of retail revival
Community, curation and convening
Quartz: Ryan Raffaelli of Harvard “studies how mature organizations and industries faced with technological change reinvent themselves. Raffaelli has termed this line of research ‘technology reemergence.’ It began with his study of the Swiss watch industry, which collectively reinvented itself (and thus survived) in the wake of digital watches. Five years ago, he set out to discover how independent bookstores managed to survive and even thrive in spite of Amazon and other online retailers.”
BRAND X JOURNAL Wegmans-mania!
Bigger than the Beatles?
The Wall Street Journal: “Across the U.S., grand openings of specialty grocery chains such as Whole Foods Market, Stew Leonard’s and Wegmans Food Markets Inc. are attracting customer hordes … By 7 a.m., roughly 2,000 people had swarmed a shopping center in Hanover, N.J., to mark the arrival one Sunday this summer of a Wegmans and its exotic cheeses and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms.” Robin W. Dente, community-affairs coordinator for the township comments: “It reminded me of when the Beatles came to America.”
BRAND X JOURNAL Outside the Box
Walmart podcasts its values
Axios: “Amazon has gotten so good at moving merchandise that it now accounts for 43 cents of every dollar spent online in the U.S., according to eMarketer … Lost in this torrent of news are indications that Amazon’s revenue formula is fundamentally changing: from a reliance on retail and cloud services, the e-retailer appears likely to power future growth with fulfillment and shipping services to third-party sellers.”