Editor’s Note: The Best of the Best

Q: What do Dollar Tree, Wayfair and 1-800-Flowers.com have in common?

A: Well, for one, they’re all publicly traded retail companies. But also, they were the top three fastest-growing retailers in the United States between the 2014 to 2015 fiscal years, according to our annual list of the 100 fastest-growing retail companies.

To compile this year’s list, Executive Editor Joe Keenan researched the net sales figures for all of the public retail companies in the U.S. (and a select few headquartered in Canada that have a significant presence in the U.S.). He then compared individual company’s sales numbers to their previous ficsal year sales, calculated the percentage change year-over-year, and then ranked each company in descending order to arrive at our top 100. (Make sure to check out myTotalRetail.com for our new top 100 list, a ranking of the same publicly traded retailers by net earnings.)

What are these retailers’ secret sauces? What drives their growth? Well, it depends on the retailer. According to investors, Dollar Tree did three major things to attract more customers and grow sales last year: dramatically increased store count; introduced frozen and refrigerated foods in two-thirds of its stores; and purchased Family Dollar. The acquisition, completed in July 2015, more than doubled Dollar Tree’s store count to over 13,600 retail stores in the U.S. and Canada.

For Wayfair, it’s all about data. The online retailer is well known for its series of algorithms that fulfill orders with a 98 percent success rate — a number that’s improving all the time. Wayfair constantly probes and processes data about its customers to better interact with them and anticipate their wishful thinking, enabling it to personalize homepages and turn search into a form of entertainment.

And for 1-800-Flowers.com, a continuous expansion of product offerings, most recently introducing gourmet foods and home and garden merchandise, has helped it develop relationships with customers who purchase products not only for gifting occasions, but also for everyday consumption.

What’s your company doing to grow sales this year? Perhaps you can implement some of the best practices these companies are employing. Lastly, if you’re seeing successes, drop me a line at mcampanelli@napco.com and tell me about them.