Running a retail chain should be like going to school on a continuous basis. In this classroom, the shoppers are the teachers and the retail managers are the students.
When it comes to Customer Input 101, the folks who run the Great Indoors home remodeling chain are acing the course.
In the beginning–back in 1998 when the first store opened outside Denver– the Great Indoors wasn’t going to sell furniture along with its offering of kitchen appliances, bathroom vanities, bed linens and home accessories.
But customers, most of them women, kept asking to buy the furniture used in room vignettes, so the Great Indoors began selling it. The furniture turned over so fast that Great Indoors buyers were having trouble finding enough new stuff to take its place.
It was shaping up to be a real problem until the store’s managers tuned into what customers were saying. “They loved the fact that the stores changed, so we had to change,” says Bob Rodgers, who developed the Great Indoors concept for Sears, Roebuck and Co. and is still in charge of it. What had been a negative from a logistics point of view suddenly became a positive from a sales perspective.
Because of its tight customer focus, the Great Indoors has become one of the biggest retail success stories around the country and one of the few things that Sears has to crow about. A big chunk of the bragging rights belongs to Rodgers, who spoke to members of the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association International, which held its annual meeting in Chicago last week.
There are currently 13 Great Indoors, including two area stores, in Lombard and Schaumburg.
So if everything is going well, why is Sears Chief Executive Alan Lacy pulling back on the reins? The 2002 expansion plans for the Great Indoors were cut in half last year to seven new stores because Lacy said the current ones aren’t cost-efficient enough.
Rodgers says the conservative change in course is appropriate. “The stores are packed. Now is the time to step back and remove the cost of what [the customer] doesn’t want,” he says.
But that means plans for 2003 are up in the air because Rodgers and his team are developing a new prototype that will cut costs on fixtures, flooring and wall coverings–changes that are intended to be virtually invisible to customers.
While they’re at it, Great Indoors executives are figuring out how to do a better job of showcasing the store’s best values with signs and aisle positioning. Indeed, some middle-income customers are so wowed by the high-end merchandise they don’t think they can afford to shop there, Rodgers says.
The good news for the store’s fans is that the new prototype won’t be smaller or feature less fancy merchandise, Rodgers promises.
Just ask women shoppers: Choice is key.
Buy now, pay later: Deferred financing options are nothing new for automakers, furniture stores or purveyors of wall-to-wall carpeting. But it’s a tactic rarely used in the apparel business. After all, that new outfit could be looking pretty worn when the bill arrives a few months later.
Catalog retailer J. Jill has decided the risk is worth it. The women’s casual apparel-maker is once again allowing customers to buy spring clothes now and pay nothing until Memorial Day. No minimum purchase is required, although shoppers must use a major credit card, which will be billed on May 27.
For spring clothing, the plan actually makes sense, retail experts say. J. Jill will get an early read on popular products in time to reorder. And by the time the credit card bill arrives, the weather should be warm enough for customers to be able to wear their new sleeveless tops and sandals.
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E-mail schandler@tribune.com.
