By all accounts, the pandemic year was a great one for home furnishings brands and retailers. Cooped up at home, Americans invested in improving their living spaces. Home improvement retailers, like Home Depot and Lowe’s that serve the DIY-inclined, rose 14% year-over-year. These retailers were aided by being classified as essential retailers during the shutdown, […]
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RSS feed for this sectionKay, Zales and Jared parent, Signet Jewelers, Outlines Next Phase of its Path to Brilliance Plan
In March 2018, shortly after being named CEO, Virginia ‘Gina’ Drosos laid out a transformational three-year strategic plan for Signet Jewelers, called “Path to Brilliance.” Its ambitious benchmarks were to be achieved at the close of 2020. But after the pandemic year, nobody would have faulted the company in its recent fiscal 2021 earnings call […]
Uniqlo Is Distancing From H&M and Zara to Become the World’s Top Fashion Retailer
Fast-fashion retailers are considered the bottom-feeders in the fashion world. They are widely credited – or discredited depending on which side of the cash register you are on – with copying designer-inspired trends, producing them in copious quantities and selling them for pennies on the dollar of the namesake brands. Sweden’s H&M operating 5,000 stores […]
RH Expands Its Horizons to a Living Ecosystem
Remember when Restoration Hardware was the quirky DIY-fixer’s catalog for people restoring Victorian houses? It’s come a long way from its home-spun roots back in 1979 when Stephen Gordon founded it. Progressive CEO In his most recent shareholders letter, Gary Friedman, the company’s current chairman and CEO, updates RH’s progress since joining the company in 2011: “The first […]
Signet Jewelers – Parent of Kay and Zales – on Its Strategy of Love
After a disappointing 2019, when jewelry store retail sales were basically flat from the year before–$32.2 billion compared to $32.4 billion in 2018–the new year 2020 started with a bang. January 2020 sales rose 11.2% over previous year and hopes were high that similar growth would continue for the rest of the year. Then Covid […]