Tag: Bonobos

Collapse of the middle, Embrace the blur, Retail

Strange bedfellows? Legacy retailer and disruptive brand partnerships are on the rise.

As the middle continues to collapse—and many well established retailers struggle to move from boring to remarkable—brands must continually seek new ways to become unique, more intensely relevant and truly memorable. One strategy that seems to be picking up steam involves so-called digitally native brands creating alliances with much larger legacy retail companies. Earlier this month, as just one example, Walgreen’s announced a partnership with fast growing online beauty brand Birchbox. An initial pilot will feature a Birchbox offering in 11 Walgreen stores.

The Walgreen’s and Birchbox deal is only the most recent of many business marriages forged in recent years. Target has been especially forward leaning, expanding its assortments via industry disruptors Casper (mattresses), Quip (ultrasonic toothbrushes) and Harry’s (razorblades), among more than a half dozen others. Nordstrom has been active as well, having added (and invested in) Bonobo’s (menswear) way back in 2012. More recently, it has augmented its offering with Reformation (women’s clothing) and Allbirds (shoes). Earlier this year Macy’s invested in and expanded the number of stores featuring b8ta’s store-within-a store concept and Blue Apron began testing distribution through Costco.

I first came to understand the potential power of these alliances when I worked on Sears’ 2002 acquisition of Lands’ End. While the roll-out of Lands’ End products at Sears was horribly botched (and hindered by Sears’ bigger problems), the strategic motivations are easy to grasp. For Sears, struggling to offer powerfully customer relevant brands that weren’t widely distributed at competing retailers, Land’s End held the promise of providing product differentiation, an image upgrade and acquiring new apparel shoppers. For Lands’ End, gaining access to hundreds of Sears stores provided substantially broadened customer reach, lower customer acquisition cost and improved product return rates. Importantly, Lands’ End management knew the biggest barrier to growing its customer base was making it easy for potential customers to experience the product in person—something only physical stores could help deliver. The Sears deal addressed this issue rapidly and at dramatically lower incremental capital investment.

More than 15 years later, the rationale for retailers with a large brick-and-mortar footprint and newer D2C brands to hook up is only stronger. In a world where consumers have nearly infinite product choices and it’s quite easy to shop on the basis of price, it’s never been more important for retailers to differentiate their assortments. Private brands (not “labels”) are one critically important element. Exclusive (or narrowly) distributed products is the other. Not only do these alliances present brands that are largely unique at retail, they can help boost a legacy brand’s overall image, attract new customers and drive incremental traffic.

For many fast-growing digitally native brands the appeal of such partnerships is compelling as well. While many of these brands are opening their own stores, some have used these partnership to test the waters prior to embarking on their own brick-and-mortar strategy. Some use wholesale distribution to drive incremental business in markets where their own stores won’t work. Others (Quip and Harry’s are prime examples) can expand their consumer reach when an owned store strategy simply won’t make sense given their particularly narrow products lines. The opportunity to dramatically expand customer awareness and trial with very little incremental marketing or capital investment is especially attractive.

Of course traditional retail and digitally native brands alike must be quite intentional about how strategic alliances advance their long-term goals. Yet done for the right reason and executed well, these partnerships can address real pain points for each and help accelerate growth. As Amazon continues to gobble up market share—and more and more tools are introduced to help consumers compare product features and prices from any and all retailers—retail brands will face increasing pressure to find meaningful and memorable points of differentiation. And, as the broader market is finally starting to accept, few disruptive direct-to-consumer brands can scale profitability without a material brick-and-mortar presence.

Seen in this light, the rise in these partnership is far from strange. Indeed, they often are quite logical. Which is why we are likely to see quite a few more in the very near future.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

November 8th I’ll kick of the eRetailerSummit in Chicago. For more info on my speaking and workshops go here. 

Embrace the blur, Frictionless commerce, Retail

Physical stores: Assets or liabilities?

Of course the obvious answer is “well, that depends.”

As the intersection of economic feasibility and consumers’ willingness to adopt new technology hit a tipping point, for retailers that had invested big bucks in the brick-and-mortar distribution of music, books and games, the answer changed rather dramatically. Today’s retail apocalypse narrative is nonsense. But it wasn’t so long ago that the tsunami of digital disruption very quickly turned the physical store network of Barnes & Nobles, Blockbuster, Borders and others into massive liabilities. While we can argue about whether any of those brands laid to waste by Amazon, Netflix et al. could have responded better (spoiler alert:the answer is “yes”), it’s hard to imagine a scenario for any of them that would have included a fleet of stores remotely resembling what was in place a decade ago.

Most of the so-called digitally native vertical brands that are disrupting retail today—think Warby Parker, Bonobos, Indochino—started with the premise that not only were physical stores unnecessary, they would soon become totally irrelevant. In fact, about six years ago, I remember asking the founder of one of these brands when they were going to open stores. He looked at me with the earnest confidence of someone who had just received a huge check with a Sand Hill Road address on it and said, “we’re never opening stores.” Clearly, at the time, he saw stores as liabilities. He wasn’t alone. Everlane’s CEO made a similar, but more public statement.

So for several years scores of startups attracted massive amounts of venture capital on the belief that profitable businesses could scale rapidly without having to invest in physical retail outlets. A key part of the investment thesis was that stores were undesirable given the high cost of real estate, inventory investment and operational support. Clearly the underlying premise was that stores were inherent liabilities. So it’s more than a little bit ironic, dontcha’ think, that my friend’s company has since opened dozens of stores, that Everlane just opened its second location (with more to follow I’m sure) and that many other once staunchly online only players are now seeing most of their future growth coming from brick-and-mortar locations.

For legacy retailers, particularly as e-commerce took off, many acted as if much of their investment in physical real estate was turning into a liability—or at least an asset to be “rationalized” or optimized. This underscores a fundamental misunderstanding of what was happening. Too many stayed steeped in channel-centric, silo-ed thinking and action. They saw e-commerce as a separate channel, with its own P&L. Because of this, they underinvested (or went way too slowly) because they couldn’t see their way clear to making the channel profitable. Before long they got the worst of both worlds: They found themselves not participating in the upside growth of online shopping while losing physical store sales to Amazon or traditional retailers that were pursuing a robust “omni-channel” strategy.

To be sure, the overbuilding of commercial real estate was going to lead to a shakeout at some point. Digital shopping growth enables many retailers to do the same (or more) business with fewer locations or smaller footprints. Yet I would argue that most of the retailers that find themselves with too many stores (or stores that are way over-spaced) rarely have a fundamental real estate problem—they have a brand problem. The retailers that consistently deliver a remarkable retail experience, regardless of channel, are closing few if any stores. In fact, brands as diverse as Apple, Lululemon, Ulta—and dozens of others—have strong brick-and-mortar growth plans.

What sets most of these winning retailers apart is that they deeply understand the unique role of a physical shopping experience in a customer’s journey and act accordingly. They know that digital drives physical and vice versa. They started breaking down the silos in their organizations years ago—or never set them up in the first place. They accept that talking about e-commerce and brick and mortar is mostly a distinction without a difference and know that it’s all just commerce. And they embrace the blur that shopping has become. They see their stores as assets. Different and evolving assets certainly, but assets all the same.

On the heels of recent strong retail earning reports (and an increase in store openings) some are starting to pivot from the narrative that physical retail is dying to one that is closer to all is now well. Both lack nuance. We can chalk up some positive momentum to the fact that a rising economic tide tends to lift all ships. We can peg some of the ebullience to Wall Street waking up to facts that were plain to see for quite some time.

What is most important over the longer-term, however, is to understand the root causes of why and where physical retail works and why and where it doesn’t. Whether it’s Casper, Glossier, Warby Parker, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Williams-Sonoma, Sephora or many others, the formula is pretty much the same. Deeply understand the customer journey, and whether it’s a digital channel or physical channel, root out the friction and amplify the most relevant and memorable aspects of the customer experience.

When we do this we see the unique role a physical presence can (and often should) play in delivering something remarkable. The answer will be different depending on a brand’s customer focus and value proposition. But armed with this understanding we can design the business model (and ultimately the physical retail strategy) knowing that the channels complement each other and the desire is to harmonize them. At this point the question is not whether stores are an asset or a liability, it’s which aspects of brick and mortar’s unique advantages to lean into and leverage.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

Over the next few weeks I’ll be in Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Toronto and San Antonio delivering an updated version of my keynote “A Really Bad Time To Be Boring.” For more info on my speaking and workshops go here.

A really bad time to be boring, Reimagining Retail, Retail

Physical retail is not dead. Boring retail is.

It may make for intriguing headlines, but physical retail is clearly not dead. Far from it, in fact. But, to be sure, boring, undifferentiated, irrelevant and unremarkable stores are most definitely dead, dying or moving perilously close to the edge of the precipice.

While retail is going through vast disruption causing many stores to close — and quite a few malls to undergo radical transformation or bulldozing — the reality is that, at least in the U.S., shopping in physical stores continues to grow, albeit at a far slower pace than online. An inconvenient truth to those pushing the “retail apocalypse” narrative, is that physical store openings actually grew by more than 50% year over year. Much of this is driven by the hyper-growth of dollar stores and the off-price channel, but there is also significant growth on the part of decidedly more upscale specialty stores and the move of digitally-native brands like Warby Parker and Bonobos into brick and mortar.

People also seem to forget that, according to most estimates, about 91% of all retail sales last year were still transacted in a brick-and-mortar location. And despite the anticipated continued rapid growth of online shopping, more than 80% of all retail sales will likely still be done in actual physical stores in the year 2025. Different? Absolutely. Dead? Hardly.

I have written and spoken about the bifurcation of retailand the collapse of the middle for years. While I was confident in my analysis, I had concluded much of this through intuition and connecting the dots from admittedly limited data points. Now, a brilliant new study by Deloitte entitled “The Great Retail Bifurcation” brings far greater data and rigor to help explain this growing phenomenon. Their analysis clearly shows that demographic factors — particularly the hammering that low-income people take while the rich get richer — help explain the rather divergent outcomes we see playing out in the retail industry today.

In particular, wage stagnation and the rising cost of “essentials” is driving lower income Americans to seek out lower cost, value-driven options. Rising fortunes for top earners, most notably ever greater disposable income, creates spending power for more expensive retail at the other end of the continuum. Deloitte’s data clearly shows the resulting strong bifurcation effect: Revenue, earnings and store growth at both ends of the spectrum and stagnation (or absolute decline) in the vast undifferentiated and boring middle.

Notably, if we isolate what’s going on with retailers focused on delivering convenience, operational efficiency and remarkably value-priced merchandise, along with those retailers that differentiate themselves on unique product and more remarkable experiential shopping (including great customer service, vibrant stores and digital channels that are well harmonized with their stores), you would conclude not only that physical retail isn’t dead, you could well argue it is quite healthy.

Conversely, the stores that are swimming in a sea of sameness — mediocre service, over-distributed and uninspiring merchandise, one-size-fits-all marketing, look-alike sales promotions and relentlessly dull store environments — are getting crushed. A close look at their performance as a group reveals lackluster or dismal financial performance and shrinking store fleets. For these retailers, by and large, physical retail is indeed dead or dying. But so are their overall brands.

It’s been clear for some time that the future of retail will not be evenly distributed. Those that have looked closely know that the retail apocalypse narrative is nonsense. Yet, depending on where brands sit on the spectrum, the impact of digital disruption and the age of Amazon is affecting them quite differently. For some, at least for now, it’s much ado about nothing. For others, it should be sheer, full-on panic.

These forces, along with the underlying macroeconomic factors that Deloitte illuminates in their report, bring far greater clarity to what many have been missing, leaving the savvy retail executive to conclude a few key things:

  1. Physical retail is not dead, but it’s very different
  2. The future of retail will not be evenly distributed
  3. The market is likely to continue bifurcating and, increasingly, it’s death in the middle
  4. It’s a really bad time to be boring
  5. Struggling retailers need to pick a lane
  6. If you think you are going to out-Amazon Amazon you are probably wrong
  7. Most likely you are going to have to have to choose remarkable
  8. You have to get started and you had better hurry
  9. What better time than now?

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here.  

My next speaking gig is in Madrid at the World Retail Congress.  Check out the speaking tab on this site for more on my keynote speaking and workshops.

e-commerce, Omni-channel, The Amazon Effect

Here’s who Amazon could buy next, and why it probably won’t be Nordstrom

Since the Whole Foods deal, more than a few industry analysts and pundits have weighed in on which retailers might be on Amazon’s shopping list.

Various theories underpin the speculation. Some say Jeff Bezos wants to go deeper in certain categories, so Lululemon or Warby Parker get mentioned. Foursquare (is that still a thing?) crafted its own list from analyzing location data. The Forbes Tech Council came up with 15 possibilities. The always provocative, and generally spot-on, Scott Galloway of L2 and NYU’s Stern School of Business believes Nordstrom is the most logical choice.

Obviously no one has a crystal ball, and Amazon’s immediate next move could be more opportunistic than strategic. Given Amazon’s varied interests, there are several directions in which they could go. And clearly they have the resources to do multiple transactions, be they technology enabling, building their supply-chain capabilities out further, entering new product or service categories, or something else entirely. For my purposes, however, I’d like to focus on what makes the most sense to expand and strengthen the core of their retail operations.

Before sorting through who’s likely to be right and who’s got it wrong (spoiler alert: Scott), let’s briefly think about the motivating factors for such an acquisition. From where I sit, several things are critical:

  • Materiality. Amazon is a huge, rapidly growing company. To make a difference, they have to buy a company that either is already substantial or greatly accelerates their ability to penetrate large categories. This is precisely where Whole Foods fit in.
  • Fundamentally Experiential. There is an important distinction between buying and shopping. As my friend Seth reminds us, shopping is an experience, distinct from buying, which is task-oriented and largely centered on price, speed and convenience. Amazon already dominates buying. Shopping? Not so much.
  • Bricks And Clicks. It’s hard to imagine Amazon not ultimately dominating any category where a large percentage of actual purchasing occurs online. Where they need help is when the physical experience is essential to share of wallet among the most valuable customer segments. They’ve already made their bet in one such category (groceries). Fashion, home furnishings and home improvement are three obvious major segments where they are under-developed and where a major stake in physical locations would be enormously beneficial to gaining significant market share.
  • Strong Marginal Economics. We know that Amazon barely makes money in retail. What’s not as well appreciated is the inconvenient truth that much of the rest of e-commerce is unprofitable. Some of this has to do with venture-capital-funded pure-plays that have demonstrated a great ability to set cash on fire. But unsustainable customer acquisition costs and high rates of product returns make many aspects of online selling profit-proof. An acquisition that allows Amazon access to high-value customers it would otherwise be challenged to steal away from the competition and one that would mitigate what is rumored to be an already vexing issue with product returns could be powerfully accretive to earnings over the long term. Most notably this points to apparel, but home furnishings also scores well here.

So pulling this all together, here’s my list of probable 2018 acquisition targets, the basic rationale and a brief word on why some seemingly logical candidates probably won’t happen.

Not Nordstrom, Saks or Neiman Marcus

Scott Galloway is right that Nordstrom (and to a lesser degree Saks and Neiman Marcus) has precisely the characteristics that fit with Amazon’s aspirations and in many ways mirror the rationale behind the Whole Foods acquisition. Yet unlike Whole Foods, a huge barrier to overcome is vendor support. Having been an executive at Neiman Marcus, I understand the critical contribution to a luxury retailer’s enterprise value derived from the distribution of iconic fashion brands, as well as the obsessive (but entirely logical) control these same brands exert over distribution. Many of the brands that are key differentiators for luxury department stores have been laggards in digital presence, as well as actually selling online. Most tightly manage their distribution among specific Nordstrom, Saks and Neiman Marcus locations. If Nordstrom or the others were to be acquired by Amazon, I firmly believe many top vendors would bolt, choosing to further leverage their own expanding direct-to-consumer capabilities and doubling down with a competing retail partner, fundamentally sinking the value of the acquisition. While Amazon might try to assure these brands that they would not be distributed on Amazon, I think the fear, rational or otherwise, would be too great.

Macy’s, Kohl’s or J.C. Penney 

Amazon has its sights set on expanding apparel, accessories and home but is facing some headwinds owing to a relative paucity of national fashion brands, likely lower-than-average profitability (mostly due to high returns) and a lack of a physical store presence. Acquiring one of these chains would bring billions of dollars in immediate incremental revenues, improved marginal economics and a national footprint of physical stores to leverage for all sorts of purposes. All are (arguably) available at fire-sale prices. Strategically, Macy’s makes the most sense to me, both because of their more upscale and fashion-forward product assortment (which includes Bloomingdale’s) and because of their comparatively strong home business. But J.C. Penney would be a steal given their market cap of just over $1 billion, compared with Macy’s and Kohl’s, which are both north of $8 billion at present.

Lowe’s

The vast majority of the home improvement category is impossible to penetrate from a pure online presence. Lowe’s offers a strong value proposition, dramatic incremental revenues, already strong omni-channel capabilities, and a vast national network of stores. The only potential issue is its valuation, which at some $70 billion is hardly cheap, but is dramatically less than Home Depot’s.

A Furniture Play

Home furnishings is a huge category where physical store presence is essential to gaining market share and mitigating the high cost of returns. But it is also highly fragmented, so the play here is less clear as no existing player provides a broad growth platform. Wayfair, the online leader, brings solid incremental revenue and would likely benefit from Amazon’s supply chain strengths. But without a strong physical presence their growth is limited. Crate & Barrel, Ethan & Allen, Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma and a host of others are all sizable businesses, but each has a relatively narrow point of view. My guess is Amazon will do something here — potentially even multiple deals — but a big move in furniture will likely not be their first priority in 2018.

As I reflect on this list (as well as a host of other possibilities), I am struck by three things.

First, despite all the hype about e-commerce eating the world, the fact remains that some 90% of all retail is done in physical stores, and that is because of the intrinsic value of certain aspects of the shopping experience. For Amazon to sustain its high rate of growth, a far greater physical presence is not a nice “to do” but a “have to do.”

Second, the battle between Amazon and Walmart is heating up. While they approach the blurring of the lines between physical and digital from different places, some of their needs are similar, which could well lead to some overlapping acquisition targets. That should prove interesting.

Lastly, the business of making predictions is inherently risky, particularly in such a public forum. So at the risk of stating the obvious, I might well be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it surely won’t be the last.

But why not go out on a limb? I hear that’s where the fruit is.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here. 

For information on keynote speaking and workshops please go here.

Customer Growth Strategy, e-commerce, Marketing, Retail

Unsustainable Customer Acquisition Costs Make Much Of Ecommerce Profit Proof

As much attention as both the growth and disruptive nature of e-commerce receives, few observers seem realize that often the economics of selling online are terrible (what I often refer to as “the inconvenient truth about e-commerce”). The fact is only a handful of venture capital funded “pure-plays” have (or will ever) make money and most are now embarked on a capital intensive foray into physical retail that even Alanis Morissette would find deeply ironic. Amazon, which accounts for about 45% of all US e-commerce,  has amassed cumulative losses in the billions, and even after more than 20 years still operates at below average industry margins. And while I have yet to see a comprehensive breakout, it’s clear that the e-commerce divisions of many major omni-channel retailers run at a loss–or at margins far below their brick & mortar operations.

So why is this?

Last month I wrote a post pointing out how high rates of returns, coupled with the growing prevalence of free shipping “both ways”, makes certain online product categories virtually profit proof. While the impact of this factor tends to be isolated to categories with relatively low order values and a high incidence of returns or exchanges (e.g. much of apparel), a different dynamic has wider ranging implications and profit killing power. I’m referring to the increasingly high cost of acquiring (and retaining) customers online.

Investors have been lured (some might say “suckered”) into supporting “digitally-native” brands because of what they believed to be the lower cost, easily scaled, nature of e-commerce. Seeing how quickly Gilt, Warby Parker, Bonobos and others went from nothing to multi-million dollars brands, encouraged venture capital money to pour in. What many failed to understand were the diseconomies of scale in customer acquisition. As it turns out, many online brands attract their first tranche of customers relatively inexpensively, through word of mouth or other low cost strategies. Where things start to get ugly is when these brands have to get more aggressive about finding new and somewhat different customers. Here three important factors come into play:

  • Marketing costs start to escalate. As brands seeking growth need to reach a broader audience, they typically start to pay more and more to Facebook, Google and others to grab the customer’s attention and force their way into the customer’s consideration set. Early on customers were acquired for next to nothing; now acquisition costs can easily exceed more than $100 per customer.
  • More promotion, less attraction. As the business grows, the next tranches of customers often need more incentive to give the brand a try, so gross margin on these incremental sales comes at a lower rate. It’s also the case that typically these customers get “trained” to expect a discount for future purchases, making them inherently less profitable then the initial core customers for the brand.
  • Questionable (or lousy) lifetime value. It’s almost always the case that customers that are acquired as the brand scales have lower incremental lifetime value, both because on average they spend less and because they are inherently more difficult to retain. It’s becoming increasingly common for fast growing online dominant brands to have large numbers of customers that are projected to have negative lifetime value.

So it’s easy to see how an online only brand can look good at the outset, only to have the profit picture deteriorate despite growing revenues. The marginal cost of customer acquisition starts to creep up and the average lifetime value of the newly acquired customer starts to go down, often precipitously. Accordingly it’s not uncommon for some of the sexiest, fastest growing brands to have many customers that are not only unprofitable, but have little or no chance of being positive contributors ever.

While it’s not the only reason, this challenging dynamic explains in large part the collapse of valuations in the flash-sales market in total, as well as several major flameouts like One Kings Lane. It also helps explain why so many pure-plays are investing heavily in physical locations. To be sure, opening stores attracts new customers that are reticent to buy online. But another key factor is that customers can often be acquired in a store more cheaply than they can be by paying Facebook or Google.

Slowly but surely the world is starting to wake up to this phenomenon. The nonsense that is the meal-kit business model is finally getting the scrutiny it deserves as people start to question whether Blue Apron is a viable business if it spends $400 to acquire new customers. Spoiler alert: the answer is “no.” Increasingly, many “sophisticated” investors are backing off the high valuations that digitally-native brands are seeking to fuel the next stage of their growth, leaving these companies to thank their lucky stars that Walmart seems to relish its role as a VC bailout fund. More folks are starting to realize that physical retail is definitely different, but far from dead. And, in another bit of irony, some even are starting to see that many traditional brands (think Best Buy, Nordstrom, Home Depot and others) are actually well positioned to benefit from their stores and improving omni-channel capabilities.

It may take some time, but eventually the underlying economics tell the tale.

A version of this story appeared at Forbes, where I am a retail contributor. You can check out more of my posts and follow me here. 

For information on speaking gigs please go here.