Tag Archives: Lands’ End Inc.

About 3213 days ago E-Commerce

Web Site 1.0 to Web Site 2.0

Your company’s web site is built and has been around for several years now. Your customers can check out the standard, “about us” link. You even have a cute stock ticker on your home. Like many businesses, maybe your web site was built several years ago and has not changed that much. But your business has changed. The demands of your customers and challenges from your competition are two major changes. Many of your competitors are leveraging more and more technology. And most importantly your customers are coming to expect more of you. Leveraging your web site as a powerful and strategic corporate asset and ensuring it is a TOOL for your business is important. A revitalized web site can save you time and money and bring you greater efficiencies. It can make your customers more satisfied and enhance communication both inside and outside of your company. Your goals is to take your web site from a static, underused, unloved, uncared for, brochure-ware, plain vanilla, digital brochure, into a POWERFUL, dynamic, TOOL. Here’s how to do it: Pull together a team representing every aspect of your company and gather a list of concerns and problems. These concerns might be – lack of inter-departmental communication; customers on hold too long; missing orders, or other concerns and issues. Analyze talk the web sites of your competition and those in your business sector to see what how their web site works? For example, if you are a clothing retailer and sell clothes online, it might be very useful for you to know the success (or lack of success) of Land’s End’s virtual model that allows their customers to virtually see how clothes might look on themselves. Review your team’s findings and consider specific steps you can take to solve problems and/or make existing business processes better, using your web site. If customers are on hold too long, for example, are they asking the same questions? If so, could customers be directed to visit your web site for the information they need. Once you have internally gone over your options it would be wise to hire a programmer with a business processes mind set (not just a geek) to advise you of options, possibilities and pricing options. This person would ONLY be hired as an advisor at this stage. Even if you do have in-house online expertise, it would be useful to hire a third party expert to advise you of the technical feasibility and practicality of how to implement your proposed web site changes. Once you have a good outline of what upgrades you wish to make and how to make them, it’s time to implement. You could hire your advisor to do the upgrades but also look for other options to ensure you get the most competent implementer and competitive pricing. Don’t rush to make drastic changes all at once, do things a little bit at a time. As you look for ways to improve your web site here are some specific tools for you to consider: Intranet — An intranet is a web site, but used only internally for your company. Creating an intranet can enable powerful intra-company communication. Using an intranet to make all corporate documents more easily available to your staff can be a worthwhile time saver and boost for employee efficiency. Maybe there’s sales literature and marketing material that is periodically updated. Instead of hoping each person who needs it was included in the email blast why not post the most recent version to your intranet for example? Intranet.com makes a popular intranet solution or you could build your own. Blogs (or Web Log) — At its basic level a blog is simply a method of putting content online in an online journal or diary format. A blog is often referenced as a more personal endeavor but increasingly is being used for business use. You could use a web log to quickly and easily update a customer support page. A blog could be set up to narrate and showcase how your customers are using your products in their businesses or personal lives. Some blogging services are Blogger.com (which I use), Movabletype.org and Userland.com. Chat — Online chat can be a powerful tool, if implemented properly. When shopping on the web site of mobile retailer, iGo, I’ve used their chat tool to quickly ask a question and get an answer. I, the customer benefited, and iGo closed another sale. Often, I take advantage of Hewlett-Packard’s live online chat support tool to get accurate and fast help about printer problems. I don’t have to wait on hold. HP saves telephone costs and can hire less staff to serve more customers. Discussion Boards — While chat provides instant communication in a one-to-one method, a discussion board is ideal for creating more of a community of discussion and support. I’ve recently been doing digital video editing and have used the support discussion board of video capture device maker Pinnacle System for support. In these discussion boards one can often find answers to previously asked questions. If no answer is found then your new question can be posted to the discussion board and answered by other users or Pinnacle Systems staff. Be warned, discussion boards can be a two edged sword at times. While they are useful tools for customer support, they expose customer complaints as well. Personalization — If your customers frequently visit your web site, to check on the status of orders for example, it might be useful to “Amazon.com” it and have them be greeted by their own, most frequently used and/or needed sections. If a customer frequently goes to your news page, why not give them an option to have the “news” page become the first page that comes up, instead of the same page that everyone else sees. We’ve just touched the very surface of what you can do towards upgrading your web site. The key is to consider where you are now, where you want to be and how your web site be a vehicle to get you there. Your web site should not just a glorified brochure but just be an asset to grow your business. Ramon Ray, Technology Evangelist, is a technology analyst, author, speaker and the editor of Smallbiztechnology.com. Since 1986, Ramon has been using computers and was first “online” in 1995. He has written hundreds of technology articles and the book “Technology Solutions for Growing Businesses” (Amacom, Nov 2003).

About 3822 days ago Business Software

Hoof and Math

The Fourth Annual Inc Web Awards: Killer Apps Company: Saddletech.com, in Woodside, Calif. URL: www.saddletech.com What we liked: A wealth of Web-collected data fires an innovative twist on customization In October 2001, Lands’ End began selling custom-tailored pants on-line. Consumers plug their measurements into the clothier’s Web site, and a program turns the data into dimensions that a computerized cutting machine at a plant in Mexico uses to make the pants. Now a small company called SaddleTech.com has introduced a comparable service for horses that is less lucrative than Lands’ End’s offering but considerably more noble. After all, an ill-fitting saddle can cause painful sores. Ill-fitting jeans just make your thighs look fat. The long-standing problem with saddles is that they’re not adjustable, explains Saddletech.com founder Robert Ferrand. Horses’ backs, by contrast, vary significantly by breed and size, and change over time in response to age and exercise. Furthermore, when tack-shop proprietors perform visual inspections to see whether a saddle sits comfortably, they don’t consider the rider’s weight, which can add a couple hundred pounds of pressure. Ferrand has been selling saddle pressure sensors to veterinarians and saddle makers since 1992. Earlier this year he began offering his customers a computer-based “saddle-fit management program” as well. Now his direct-to-consumer offering allows horse owners to retain their existing gear — which can cost thousands of dollars — and still give Trigger a more comfortable ride. When customers register on the Saddletech.com Web site, Ferrand sends them a patented gauge, which they can use to measure the arcs and angles of their mount’s back and compare them with the arcs and angles of the saddle’s underside. Customers enter the gauge data, the horse’s weight, their own weight, and other information into a series of fields on the site. Ferrand feeds the Web data into a patented algorithm of his own devising, which calculates the difference between the shape of an unloaded horse’s back and the shape of a horse’s back with saddle and rider. He then uses those measurements to design and manufacture a thermoplastic orthotic which, when placed between horse and saddle, evenly and comfortably distributes the rider’s weight to prevent the formation of sores. Ferrand is also conducting research on the site, asking horse owners to plug in body measurements and ancestral data for close to 80 breeds, from Akhal-Teke to zebra. The idea is to determine whether there are clusters of horses with similar measurements. That would allow saddle manufacturers to build products that fit better without individual customization. The orthotic costs a hefty $350, and so far Ferrand has sold fewer than 100 of them. (The rest of his nearly $100,000 in annual revenues comes from instruments for measuring saddles, computer systems, and saddle-fitting clinics.) But the product is brand-new, and Ferrand has done nothing yet to promote it. At press time, he was planning an E-mail campaign targeting U.S. equestrians, who number in the millions. “You’ve got a $500-million business out there that operates on the principle that the customer cannot possibly tell whether the product will actually fit,” says Ferrand. “This solves the problem.” Leigh Buchanan is a senior editor at Inc. Anne Stuart is a senior writer. The Fourth Annual Inc Web Awards Killer Apps Printing Money Rental Health Lab Retrievers Take My Payroll, Please Hoof and Math Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4462 days ago E-Commerce

A Closet Full of Cash

realbusiness.com The Conservative In an industry characterized by sloppy spending and business models with as much staying power as last year’s shoes, Fashionmall has stuck to a classic line Company: Fashionmall.com Inc., in New York City What it does: Operates a virtual mall for shoppers with a yen for designer clothing Number of employees: 45 Conventional wisdom: Retail sites can’t build a brand without blowing their cash, nor can they generate enough money to scale up into the big leagues. Unconventional wisdom: There’s money in the minor leagues. Building a brand is a long-term game, and the company has enough cash to keep going for years. Revenue growth: $14,000 in 1995 to $5 million (projected) for 2000 Profit profile: Lost approximately $6 million last year Capital: Less than $100,000 in seed capital; $35 million from a May 1999 IPO If you really want to get Ben Narasin pissed off, ask him why he isn’t spending the $35 million that’s left over from his company’s May 1999 IPO. Tell him that analyst Catherine M. Skelly of investment firm Gruntal & Co. says his company, Fashionmall.com, needs a “catalyst” to scale beyond last year’s projection of $5 million in revenues. Cite other experts who argue that the company’s only path to glory lies in spending big in order to build a brand, increase traffic, and jack up both the top and bottom lines in a hurry. That kind of talk makes Narasin mad. “With all due respect to intelligent analysts, that’s what they said about everybody — and they are all out of business. Look at MotherNature.com. Gone. Pets.com. They scaled, and look at them. They’re all gone! The concept that you have to spend the money is just plain stupid,” says the 35-year-old CEO, pausing for emphasis. “You have to spend the money intelligently.” Intelligently, for Narasin, means for the long term. For the past six years he’s been carefully building branded sites that will steer Web shoppers to the stores and products they seek. Fashionmall consists of a handful of sites, each of which serves as a central site through which visitors can shop for goods. Web surfers who want to shop for Armani ties or Bulova watches can avoid the various search engines by glancing through the main page of Fashionmall or of one of its other portals, Outletmall.com (a discount site) or the trendsetter Boo.com. The bulk of Fashionmall’s revenues derive from the 60 or so tenants that pay the company 70¢ to 98¢ (depending on the length of their lease) for every shopper who clicks through a Fashionmall site to a tenant site. A small number of tenants also pay Fashionmall for every sale. In addition, the company charges advertisers for banner ads and sponsorship spots throughout the sites, garnering slightly less than 40% of its revenues from those sources. For the millions of people still cowed by the Web, Fashionmall sites offer a one-stop-shopping resource. For its retailer tenants, Fashionmall generates traffic. The company carries no inventory; its resources consist of its intellectual property, its computer equipment, the 45 employees who work in roughly 5,300 square feet of Madison Avenue office space, and, of course, more than $35 million in cash. Narasin launched the company in late 1994 with less than $100,000 in funds from Boston Prepatory Co., an Inc. 500 clothing company he founded and which generated enough cash flow to launch Fashionmall. Narasin, the son of a 30-year IBM man, discovered the Internet in 1994 and was instantly hooked on its promise for spreading the fashion word. He took a leave of absence from Boston Prepatory to run Fashionmall full-time, spending most of his energy evangelizing in an industry resistant to both technology and change. Today Fashionmall has an elite board of directors made up of executives with expertise in retailing, fashion, and mall operations, including former Liz Claiborne Inc. chairman Jerome Chazen, former Neiman Marcus CEO Richard Marcus, and mall developer Robert Taubman, CEO of Taubman Centers Inc. And the company has built a base of about a million unique visitors a month — not enough to rank among Media Metrix’s top 50 Web sites but sufficient to keep its gross margins for last year at more than 80%. Despite having a high-caliber board and a heavily trafficked mall, the company was projecting a 2000 loss of more than $6 million on revenues of roughly $5 million — hardly pretty by conventional accounting standards. Yet Narasin says that the loss, about the same as the previous year’s, is a result of trying to build the company’s brand at a sustainable pace. With its multimillion-dollar stash and its low burn rate, the company could survive for years without any revenue growth. Moreover, Narasin appears to know how to operate the company in the black. For its first four years of operation the company funded its own growth, and for the two years prior to its public offering it turned a small profit. Analyst Heather Dougherty of Jupiter Research respects the company’s prudent financial course and says that Fashionmall has succeeded as a “niche aggregator” that delivers traffic to its tenants without spending itself out of existence. The key to Fashionmall’s long-term success rests in its ability to stick to the plan of building the brand without burning the cash. As a brand builder — and in many other respects — Fashionmall has trod a different path from the one taken by the scores of now-dead players in the fashion and retailing space. When most online retailers were building inventory and reinventing the logistics of home delivery, Fashionmall was eschewing such costs, cutting revenue-generating deals with the likes of Brooks Brothers, Gap, and Lands’ End. And when other dot-coms were spending cash on television and magazine advertising, Fashionmall was swapping space on its sites for valuable ads in magazines like Modern Bride and Civilization. The most spectacular failure in the Web-based fashion industry to date has been Boo.com, which spent $135 million attempting to build its brand before folding. Narasin swooped in and purchased the brand for a figure between $500,000 and $1 million — and got a ton of free publicity to boot. Since purchasing the site, Fashionmall has transformed Boo.com from a high-profile, high-burn-rate, inventory-burdened retailer into a lean portal. At its core, Fashionmall will rise or fall on the notion that established retailers will continue using the Web as a natural extension of their existing businesses. Board member Marcus believes that as more traditional brands use the Web, they will rely on portals like Fashionmall to help shoppers find them in cyberspace. Still, the major challenges for Fashionmall will be holding on to retailers — and to shoppers (who may increasingly skip portals by going directly to their preferred sites) — and finding a way to crack the growth challenge. Skelly, who rates the company as a “market performer” in the intermediate term and a “market outperformer” in the long term, says its key strengths are its available cash balance, slow burn rate, and prudent strategy. “Ben was very forward-looking in predicting that all those dot-coms would go out of business — and he was committed to hanging on to his capital for dear life,” says Skelly, who then falls back on conventional wisdom by adding, “But he sacrificed a great company.” In other words, Narasin could have built a far bigger, fashionably unprofitable Wall Street darling if he had grown the company beyond its modest model. Narasin insists, however, that growth at any cost has already caused the demise of far too many companies. He believes the key to Fashionmall’s long-term success rests in its ability to stick to the plan of wisely investing in personnel and technology, expanding partnerships with blue-chip fashion players, keeping margins fat, and building the brand without burning the cash. “People think there is no barrier to entry on the Web,” he says. “They are wrong. It is just like the fashion business. There is no barrier to getting in, but there is a huge barrier to lasting.” Tom Ehrenfeld is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Mass. With no fanfare and little venture money, the companies profiled here are delivering real stuff to paying customers and making a buck in the process. There may not be any “new rules,” but there are rules, and we suspect every one of them will look familiar. DVD Empire: The Bootstrapper SitStay.com: The Mom-and-Pop Shoebuy.com: The Scorekeepers Accuship.com: The Traditionalist Fashionmall.com: The Conservative Healthcommunities.com: The Underwriter Commentary E-tailing Intermediaries The Markets Please e-mail your comments to editors@inc.com.

About 4796 days ago E-Commerce

Develop a Return and/or Exchange Policy

Returns are a headache for vendors and an inconvenience for consumers. However, they do happen, so make your return and exchange processes as simple as possible. Posting a returns policy in a “can’t miss it” location on your site helps ensure that customers understand the refund and exchange rules before they make a purchase. It also provides clear instructions for customers to follow when returns are necessary. Research Return Policies of E-Commerce Leaders There’s nothing like a little competitive intelligence for helping a small Web merchant who’s trying to learn about the Internet economy. Begin by reviewing the return policies of e-commerce leaders such as CDnow and LandsEnd.com to understand the fundamentals of an effective policy. Then, based on what you learn from your research, work through the following questions to build a framework upon which to base your own return policy: Do the companies you researched take back all merchandise? What are the time limits for returning merchandise? Is there a special return form involved? Is a return authorization number required? Is a receipt required? Is there a restocking fee? Do they pay for return shipping, or is it the customer’s responsibility? How do they handle the return of gifts? How do they handle exchanges? If they take international orders, do they have specific instructions for different world regions? Write Your Return Policy Using the information you gathered in the Web merchant research process, create a returns policy that includes those elements that are appropriate for your business. An effective return policy: Spells out precisely what conditions — if any — customers must meet to return merchandise — for example, inclusion of sales receipt, condition of item, and time limits Gives clear, logical instructions on how to return merchandise Provides clear, logical instructions on how to return gifts Gives clear details on how to make exchanges and qualify for refunds Provides contact information, including fax and phone numbers and e-mail addresses Post Your Return Policy Strategically Once you’ve created your return policy, post it in strategic places on your site, such as the customer service center, FAQ page, and “checkout” pages. Posting this information on key areas of your site helps ensure that your customers understand the policy before ordering merchandise and how to return or exchange merchandise that is unsatisfactory. Copyright © 1995-2000 Pinnacle WebWorkz Inc. All rights reserved. Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form.

About 4827 days ago Online Marketing

Learn When to Use a Branding Campaign

The objective of a branding campaign is to impress your firm’s brand identity on potential customers, not necessarily to entice users to visit your site or to capture an immediate sale (although both of these may result from a branding-oriented banner). Because of this very specific objective, branding campaigns are more appropriate for certain phases of your business’s growth than for others. How do you determine whether to launch a branding campaign? Here are some of the most common reasons to do so. Use a Branding Campaign if Your Business or Product Is New Branding builds name recognition for your company or product, and there’s no better time to do this than right at the beginning. By having a powerful branding campaign in place when the doors open or the site launches – or both – you’ll have a jump-start on future marketing initiatives (and perhaps on your competition as well). Use a Branding Campaign if Your Business Is Developing an Online Presence If you have a traditional offline business and are now moving into e-commerce, your new venture will require some branding of its own. Particularly if your offline business relies heavily on brick-and-mortar brand associations, you’ll need to invoke different – but equally compelling – associations for your online brand. Consider clothing retailer Lands’ End, whose brand historically has been more about sturdy, practical, and classic apparel than convenience or immediacy (the products were available by mail-order catalog only). Now the company’s site, which has live online service and virtual fitting rooms, is recognized as a leader in e-commerce, expanding the brand emphasis from practicality to cutting-edge, customer-focused service. Use a Branding Campaign if You Need to Set Yourself Apart from Close Competitors One result of effective branding is that it gives the impression that you are the biggest and best player in your market. If you have stiff competition, some savvy branding may be in order. Just think of the fierce competition among the many pet-related e-commerce sites: Pets.com, Petopia, PETsMART.com, Petstore.com, and others. The sites that haven’t built strong brand identities either by leveraging their brick-and-mortar reputation (PETsMART) or by playing up online convenience (as in Pets.com’s tag line “Because pets can’t drive”) will not succeed. Copyright © 1995-2000 Pinnacle WebWorkz Inc. All rightsreserved. Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form.