What the F! H&M's Retail Future
- Stine Marie
- Mar 29, 2017
- 2 min read
Traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores have long been challenged with declining consumer traffic and many clothing retailers have been struggling with declining sales as a result.
This has forced retailers with less healthy business to shut their physical stores, recently Macy's announced that they were to close 63 stores. Macy's stock price have plummeted and Nordstrom and J.C. Penny are experiencing declining stock prices.
This is all a due to our beloved, can't live without it; internet.
Why should we go though all the trouble of driving downtown, struggle finding parking, stand in line with all our fellow sales shoppers, just to end up at the less than friendly cashier to buy what one item we could have found online with no line and possibly for cheaper price?
The retail landscape is going through a major shift. Shoppers have the opportunity to shop where ever they want whenever they want in their pyjamas so in order to get the millennials to get up from comfort of their couch they need an incentive to do so. Retailers have to develop a set of values that goes beyond just selling stuff, they need to get their purchases with a side of experience.
The retail dilemma is that shoppers expect the lowest possible prices but best possible service and a large variety of offerings.
One retailer that has experienced a slowturn in sales in the physical stores is the swedish fast-fashion giant, H&M. Previously H&M stores have been opening with a speed only matched by Starbucks, but now the company has reached a tipping point and are pulling back on store expansion in order to focus ore on it's online sales.
H&M have acknowledged that more shoppers s are turning towards e-commerce, and that it already has plenty of physical stores and that those stores are not bringing it what they used to.
Even though the company is slowing down their store expansion, they are still planning to open more than 400 new stores worldwide in 2017, entering new markets in Kazakhstan, Colombia, Iceland, Vietnam, and Georgia, among others.
They also plan to enter six new markets online in 2017, focusing on Asia. Shoppers in 35 of the 64 markets H&M serves could shop from the swedish brand online in 2016, but there is still a long way to go.
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