Merchandising

The designer-level racks at select Saks Fifth Avenue stores are expanding. Beginning this fall, the options for women looking for sizes 16 and 18 will include more high-fashion styles.

Von Maur, a family-run department store from Iowa, is stepping into the fast-fashion business. The 138-year-old merchant plans to unveil a concept store aimed at young women called Dry Goods.

This summer, why not chat about the strength of your merchandise’s kindle factor and see if there aren’t ways you can turn up the inspiration intensity of your product offering?

Retailers (or any marketer or publisher) seeking higher conversion rates must adopt an “innovation attitude” to guide them amid a fertile landscape for new ideas, advanced technology and customer behavior learnings. So advised speaker after speaker at last week's Shop.org Merchandise Summit in Huntington Beach, Calif.

Forever 21, a clothing chain that attracts many under-21 customers with its inexpensive, trendy fashions, is being questioned about its motives in choosing a select group of states to carry its recently launched maternity line. The line, called Love 21 Maternity, is currently available in Arizona, Alaska, California, Utah and Texas.

Walmart's strategy is evolving, and would have evolved regardless of what managers are in place. "Taking merchandise out of the Action Alley and providing clear sight lines has been a successful strategy," Spokesman David Tovar said in an e-mail, but added, "We are constantly listening to our customers and some have told us they liked seeing the rollbacks on merchandise in the aisles. .... We have given more autonomy to our store managers to make the decisions on what is right for their customers."

To “live curious” as a merchant means to dig deeper, pay more attention to details and patiently sift through the mundane to find the remarkable. And sometimes it means making the mundane simply remarkable.

A host of retailers are stretching their brands into uncharted product categories and into new lines of business. With store expansion on the back burner, retailers are turning to fresh avenues for growth, betting that their brand equity will carry over to new product categories.

Clothing maker Perry Ellis International sees a 10 percent rise in industrywide apparel prices over the next two years amid rising commodity prices and higher labor costs in China. "Prices have to go up at some point. The American consumer will have to pay higher prices... It's only apparel and electronics, the items that keep coming down, everything else in life has come up," Chief Executive George Feldenkreis told the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit in New York.

Upon learning of shotfarm, a free, centralized digital asset exchange service that allows retailers and manufacturers to quickly and securely share product images and information, Schwake immediately joined hoping both his company and his partners could reap the benefits of free, centralized product image management.