Every week we see another news story about failing retailers closing stores. Typically the view is that they’re unprofitable. Yet this is a misconception that too many continue to make.

Today your bricks and mortar stores should prioritise experience over transactions. Some retailers are already making the switch. 

This isn’t only TFM marketing research and feedback making this point. During a recent trip to the Gold Coast, I sat down for a podcast chat with Simon Beard, responsible for one of Australia’s biggest retail exits following the $600m sale of Culture Kings. 

His path from market trader to clothing empire is well-trodden, but some of the lessons he shared with me, still haven’t been heeded. For Culture Kings 85% of customers experienced the store first, yet digital represented 100% more money as a channel. But it was the store, or ‘studio’ and he phrased it, that created the relationship. 

Here are three ways retailers should be refocusing priorities heading into the business end of retailers’ year.

There was a time in the not so distant past, when customers would look in a local store, to find a product, then scour the internet for the cheapest place that sold it. 

I’m sure there are agents that could do this job today, saving more time.

But in an ever digitised world, shoppers crave tangibility. They crave discovery of products through analogue means. Walking through the threshold, and getting to ensure the fit and feel of clothes match their body.

From clients we’ve worked with, like Price Attack, we’ve seen the success of selling products off the back of having a salon in-store.

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