What: The trend among US retailers is to go towards more personalization and customization, through an ultra-local approach based on community management, focused product assortment and neighborhood approach.

Why it is important: This is exactly what Fenwick has done for decades before dropping this approach in the 00s. For the department store companies with a wide store network, they are also expected to be more localized now that international tourism should be seen as a bonus, but not as the core business.

Following the first trials made by Macy’s (Macy’s Market), Nordstrom (Nordstrom local) and Bloomingdales’ (Bloomies), large US retailers are all trying the smaller store format in order to get back in touch with their customers. It’s all about personalized service (the new Kohl’s concept store) and ultra-local approach (Glossier).

Big-box stores, which offer a breadth of assortment and depth of sizing or colours, are slowly returning to recipes from the past, when it was all about personalization and localized features. This is a must-do now that they also realized that instore interactions are one of the most efficient ways to capture customers, even though they might end up in the retailer’s digital ecosystem later on.

However, this approach requires a real range of freedom granted to the local teams, especially for retailers who have thousands of locations, and this should not be taken for granted. It also requires a strict product management system in order to avoid being swamped with various SKUs all different from one location to another.

The return of the neighborhood store