Crabtree and Triangle Town Center

Week 2

Tuesday- Crabtree (Flagship)

     Tuesday we were at Crabtree, our main store. In the morning we went over numbers and talked about how the store did over the weekend and great news—our sales were up from last week and we beat last years plan! Moving the merchandise around on the floor really was effective. The numbers are thrilling to look over as they provide concrete data reinforcing what changes we made on the sales floor are not in vain.

     We went over to Big & Tall to recover and gear up for the Father’s Day weekend (RL’s biggest weekend next to Christmas). We rearranged the swim trunks (AKA “baggies” in the salt life world), shirts and shorts to make the Big & Tall area more fluid.

     We made a quick visit to the “Rock the Dock” area and the prop room. “Rock the Dock” is a team that Belk implemented to get merchandise off the trucks, unboxed and out on the sales floor at unnaturally early hours before customers and even associates get to Belk. There are three shifts; one starts at 4:30AM, another at 5:30AM and the last at 6:30AM. Yikes. This team was created to alleviate a lot of complaints from customers. Before the Rock the Dock team associates were expected to put out merchandise during the day between customers, however this became problematic when customers voiced that the associates were concentrating too much on restocking and thus were less concentrated on helping them. Another reason Rock the Dock was created was for the safety of the customer—no more large carts with merchandise fill and crowd the already snug aisles, a disaster waiting to happen.

     We took a trip over to Women’s Swim in Belk and checked on the beach bags we moved over there the previous week. It didn’t look like anything had been sold. Maybe price point is too high? Maybe people aren’t buying beach bags yet? …Who knows?

Will in the Big & Tall

Wednesday

Triangle Town Center (Low Tier 3)

     Wednesday morning we started at Triangle Town Center, our first visit here! It’s a smaller shop and very manageable. We went over numbers in the morning and this location is doing very well. They are uptrending in just about everything except for pants, accessories and dress shirts. The explanations behind these, though, are interesting. Cynthia said not to be worried by the downtrend in pants because the sales on shorts have increased; they tend to have a balancing relationship depending on the season. Dress shirts were down because they were actually removed from this store. This is because it is a low tier 3 and certain products that are not selling well should not take up the precious space.

     We went into the Saks Fifth Avenue to do a bit of comparative analysis between Belk. They carry women’s Black Label but no longer carry men’s RL products (I don’t have an explanation why, unfortunately).

     One other thing to note was that when we were working on the fashion groups Head of Charles and Beach Shop some of the components/products were missing. This is again, due to the fact Triangle is such a low volume store. 

Compared to the Southpoint picture of this fashion group,

 you can tell there are a lot less items sent to Triangle.

-Gina