International Business

Dov Charney, founder and outsted CEO of American Apparel, made an emotional—and meandering—plea to regain control of the company at a bankruptcy court hearing in Delaware on Thursday.

“I’m a merchant, I’m a creative artist, I’m a photographer, I’m a marketer, I’m an industrialist,” Charney said, according to the New York Times. “I don’t want to hand over my company. This is coercion.”

After relinquishing the CEO role last year, Dollar General chairman Rick Dreiling will complete a previously announced leadership transition on Jan.

Ikea Canada is building a 328,000-sq. ft. store Halifax, Nova Scotia, that will feature a special focus on energy efficiency and waste management.

The store will take roughly 14-16 months to build once ground has been broken in summer 2016. It will be built to operate as the retailer’s most sustainable store in Canada, and include a rooftop solar photovoltaic installation that provides electricity to the store and a geothermal energy generation system to support heating and cooling needs.

Macy’s announced that a Bloomingdale’s store will open in spring 2017 in Kuwait as part of the company’s strategic partnership with Al Tayer Group LLC.

This will be Bloomingdale’s second international location (the first opened in Dubai in 2010) and ahead of Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s stores scheduled to open in Abu Dhabi in 2018 – all in partnership with Al Tayer.

Tiffany & Co. says weak tourist spending and a strong dollar hurt its sales results for the two-month holiday period.

The retailer said worldwide net sales declined 3% (due to declines in the Americas and Asia-Pacific offsetting growth in Japan and Europe) and same store sales declined 5%. There were no noteworthy differences in performance among jewelry categories, the company said. Reported in U.S. dollars, worldwide net sales of $961 million were 6% lower than the prior year.

Ten years after first entering the market, Toys "R" Us has opened its 100th store in China. The retailer has opened a total of 27 new locations across China within the past year.

Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. offers a highly customized product across multiple channels, which can make planning tricky.

Add in that the 400-store global retailer has an aggressive strategy for further international growth, and ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of its omnichannel merchandise planning becomes what could be called a “bearish” task.

Walmart said it will close 269 stores worldwide this year, including many of its smallest-format stores, in a move that CEO Doug McMillon characterized as being more disciplined about growth. It is one of the largest number of stores closures that Walmart has ever announced at one time.