Retail

NEW YORK — Despite caution among consumers, retailers wrapped up 2012 with a healthy holiday shopping season, according to a new report by a retailing trade group.

The National Retail Federation said that holiday retail sales increased 3% over the year before, to $579.8 billion. December retail sales increased 0.8% seasonally adjusted from November and 2.1% unadjusted year over year. Nevertheless, the 3% increase was still below the NRF's projected 4.1% growth. Meanwhile, nonstore holiday sales grew 11.1%.

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.

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.

Atlanta – Predictix announced that Crate and Barrel is implementing a broad suite of planning solutions from Predictix, including merchandise financial planning/merchandise financial management, assortment planning and item planning.

The Predictix solutions are being deployed across all Crate and Barrel brands — Crate and Barrel, CB2 and The Land of Nod — and will go live this quarter as part of a strategic plan to optimize the retailer's planning processes.

DAYTON, Ohio — Stratacache, a leading provider of scalable, high-performance digital signs, content distribution and video acceleration technologies, has unveiled a Web caching solution at the National Retail Federation's Annual Convention and Expo.

Called Retail Cache, the solution enhances Web browsing, so customers can use in-store tablets to check out catalogs or order out-of-stock merchandise, without encountering slow, unreliable Internet connectivity.

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.

New York -- 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 -- Walmart plans to significantly boost its sourcing from domestic suppliers over the next decade. The plan was announced during an address by Bill Simon, Walmart U.S. president and CEO, at the National Retail Federation's annual convention in New York. Simon also announced the company is committed to helping part-time associates who want to be full time, make that transition.