The merged company made up of the two German department stores Kaufhof and Karstadt will be led by Karstadt chief Stephan Fanderl. Kaufhof boss Roland Neuwald will leave at the end of January after only 14 months heading his company. The ex-Metro Kaufhof CEO had launched cost-cutting measures as well as initiatives to increase sales. He will be replaced at the head of the joint structure by Fanderl, who comes originally from Signa, owner of Karstadt and 50.01% owner of the joint structure. The rest is owned by HBC which acquired Kaufhof in 2015.

The group operates 243 stores in Germany, Belgium and Netherlands, including Galeria Inno, Saks Off and Hudson's Bay. According to reports in the German press, only the financial director of Kaufhof will continue in the new structure.

Casino Group has launched 'Le 4 Casino', its first cashier-free location on Paris' Champs-Elysées, with its long-standing partner Prodistribution.

The new store has three floors and offers 6,000 products. It's open 24 hours, seven days a week, and it boasts a selection of organic products, a "smart wine and spirits cellar," and sample dishes prepared by a chef. There is also a showroom for products from French ecommerce site Cdiscount and a free coworking space. In addition to grabbing products onsite, shoppers have the option of ordering home delivery through a digital wall, where they can scan items and schedule delivery. It also features an augmented reality experience, visible from the street, to enhance the customer experience in-store. Visitors to the store are able to conduct their shopping without visiting a cash register as image recognition allows them to make purchases by using the Casino App on their phone and scanning the app at a self-service checkout. However there are still a few automatic cash-desk.

The innovations delivered by "Le 4 Casino" are the collaborative achievement of around fifteen different partners from the retail industry. Technology is harnessed to enhance the customer experience by offering creative new services such as in-store product mapping and shopping route management, and innovative solutions to provide fully personalised shopper assistance and a fast, easy checkout. These state-of-the-art services and technologies are a sign of things to come in the Group's other stores.

The company says Le Casino 4 is an experiment, and it plans to give the store at least six months before evaluating its reception (the concept is located at 4, avenue Franklin Roosevelt in Paris and opened in October 2018).

Press release and pictures below

press release on le casino 4 opening

Blake Nordstrom, who headed a trio of brothers that ran the luxury apparel store chain that their Swedish-American family founded has died at 58. He died in Seattle on 2 January, the company said in a statement, less than a month after disclosing he was undergoing chemotherapy for a treatable form of lymphoma.

Nordstrom was sole president of Seattle-based Nordstrom Inc. for 15 years, beginning in 2000. In 2015, the company named his brothers, Peter and Erik, as co-presidents in charge of the chain's brick-and-mortar stores and nordstrom.com unit, respectively. Blake Nordstrom remained the public face of the company for shareholders in the absence of any chief executive officer.

Like his brothers, Nordstrom spent his adult life at the company, starting as someone who swept floors and restocked shelves with shoes, the sole product offered at its founding in 1901. Blake Nordstrom's principal challenge as president was to counter declining sales at its large, luxurious mall stores in the face of online competition. In charge of the company's chain of discount stores, called Nordstrom Rack, he increased profitability at that unit right after his promotion and helped implement innovative revenue-increasing ideas; one of these was to open small stores, called Nordstrom Local.

In 2018, the Harvard Business Review named Blake Nordstrom, who reported only to a non-executive chairman, one of the 100 best performing chief executives, as it had for several years.

Blake Willard Nordstrom was born Oct. 4, 1960, in Washington, DC, and was the great grandson of Nordstrom founder John W. Nordstrom.

read full article by Bloomberg on Blake nordstrom

For months, there has been a steady stream of store closure announcements from Sears, Bon-Ton, J.C. Penney and other retailers. And while mall and shopping centre owners appear to be holding their own at the moment, that could soon change, with another wave of closures expected in 2019.

The vacancy rate at regional and super regional malls was 9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018, based on a survey released by real estate research firm Reis of 77 metropolitan areas across the country. That's down from 9.1 percent — a seven-year high — in the third quarter, but up from 8.3 percent at the end of 2017. That's also above a 10-year average vacancy rate for these malls of 8.4 percent during the fourth quarter.

Overall, U.S. retail vacancies remained flat at 10.2 percent during the latest quarter.

Henry Sy, who became a billionaire by parlaying a shoe store into the biggest retailer in the Philippines, has died. He was 94. He died in his sleep on Saturday morning (Jan 19), his daughter Teresita Sy-Coson and Jose Sio, chairman of SM Investments Corp, said.

Sy's company started as a shoe store in 1948. Today, SM Investments is an empire that includes SM Retail Inc, which operates the nation's biggest supermarkets and department store chains; SM Prime Holdings Inc, the largest shopping-mall operator; and BDO Unibank Inc. In the nation of more than 105 million people, his malls attract an average of 3.5 million shoppers a day.

Sy amassed his fortune against the backdrop of unstable governments, political corruption and economic contractions, notably the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. He continued to expand his empire with new shopping malls and a bank that eventually became the nation's largest by assets. Today, the group runs 62 department stores, 56 supermarkets, a network of 194 SaveMore grocery stores and 50 hypermarkets.

SM Department Store is a member of the IADS.

read full history of henry sy

In 2010, HBC invested $150 million in updating Lord & Taylor. Seven years later, it received another $12 million renovation. Yet within just over a year of that final investment, the company sold the building, the oldest department store in the country, to WeWork, closing its doors for good.

According to one commentator, "while a presence on Fifth Avenue helps elevate the brand image for Lord & Taylor, brand image doesn't translate into profitability. As a corporation driven by stockholders' desire for stock price appreciation, Hudson's Bay Company sold its Lord & Taylor property to boost its profitability."

Profitability is something that HBC needs, given its large amount of debt. In March, the company reported around $4.6 billion in debt and revealed plans to close at least 10 stores including the flagship Fifth Avenue location.

HBC is concentrating on better potential stores: sales at Saks Fifth Avenue, specifically, grew by 7.3 percent in the third quarter of 2018 — by creating experiential efforts. In early 2019, HBC says it will launch a new in-store jewellery concept at Saks Fifth Avenue. At New York Fashion Week, in September, Saks made experiences a priority with a highly Instagrammable experience.

In their most recent earnings call in December, multiple HBC executives alluded to the fact that the company was behind many of its competitors in terms of online and digital tools. Helena Foulkes, CEO of HBC, said that the basic digital infrastructure the company has created for its stores over the last year "was not in place before."

The bright side of HBC's current situation is that it has been able to pay off a significant chunk of its debt, and its executives seem aware of its problems. Adaptation is a requirement for older retailers today, especially as brands sell direct to consumer and resellers cut into retailers' traditional margins.

A company controlled by a joint venture of the insurer Zavarovalnica Triglav and the German asset management firm KGAL has published a takeover intent for the Nama department store in the centre of Ljubljana, one of the capital's landmarks.

Nama is the acronym for *Narodni magazin* 'national store'. This was a chain of department stores in the former Yugoslavia and the first Slovenian department store.

Saks Off 5th announced the launch of Le Cloud, a ready-to-wear collection of wardrobe essentials that caters to women of all shapes and sizes. Le Cloud is designed by Amy Schumer and celebrity stylist and costume designer Leesa Evans. The name of the clothing line was inspired by the actress' interest in having her clothes feel like a cloud. The collection includes ready-to-wear separates and products were designed with soft and "light as a cloud" fabric. Sizes range from XS to XXL, while the retail prices go from $38 to $248.

Thirty percent of net proceeds from sales will be donated to not-for-profit organization Community Partners in support of the STYLEFUND project, which was founded by Schumer and Evans. The initiative aims to empower women from all economic backgrounds through the use of clothing.

Le Cloud will be available exclusively online and in-store at Saks Off 5th's 57th Street flagship in New York City and the Beverly Connection location in Los Angeles.

H&M has announced it will launch a gender neutral collection in collaboration with fellow Swedish label Eytys. The latter is a brand founded by two childhood friends, Max Schiller and Jonathan Hirschfeld, and has become well-known for its Scandi-cool aesthetic that places unisex design at the heart of its DNA.

Entirely unisex, the collection has a traditional workwear feel, consisting of everything from boxy leather jackets and heavy cotton sweaters to graphic tees and raw denim jeans. At the heart of the fashion-forward, normcore range are Eytys's signature chunky-soled shoes - from robust boots and sneakers to plimsolls. Each pair comes in a custom-designed box patterned with artwork by Stockholm-based painter Zoe Barcza. As for color, H&M says the palette will consist of bottle green, school bus yellow, beige khaki, dark indigo, black, and white. The color scheme is meant to be "effortlessly" mixed and matched.

The collection, ranging in price from £14.99 to £149,  lands in store and online from January 24 2018.

press release on h&m and eytys collection

read article: eytys x h&m - swedish bffs

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An annual ranking published by Cushman and Wakefield lists the most expensive streets in the world this year in terms of retail rent. Last year's number one, New York's Fifth Avenue, has slipped to second place behind Hong Kong's Causeway Bay. In Europe, the most expensive street is London's New Bond Street followed by Paris' Champs Elysées and Milan's Via Montenapoleone. Others in the top ten in Asia include Tokyo's Ginza and Seoul's Myeongdong.

Saks Fifth Avenue is shutting its women's store at Brookfield Place downtown in New York, roughly two years after it opened. But the luxury department store operator will be keeping the men's portion of this location open. The women's shop is set to close Jan. 5. The company said it had been using the store as a "test concept" to learn about how women liked to shop in New York. It said it "determined that [its female customers'] preferred format is a combination of our digital channels and our iconic Fifth Avenue flagship."

The closing of this Saks store comes as the retailer's parent company, Hudson's Bay, has been renovating Saks' flagship shop uptown on Fifth Avenue, giving its beauty department a facelift and adding more wellness options for shoppers. Also next month, Hudson's Bay will shut its flagship Lord & Taylor shop on Fifth Avenue, which is being replaced by co-working operator WeWork.

Thank you for your participation and contributions during 2018.

Warm wishes for a year of success and prosperity in 2019.

*Please note that IADS Offices will be closed from 24 December 2018 to 2 January 2019 included.*

Happy Holidays,

The IADS Team

Eddie Lampert, chairman of Sears Holdings Corp and founder of hedge fund ESL Investments Inc, has made an offer valued at $4.6 billion to buy bankrupt U.S. retailer Sears, one of the only options that would prevent the department store chain from shutting its doors for good. Lampert's offer calls for about 500 Sears stores to remain open and would keep 50,000 of the retailer's workers employed, according to a letter from his hedge fund filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The 125-year-old company faces a series of deadlines this month to find a buyer that would keep it in business as some of its creditors call for it to shut down, claiming they would be repaid more through going-out-of-business sales.

Lampert's hedge fund has been working on a bid for Sears since the company filed for bankruptcy in October. It features financing from a variety of sources and a complicated structure not uncommon in bankruptcy auctions. ESL also proposes to acquire Sears Auto Centers, appliance brand Kenmore, battery line DieHard and the retailer's home services division, the largest U.S. appliance repair provider.

Many retailers that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, including toy seller Toys R Us Inc and department store Bon-Ton Stores Inc, have liquidated after no viable offers to keep the companies open were made.

Read full reuters article on ESL Investments inc's bid for sears

read article by iads: 'SEARS: a victim of old age, mismanagement or evolution?'

Europe's largest department store group, El Corte Inglés of Spain, has signed a deal with China's Alibaba Group covering retail, logistics and payment. El Corte Inglés will leverage Alibaba's data analytics, and artificial intelligence tools to provide customers with a more personalised experience. It will also benefit from Alibaba's B2C marketplaces (Tmall and Aliexpress) to offer goods in China. Alibaba will benefit from El Corte Inglés' fulfilment capabilities. Aliexpress may also explore the use of El Corte Inglés' distribution centresas collection points for online purchases made through Aliexpress.

press release on El Corte inglés and alibaba deal

A report by Global Data and Sybarite, an architectural firm that specialises in retail space, ranks luxury department stores of the world by sales per square foot in 2017. It credits the department stores with ongoing investments to renew their shop floors for their success.

Harrods, which came first, has embarked on a $260 million investment to expand its Watch Room and Salon des Parfums, relaunched its wine and spirits room, and opened a new wellness centre. It also highlights Selfridges and its $395 million refurbishment of its Oxford Street store which is also used as a platform "to create socially-driven, state-of-the-art experiences". Le Bon Marche, Paris, Liberty, London, and SKP, Beijing were also in the top five of the ranking. Others mentioned include Breuninger, Palacio de Hierro and Galeries Lafayette.

read The Sybarite Report 2018: The future of the luxury department store

La Rinascente stores in Milan and Rome have joined forces with Dolce & Gabbana and Smeg to reproduce the colour and vibrancy of a traditional Sicilian market. Window displays feature illuminations and traditional puppet theatres starring Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana in puppet form. Decorations festoon the interiors of the stores and markets are recreated inside the stores with a host of colourful stalls. Smeg's collection of Sicily is my Love small and major appliances will include a four-slice toaster and a slow juicer.

Dickson Concepts, the owner of Harvey Nichols, plans to invest HK$1bn on technology companies, including HK$250m on revamping its flagship store in Pacific Place. Pearson Poon, 24, son of chairman Dickson Poon, has been put in charge of the project, a move some say could pave the way for him to succeed his father. The project involves cutting space in the store in half (from 84 000 sq ft to 42 000 sq ft), and increasing the products on offer thanks to online. Shopping experiences will be improved also on the model of the revamp of the London Harvey Nichols. According to the chairman, Dickson Poon, "the company faces unprecedented margins compression from online operators internationally. Retailers need to work on the retail format that faces possible elimination".

When Bloomingdale's 59th Street will unveil its renovated designer floor early next year, 17 designers never carried before will be part of the presentation. Irish designer Alison Conneely, Dubli-based, is part of the mix. "Alison is our first Irish designer in ready-to-wear and it's exclusive to us," said Frank Doroff, vice chairman of Bloomingdale's and general merchandise manager of ready-to-wear, who discovered Conneely at the WearingIrish fair held in Manhattan to promote Irish designers. "We were immediately impressed by Alison's blend of artistry and craftsmanship when we first met her. Bloomingdale's is always searching for new designers and unique offerings for our customer." Bloomingdale's decades ago did stage a promotion showcasing Irish products. Meanwhile, Bloomingdale's new designer floor, expected to be complete around late January or early February next year, will be bolstered with trunk shows, luncheons, special events, and  labels new to the store. It's a culmination of the ongoing renewal of the flagship involving most of the floor space from footwear to home to denim and ready-to-wear.

Siam Takashimaya is the first branch in Thailand of Japanese department store operator Takashimaya Co. The department store is the anchor tenant of the new IconSiam shopping mall, a large complex on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok that opened simultaneously to the store. It joins other Japanese department stores in the Thai capital such as Isetan and Tokyu and offers a high-end shopping experience to upscale customers. Siam Takashimaya occupies 25,000 square meters across seven floors of IconSiam. There are some 530 brands on offer, including 180 from Japan. Japanese foodstuffs are also on sale, and a Japanese-themed food court features many well-known restaurants and shops. Nursing rooms and cold storage lockers are also available to enhance the shopping experience.

Siam Takashimaya (Thailand) Co. is a local joint venture set up by Takashimaya Singapore Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Osaka-based department store chain, and IconSiam.

Galeries Lafayette is closing Instantluxe.com, the luxury goods resale site it bought two years ago in a bid to tap into the growing markets for second-hand goods. The French retailer will also close the two Instantluxe.com corners in Paris at the Galeries Lafayette flagship on Boulevard Haussmann and the BHV Marais department store, a spokeswoman for the brand said. The site employs around 10 people, who will be offered positions within the group. Instantluxe.com sells certified secondhand luxury products, specializing in leather goods, jewelry, watches and accessories. In November last year, it launched a luxury bag rental service. The site is believed to have struggled to attain critical size against more established market players such as Vestiairecollective.com in what is still a nascent segment in France, leading Galeries Lafayette to prioritize other investments.

Among its projects, Galeries Lafayette plans to open a new flagship on Avenue des Champs-Élysées next year, and has five overseas stores in the pipeline: Doha, Kuwait City, Luxembourg, Milan and Shanghai.

Amazon will run holiday pop-ups, dubbed "Amazon Loft for Xmas" and centered on electronics and toys, from 16 to 26 November in the city centers of Milan, London, Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Amsterdam. The holiday effort will also feature apparel, home goods and beauty. Amazon is swiftly adding to its brick-and-mortar footprint, as it also ran a fashion pop-up last month in London called "Pop Up Shop Love."

Hyundai Department Store has opened its first duty free store in Seoul. The 14,250sq m store occupies the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the company's Trade Center branch in Seoul's Samseong-dong business district. It features 420 brands, including 40 foreign luxury brands. The ninth floor is dedicated to cosmetics, while the store also features a separate foreign fashion zone. Hyundai Department Store Duty Free Co. President Hwang Hae-yeon said that the company expects to generate KRW670 billion (US$593 million) in sales revenue next year, and more than KRW1 trillion (US$885 million) in 2020.

London department store Harrods opens its newly refurbished Fresh Market Hall. The revitalised space marks the second phase of Harrods' two-year Food Halls overhaul, offering a contemporary design take on a sprawling food market, featuring a new range of internationally- and locally-sourced premium culinary offerings. It was redesigned by London-based practice David Collins Studio, following their completion of the dry goods section, the Roastery and Bake Hall at the close of 2017. The design studio plays with lighting, materiality and the building's art deco heritage. White and black finishes have been applied across spaces, providing a monochrome backdrop to the colourful foodstuffs. Convenience also plays a big part, with Harrods introducing a new range of grab-and-go offerings for the time-pressed customer. 'Opening the Fresh Market Hall will allow us to bring my 150 in-house chefs to the forefront,' states executive chef Andy Cook, 'servicing our food customers directly and introducing the chef's brand new creations to the Harrods Deli counter.'

full article: Harrods Fresh Market Hall overhauled by David Collins Studio

Macy's is reducing retail space at some of its US department stores, cutting the amount of merchandise and employees at slower-performing units. Macy's will be walling off entire sections at some locations and leaving the space empty. The smaller-store footprint, an experiment now under way at four locations, is intended to save money on staffing and inventory, while improving the chain's sometimes lacklustre shopping experience. "People don't have to walk through 200,000 sq ft to find what they're looking for," said chief executive Jeff Gennette. "If we were building stores today, we'd build them smaller," he added. The Macy's locations being converted into what Gennette called "neighbourhood stores" will shrink in size by as much as a fifth. They will have fewer employees and a leaner selection. The pitch to shoppers: more self-service options — shoe departments display boxes of various sizes — and a convenient place to pick up or return online purchases.