The missing wow factor behind Clintons’ collapse

Graham Soult

Retail consultant, writer, blogger; helping retailers via CannyInsights.com and CannySites.com. Say hello on Twitter at @soult!

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3 Responses

  1. Mike Bennett says:

    Nice piece Graham.
    As the founder of http://www.hephalump.com, a small but perfectly formed online card site, it was the recognition that the bricks and mortar market leader had not embraced online that persuaded us to get involved.
    Clearly Card Factory have cut costs by producing in quantity in China and cutting out the publishers with their own designs which mirror the market.
    The dilema for a mass market retailer is do you get down and dirty as Tesco and Asda have with the hard discounters (Aldi etc)or move upmarket and add value. Clintons did neither and both at the same time while missing the key opportunity that online offered.
    American Greetings put the knife in but it was the humane thing to do. Let’s see what they do with it now and see if they take some of your advice.

  1. June 8, 2012

    […] will be willing to negotiate rather than risk an empty unit. As it is, 400 shops accords with my earlier estimate of what a post-collapse Clintons might look like, and should give the chain a much more focused and manageable estate than the nearly 800 shops it […]

  2. August 9, 2012

    […] the more upmarket fascia, these types of improvements certainly go some way towards restoring the missing ‘wow factor’ that I talked about in May, and begin to justify Clintons’ higher-end pricing. As I argued then, a key factor […]

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