Gap store interior

Kanye West Gets What He Always Wanted In Partnering With Gap

Successful brand partnerships are made when it’s a win-win for both brands. That is what the just announced Gap partnership with Kanye West’s Yeezy brand promises. The Gap brand desperately needs a turnaround plan, with global sales falling from $5.3 billion in 2017 to $4.6 billion in 2019. After trying so hard and failing so […]

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sick retail photo-1557076329-cda8f51f2b95

Retail Is Sick: It’s Time for Wellness

I recently participated in a retail webinar on wellness. My main message was that retailers limit themselves if they think of wellness just in terms of products consumers use, wear close to their body, put on their skin or decorate their homes with. All retailers, nonessential and otherwise, have been massively disrupted during the nationwide coronavirus […]

Woman with facemask

Luxury in a Post-Covid World

Letting no crisis go to waste, the MBB big-three consulting firms – McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company – have all come out with their post-coronavirus predictions for the luxury market. I’ve spent hours digesting their reports, including interviewing Bain’s Claudia D’Aprizio, who is arguably the world’s leading authority on the […]

RH Store, Denver, CO

Gary Friedman Aims to Make RH More Luxury, But Can His Dream Become Reality?

In a recent conversation with fellow Forbes.com contributor Steve Dennis, our wide-ranging discussion turned to RH, the company formerly known as Restoration Hardware. “I was at a conference where Gary Friedman talked about these new gallery stores that hadn’t opened yet. And I thought he was crazy,” Dennis said. I had much the same feeling […]

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Shanghai, China

All Eyes Are on China for Luxury’s Recovery, But Future Success There Is Not Guaranteed

Since the 2008/2009 recession, China has effectively become the tail that wags the dog of the global luxury market. That’s because China was largely unaffected by the economic downturn that battered the market throughout the rest of the world. Not only that, Chinese consumers, with their growing economic power, expressed a heady appetite for luxury […]

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