Apparel

While there were some reported ups and downs over the course of last year’s holiday shopping season, the early takeaway is that the season was, in the end, positive. While we’ll have to wait for hard numbers for more detailed insight, and while definitive conclusions might be a bit much to draw at this point, it does seem to me like the increased length of the ever-expanding holiday shopping season didn’t have any appreciable negative impact.

Strong e-commerce growth and omnichannel contributed to a healthy holiday shopping sales season at Belk.

The nation’s largest family owned and operated fashion department store company reported a 5.2% increase in sales for the nine-week period ending Jan. 3. Same store sales for the same period increased by 4.8%.

Despite a strong increase in same store sales, Genesco’s CEO says the company remains cautious about the rest of the fourth quarter.

Genesco Inc. reported that its same store sales, including both stores and direct sales, increased 10% for the quarter-to-date period ended Jan. 3, from the equivalent period last year. Same store sales increased 9% and sales for the company's e-commerce and catalog direct sales businesses increased 25% on a comparable basis for the period.

San Mateo, Calif. -- NetSuite Inc. announced that two fashion and apparel retailers — Journelle, a seller of high-end lingerie and loungewear, and Alton Lane, a maker of men’s custom-tailored clothing — have deployed NetSuite to run their core retail business processes from order management, inventory management, financials, supplier purchasing and customer relationship management (CRM) to marketing — all from within one unified cloud-based business management platform.

New York -- Former Coach Inc. chief Lew Frankfort has joined Sycamore Partners as an Executive in Residence, which will allow the private equity firm to tap into Frankfort’s retail knowledge, managerial expertise and network of industry relationships. Sycamore’s portfolio of retail investments includes Aeropostale, Coldwater Creek, Hot Topic, Jones New York, Nine West Holdings, Stuart Weitzman and Talbots.

Apparently closing all of your stores and firing all of your employees is among the actions a retailer can take when it is “exploring strategic alternatives.”

Body Central Inc., which announced early this month that it was $18 million in debt and exploring strategic alternatives, has shuttered all 265 of its stores and fired 2,500 employees.

New York -- Family-owned luxury apparel retailer Mitchells Family of Stores has partnered with ThoughtWorks Retail to reenergize the luxury shopping experience through its e-commerce and brick-and-mortar channels. The newly launched, customized responsive-design website, developed by ThoughtWorks, allows the Mitchells loyal customer base to access personal shopping profiles via M World, a platform where customers can see their own virtual closets of wardrobe purchases made both in the physical store or on the e-commerce site.

Columbus, Ohio -- Express is lifting its fourth-quarter and full-year profit forecasts, citing a better-than-expected performance at the end of December and beginning of January.

CEO Michael Weiss said that Express Inc. experienced slowing sales during the first three weeks of December, but that its performance has bounced back since.
 
Fourth-quarter same-store sales are now predicted to fall 3%-4%; Express previously forecast a mid to high single-digit decline in the figure.