News English — Department Stores

Oxford Street is being transformed to a people-only place in 2018, starting with closing the stretch from Oxford Circus to Selfridges/Orchard Street (aka 'the posh bit of Oxford Street') to vehicles. Crossrail will open in Bond Street station and Tottenham Court Road station in December 2018 pushing up total visitor numbers to Oxford Street by a forecast 20%, or 120,000 visitors per day. With 200 million visitors already passing through Oxford Street every year, this will push visitor numbers closer to 240 million per year. Artists impression of a pedestrianised Oxford Street The 300+ retailers in the area will no...

Today we cannot just separate online and offline... wise words by Daniel Zhang, the CEO of Alibaba, who is eyeing a $2.6bn deal to take the Chinese "Intime Retail Group" department store chain private. Source: FT.com This follows several offline moves by a number of "tradtitionally online" companies including Amazon, Made.com, Boohoo, Zalando, Farfetch and others. The main advantage moving from online to offline is the corporate culture of accepting and managing with multi-year losses to build a better business. Most offline businesses with online add-ons have a culture of carefully weighted KPI's on which bonuses and other advantages are...

We recently visited Denmark and paid a visit to the Illum store on Stroget in central Copenhagen. Visit Illum online here

Fenwick is a chain of independent department store in the UK. Individual stores manage their own buying with the ranges appearing very different if you visit two different stores. Their HQ and largest shop is based in Newcastle. Fenwick Bond Street is one of the stores that compete for a higher end clientele and hence see a higher spend on visual merchandising as you can view in the image. #fenwick #bondstreet

Our first reaction to Farfetch raising another $110million taking its total funding to $300million was - WHAAAAAT? The company is a retailer without stock and operate as an advanced affiliate network connecting buyers with stores & brands. It earns about 25-30% in commissions on the sales they generate which is much higher than standard affiliate schemes, where anything up to 10% is considered good, and would resemble more of a department store with concession shop-in-shops where up to 40% commission on sales is not unheard of. However, Racked (link below) reports that much of the $110million will be used to...