Kohl’s evp sets aggressive new tone

ORLANDO —The opening of 47 Kohl’s stores this October will move the retailer past the 1,000-unit milestone and be cause for a major celebration that is likely to overshadow an equally significant development.

The company continues to upgrade its product offering with exclusive and proprietary brands, and based on the success last September of the Simply Vera line from couture designer Vera Wang, the retail industry can look for Kohl’s to make more headlines ahead as new deals are announced and existing alliances are expanded.

When Kohl’s introduce the Simply Vera line, senior evp John Worthington said it was “the biggest brand we ever launched in the history of the company.” Although he didn’t provide specific figures, when discussing Kohl’s other proprietary and exclusive brands, the Simply Vera line received Worthington’s highest praise during a presentation at the 17th Annual Retailing Smarter conference sponsored by the University of Florida’s David F. Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research.

Kohl’s also has exclusive relationships with brands such as Chaps from Ralph Lauren, Candie’s and the Food Network. Although Simply Vera has been an unbelievable success for Kohl’s, according to Worthington, he noted that the company learned a lotfrom the brand launch and made some mistakes. “Our biggest mistake was we had no idea the customer response would be so good. It has been beyond phenomenal,” Worthington said.

The launch of Simply Vera stemmed from the company’s desire several years ago to fill voids in its product assortment. Kohl’s base business was built on offering customers a good, better and best assortment of brands in classifications such as ‘classic’ and ‘updated.’ The void lay in the company’s lack of contemporary offerings along the same, good, better and best quality metrics that were applied to other areas.

Once the company realized the opportunity in front of it, Worthington said, “we went back to our product development team and said, ‘You’ve got to fill in this white space as fast as you can.”

As the executive at Kohl’s who oversees store operations, administration, merchandise presentation and loss prevention, Worthington will be running as fast as he can in the years ahead as the nation’s leading off-the-mall department store operator moves toward a goal of operating 1,400 stores by 2012. “We believe there are more stores beyond that, so there are some great conversations going on with people we bring on board today,” Worthington told an audience that included roughly 50 University of Florida students looking to pursue retail careers.

For example, he noted that the company will enter South Florida this fall with seven units, “but we really need 25 to be competitive.” It was only a few years ago that California was a new market for the company. However, today Kohl’s has 80 stores in California and Worthington said ultimately the company needs 250 or more to be competitive.

In addition to retail expansion, look for Kohl’s to get more aggressive online. “We are only at $300 million online [in revenues], but we should definitely be over a $1 billion or $2 billion,” Worthington said.