The shopping experience
Beckey Boswell -- Home Accents Today, 5/1/2006
You may be tired of reading about Wal-Mart's adventures — after all, everyone knows the operation is overwhelmingly massive and powerful.
But I encourage you to take time to read our Wal-Mart report on page 16 about the behemoth's plans to move into lifestyle selling of home accents.
They're taking a page (or maybe lots of pages) from our playbook and planning to create Pottery Barn-like vignettes to help customers envision a beautiful room perfect for their own homes.
This news comes at about the same time Target, the other big kid on the block, is reporting sales in the home sector of the business for first quarter are not as healthy as they hoped.
Hmmm.
Maybe there's a link there. Maybe those two stores' activities reinforce something independent furniture and home accent specialty stores should already know.
It's not easy to create a shopping experience for customers, to make them excited about the opportunity to make their homes more attractive, more inviting and more comfortable. It's not easy, but it's very doable and many retailers we know are doing a doggone good job of it, too.
After you read about Wal-Mart, go to page 21 and look at our list of 50 retail stars — smart retailers who rely on savvy buying and merchandising, as well as filling an important role in their communities, to help them succeed. They focus on service, unusual products, trunk shows and clever promotions to make their stores stand out from the crowd. I like that.
I'll shop with these folks a whole lot quicker than I'll hit the Wal-Mart parking lot.
How about you?
Talkback
Related Content
Related Content
