Gallery of E-Commerce Design Excellence

April 9, 2009

Meet Retailing Together’s new best friend, at least for today: ecommr. Ecommr publishes images from ecommerce applications. It’s probably boring to most, but a fantastic resource for those of us obsessed with both web design and retail. 
The site is very spare, and most posts are simply an image taken from a web application, and most [...]

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Small Business Promoters Use Web, Prefer Mail

March 27, 2009

Marketing Charts reports on research from Bredin Business Information that Small and Medium Businesses prefer to use web technologies for promoting themselves, but prefer traditional methods for getting information about other businesses. 
Based on Bredin’s survey, SMBs expect to generally decrease their use of offline marketing tactics, with increases in PR and telemarketing. The increase in [...]

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Fashion Entrepreneurs Who Do It All

March 24, 2009

Lean times drive savvy businesspeople to reassess every aspect of their businesses, and Brian Hill of Femme Athletic in Phoenix, Arizona, is a prime example. Hill designs the apparel, promotes his line to other stores, deals one-on-one with manufacturers and fabric suppliers, and markets his products online at http://www.femmeathletic.com. Hill started Femme Athletic on the campus of [...]

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Fashion and Apparel Industry Networking

March 14, 2009

Here are a few websites that offer opportunities for online and physical world networking for people in the fashion and apparel business: 

Independent Fashion Bloggers.  An influential community of fashion bloggers.
Fashion Retailers. A new social network for retailers. The website is similar to LinkedIn. 
HauteNet. A general fashion social network, also similar to LinedIn. HauteNet has an impressive [...]

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Independent Retailers Outperform Chains Over Holidays

March 13, 2009

If you’ve been following the grim news about apparel and retail layoffs, you may have noticed that the layoff news is always about major retailers. Is it because mass layoffs data is the easiest to collect? Or are the layoffs concentrated among the majors?
One clue comes from a survey from ILSR, the Institute for  Local [...]

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Retailers Win With Inventory Planning and Customer Service

March 12, 2009

Successful retailers are reevaluating every aspect of their businesses, paying special attention to inventory management. Why? Because improper planning leads to overstocking, heavy markdowns, and serious cash flow problems"mistakes that can be the death of a business in a poor economy. 
As a result, many successful retailers today ensure that inventory management is not an issue [...]

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Book Review Reviews

March 9, 2009

If you aren’t familiar with the Retailing Together archives, here are a few recent book reviews that you may have missed:

Marketing Your Retail Store in the Internet Age. A comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of marketing and promotion with specific application to using the Internet. 
The Profitable Retailer . A collection of powerful tips, all drawn from Doug [...]

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Fashion PR And Declining Magazine Sales

March 2, 2009

Fashion and beauty magazines have played a critical role in the historic methods of fashion marketing, and you might expect that to change as consumers embrace the Internet. But, are consumers abandoning fashion magazines in favor of the web?
While we don’t have enough data specifically on fashion magazines, we do have a report on 10 [...]

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Surviving Retail

March 2, 2009

Surviving Retail is a new webcomic , about, you guessed it, the travails of working in retail. It just launched on December 29, so start reading it now and you can impress your friends with yet another cultural touchpoint you scooped before it was popular, you hipster. 
We, of course, can’t really relate to the comic, [...]

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Upbeat News From Las Vegas Markets

March 1, 2009

The occasional encouraging sales reports that Retailing Together found on the trade show floors in Las Vegas has been confirmed in more detail by the real journalists.
The February 27 issue of California Apparel News ran several encouraging articles:
Better Results Than Expected in Las Vegas
 

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