Retailers’ beauty departments represent one area where progress has been made on the road toward more diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past two years, and change continues. While each effort is unique, in general retailers have diversified their product mix to make more offerings available for women of all colors and skin and hair […]
Archive | Retail
A High-Flying News Channel
Last month Stellar Partners announced the launch of Buzzfeed-branded airport newsstands, with the first two outlets located in New York LaGuardia’s Terminal C. Buzzfeed is the just the latest in a long string of media brands that have lent their names to airport news and convenience stores over the years. In fact, since the early […]
New Ways to Feather the Nest
Retailers of all types have been expanding their home assortments since shortly after the start of the pandemic. This is a logical move, as consumers have been doing more DIY projects; redecorating their nests to create comfortable sanctuaries; reconfiguring to accommodate home offices, schooling, and outdoor entertaining; and sometimes filling the blank slate of a […]
State of the Art
Museums, from the V&A in London to MoMA in New York, have been involved in both inbound and outbound licensing for a long time, and several players have been entering and expanding their licensing activities at a fast pace over the last two years. Institutions including The Met, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Oxford University’s […]
Design on Demand
The increasingly important role of print on demand in art licensing was one of the topics discussed in the “Spotlight: Art Licensing” session at Licensing University in late August. Licensing U was produced by Licensing International and took place alongside Licensing Expo Virtual. Print-on-demand platforms have had an ever greater impact as the technology has […]
Full Circle
The apparel and retail industries’ embrace of circular fashion—the reduction of waste by using materials for as long as possible, such as through reuse, recycling, and/or upcycling—has been a hot topic in the last couple of years. As time goes on, it seems more and more certain that these techniques are here to stay, one […]
Retailers Rethink Beauty
Four of the major U.S. mid-tier and mass retailers are launching new beauty concepts, three this month and one in the fall. All have in common a focus on younger shoppers, synergies between in-store and online executions, and an emphasis on products for consumers of all ethnicities. The goal is to capture new consumers at […]
Second-Hand Shopping
Platforms that facilitate the donation and purchase of gently used, “pre-loved” clothing represent one key part of the circular fashion eco-system, along with other post-first-sale techniques such as recycling, upcycling, and rental. In the past month alone, several fashion brands and retailers have made moves to strengthen their position in the second-hand sales space: Luxury […]
A High Point for Low-Priced Craft Supplies
The arts and crafts segment proved to be one of the beneficiaries of the pandemic-driven stay-at-home era—as measured by increased sales levels—thanks to families looking for things for their kids to do while in isolation and adults using their unexpected leisure time to try a new craft or revisit a hobby they had abandoned. It […]
Going Home
The fast-fashion sector, which was built on low-priced, in-and-out collections that have been perceived almost as disposable, has been one of the most distressed in all of retail. Not only were many chains impacted, like the rest of the apparel industry, by consumers turning away from fashion during the COVID stay-at-home orders. They also face […]