Retail

Boston — The Wilder Companies has been awarded five new leasing and management contracts for nearly 900,000 sq. ft. in five shopping centers on the north and south shores of Boston.

The Crossing at Walkers Brook in Reading, Mass., is a 480,000-sq.-ft. center featuring Jordan’s Furniture, an IMAX Theatre and The Home Depot. An 80,000-sq.-ft. pedestrian-friendly lifestyle portion of the center features Staples, Golfsmith, the Paper Store, Macaroni Grill, Chili’s, and Starbucks.

East Moriches, N.Y. -- Solutions Management, a leading national retail and corporate maintenance company, announced the appointment of Michael DiTaranto as its new senior operations manager.

Fort Worth, Texas -- Pier 1 Imports has named Eric Hunter as executive VP of marketing, responsible for the company’s brand image and integrated marketing efforts. He most recently served as senior VP of marketing and acting chief marketing officer for J.C. Penney Co., where he led strategy, research, creative, media, customer relationship management and digital direction for the JCP enterprise brand and all JCP-owned brands.

New York -- Shaky consumer confidence and increased efficiencies among retailers may put a damper on retailers’ holiday hiring plans, according to global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

In its annual holiday hiring forecast, Challenger estimated that seasonal job gains will not see a significant decline from last year’s robust numbers, but they are likely to at best match the level of hiring that occurred in October, November, and December 2012.

Atlanta – Independent bookstores are reportedly growing sales at a healthy rate despite stiff competition from Amazon.com. According to an article in Fortune, American Booksellers Association figures show that independent bookstore sales in the U.S. grew 8% last year and are on track to grow at a similar pace this year.

Traditionally, retailers relied on advertising and direct response to succeed. To make more money, retailers simply let more people know about their stores and products.

Los Altos, Calif. – Catalog Spree has launched a new beauty department in its mobile shopping app with lookbooks for retailers including Sephora, Beauty.com, Avon, Bliss, and The Body Shop. Catalog Spree's full-page lookbooks let consumers browse and shop by flipping through pages on an iPad or iPhone.

The app features more than 350 custom lookbooks, as well as traditional digital catalogs. Catalog Spree says the lookbooks have 50% more page clickthroughs than a traditional digital catalog.

Retailers often assume that meeting the needs of the Millennial generation through technology is a highly specialized endeavor due to the unique experience these “digital natives” have had growing up in an IT-centric world. But before making that assumption, retailers should consider these words author Joyce Maynard, then a Yale freshman, wrote in her 1972 New York Times essay “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life:”