eCommerce

New York -- L Brands Inc., parent of  Victoria's Secret, is bullish when it comes to foreign expansion. The company opened 160 international stores in 2013, for a total of 863 locations. It hopes to add more than 140 this year, according to Columbus Business First.

Victoria's Secret expects to open 100 stores in 2014, including six additional locations in the United Kingdom, the report said.

Ottawa, Canada -- Well-executed dynamic pricing strategies, such as those deployed by Amazon and Overstock, led to higher sales during the 2013 holiday season as opposed to all-season discounting and other strategies. In its “Retail’s 2013 Holiday Winners and Losers” report, pricing intelligence vendor 360pi rated retailers’ overall financial performance for the 2013 fourth quarter on a scale from +5 (above expectations/excellent) to -5 (below expectations/very poor) based on third-party financial analysts’ overall assessments.

By Mark Ledbetter, Global VP Retail Strategy, SAP

The changing nature of retail combined with an ever-greater reliance on data is forcing retailers to adjust their workforce and employee skill sets accordingly. From a customer experience standpoint, most retailers are transitioning to a brick-and-click model that aims to ensure customers have a seamless shopping experience regardless of which channel they use.

Speaking with Ron Goldstone, senior VP at Southfield, Mich.-based Farbman Group really got my juices flowing about the Midwest retail real estate marketplace — Michigan in particular. The state’s retail real estate market is an interesting candidate for closer study, simply because the Detroit dynamic, even in its extremes, gives us a valuable perspective on the national landscape:

Remember 2011 and 2012? Back then, the forecasters were saying that the economy would probably be sluggish through 2013. After that, starting in 2014, growth would return.

As a category of shopping center, open-air centers have been evolving ever since the days they were called lifestyle centers. New categories of tenants have evolved, along with new ways of creating compelling tenant mixes and environments. We asked three open-air owners to tell us about current and possible future directions that evolution may take.

The companies are San Diego-based American Assets Trust; Irvine Co. Retail Properties in Irvine, Calif.; and Columbus, Ohio-based Glimcher Realty Trust. Here’s what they had to say.

New York -- As technology transforms multichannel retail into hyper-channel, “always-on” retailing, chains must emotionally connect with consumers as never before, according to Joseph Bona. Bona, president of branded environments for New York City-based brand agency/retail design firm CBX, is one of the featured speakers at Chain Store Age’s upcoming 50th annual SPECS conference,  March 9 -12, Grapevine, Texas.

Hanover Direct aligns back-end systems for seamless front-end experience

The days of independent silos, of when the Web, phone, catalog and store could be operated separately each with its own unique customer experiences and fulfillment processes, are behind us. Today’s “always connected” consumers demand a seamless experience from the retailers they shop, regardless of channel. And that seamless experience requires extensive alignment of systems on the back end as well as the front end.

Momentum to continue through 2014

By most accounts, 2013 was a banner year for IPOs. According to Renaissance Capital, a total of 222 companies went public in 2013, marking the best year for the IPO market since 2000. As we predicted in a previous article in Chain Store Age, the retail and consumer products industry played a key role in this IPO activity, accounting for 19 offerings and $8.3 billion in proceeds. This marked a notable increase from the number of offerings seen in 2012 (15) and 2011 (12), according to Renaissance Capital.

Think brick-and-mortar retail is doomed in an increasingly digital world? Visit Sephora, where consumers line up to sample the dizzying array of beauty products. Watch as a bunch of excited kids go through the rounds at Build-A-Bear-Workshop. Listen as a pharmacist at Walgreens gives some advice to a harried mom whose kids are coming down with something. Stop in at H-E-B, Whole Foods Market or some other great supermarket and breathe in the tantalizing aromas. Fool around with the latest gadgets at Apple or one of the new generation of AT&T and Verizon stores.