CIO
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Reader ROI
Find out how e-commerce is helping an old company update its image
Learn which technologies this brick-and-mortar retailer is adopting to compete online
You’re online looking for some new clothes for work, and you surf to the website of a famous retailer. Up pops the image of a striking young man wearing a spread-collar dress shirt in sage green—one of fall’s hot colors. His top button undone; he’s the picture of business casual. Another image flashes at you—a stack of women’s shirts in apple green and hot pink. The latest from Banana Republic? Nope. You’re shopping at stodgy old Brooks Brothers’ online site.
Yes, the company still sells those famous button-down white shirts, if that’s what you want. But the venerable retailer has designed its website to attract young customers, the demographic that abandoned the company in droves for the more fashionable, casual attire of competitors. Brooks Brothers wants these customers back and once it gets them, it wants to keep them for life, like it did in the days when Wall Street bankers brought their sons to the store to be measured for their first pinstripe suits.
Information technology—and the Web especially—plays a critical role in Brooks Brothers’ strategy to rekindle that tradition and boost its flagging profits. The casual ’90s were an up-and-down decade for Brooks Brothers as it struggled to remake its buttoned-up image and bolster profits that slumped by 38 percent from 1999 to 2000. As part of its push to improve the bottom line, the company is in the middle of a two-year plan to integrate its Web, in-store and catalog operations to provide a single view of each customer that its sales force can use to market new clothes and provide personalized services in all three sales channels.
Been measured in the store for a custom-made shirt? Then order some more from your Palm Pilot while you’re waiting in the airport. Want to buy your brother another tie but can’t remember which one you bought him last Christmas? Brooks Brothers will look it up, no matter which channel you bought it from. The Web won’t save Brooks Brothers. No amount of technology can help a retailer make money unless it sells products that people want to buy. But if the company solves that problem—and it remains to be seen whether it will—then the way the organization uses IT can distinguish it from, or at least allow it to keep up with, the competition. Brooks Brothers’ online push is coming at a time when it has curbed plans to open new stores and abandoned an effort to spin off separate stores for women. Last fall, six executives, including those in charge of men’s clothing and online and catalog sales, left in a management reorganization sparked by the company’s losses. Marcia Aaron, a retail analyst with Deutsche Banc Alex Brown in San Francisco, says, "People shouldn’t look at the Internet to be the main growth driver" for any retailer. But she thinks online stores are necessary for the convenience they offer customers.
