04.04.18 -- Is Retail Out Of The Woods With Store Closings?

Guest Column | By Keith Jelinek, Rick Maicki, Rich Vitaro, and Christopher Ventry; Berkeley Research Group

The continuing evolution of shoppers creates new demands on retailers that impact all aspects of the business, from stores to backstage operations to information technology and supply chain capabilities — including home delivery. The disruption continues to drive concern with investors, creditors, industry analysts, and — most of all — companies themselves.

Multichannel retailing capitalizes on this tendency by using various channels—e-commerce, catalogs, brick-and-mortar stores, kiosks, etc.— to target and engage customers. While this is obviously a smart move in retail, it comes with a unique challenge: How does a retailer keep its product and customer information consistent across all of its marketing and sales channels, as well as across the enterprise itself?

There's no business like shoe business for this company that operates both a retail segment and private label brand operation. The retail side runs over 1,045 value-priced family footwear stores in the US and Guam, 159 other stores in the US and Canada selling natural comfort style shoes, and a growing number of shoe stores in China. The company also sells shoes online and licenses two major name brand footwear product lines.

While adding an e-commerce channel has the potential to offset declining brick-and-mortar sales, it can only happen if the added channel satisfies basic supply chain and customer service requirements, including getting the right product to the right place at the right time and at the right cost. As retailers look to add or develop online sales channels, fulfillment challenges inevitably spring up.

For most omni-channel businesses, the cost of shipping now exceeds the sum of all other fulfillment costs including direct and indirect payroll, benefits, facilities and utilities, packing supplies, etc. Businesses need every advantage they can get to hopefully evaluate, reduce, or control the rate of shipping expense increases.

Magazine Article | By Christopher Walton, entrepreneur and former vice president, Target Store of the Future

Retail is in a period of incredible adaptation, and the important question to answer is not what will happen; rather we need to know how the pie will get carved up. Or said another way, which retailers that we know today will survive for the long term? What new players will emerge? And what technologies will play the largest roles in determining how the pie ultimately gets carved up?