News

San Francisco -- Piperlime, a division of Gap Inc., has enhanced its website to include streams of images filtered directly from Instagram providing customers with fashion. Shoppers will be able to click the images and shop the items to make these looks their own. Product pages will also feature styling ideas from bloggers and influencers, showing unique ways to style the same must-have pieces for each season.

A new initiative at Books-A-Million called “The Write Stuff” will reveal whether book buyers value the opinions of the retailer’s merchants.

In the coming weeks, Books-A-Million will roll out its “The Write Stuff” program online and in stores. The program revolves around use of a Write Stuff logo next to different titles which signifies they were hand selected by the retailer’s buying staff.

Chain Store Age is excited to announce a partnership with Sunnyvale, California-based business accelerator Plug and Play. Plug and Play’s Retail Accelerator has joined forces with leading brands and retailers in order to foster the growth of retail-focused startups during a 12-week startup program in Silicon Valley. A round table of corporations, venture capitalists and industry experts guide the direction of the program.

Dollar General bid $78.50 for Family Dollar Monday morning in a $9.7 billion deal that exceeds the $74.50 a share Dollar Tree offered for Family Dollar on July 28.

The deal would create a small format powerhouse with nearly 20,000 stores in 46 states and sales of more than $28 billion.

Boston -- Wayfair filed its paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday to raise as much as $350 million on the public market.

The Boston-based online homegoods retailer posted a loss last year of $15.5 million, and the loss was $51.4 million in the last six months. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup are leading up the underwriting for the IPO, along with Allen & Co., Pacific Crest Securities, Piper Jaffray, Wells Fargo Securities, Canaccord Genuity, Cowen and Co., and Raymond James.

ECRM compared retail circular advertising in July 2013 versus July 2014 and noted trends occurring across top retail chains. The start of the back-to-school season saw large decreases in these metrics for both Staples and Walmart across the board. Walmart continued its trend of smaller, less dense, highly-targeted and themed circulars. It barely touched on BTS on the front pages of its July 2013 circulars, with only a small laptop ad and some apparel promotions. 2014 saw a more concentrated effort as early as 7/13, prominently featuring notebooks, glue sticks, and crayons.

Nielsen, a leading global provider of information and insights into what consumers watch and buy, has appointed John Lewis as global president and Karen Fichuk as president, North America. Both executive leaders are based in Schaumburg, Illinois.

Goodlettsville, Tenn. -- The battle between the extreme discounters is heating up: Dollar General Corp. said Monday it has made an all-cash bid of $9.7 billion for Family Dollar, topping a deal Dollar Tree made last month. Dollar General is bidding $78.50 per Family Dollar share, which includes a $2.26 per share premium over Family Dollar’s closing price on Friday. The offer is $4 higher per share than the $8.5 billion deal with Dollar Tree.