Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus and J Crew have all filed for bankruptcy under the cover of COVID-19. Only Bloomberg seemed to notice that these retail giants were over-burdened with debt. The reality is they aren’t just laden with debt; they also are laden with poor management.
Creativity and Innovation are just not a part of the corporate structure much any more. On Forrester’s SDSummit, speakers remind attendees that companies need to “encourage more innovation” since “failures are just experiments“. There was no better time to open the cookbook and try things than during this pandemic.
My fiance and I were talking about how we just had not seen much from locals stores. Amazon took the lion share of business because everyone else sucks at it! It is frictionless!
TJ Maxx just closed down. Walmart wasn’t doing pick-up or shipping (on many items). Target or Big Lots either. Dick’s Sporting Goods was doing pick-up, they just wouldn’t say when you could pick up. Even Drizly was stalling out — which is okay IF you (over) communicate!
There was not much clarity to Big Retail. And Local retail – where are you?
This would have been the perfect time to do personal shopping for folks via Facetime. If Instacart can text with buyers as they shop for them, why couldn’t retail? What an experiment that would have been for any clothing store in America.
Bakeries were open, but you wouldn’t know it. What a time to be Gramming your cakes, brownies, cookies, what-have-you. What a great time to sell a kit to make a cake at home!!!! My pal, Dave Burton, got inventive at Tampa Pizza Co. by selling make your own pizza kits!
This was the time to experiment with ways to sell and serve.
One store was pushing its organic, homemade disinfectant.
There are a thousand ways to be creative. The bars started getting imaginative with take-out cocktails and videos on how to mix that specialty drink.
There are a bunch of books not just on creativity but ways to do guerrilla marketing or experiential marketing.
We even offered to hold a webinar to help businesses with ideas – and crickets. If you close down, you can blame the government and the pandemic but some of it was a lack of creativity on your part.