West Elm

West Elm announced this week that it will be opening a boutique hotel in Portland, Maine, the retailer's sixth such property scheduled to open in the next two-and-a-half years. Other hotels are scheduled for Detroit; Minneapolis; Savannah, Ga.; Oakland, Calif.; and Indianapolis. The hotels will essentially serve as massive showrooms for the furniture and home…

West Elm is expanding into the hospitality business. The furniture and home goods retailer announced the expansion of its signature modern aesthetic, West Elm Hotels, in partnership with DDK. The first properties are expected to open in late 2018 starting in Detroit, Minneapolis, Savannah, Charlotte and Indianapolis. In addition, each hotel will offer a unique…

In a session yesterday at the NEMOA directXchange Spring Conference in Boston, Anna Pfeiffer, a marketing strategist at marketing automation services provider Bronto Software, identified her top 10 must-have components for a successful email marketing program. Here they are:

Home furnishings and housewares retailer Williams-Sonoma is enjoying profitable growth in a competitive marketplace. What's its secret? Pat Connolly, chief strategy and business development officer for the San Francisco-based company, provided some insight into that question for the audience at NEMOA's directXchange Fall Conference in Groton, Conn. yesterday. Specifically, Connolly outlined six beliefs that Williams-Sonoma holds as integral to its success.

In an effort to tap into the $532 billion global marketplace for housewares and home furnishings, Williams-Sonoma, the San Francisco-based omnichnannel retailer, took its business beyond its domestic borders. In a session yesterday at NetSuite's SuiteWorld conference in San Jose, Calif., Rob Bogan, vice president of international systems for Williams-Sonoma, discussed the brand's experiences going global.

Jim Brett was haunted by mud-colored squares. When he started as West Elm's president in 2010, he couldn't believe how a furniture store could have so many products designed with such little imagination. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, what's with the brown boxes?'" he says. "The whole brand was brown boxes made in China. There wasn't a curve in the store!" From couches to beds to dressers, much of the line consisted of 

In a world increasingly filtered through Instagram, a carefully crafted photo shoot starts to look dated. That's why retailers are rushing to crowdsource their product shots, harvesting a stream of photos from social platforms to help sell everything from West Elm couches to Coach handbags. The photos are typically curated in galleries, where each picture is linked to a page selling the product. Increasingly, the amateur images are also showing up directly on product pages, next to professionally styled pictures.

It would be fair to call Etsy, which bowed in 2005, a disruptor. The online marketplace birthed a new business model that gives independent designers a global platform to sell everything from handmade jewelry to vintage clothing and home furnishings. But lately mainstream, national chains like Nordstrom and West Elm have been turning to Etsy — which swelled to $895.1 million in sales in 2012, up from $525.6 million in 2011 — to inject their stores’ merchandise with a patina of one-of-a-kind-handcraft authenticity, much like many big Hollywood studios set up independent film divisions to burnish their art-house cinema bonafides.

E-commerce retailer One Kings Lane is one of the first flash-sale sites to partner with a digital catalog company — in this case, Catalog Spree — to let shoppers browse on both the iPad and web. This is also Catalog Spree's first deal with a nontraditional retailer, the company says. Typically, the startup works with brands and retailers like Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, West Elm, Macy's, Patagonia and hundreds of others, aggregating and organizing their content into one app.

Pinterest, the virtual pinboard at the crossroads of social and style, has burgeoned into a marketplace for consumer brands, offering a visual and demonstrable platform for engagement. A wide range of major brands including Lands' End, West Elm, Etsy, Gap and Whole Foods are using Pinterest to engage fans through social curation and as an online focus group to see what clicks with consumers.