Beauty’s Retail Reckoning: Specialty and Mass Retail Poised for Further Gains

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By Allison Collins on October 29, 2021  ||  WWD The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have specialty retailers including Sephora and Ulta Beauty poised to gain even more market share in the U.S., experts said. How many brick-and-mortar retail stores does the beauty industry actually need? That’s the question those in the industry are asking themselves in ... Read more

Gen Z Cares But Expects Retailers to Care More

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Members of Gen Z care about social issues, but they also demand that retailers and brands make sustainable, conscious consumerism easy to achieve. We pulled Gen Z responses from two How America Shops® 2021 reports and compiled the results, to reveal a telling pattern. Do You Really Know What Gen Z Cares About? WSL’s recent How America Shops® study, “The ... Read more

Powerful Partnerships: What Makes Retail Alliances Work

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More big retailers are exploring alliances, with the anticipation that doubling up will double the cachet, more than double the size of the shopper basket – and create a second reason to come into the store. WSL sent its Retail Safari® scouts out to see what works and does not toward this bigger-basket goal, and ... Read more

Are You Honest Enough for Shoppers? 5 Steps to Get There

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We asked shoppers to speak their truths about what they buy, how and why, and learned this: They expect the companies they purchase from to take responsibility for social change and to authentically PROVE it. In short, companies must “show” they are more sustainable, fair and community-focused – across all the media their customers use. Here ... Read more

Destination: Innovation. 4 Retail-Shaking Store Concepts

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Sure, more shoppers are going back to stores, but which ones, and for what reasons? Now that tech has irreversibly changed the shopping trip, retailers have to anticipate a future when consumers find stores less important. These innovative approaches, discovered by our WSL Retail Safari® scouts, are turning stores into destinations.  It’s Time for Retailers ... Read more

Retail Consulting Services

Many of the world's biggest retailers and consumer brands use retail consulting services to drive their shopper-centric strategies. Whether to optimize the customer experience through focused workshops, develop new strategies or adapt to the changing retail industry, brands across channels and subsectors can benefit from retail consulting. When you work with a retail consultant, you ... Read more

Shopper Expectations Have Accelerated. Ready to Meet Them?

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People have emerged from their COVID cocoons, and this presents retailers with an unparalleled opportunity to reacquaint themselves. Here is how retailers can alter their foundations to support the accelerated expectations of more tech-enabled shoppers, who think online first and trip to the store second. Have You Met the 2021 Shopper? She’s the Same, But ... Read more

New Shopper Habits are Forcing Stores to Change The Space

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Guess what? Shoppers grew to really like those quicker trips during the pandemic, and that’s forcing all retailers to rethink the space in their brick stores. We explored some ways retailers are reinventing their space to accommodate customers who have changed their focus, and our research hints at where it’s heading. Stores Are Luring Shoppers ... Read more

Retail Leaders Predict Future Success Relies on Engagement

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Retail’s future isn’t simply online or in-store – it’s in a “chameleon consumer” who moves effortlessly through complexity and change. In WSL’s latest Future Shop® podcast, top executives from the Fashion Institute of Technology and Maybelline cultivate new ideas with WSL’s CEO Wendy Liebmann on retail futurism, from the role of supply chain to “ROE.” Where ... Read more

7 Trips from 7 Explorers: WSL’s Best Retail Roundup

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WSL’s experts are committed to examining retail strategies, but we’re regular shoppers, too. So what does the Shopping Life® look like through the eyes of an experienced retail explorer? We share what shoppers told us they expect in the store now, and our own best shopping experiences so far in 2021. How Do We Define ... Read more

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