Bonobos, the online men's wear fashion retailer which operates over 30 "guideshops" (where customers can try on but only purchase online) has launched a campaign emphasising fit. It claims to cover 172 sizes and fits through a campaign which features 172 men dressed in Bonobos clothing. It will run a TV spot as well as radio, digital and social marketing, and project video o buildings in Austin and Chi ago where the campaign will run. The story of the founding of Bonobos includes the search for perfectly fitting clothes.

see ad on the 172 fits by bonobos

Department store beauty departments are traditionally located on ground floors, close to store entrances and have been for very many decades. And the Saks Manhattan beauty department has been at street level since 1924. But turning its back on tradition, Saks beauty will now sit in a revamped second floor home that will also go heavily into spa services and treatment rooms. The new beauty department will be 40% larger than its ground-floor predecessor and will feature an event space as well as 15 spa treatment rooms, including Blink Brow Bar, FaceGym and Skinney MedSpa that offers fat-freezing CoolSculpting treatments. There will also be beauty concierges on hand to advise customers without being linked to specific brands -which is an important and much needed new development in order to effectively market the 122 brands that will be available in the department (61 of them new to Saks).

Saks Manhattan ground floor will now be home to handbags and leathergoods, and fine jewellery will be shunted from the ground floor to the basement.

J.C. Penney CEO Marvin Ellison is leaving the department store retailer to take the chief executive spot at Lowe's. Ellison, who has been guiding J.C. Penney through a turbulent period, will now help Lowe's try to catch up with archival Home Depot. The news dealt an immediate blow to J.C. Penney's own turnaround hopes; the company's stock fell 6.8% in pre-market trading to $2.33.

At J.C. Penney, Ellison has closed stores, enhanced the company's in-store partnership with beauty brand Sephora and started selling toys and appliances. And even if sales have suffered amid declining mall traffic and falling consumer interest in department stores, Ellison is largely credited with helping J.C. Penney get back to the basics after a rough CEO stint by former Apple executive Ron Johnson.

He is stepping down from his post as the company's board chairman immediately and will stay on as a director and CEO through June 1. J.C. Penney appointed a team of several leaders to head a new "office of the CEO" while the company searches for a permanent replacement.

press release "JCPenney Announces Resignation of Chairman and CEO Marvin Ellison"

Management of the UK department store Fenwick has announced that the company will undergo a major business review. A significant proportion of the 2000-strong workforce could be affected by the proposals. Apart from the long-awaited launch of an e-commerce website, management functions across the business will be changed.  The nine stores of the group have been run autonomously. Under the new proposals, directors are now seeking to centralise many functions and several appointments have been made to oversee group-wide functions which until now have been carried out by each store individually. Merchandising will become a group function, there will also be a group property director as well as a central retail operations director. The CEO stresses however that Fenwick will "maintain the localness" of each store.

HBC and joint venture partner RioCan REIT have signed a conditional agreement to sell HBC's downtown Vancouver store for C$675m, to an Asian buyer. The partners announced they were considering the sale last October. The buyer, who remains anonymous, is negotiating interim financing. HBC will leaseback space in the property and continue to operate the store. The deal is part of HBC's efforts to extract vale from its real estate holdings as it fights a retail slump and faces pressure from investors to lift share price. The Lord & Taylor flagship on New York's Fifth Avenue was sold to WeWork last year for $850m.

The Chinese owner of Hamleys toy stores is in talks to take a stake in UK department store group House of Fraser. Hamleys owner C.banner International has signed an understanding with Nanjing Xinjiekou which holds an 89% stake in House of Fraser and is part of Sanpower, the Chinese firm that paid £480m for the department store in 2014. House of Fraser operates 59 stores, with 6000 staff and 11 500 concession staff.

C.banner, best known as a footwear retailer, bought Hamleys in October 2015, and has shown an interest in House of Fraser for two years. It operates three Hamleys stores, in China, in Nanjing, Xuzhou and Beijing.

Lotte of South Korea, has decided to sell 21 of its stores in the Beijing metropolitan area to a local Chinese retailer, Wumart, for $231m. It will continue to hold a 5% share in the affiliate. Lotte initially considered all of its 112 stores across the country, but finally decided on a series of local sales. Wumart, founded in 1994 and which operates a similar business model to Walmart in the US, has about 900 stores around the country. Lotte has been suffering losses in China.

Swedish furniture giant Ikea has announced that it will open its first stores in South America under a franchise agreement with Chilean retailer Falabella. The group is aiming to open at least nine stores in Chile, Colombia, and Peru over the next ten years, and will sell through online channels in the three countries. According to Ikea, Chile, Peru, and Colombia have a combined population of almost 100 million people and a market potential for home furniture of more than €8bn.

Ikea has been responding to slower sales growth by pushing into new markets such as India, as well as developing smaller city-centre formats; it is is also investing in online services to adapt to the surge in e-commerce.

Amazon Go, the Amazon cashier-less convenience store, is coming to San Francisco and Chicago -The first location opened in Seattle in January after a year of testing.

To shop in the Seattle store, which is about the size of a 7-Eleven, customers must first download the Amazon Go app and link it to a payment method. Then they open the app on their phone and scan it at one of the four turnstiles to enter the 1,800 square foot store. Once inside, cameras in the ceiling, sensors on the shelves and a massive amount of computing power track every item they pick up and what goes into their pockets or bags. To check out, you just walk out — it's called Just Walk Out technology.

The actual Amazon Go store is extremely tech-heavy, was expensive to build and can only sell a narrow range of specially-selected items — nowhere near the 50,000 or so items a typical supermarket stocks. But with time that could change, making the possibility of a true revolution in the way we interact with brick and mortar stores.

Luxury London department store Harrods has refurbished its fine wine and spirits rooms creating a new customer journey that focuses on discovery and education.

Customers are invited to interact with ingredients displayed in glass bell jars on the 'aroma tables'. Instead of actually sampling the products, visitors can use atomisers to experience the scent of items, which are all associated with particular flavours of wine. At the heart of the new department is the Fine Wines room, where products are categorised by terroirs, allowing customers to discover wine by region.

Digital also plays a strong role throughout the space. Interactive screens that display product information are activated by visitors picking up the complementary bottles. There is also an 'education' room, offering live streaming to vineyards and winemakers in the best regions and chateaus in the world, giving customers an insight into where the wine is produced. Additional services include bottle personalisation, with an in-house engraving machine, personal consultations and bespoke cellar plans for those looking to build their collections.

Read full artcile below and see pictures

read full article "GDR visits the harrods wine shop"

Los Angeles-based designer Trina Turk, known for colourful prints, will debut an INC International Concepts collection for women and men with Macy's. The INC International Concepts line mini-collection will showcase the designer's signature patterns and colours, and will launch on 15 May. It will offer an INC spin on both her eponymous women's line, founded in 1995, and the six-year-old Mr Turk men's line. The Trina Turk x INC collection comprises 40 stockkeeping units including apparel, accessories, swimwear and shoes, and the Mr Turk x INC collection is 14 apparel sku's.

While a selection of Turk's contemporary line is already available in select Macy's doors, the INC collaboration marks her first entry into Macy's more accessibly priced arena as well as the first wholesale channel for Mr Turk.

Read full WWD article on Trina Turk tying up with Macy's

IKEA Group, owner of most IKEA budget furniture stores, said on Tuesday it would open one of its new, smaller city-centre stores in downtown Paris by summer 2019 as part of a push to become more accessible to shoppers. Items at its first French city-centre store will be displayed in a new way thanks to new digital technology and services. The store, which at 5,000 square metres (54,000 square feet) will be less than one-fifth the size of a standard IKEA store, is to be implemented in the upmarket Madeleine neighbourhood. It has not been decided yet how much of the range would be on display, and how many of the smaller items would be readily available to carry home from the store. Larger furniture at least would be for home delivery only. This new format should meet the habits and expectations of Parisians and will offer solutions for small spaces. Moreover, the retailer will use alternative delivery service such as bike delivery; and it even plans to have deliveries 100% electric by 2020.

In the roadmap on Circular Economy published by the French government on 23 April 2018, the Ministère de la Transition Ecologique indicates that starting 2019, it will apply the main principles of the 2016 Law Against Food Waste to the clothing industry –this 2016 law forces hypermarkets and supermarkets to donate their unsold food produce to charity organisations. With this new law, the French government will prevent companies from destroying their unsold clothes, in order to give them to charity instead.

Textile industry is the second most polluting industry worldwide, just after oil; and experts estimate that waste generated from textiles is worth $500 billion a year.

Located in a new brand village in Villefontaine (east of France), the new 1200sqm space features a wide selection of brands for fashion women, men and children, and accessories and shoes. The outlet format was launched in 2015 and offers the possibilities to acquire items from past collections, sometimes 50% reduced from the original price. This is the ninth Galeries Lafayette outlet to open.

Darktrace, founded in 2013 by Cambridge University mathematicians and intelligence experts from GCHQ and MI5, now employs 300 high level staff and has 1500 customers. Their reputation comes from the fundamentally different approach they take to cyber-threats: they talk about the "enterprise immune system" and offer products such as "Antigena". The medical metaphors reflect their use of artificial intelligence which introduces an adaptive machine learning defence component. This unusually discreet company, which recently hit a $500m valuation, agreed to an interview of one of its founders, Poppy Gustafsson, with the Financial Times, in which she predicts that artificial intelligence will also become a rising trend in cyber-attacks, not just for defence.

read full article on "Darktrace predicts AI use in security breaches"

Macy's added 20 off-price locations in the first quarter of 2018 as part of a plan to open 100 off-price outlets — dubbed Macy's Backstage — in fiscal 2018. The new locations would open in existing Macy's stores. Macy's is also expanding the geographical footprint of Backstage, venturing into the northwestern and southwestern U.S. To support the growth, the company is adding a distribution center in Ohio dedicated to the off-price unit. The facility is scheduled to open in fall 2019 and would add 400 jobs to Macy's payrolls.

press release on Macy's opening more backstage stores

Barneys is straddling the line between luxury department store and media company with this step into the still-booming podcast world. And it will be one of the first retailers to do so. The luxury department store is launching an eight-episode season, dubbed "In Conversation," beginning on May 2. The show, which will air weekly on Wednesdays will be all about fashion, style, culture and, most of all, personality. It will spotlight an array of creatives, including: artist and poet Cleo Wade, designer Rick Owens, interior designer Jonathan Adler, celebrity hair stylist Sally Hershberger and Chief Content Officer of Teen Vogue Phillip Picardi.

It appears the show won't so much be an inside look at Barneys business strategy as it will be a way for them to tap into their network of celebrity designers and stylists who will share stories about launching careers in the fashion industry. That makes for a podcast focused more on the atmosphere and lifestyle that the store promotes rather than the specific products or promotions it offers.

Press release on Barneys podcast initiative

Promotional video of the barneys podcasts

Liz Rodbell, after 32 years at Lord & Taylor where she rose from dress buyer to president, is leaving the department store at the end of this month. The HBC-owned department store veteran has been in the position as Lord & Taylor's president since 2014, where she oversees merchandising, marketing, creative, stores, e-commerce direction, and overall strategy. She started with the company as a dress buyer in 1985, then she held various management positions with the department store including Executive Vice President of Merchandising from 2008 to February 2012 and Senior Vice President General Merchandising Manager since 1992. She also simultaneously served as President of HBC Department Store Group at Hudson's Bay Company in Canada from February 2014 to June 8, 2017. She is one of only three women to have led the retailer since it was founded 190 years ago.

Hudson's Bay has disclosed that it was the victim of a security breach that compromised data on payment cards used at Saks Fifth Avenue in the US and Canada and Lord & Taylor stores.  Some reports mention millions of cards but neither exact numbers nor precise timing have been confirmed by the company yet. JokerStash which sells stolen data on the criminal underground has said that over 5 million stolen credit cards would be released.

So far around 125 000 have been and some 75% of those appear to have been taken from the Hudson's Bay units. JokerStash has been active in hacking retail and hospitality companies for some three years.

Zara owner Inditex is accelerating its digital development. Apart from a highly publicised app with which customers can bring the windows to life on their mobile screens with augmented reality images of models wearing latest designs, Inditex of Spain is now achieving 10% of its €25.3bn group sales online. Inditex has 19 warehouses globally dedicated to fulfilling online orders. Although margins are falling, the group claims it is more the effect of adverse currency exchange than the internet business. It is rolling out a centralised inventory system using RFID, already operating at Zara. Another of Inditex's strengths is the ability to get new designs in store in as little as 15 days, which is also what Asos and Zalando can do.

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The Japanese Muji, which has offered dried foods and snacks since 1980 among its usual home, apparel and accessories offer, has opened a large 4300 m² store offering fresh food in Osaka. The offer, which includes chilled fresh meat and produce, occupies 50% of the store space and also features a Café and Meal Muji eating area. The concept will be rolled out to other markets according to CEO Kei Suzuki. One of the reported rationales of the innovation, is to entice customers to visit more often.

Digitally native French fashion brand Sézane is bolstering its physical retail footprint via a new partnership with Nordstrom, its first US retail partner. Each pop-up will be merchandised in the style of a French apartment. "It was very important for us to be able to offer the Sézane experience," Sézane founder Morgane Sézalory said. "We accepted to do the Norstrom collaboration because they allowed us to create our own little world."

Founded in 2013 as an online-only, accessibly priced collection of pieces that embody quintessential French style, the brand has been delving deeper into brick-and-mortar retail: in 2015, it opened "L'appartement," in Paris, a boutique inspired by a Parisian apartment, which was followed by an apartment-style concession space at Le Bon Marché in 2016. Unlike its arrangement with Le Bon Marché, the Nordstrom partnership is a wholesale one. Sézalory insists, however, that "it's a very unique case" and that Sézane is not exploring a move away from its direct-to-consumer model.

Nordstrom will carry the label's Spring collection from April 11 in five select stores across Seattle, Chicago, Costa Mesa, San Francisco and Austin. The collection will also be sold on Nordstrom's e-commerce website.

The first Isidoro Alvarez Lifetime Achievement Awards, given at this year's World Retail Congress in Madrid, were presented to Jorge Pont, International Director at El Corte Ingles, and Gilbert Harrison, founder and chairman of investment firm Financo. The award is named after former chairman and chief executive of El Corte Ingles, who recruited Jorge Pont in 1965. The awards were presented by Marta Alvarez, daughter of Isidoro.

A mummified monkey has been found during redevelopment work in an old department store in the US in Minneapolis. The famous Dayton's store founded in 1902 by George Draper Dayton merged in 1969 with Hudson of Detroit, forming the Dayton-Hudson Corporation. Dayton was the founder of Target in 1962. Dayton-Hudson stores were in turn acquired by Chicago-based Marshall Field's, which then became May Company prior to its acquisition by Federated Department Stores which rebranded it as Macy's. The origins of the monkey are therefore uncertain. However it is thought unlikely that it was an early customer of the Dayton store. The store is currently undergoing transformation into an office building and food hall.