Marketing

MINNEAPOLIS — Winmark Corporation, franchisor of four value-retail store concepts, is developing a new concept focused on reselling women's apparel and accessories.

Winmark Corporation operates 968 franchises under the Plato's Closet, Play It Again Sports, Once Upon A Child and Music Go Round brands, all of which buy, sell, trade and consign gently used merchandise. The franchisor intends to market the new retail concept to savvy and frugal shoppers.

BALTIMORE, Md. — Barcoding, Inc., a leader in the automated data collection market, has promoted Shane Snyder to president. He succeeds Jay Steinmetz, who founded the company and remains the company’s CEO.

As president, Snyder will direct Barcoding’s day-to-day business operations and lead expansions into traditional markets.

Target is relying on two new services providers to operate its mobile business following an end to its short-lived relationship with RadioShack.

New York -- Wal-Mart Stores is set to announce in a Tuesday address at the NRF convention in New York City that it is prepared to hire more than 100,000 veterans over the next five years.

The pledge will come as part of U.S. CEO Bill Simon’s Tuesday keynote address at the 102nd annual BIG Show.

The hiring pledge will begin on Memorial Day, and applies to veterans within 12 months of leaving active duty. Most of the jobs will be in Wal-Mart's stores or its Sam's club locations. Some will be in the company's distribution centers.

AUSTIN, Texas — Mozido, a cloud-based, white-label integrated platform of mobile payments, commerce and marketing, has appointed former senior CorFire executives Steve Bacastow and Charlie Wiggs to its management team.

Mozido enables companies in retail, financial services, consumer packaged goods and telecom to serve consumers, small businesses and global corporate brands with and without bank accounts. Its platform complemented by real-time customer behavior analytics.

Flower is the name of a new proprietary cosmetics line developed by Walmart in conjunction with Drew Barrymore and cosmetics manufacturer Maesa.

The new brand is positioned as offering department store quality at mass market prices and consists of 181 products in the eye, face, lip and nail categories with prices ranging from $4.98 to $13.98.

Paris -- French luxury group PPR’s Tuesday announcement that it has acquired 51% of British fashion brand Christopher Kane means that the luxury designer will soon have branded boutiques. The first is slated to open in London as early as 2014.

According to a report by Reuters, the deal is part of PPR's strategy to add to its luxury portfolio with small brands that have growth potential.

"We think it can become a sizeable business," Alexis Babeau, managing director of PPR's luxury division, told Reuters on Tuesday.

In December, the retailers that increased their page counts were balanced out by those that decreased their page counts. However, of those retailers that did reduce their page counts, only two also reduced the number of inserts distributed by more than 2%. 

Keeping with their November strategy, Walmart continued its aggressive promotions this month, and has shown a significant increase in both drop of flyer and pages per flyer. They showed the highest growth compared to other advertisers in page counts, and the second highest growth in number of flyers.