这家老牌零售店有机会成为亚马逊的,它做错了什么?
2019-07-15 21:30
|IV. APPAREL AND HOME GOODS: THE SO-SO SIDE OF SEARS
When shoppers prefer thrift stores to your mall stores, you’ve got a problem.
Sears’ huge appliance and tools businesses distinguished it from rivals like J.C. Penney and Macy’s, which were best known for apparel. The problem: People buy a fridge or power drill only once every few years, while they stock up on clothing three or four times a year.
In the 1990s, then-CEO Arthur Martinez tackled the dilemma by committing Sears to selling higher-quality apparel and home goods, supported by the clever “Softer Side of Sears” ad campaign. But the retailer never caught on with consumers in those categories. “Sears struggled with brands not wanting to be associated with it,” says Chad Bright, a former Sears online apparel executive and a sector leader for big-box stores at Gartner L2. Penney’s and Macy’s pressured better-known vendors that sold in their stores, urging them not to overexpose themselves by selling through another chain. The fact that Sears simply wasn’t known for fashion scared others away.
Even when Sears did lure desirable brands, its increasingly dumpy stores hurt momentum. A 2010 partnership with fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 didn’t go far; in 2011, even peak Kardashian mania couldn’t keep the Kardashian Kollection from flopping. Things got so bad that in a 2016 survey, female shoppers said they preferred thrift store Goodwill over Sears for clothing.
Bad timing undid one “what if” partnership. Former CEO Lacy says that in 2004, he was in talks with Martha Stewart, who had a successful product line at Kmart, to create home goods for Sears. The talks were scotched by Stewart’s conviction on charges related to an insider-trading case. “We were darn close to getting that done—then Martha goes to jail,” Lacy says. “That was a bit of a snag.”
A version of this article appears in the June 2019 issue of Fortune with the headline “Seven Decades of Self-Destruction.”
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