Online Retailers Starting to Appreciate Value of Brick and Mortar Stores

Posted by Techvibes Newsdesk on Mar 27, 2013

This article was written by Glen Korstrom and originally published in Business in Vancouver.

E-commerce ventures and traditional retailers are rapidly fusing sales strategies and creating a hybrid model that includes online and in-store purchases.

As street-front retailers reduce store size, opt for kiosk-style outlets within stores and increase marketing budgets for online sales, e-commerce ventures are opening more pop-up stores that last weeks or months instead of days.

Vancouver-based online suit-seller Indochino launched its first pop-up store in Vancouver in November 2011 and has since had seven other pop-up stores in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Chicago.

CEO Kyle Vucko told Business in Vancouver that his company has increased pop-up store opening times to several weeks for the one currently in Boston. Its first pop-up store lasted four days and offered customers the opportunity to book sessions for Indochino staff to take their measurements.
Vucko’s company continues to more than double its revenue each year and recently moved its 40 Vancouver staff to a larger office in Vancouver’s Railtown neighbourhood, east of the downtown eastside.

Vancouver’s other major e-commerce venture, Coastal Contacts, is also scouting around for potential pop-up stores.

It opened a new 1,000-square-foot store under its Clearly Contacts brand on Robson Street between Burrard and Thurlow streets on March 21.

CEO Roger Hardy refers to the store as a “pop-up”; its lease is rumoured to be six months.
Hardy would not disclose the length of the store’s lease, but he said it’s shorter than leases that most retailers sign and that he is simply testing out the location.

Coastal Contacts’ Lensway subsidiary operates six street-front locations in Sweden, and Hardy said the stores have helped boost e-commerce sales in that Scandinavian country.

“There’s evidence that hybrid models of retail are going to be the most successful.”

FUTURE OF RETAIL

Indochino and Coastal Contacts’ moves come as another successful e-commerce retailer, U.S.-based Bonobos, is taking pop-up stores one step further by opening Bonobos Guideshops.

• Click to read the answer and the rest of the article…

Landlords are finding it easy to fill empty big boxes

March 28, 2013
Shopping Centers Today

Remember those vacant big-box store sites that were expected to gather dust for decades? Today, the only dust seen at many of them is the kind that's getting kicked up by the procession of tenants scrambling to fill them. Minimal new retail construction, coupled with improvements in the housing, employment and lending sectors, have retailers and a host of other users re-filling boxes of all size from Billings, Montana to the Big Easy.

Though deals have yet to return to pre-recession pricing, big-box vacancy is dropping and cash flow is rising faster than many predicted just a few years ago. A prime example: the brisk leasing and sales activity of the nearly 400 vacant Borders Books spaces returned to market following the retailer's 2011 bankruptcy. Even in economically pressed Michigan, 11 of the state's 18 former Borders locations had been absorbed as of February 2013 and several other deals are working, a February report in the Detroit Free Press said. One of those is in Borders' former home base of Ann Arbor, where the bookseller's old two-level, 44,000-square-foot flagship store is being subdivided into five first-floor retail and restaurant spaces and a bank of second-floor offices.  In Billings, Montana, Jo-Ann Fabrics and Crafts emerged to take over a former Borders in Marketplace West, beating out about a half dozen other national retailers, developer and leasing agent Steve Corning said.

Last summer, Fresh Market took over a former Borders on stately St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, while in central Philadelphia, Walgreens is  moving into a former three-floor Borders where it will mirror new-concept stores that it previously opened on New York's Wall Street and Chicago's Michigan Avenue. The store will feature a salon, salads, juice bar, fresh sushi and a doctor-attended wellness center.

The Borders blitz seems destined to continue. A few miles from the Notre Dame campus in South Bend, Indiana, Whole Foods is set to open April 10 [2013] in an old Borders, while another healthy grocery, Asheville, N.C.-based Earth Fare, has opened in an old Borders space in Noblesville, Ind., near Indianapolis. "Borders had great real estate and unlike a lot of the vacant boxes, it was a part of that same tribal gathering of tenants that went into many of the modern-day lifestyle centers," said David Palmer, head of Dallas/Fort Worth development for Dallas-based Cencor Realty Services. Among retailers taking former Borders in Texas are Nordstrom Rack, Container Store and Neiman Marcus Last Call. But not all the Borders went to retailers. A former Borders at Westfield Southcenter Mall in Tukwila, near Seattle, went to Hope of the City Church.

It isn't just old Borders boxes that are getting absorbed. The Detroit report said 17 of Michigan's 21 former Circuit City big-box locations are either occupied or scheduled Read the full article

What Exactly is a Pop-Up Store

Posted by Storefront Team at The Store Front Blog
March 22, 2013 at 8:27 am

photo credit : Storefront.com

Whether you hear temporary retail, flash retailing, pop-up store, or pop-up shop, it is all one and the same. Pop-up shops are taking over the retail world and rethinking traditional brick-and-mortar and big-box stores, but what exactly is a shop that pops up?

Sighted as early as the 1990s in large urban cities such as Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and New York City, pop-up shops and pop-up retail are temporary retail spaces that sell merchandise of any kind. That’s right, just about every consumer product has been sold via a pop-up shop at one point in time. From art to fashion to tech gadgets and food, pop-ups are exciting because they create short-term stores that are just about as creative as they are engaging. And they come in all shapes and sizes.

Specific Details:

• Term: typically a 3 days to 3 months.
• Location: high foot traffic areas such as city centers, malls, and busy streets.
• Price: much lower than a traditional store, typically paid upfront.
• Use: launch new product, generate awareness, move inventory, vet idea, increase ‘cool’ factor.

What are the benefits of a pop-up shop?

• Connect with customers: The pop-up retail format allows you to personally get to know your customers and build stronger relationships.
• Sell more: About 95% of all purchases are still completed offline. This is your opportunity to take advantage of the retail channel.
• Build awareness: Consumers and the media love the excitement generated by pop-up shops. Build awareness by going offline!
• It’s cheaper: Launching a pop-up shop is 80% cheaper than a traditional retail store
• Test new markets: Easily enter a new market and launch new products

 

So, who can start pop-up shop?

• Click to read the answer and the rest of the article…