Retail Stores

Name: Republic Spaces
One-Liner Pitch: A boutique marketplace for pop-up shops.
Why It's Taking Off: Republic Spaces is a marketplace that helps retailers rent out their extra space to emerging designers, while at the same time helping designers find low-cost spaces to sell their products.  

We may be in the dog days of summer, but retailers and brands are hard at work gearing up for one of the busiest shopping periods of the year, back to school (BTS). Second only to the winter holiday season, BTS shopping marks the start of a mad dash for retailers as parents look to stock up on new clothing, school supplies and even electronics. In 2012, parents spent approximately $689 per child on back-to-school items.

Leading video and e-commerce retailer QVC has launched a second broadcast channel, QVC Plus. QVC Plus will maintain the QVC brand and television experience, including shows, exclusive products and program hosts, airing on a three-hour delay of QVC's current live broadcast. "One of the secrets of QVC's success is that we offer customers the joy of discovery," said Mary Campbell, senior vice president, multichannel platforms at QVC. "QVC Plus provides an additional discovery experience for our customers and more ways to view our unique, ever-changing curation of people, places and finds."

Bloomberg's Julie Hyman reports that Barnes & Noble Inc. founder Leonard Riggio suspended his efforts to bid for the company's retail business amid deepening losses at the bookstore chain.

With customer engagement and driving traffic as top priorities, Kohl's has spent many months revamping its e-commerce platform and mobile technologies to support a game-changing loyalty program, currently in beta in Texas and expanding imminently to California. The retailer launched its loyalty pilot in late 2012 to great results, with the Texas test stores "handily" outperforming the control group. Kohl's will offer the program in roughly 300 total stores when it goes live in California and will make a decision in early 2014 about implementing it throughout the chain.

Our cable bill doubled. Apparently we had an introductory rate — which lasted more than five years. We had nearly 500 channels, and nothing ever seemed to be on, so we cut cable. Cold turkey. Even returned the cable company's DVR full of unwatched episodes of nothing in particular.

In another sign of how much eBay is moving away from its auction roots to become a more mainstream retail site, the company is ending its Trading Assistant (TA) consignment selling program. eBay Spokesperson Ryan Moore confirmed that eBay sent a letter to TAs on Tuesday informing them of the demise of the program. The letter explains, "We've been listening to feedback from many of you and have heard that the program is not meeting expectations or delivering a significant number of sales leads."

The great Amazon warrior tribe is at the wall. To fortify themselves, retailers have settled into seven kingdoms. Check out the interactive map and hover on each home to see their defensive strategies.

Listen closely...can you hear that? It's the terrified screams from millions of children enjoying their summer breaks as retailers pound a [premature] Back-to-School drumbeat to get the second largest shopping season of the year underway. And when schools return to session in September, you can expect retailers to strike up the promotional band for the biggest selling season of the year: Holiday 2013. Forget the screams (along with Halloween and Thanksgiving), and cue the Buddy-the-Elf-esque joyful noise: "Santa!" By these

Our objective in creating the CircleUp25 was to honor 25 companies that are starting to change the way we live our lives — companies that influence what we eat, what we wear and what we use every day of our lives. They're companies that lead us to decide where and how we shop. They're the most innovative consumer and retail brands that exist. In short, they're innovative businesses that go far beyond our local farmers markets. They're reinventing industries.