Two interesting articles. This one popped up on the Globe site yesterday:
Sears Canada looking for ‘complementary’ retail partners
Marina Strauss, The Globe and Mail, 27 April 2016
And this one was listed on Retail Insider this morning:
Sears Canada is trying to radically reinvent itself with new leadership, culture and technology
Hollie Shaw, Financial Post, 27 April 2016
Looking for retail partners to occupy space in Sears stores would seem like a winning strategy for Sears, given that it would be an inexpensive way for them to get brands in their stores that would attract new customers.
It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off. The main problems seem to be twofold. Sears has unloaded some of its best locations - for example, in Toronto, they can no longer offer prospective partners Yorkdale, Toronto Eaton Centre or Sherway (or even STC, given that IIRC Sears sold an option on that space) - would Fairview be enough to attract partners that would make a meaningful difference? Second, if the effort is intended to draw traffic to the rest of the Sears store, the rest of the store needs to be appealing. All this talk of reinvention by Sears executives, but investment in stores does not seem to be something they are pushing.
Funny that the Globe article mentions Sears' deal with Primark in the U.S. northeast. That deal was nothing like what HBC did with Topshop or Kleinfeld. Sears basically unloaded a bunch of space at key malls by subleasing space to Primark, with Primark in a number of cases taking entire floors of the old Sears store (at King of Prussia, Sears left the mall entirely because it was able to sublease the rest of the space to Dick's). Primark stores have separate entrances with no internal connections to the Sears store, and unlike the HBC/Topshop arrangement in Canada, one cannot use one's Sears card at Primark or buy Primark clothes on the Sears website. To the average shopper, Primark is simply a store that happens to be next to/above/under the Sears. I haven't seen any information (has anybody here seen anything), but I doubt Primark is pulling customers into Sears store. The Primark deal is just another aspect of the Sears fire sale. It's actually more similar to the HBC/Target deal for the Zellers leases than it is to anything other department stores have been doing with in-store boutiques.
As for all the talk about IT improvements, sounds good, but wonder why they took so long. At one point, they were the only major bricks-and-mortar retailer in Canada with a substantial online sales channel. Now they are eating HBC's dust (not to mention Walmart's).
I am also a wee bit skeptical of all this talk of theirs of "fresh blood" (having your top execs continually abandoning ship, not to mention widespread layoffs, tends to get you there, but doesn't make it a positive process), moving key departments all to one floor (again, easy to do when layoffs decimate the ranks), and of a "refreshed" store concept (which requires investment, but they're still cutting $100 million to $127 million this year alone). Seems like a lot of positive spin, and only time will tell if there is any substance to it.
