Have Lands’ End and Sears Finally Gotten it Right? Almost.

The sharp thing here is that both my mother-in-law and my wife are regular Lands’ End customers, but only my mother-in-law is a Sears regular — or at least, she used to be. My wife got the store promo and my mother-in-law got the Web promo.

If you’re a multichannel marketer with retail stores, you can take several ideas from this. First, the catalog, online and retail channels of Sears and Lands’ End are communicating quite well with one another. Although Lands’ End’s Dodgeville catalog operation retains a sizeable degree of autonomy from Sears’ ivory tower in Hoffman Estates, Ill., there appears to be a lot of back-and-forth going on. You’ve certainly heard from enough people before me that breaking down silos between retail and direct divisions only can help a multichannel business.