News English

01 August, 2018 The saga about House of Fraser has now rolled on from the Spring without any resolution. Today BBC News reported two developments; a) Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley have been asked for a loan by the House of Fraser management and that b) the House of Fraser management has approached turnaround specialists Alteri (among others). The background is that the Chinese owner, Sanpower, has been unable or unwilling to invest in the ailing department store group. In addition, its original investment included a plan to roll out House of Fraser stores across the Chinese mainland, something that...

Online has led to widespread high-street store cannibalisation putting profitability at risk. CEO's need to look at organisational fundamentals to remedy the damage done to the many multi- or omni-channel (whatever you want to call it) retailers. At its most basic - retailers have not given any thought to new business when rolling out the online channel and have continued to focus on existing customers and demographics hence inviting channel cannibalisation. For example, John Lewis (excl. Waitrose) increased revenue by 5.6% CAGR 2008-18. In the same period online has grown as a share of revenue from 13% to 42% at...

Retail is detail... and customer service.  Long gone are the days when you could instruct your store staff to decline any returns or refunds for whatever reason. However, in an online world the ability of customers who feel they have been wronged to broadcast their grievance has empowered customers to a level which legacy retailers do not appear well prepared for. Following the [again] lacklustre results from Arcadia Group we took it upon us to go through their finances to see if there is anything alluding to why the company is not doing well and gaining online traction where Asos...

We visited Arket on Long Acre in Lodnon's Covent Garden earlier this week. The store is located on three floors and is very plain in its layout. It reminds us of a Muji store, but much larger and with less products. Arket is, of course, also primarily a clothing brand. At the back, next to the Floral Street entrance, this Arket store also host an Arket-branded cafe serving a number of cakes (however, the Arket cafe has stiff competition from the Swedish-owned cafe 'Bageriet' on Rose Street - highly recommended!) which we have never seen in Sweden before. Our visit...

If you are into 3D this will be for you! Our recent visit to VR World Expo 2018 yielded little to talk about, possibly as a result of the limited amount of exhibitors. There were gaming applications, engineering and medical applications with haptic feedback robotics, etc. While many of these applications have advanced a lot over the past few years and now offer global teamwork options in a virtual space, etc. new retail applications have been far a wide between. One company stood out from the rest though: Astrivis Astrivis is a 2 year old startup from Switzerland which started...