Retail

Free flowing venture capital dollars in the digital age have made business incubators and accelerators commonplace, but until now the retail and consumer packaged goods industry didn’t have one it could call its own.

Houston - Sub Zero Ice Cream & Yogurt has leased 1,200-sq.-ft. of retail space in Vintage Marketplace, a Whole Foods-anchored shopping center, for its first Houston location. Jacob Grossman with The Weitzman Group handled negotiations as exclusive tenant representative for Sub Zero.

At Vintage Marketplace, Sub Zero joins a line-up that includes, in addition to Whole Foods, concepts including Verts, Orangetheory Fitness, Mod Pizza, Supercuts and several others.

JCPenney Co. is launching a back-to-school marketing campaign that covers all the bases of omnichannel retailing.

Conshohocken, Pa. – Ikea is taking a sunny approach to energy at its soon-to-open St. Louis store. The retailer has completed installation of solar panels atop its 380,000-sq.-ft. St. Louis store opening Sept. 30.

TigerDirect is encouraging consumers to unleash their inner geek with 18th annual PC Race.

The retailer has partnered with Intel to host the competition, which is set to kick off at QuakeCon 2015 in Dallas from July 23 to July 26. The first contestant to assemble and boot their high performance PCs in each regional race will win an all expenses paid trip to Miami to compete in the National Finals on Nov. 6 during Tech Bash.

Las Vegas – Privately held real estate company Vestar has completed a buyout of The District at Green Valley Ranch, in Henderson, Nevada. Vestar paid $120 million to its joint venture partner Rockwood Capital to take full ownership of the 37-acre, 384,107-sq.-ft. landmark retail property minutes from Las Vegas.

Chicago – When a retailer includes the word “brain” right in its name, a certain level of operational intelligence is expected. For 30-plus-unit specialty educational toy and game retailer Marbles: The Brain Store, smartening up operations has included organizing product data on the Salsify product information management platform to provide merchandise intelligence across the organization.

Retailers today are in a constant search for the industry’s Holy Grail – delivering an omnichannel brand experience across all touchpoints. Unfortunately, this quest to deliver on the promise of the omnichannel experience has given rise to a troublesome and pervasive problem known as fake omnichannel or “’fomni.”

Amid their search, retailers confront a wide array of commerce-related software solutions masquerading as omnichannel and promising to provide the type of seamless experiences shoppers now expect.