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To make the most of its stores and keep customers coming back to shop in person, baseball hat retailer Lids announced Wednesday that 20 locations will have a newly redesigned store concept this month built for customization and personalization. Physical retail’s not dead, but to breathe new life into itnot to mention make more money from the remaining square footagebrands are rolling out more personalized in-store customer experiences. Concierge-style customer service along with customizable products have become the name of the game to counter the many headwinds physical retail has faced in recent years, including the rise of online and social media shopping, the pandemic, and inflation. Personalized experiences create upsell opportunities, strengthen customer loyalty, and, most important, draw people into those dusty physical locations. [Photo: Lids] Lids does “north of 25 million transactions” in its stores, according to Glenn Schiffman, CFO of Fanatics, the apparel, merchandise, and collectibles company that owns a majority of Lids. Lids makes up a portion of the Fanatics commerce division along with Fanatics merchandise and collaborations with other brands, sports leagues, and celebrities. Its commerce division, which includes retail, is responsible for about three-fourths of its 2024 revenue, according to data from Sportico, a sports industry trade outlet. Parent company Fanatics grew 15% in 2024. [Photo: Lids] At Lids, the new store concept has a build-a-hat kiosk where customers can personalize headwear digitally; select locations will also have curving stations where customers can curve the brim to their liking. Known for its officially licensed and branded hats and apparel, Lids says the new stores have an increased emphasis on local teams and exclusive products. Exclusive product drops have become a common model for brands and artists to generate hypeand sales. [Photo: Lids] “Customization has always been at the heart of our brand, and this new store design takes it to the next level,” Lids President Bob Durda said in a statement. “This rollout represents our commitment to a dynamic, customer-centric experience where every visit feels personal, engaging, and tailored to each individual.” [Photo: Lids] Customization at Lids gives shoppers a product that’s distinctively theirs for a premium. The store offers hat curving for $10, stitching for $12, and patches for $15. Jersey personalization, which is available in some stores, starts at $50. Sure, you could get a cheap baseball hat from Amazon, or a custom jersey through the MLB’s pricey Fanatics-run online custom shop delivered in a few days. Lids seeks to counter these offerings with a premium design built to your liking with help from a professionaland you can walk out with it the same day. Personalization also increases the likelihood of return customers. A 71% majority of consumers expect personalized interactions from companies, according to a 2021 report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which also states that 78% of customers are more likely to make a repeat purchase from companies that personalize their offerings. The trend toward personalized, customized retail experiences can be seen across categories, from self-service kiosks at select Pizza Hut locations to DIY AI Jibbitz for Crocs. By giving customers the opportunity to build their own custom caps, Lids is giving them a store experience worth visiting.
Category:
E-Commerce
Amid tariff whiplash and the rejuggling of global trade, GE Vernovas CEO Scott Strazik is finding a way to stay relentlessly optimistic. Strazik returns to the Rapid Response podcast to share how the company plans to continue its success as one of Wall Streets top-performing stocks, despite looming supply chain disruption and market unpredictability. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. GE Vernova is now one year into life as an independent public company, much to celebrateyour revenue rose to $35 billion. In 2024, GE Vernova was the year’s fourth best performing stock. Again, a lot to celebrate. But in 2025, the external environment hasn’t been as friendly. The Trump tariffs have everyone scrambling. How do you think about this moment? How do you think about it compared to a year ago at this time? Well, our end markets really haven’t changed very much, Bob. I would start there. I mean, we continue to see very strong end markets in our larger core businesses and gas power, in our electrification and grid businesses. So, frankly, there’s going to be moments of dislocation between the stock market and our end markets. It doesn’t mean that depending on where the tariffs go, that doesn’t create an opportunity for us to prove out our nimbleness and managing our global supply chain, and we’re going to have to do that. But I think it’s frankly an opportunity for us to demonstrate how much we’ve grown in our first year as a public company to be able to operate in this kind of environment. How do the tariffs practically impact your business? I mean, you’re a global business, so changes in global relationships and reputation, all of that requires some adjustment. Yeah, I think even if you take a step back and think about some of the stuff I’ve talked to our investors about on where we want to make investments, we want to invest in our business where we can improve the durability or the resiliency of our supply chain, and that’s simply because we have a lot of organic growth that’s coming in our businesses, irrespective of any policy changes. Now, policies are going to change, they’re going to evolve. This is going to force us to relook at where we source certain things. It’ll force us to revisit our terms with some of our suppliers in different locations, but we know how to do that. So, we don’t want to be too fast to respond as we’re kind of trying to make sense of everything. But I’d also rather be a company that is quick on its feet. In this environment, President Trump announced the tariffs on a Wednesday afternoon after the market closed. Rest assured by Friday afternoon, our teams were actively working evaluation plans of what our alternatives are. Now, it doesn’t mean within 40 hours you pull the trigger in a dynamic period of time. So, we’re working it pretty hard right now to figure out what our alternatives are, and with a growing backlog, to the extent our backlog is growing so substantially, that also puts us in a privileged position with our supply base to come and say, “Listen, this is what it’s going to take to keep serving GE Vernova.” It’s almost like there’s been a pullback around the very idea of globalization that maybe it’s not good to be a global organization. Do you think about that? Well, when I think about my first four months of the year. I mean, my first trip of the year was to Singapore and Japan, the first week of January. I had a great trip in the Middle East in February visiting Saudi, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. These are all important markets for us. I think we’ve got opportunities to serve these markets throughout, and we’re going to work really hard to earn those opportunities. At the same time, long before announcements with tariffs, the reality is there has been an evolving shift with globalization. There’s certainly been a lot of strategic moves towards concepts of decoupling from the Chinese supply chain explicitly. So, we’ve been working that over a long period of time. Now, the last week certainly has been broader than any one country, and with it, it forces you to really revisit it in an even more intimate way, what you do and where you do it, but we can do that. We’re capable of taking that on, and I’m highly confident we can use this moment to make ourselves a better company for the long term. You have announced investing $600 million in U.S. factories yourself creating over 1,500 jobs. Yes. How much does GE Vernova need to be an American company? I would say more we need to be a local company for our local markets. I think in your bigger markets, you’re going to have a local supply chain to serve that market, local teams to serve that market. We’re a global company where, at this moment, one of our most important local markets certainly is the U.S., and that’s why we’re investing into that market. But we’re not going to not invest in some of these other countries that are attractive and markets too to be local there. There’s been some speculation that the speed with which U.S. manufacturing can ramp up to replace things that might have come from abroad, that that’s going to take a while and there’s going to be disruption. Is that something for your business that you see that you worry about, or is that part of the nimbleness, I guess, that you’re talking about on the part of your team? We do have a fair amount of industrial footprint in the U.S. that allows us to build on existing assets. So, the $600 million investment is reinvesting in existing assets, 1,500 jobs to locations that already have the concrete poured. They already have the cranes. They already have the logistics with the railroad adjacent to the factory. So, we can move reasonably quickly. Now, to the extent the policy environment drives us towards greenfield investments to reindustrialize parts of our supply chain, that would take longer, truth be told. And that’s a multiyear journey that, at this point, we aren’t necessarily evaluating, but we will keep looking in that regard. But first and foremost, we’re going to keep trying to eliminate waste in our existing processes and build upon the assets we have, and we feel like that can carry us for a eriod of time. Now, where we don’t have it, as an example, we announced and closed an acquisition of a supply chain footprint from Woodward. That was a vertical supply chain integration of a small part of Woodward’s business, but for our gas business, an important part of our supply chain where we thought it made more sense to just have that internal. How much do you tune your long-term decision-making when there’s noise and change and pressure in the near term? We need to scrutinize how long the status quo is, for sure. And that can be hard to do in a volatile moment that we’re in. But if nothing else, it gives us a chance to really challenge ourselves on what we have been doing, whether there’s a different way to do it. And that’s the way we talk about it internally is: “This is an opportunity for us to really revisit past assumptions and think about how we can be better.” Now, in some cases, we may gain conviction with exactly the play we’ve been running. In others, there may be a better alternative. I mean, do you have, sort of, I don’t know, leadership principles or lessons that you use as a touchstone when things do get volatile? Well, we’re not going to suck our thumbs and cry on our beer as things kind of change. We want to use change as an opportunity to improve. In that regard, this moment when we’re just reaching our one-year anniversary as a public company is a moment when I feel pretty confident we’ve got our feet on the ground, and we can play into this and use this moment of change to play offense on not just how we want 2025 to go, because we won’t change 2025 in any material way certainly from a supply chain strategy, but we can use 2025 to challenge ourselves for the next decade, and that’s very much what we’re doing.
Category:
E-Commerce
Given all the recent bad news on the world stage, from tariffs wars to the war in Ukraine, it’s no wonder Swedes are seeking a moment of zen by watching a livestream of “The Great Moose Migration” (loosely translated from the Swedish, “Den stora älgvandringen“). The 24-hour event, which runs for 20 days straight, kicked off on Tuesday. Since it first aired in 2019, it’s been providing soothing entertainment for millions of Swedes each year around this time. That first year, nearly a million Swedes tuned in to literally watch moose walk through forests and swim across the ngerman River, all captured by remote cameras and drones, the Associated Press reported. By last year, the sleeper hit had a whopping 9 million viewers, who followed along on Sweden’s national public television’s streaming platform, SVT Play. This year, the livestream started airing a week earlier, as the moose got an early start due to warmer weather. From now until May 4, viewers can watch dozens of moose migrate to their favorite pastures located about 187 miles northwest of Stockholm, the country’s capital. Sure, there’s not much happening, but that’s why so many people find it relaxing. So much so, that more than 78,000 Swedes have joined a Facebook group with fans sharing photos of their TV screens when moose appear, according to NBC News. In fact, The Great Moose Migration is part of a larger global trend of relaxing, nature-oriented livestreams with not too much going on, which began in 2009 when NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, aired a seven-hour train trip across the southern part of the country. That trend has even extended to the U.S., where thousands of captivated viewers have tuned in to watch a couple of wild eagles, Jackie and Shadow, and their growing family via the bald eagle nest cam in California.
Category:
E-Commerce
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