Retail Strategy Quotes

I have learned a ton about inventory, co-packing, wholesaling, end caps. All these concepts are easy to breeze by in what I do for a living or assume that there is a marketing manager or specialist in one of our companies that handles that.

My view is that everything begins with the customer. If you know the customer, then you can match the merchandise and then you can market it. The marketing is kind of the icing. The foundation is the cake. That's the merchandise. Then the question is, "Do the customers want cake, or do they want cupcakes or donuts. What is it?"

I don't have a problem to say I am a good merchandiser, because I love objects.

Basically we get confused a bit about what retail is. It is really just buying things, putting them on a floor and selling them.

The same time I'm designing my collection, I'm also designing my store. It has to have brand awareness, an identity. I'm also designing the racks and the hangers, and juggling a lot of things.

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.

When I started at Bloomingdale's as a buyer, Alexander's was a discounter across the street, and every time Alexander's had something that we had at Bloomingdale's, we'd have to meet price. I didn't really want to be in a business where I had no control over my inventory, the value of my inventory.

When I'm doing a store in a country, I always like to consider the concept of the country and the city.

Eventually, I want to have my own clothing line.

I wanted control over the merchandising, the actual packaging of the product. That was a big factor. The only way for me to exercise control on all those levels was to start my own label.

I'm thrilled to be joining Gap Inc., a company that understands the importance of integrating technology and retail in ways that improve the lives of its customers.

People will steal it if you don't make it easy to buy it.

I may be the only shark who hasn't been on QVC, but I have learned a lot from those folks about what it takes to get a product on store shelves.

Retailing, it's always true that there is some items that I wish we had a lot more of like the iPod and there is some items I wish we had a lot less of.

The only way I could get my old CD into stores is if I took one in and leave it. "Sir, you forgot this." "No, I did not. That is for sale. Please alphabetize it."

A lot of the things I did - it's not going to sound anything but egotistical - if I'm lucky and I did the right thing, they will be at Zara way before I can get them in the store, and I don't like that.

The more books there are on shelves, the more will be sold. Once you get to the level of The Secret and have 40-100 copies in many stores, managers have almost no choice but to put them in prime real estate like front-of-store, end caps, or front window.

Walmart has stores in almost every city in North America. When they go to same-day delivery, they don't have to build warehouses across North America like Amazon has to do. It is so much cheaper for Walmart to use existing stores as distribution centers.

What we learned was that the collective glamour of a specialty store could sell a lot of merchandise.

Having some retail experience is key. It really is where the battle is won or lost.

Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.

Most people assume that a record shop's success lies in selling records. In fact, Virgin's success both in mail order and the record shops lay in skill at buying records.

I couldn't have opened a store without putting books with the clothes. I am still writing as I have always done, and have published my ninth book "L'envers à l'endroit" last year. I am currently working on a dictionary of my favourite words.

I don't believe in flagship retail, because the definition of flagship retail is that it's a marketing expense, and it's going to lose money.