FAO Schwarz Reopens at Rockefeller Center in New York City

FAO Schwarz Makes a Comeback

FAO Schwarz reopens at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Domain: faoschwarz.com

FAO Schwarz And Its Piano Are Back In NYC

CNBC.com video above published Nov 19, 2018: Iconic toy retailer FAO Schwarz is making its return to New York City after shutting its famed flagship store on Fifth Avenue in 2015, when the brand was still owned by Toys R Us. Now under a new owner, FAO Schwarz will bring its plush stuffed animals and walk-on piano keyboard — featured in the 1988 movie "Big" with Tom Hanks — back to life, and just in time for the 2018 holiday season. 

The store is at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan. FAO Schwarz, meanwhile, has already embarked on expanding around the globe. The goal is to make the space "experiential" and one that can "deliver theater and can drive customers," David Conn, CEO of FAO Schwarz's parent company ThreeSixty Group, told CNBC last month. Brands featured in the 20,000-square-foot 30 Rock store include two of those also owned by ThreeSixty — electronics from The Sharper Image and toys from Melissa & Doug. There are walls of Barbie dolls, a Build-A-Bear Workshop station, a racetrack for kids to play with cars, a space where a magician will teach tricks, a candy shop and so much more for visitors to do there, beyond shopping. And, of course, FAO Schwarz brought back its iconic keyboard on the floor. (This time it's also on the ceiling, in bright lights, to spark the curiosity of those walking by.) The massive clock tower is there too, along with a new centerpiece, a rocket ship. 

Without Toys R Us now that it's bankrupt, there is a huge share of the toy market left up for grabs, giving FAO Schwarz the chance to make a name for itself again. FAO Schwarz will also be selling its own branded items inside other retailers including Kohl's and Hudson's Bay this holiday season. Back at 30 Rock, FAO Schwarz will offer everything from hot items like Hatchimals to the brands older generations of consumers grew up with, like Steiff teddy bears. Its goal is to be a store that customers remember and keep coming back to. The experience is the key. It's a strategy many retailers are employing to lure consumers out of their homes and into the stores — but it's also part of FAO Schwarz's heritage. The fun of going to the old store is a memory for many generations, but today's shoppers may find many "Instagrammable" moments inside the walls of the new store.

Tweets by FAOSchwarz

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Digital Winners: Jeff Bezos & Amazon, Retail Like It's 1999 (video)

Retail Like It's 1999

L2inc.com video above published Dec 14, 2017: Scott Galloway on digital winners and losers:

Winner: Jeff Bezos. But as the Amazon founder becomes the world's richest person, who's losing?

Sources: 

(0:03) “Bloomberg Billionaires Index,” Bloomberg, December 2017.

(0:28) Credit Suisse. 

(0:33) “Sears And Kmart Are Closing 63 More Stores — See If Your Store Is On The List,” Business Insider, November 2017.
(0:35) “Sears’ Loss Narrows As Same-Store Sales Plunge,” Business Insider, November 2017.
(0:39) “Sears, Roebuck And Co.,” Chicago Tribune, April 1999. http://trib.in/2jVeZMm
(0:39) Yahoo! Finance.
(2:01) “9 Facts About Amazon’s Unprecedented Warehouse Empire,” Curbed, November 2017.
(2:01) “Amazon Global Fulfillment Center Network," MVPVL, 2017.
(2:18) “Amazon’s Ever-Growing Shipping Costs,” Statista, February 2017.
(2:25) “Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics Survey (National),” Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 2017.
(2:32) “There Are 170,000 Fewer Retail Jobs In 2017—And 75,000 More Amazon Robots,” Quartz, December 2017.
(2:32) “Amazon Now Has More Than 500,000 Employees,” CNN, October 2017.
(2:32) “Amazon Soars To More Than 341K Employees — Adding More Than 110K People In A Single Year,” Geekwire, February 2017.
(2:41) “Calvin De-Kleins Retailers to Sell on Amazon,” L2, Inc., November 2017.
(2:52) “PVH’s (PVH) CEO Manny Chirico on Q3 2016 Results - Earnings Call,” Seeking Alpha, December 2016.
(3:17) “How Dollar General Became Rural America’s Store of Choice,” The Wall Street Journal, December 2017.
(3:17) “Net Sales of Macy's Inc. Worldwide From 2005 To 2016 (In Million U.S. Dollars),” Statista, 2017.

Transcript auto-generated via YouTube.com:
00:00 a winner Jeff Bezos who is now the
00:04 wealthiest person in the world he's been
00:10 criticized for not being more
00:11 philanthropic which in my view is total
00:14 BS just recently mr. Bazo spent almost
00:16 14 billion dollars trying to solve the
00:20 shortage of almond milk in Tribeca who's
00:22 losing retailers more stores closed in
00:25 2017 than during the financial crisis of
00:28 2008 one retailer shuttering stores
00:31 Sears dozens of stores after sales
00:34 plunged 17% in the third quarter in 1999
00:38 Sears had a market cap of 16 billion
00:42 meanwhile in July of 1995 from this
00:46 modest ranch house outside Seattle Bezos
00:50 sold his first book today he has five
00:53 huge warehouses in the United States and
00:55 Europe last year Amazon sold more than
00:58 600 million dollars worth of merchandise
01:00 over the Internet and Wall Street isn't
01:03 concerned that Amazon has never made a
01:05 profit not a dime in fact it lost a
01:09 hundred and twenty five million dollars
01:11 last year the company says it's
01:14 investing for the future skeptics say it
01:17 would have to sell every book being sold
01:19 in the world today to justify its stock
01:23 price I think my generation grew up with
01:25 Sears and Amazon is worth 20% more than
01:28 Sears is worth in market capitalization
01:30 how do you view that phenomenon that
01:32 Amazon today is worth more than Sears
01:35 investors are focused on the future
01:36 Amazon has growth potential that Sears
01:39 doesn't could Amazon Dundas tributaries
01:41 be flowing towards the shopping mall and
01:44 eventually drown it out today the market
01:47 capitalization of Sears is four hundred
01:49 and thirty million and Amazon is
01:51 approaching six hundred billion or
01:54 approximately fourteen hundred times
01:56 what Sears is worth an Amazon operates
01:58 75 fulfillment centers or put another
02:01 way there's an Amazon warehouse within
02:03 20 miles of half the US population and
02:06 some of those warehouses are shipping
02:08 more than a million items a day
02:10 meanwhile retailers are scrambling to
02:12 offer the same level of
02:13 but only Amazon can afford the seven and
02:16 a half billion dollar loss getting you
02:18 your kombucha tea within 47 minutes this
02:22 year there will be a hundred and seventy
02:23 thousand fewer retail jobs in the United
02:26 States but don't worry amazon added
02:28 fifty five thousand robots to its
02:32 workforce to win as a brand you have to
02:34 have an Amazon strategy and sometimes it
02:37 means distributing on the platform
02:39 Calvin Klein sells certain items
02:41 exclusively on the e-tailer and focuses
02:43 on selective high-volume low-cost
02:45 products and core replenishment
02:47 categories for example under we're
02:49 helping parent company PVH achieve 20%
02:52 digital revenue growth in the third
02:55 quarter of 2016 Levi's a brand that
02:58 missed the boat in the early part of the
02:59 millennium has rebounded with an Amazon
03:01 strategy focused on selling its core
03:04 product genes on the platform how do you
03:07 win as a retailer Dollar General one of
03:09 the most profitable retailers in the US
03:11 this year is winning by focusing on
03:13 where Amazon is not the low end market
03:15 its 14,000 stores more than doubled
03:17 Macy's profit last year on less revenue
03:20 and its market value exceeds that of
03:22 Kroger the largest pure-play grocer in
03:25 the country as other retailers close the
03:27 company plans to build thousands more
03:29 outlets in rural areas everybody is
03:33 looking for is silver bullets or some
03:34 sort of magic pixie dust to compete with
03:36 Amazon the first thing I tell boards
03:38 when asked how do we compete with Amazon
03:39 is unfortunately you'll lower your
03:42 profit expectations how do you compete
03:44 with a company that doesn't want to be
03:45 profitable bottom line you reinvest more
03:48 in the consumer experience we leave you
03:51 with a picture of mr. Beezus in 1999 and
03:54 one in 2017 we are exactly the same age
03:58 except one of us a is worth a hundred
03:59 billion dollars but more importantly is
04:01 aging in Reverse what what is going on
04:05 here I want on the program you're my
04:07 trainer boss I'm here New York Sports
04:10 Club we're talking isometrics we're
04:11 talking yoga I have one of those
04:13 machines you wrap around and jiggles you
04:15 up call me we'll see you next week
04:21 [Music]

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Advertising and Offline Retail: A Better Way to Track Shoppers (video)

A Better Way to Track Shoppers Offline

Stanford Graduate School of Business video above published Oct 9, 2017: Stephan Seiler, Associate Professor of Marketing, Stanford Graduate School of Business

YouTube.com auto-generated transcript (w/ minor edits):
00:00  [Music]
00:18  off-line compared to online retail is
00:20  still actually a very large fraction of
00:22  consumer spending so although online is
00:24  growing quite dramatically as of now
00:27  essentially still about 90 percent of
00:29  total retail spending happens in the
00:31  offline world and firms are still trying
00:33  to figure out how to best promote
00:35  products how to best run a price
00:37  promotions things of that sort and so we
00:40  wanted to go back and see can we
00:42  actually use tools that we learned about
00:45  it in the online world better types of
00:47  measurement and can we bring that back
00:48  through your flying world and try to
00:50  track things better so we know if I run
00:57  an ad online
00:58  I typically can track did somebody click
01:00  on it did it again to go to my website
01:01  how much they spend all this linkage is
01:04  much closer and those are often things
01:06  that we don't observe in the offline
01:07  world right so an online retailer would
01:09  know how did this consumer get to the
01:12  product you're ultimately purchased we
01:13  can observe browsing with a lot of
01:15  precision. Offline does usually no
01:17  equivalent traditionally we weren't able
01:18  to see how did somebody walk through the
01:20  store how did they actually get to the
01:22  specific aisle where they then picked up
01:23  products and so what we do in the study
01:26  is we actually bring in a new
01:28  measurement tool that's going to mimic
01:30  the way we're gonna observe things
01:31  online in the offline world and in
01:33  particular what we're going to do is
01:34  we're gonna rig consumer shopping carts
01:37  if you will with so-called radio
01:38  frequency identification tags which
01:40  worked like a GPS tracker that allow us
01:42  to track exactly how does somebody walk
01:44  through the store which category is
01:46  godigo? do they walk past what do they
01:48  eventually end up purchasing
01:50  [Music]
01:54  if in a particular week the supermarket
01:57  is running a beer ad do more people buy
02:00  a beer
02:00  that we were usually able to observe
02:02  even before but now we can also see did
02:04  actually more people go to the beer
02:06  aisle so did did that advertising
02:09  attract people to go to different part
02:11  was started they wouldn't have otherwise
02:12  gone to and then they made the purchase
02:14  if that's true then maybe this
02:16  advertising will have positive spillover
02:18  to other categories maybe people on
02:20  their way to the beer aisle are now
02:21  gonna pick up salty snacks other things
02:24  and so there's sort of anecdotally a lot
02:26  of that sense that we are gonna get
02:29  these kind of spillover effect so people
02:31  often talk about the fact that milk gets
02:33  stored in the back of the store
02:34  why because people buy it very
02:36  frequently and having it in the back of
02:38  the store makes them walk past a lot of
02:40  other categories and hence they might
02:42  pick up other things that they didn't
02:43  plan on buying on their way and so you
02:46  could imagine that advertising does
02:48  something very similar if advertising
02:49  allows me to divert traffic to other
02:51  parts of the store then maybe products I
02:54  pass on that way also gonna end up in my
02:56  purchase basket and so that was
02:59  something that we weren't usually able
03:00  to observe
03:01  [Music]
03:05  so for a store manager the good news
03:08  here is that advertising is quite
03:10  effective beyond just individual product
03:12  being advertised so what we find is that
03:14  when you advertise a particular brand of
03:16  beer sales go up in the beer category as
03:18  a whole and that increase comes partly
03:20  from the advertised brands but also goes
03:22  beyond that
03:23  so some consumers presumably just pick
03:26  up on effect beers being advertised
03:27  today they got reminded of I want to buy
03:30  beer and hence we seen increase in beer
03:31  sales and that's beyond the individual
03:34  product being advertised at the same
03:36  time we also find that the effect stops
03:38  there so to the extent that stores might
03:40  have to hope that driving more people to
03:43  the beer aisle through advertising will
03:45  then spill over into higher sales for
03:46  salty snacks or other categories that
03:49  are stocked nearby we find no evidence
03:51  for that whatsoever so we think so
03:53  things stop at the category level but
03:56  they go beyond individual product being
03:57  advertised and so hence as we think
04:00  about allocating advertising budget
04:02  thinking about effectiveness at the
04:04  level of the category rather than the
04:06  more narrow product level or the broader
04:08  store level seems to be the right way to
04:09  tackle that managerial decision
04:12  [Music]

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Retail Trends: Death of the Department Store, Is It Too Late? (video)

The Death of the Department Store

Bloomberg.com video published Nov 20, 2017: E-commerce has chipped away at the market share of storied retailers like Macy's, Sears, and JC Penney, but it's hardly the only reason the future for these stores looks bleak. Bloomberg Gadfly's Sarah Halzack explains what department stores are up against, and how they might revive themselves before it's too late.

One Retailer's Strategy: Target’s Plan to Win Big This Holiday Season

Target (domain: target.com) offers free shipping beginning November 1st, and most of its holiday assortment will be priced at under $15. Fortune.com video above published Oct 23, 2017.

Department store sales, which peaked in 2001, have been crushed by e-commerce. 16 years of inflation and population growth notwithstanding, department-store sales have fallen by 35%.

Brick-and-mortar sectors that are still considered “online-proof” or “e-commerce resistant”:

• New- and used-vehicle dealers and auto-parts retailers: 21% of total retail sales.
• Grocery and beverage stores: 12.6% of total retail sales. 
• Gasoline stations: 8% of total retail sales.
• Restaurants and bars: 12% of total retail sales

Total of above: 54% of all retail sales. 

Everybody else is "at risk." 

See also: Amazon discounts other sellers' products as retail competition stiffens | Reuters.com.

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Amazon.com Prime Day Starts July 10, 9pm EDT (US), LIVE Twitter Feed

Prime Day 2017

Amazon.com, Inc.’s ($AMZN) third annual Prime Day features hundreds of thousands of deals exclusively for Prime members around the world--30 hours of deal shopping starting at 9pm EDT. Monday, July 10 in the U.S.--with new deals as often as every five minutes. Prime Day has expanded to 13 countries this year, and Amazon says it is bringing new and existing members in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Mexico, Japan, Italy, India, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium and Austria the best deals of the year, "Prime Members will find millions of items in stock including deals from thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs."--Amazon.com/primeday

More information at http://amazon.com/primeday and PRIME DAY Insider Guide

Amazon Prime Day--"30 hours of deals"--starts at Amazon.com 9pm EDT (US), July 10, 2017

Prime Day Domain: amazon.com/primeday  |  LIVE Twitter Feed further below

Amazon is beating Google in "product searches"--according to a UPS survey among more than 5,000 U.S. online shoppers, Amazon and other marketplaces are the most popular destination for shoppers searching for a product--Amazon.com is increasingly the "first stop" for U.S. online shoppers:
Source: Statista
Tweets by amazon

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EU Outlaws Network Ad Blocking, Death of the Advertising Complex?

EU's ad blocking ban explained:

New EU telecom rules mean that network-wide blocks on advertising by wireless carriers, and other "internet access service" providers, will be outlawed. In the video above, FT.com telecoms correspondent Nic Fildes explains what this means for mobile companies, consumers and other industries. Video published 1 September 2016. See also: Blow to telecoms companies as EU outlaws network-wide ad blocking | FT.com: "... companies “should not block, slow down, alter, restrict, interfere with, degrade or discriminate advertising when providing an IAS (internet access service)”." 

Professor Scott Galloway on Death of the Industrial Advertising Complex:

Video above: In this talk at L2’s Digital Leadership Academy, NYU Stern Marketing Professor Scott Galloway argues that advertising is becoming less essential to brand building as consumers are discovering products with tools like Google, Amazon, and TripAdvisor. The brand is no longer on the tip of the tongue, it’s what Google says it is. Furthermore, wealthy shoppers are paying to avoid advertising altogether. Winners in this new age are not always the biggest spenders on ads, but innovators in product, supply chain, and influencers. 

Transcript via YouTube:




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