Retail Recovery
How Creative Retailers Are Winning in their Post-Apocalyptic World
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2022
The world's retail sector has been devastated in recent years by two unstoppable forces: internet shopping and the Covid-19 lockdown. The result: huge numbers of prestigious brands have gone under, or are now a shadow of their former selves, and large parts of the world economy have fallen into a recession, with reduced employment and incomes across large parts of society. High streets and shopping malls lie half-empty, causing a vacuum at the heart of our communities and societies, and many discretionary products have simply become too expensive for people to buy on a regular basis.
There is now an urgent need to regenerate our local shopping areas, so how can retailers and brands respond to this crisis? Fortunately, new shoots of recovery are emerging from the wreckage of the old order – new brands, new ways of providing value, and new and innovative methods of creating interest to draw in consumers, all of which have the potential to kick-start the retail economy.
Retail Recovery offers a comprehensive analysis of these new forces that are changing the way in which we browse for and buy products, and how we experience and engage with the brands themselves. It includes in-depth interviews with some of the most innovative players in the UK, Europe and North America, in the hope of drawing out key learning points for the rest of the industry. It also provides essential guidelines for governments, as they strive to rebuild and reinforce the retail spaces within our communities, allowing them to create a more effective economic lifeline for retailers, shoppers, retail workers, manufacturers and distributors.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The pandemic's destruction of traditional shopping has created an opportunity for companies to reinvent themselves according to this timely survival guide for the industry. Retail consultant Pilkington (Retail Therapy) argues that when much of the world's economy shut down in March 2020, businesses were quickly divided into those that had already modernized their operations and those that clung to traditional models, in effect "creating a reset moment for the entire industry." He painstakingly catalogs the changes that roiled the sector and the ways many companies were already lagging in adapting to changes wrought by the internet: there's "long-troubled brand" Revlon, which "saw revenues down 26 percent in the first three quarters of 2020," for example, and things at a declining Victoria's Secret only got worse. Walmart, meanwhile, began upping its digital presence to compete with Amazon in 2016, while also expanding physical stores, capitalizing on an "advantage that Amazon cannot replicate," and Patagonia was well prepared for workplace disruptions thanks to its already-flexible practices. There's a wealth of interviews with CEOs, and plenty of in-depth analysis on offer to provide a road map for those emerging "from the wreckage of the old order." The result is a solid handbook for leaders navigating still-uncertain currents.
