News

With back-to-school season in full swing, Lands' End Kids has enlisted seven PopSugar Select mom bloggers to curate a collection of "First-day Faves," each to be featured in a new digital popup shop every week at landsend.com/firstdayfaves.

Featured items will be offered at a 25% discount.

Mahwah, N.J. - Dirk Montgomery, executive VP and CFO of Ascena Retail Group Inc. since January 2013, has accepted a position with a healthcare-related company based in Florida. Ascena has initiated a search process for a new CFO.

Montgomery has agreed to remain through the end of the summer. Randy Pearce, a member of Ascena’s board of directors, chair of the Audit Committee, and former CFO of Regis Corp. from 1998 to 2011, will increase his involvement in overseeing the company’s finance department during the transition.

Target is leaving no digital stone unturned this year as its looks engage with shoppers in the lucrative back-to-college market.

Menlo Park, Calif. – Facebook is testing a new “buy” button designed to help businesses drive sales through Facebook in News Feed and on Pages. With this feature, people on desktop or mobile can click the “Buy” call-to-action button on ads and page posts to purchase a product directly from a business, without leaving Facebook.

By Ben Pivar, Senior VP, Retail Leader, North America, Capgemini

Showrooming may not be as concerning as many traditional retailers once thought. In fact, retailers who embrace clienteling and other strategies can leverage showrooming as an element of the overall all-channel experience for their customers. Through the use of new technologies as well as in-store and online strategies, many of those retailers who have tested clienteling have experienced a lift in customer conversion.

Imagine a lifelong Procter & Gamble employee suddenly named CEO of Walmart and that is essentially what happened at leading global retail Tesco where the company has named long time Unilever executive Dave Lewis as its next CEO.

Tewksbury, Mass. – Demoulas Super Markets Inc., parent company of the Market Basket grocery chain, has reportedly fired some employees in the wake of inventory problems during the weekend of July 19-20. According to the Boston Globe, several managers were fired the evening of Sunday, July 20 after the company noticed thinning inventories of perishable items.

Tiffany’s long-standing CEO Michael J. Kowalski will retire from the company March 31, 2015. Kowalski, who has been a member of the company’s board of directors since 1995, will continue to serve as non-executive chairman.

The board has tapped Frederic Cumenal, currently the company’s president, as Kowalski’s successor; he will step up to the CEO role April 1, 2015.

Kowalski joined Tiffany in 1983, became CEO in 1999 and assumed the role of chairman of the board in 2003.