Magazines Archives - 2009 October

Retailers look at branding and staffing to improve operations
Story 7 - Focus

As the tremors of the global recession start to wane across the region, retailers in Singapore
have taken the opportunity to tweak their management practices, in order to ensure business continuity as they emerge from the downturn.

While many have started to implement technologies and solutions to help monitor and assess their businesses, others have turned inward to re-evaluate their businesses’ fundamentals in order
to implement the best retail management practices in their companies. As such, retailers are increasingly identifying that aside from having a good product to sell, they need to manage
their branding strategy and their staff, in order to keep the cash tills ringing.

Fashion apparel and accessories retailer Levi’s, renowned for its denimjeans label, states that retail management entails driving excellence in the critical aspects of the store performance
that will maximise revenue and margins, and positively impact brand equity.

According to Levi Strauss’ Asia Pacific vice-president of Retail Operations, Kevin Sargison, there are two key components in retail management, the first being retail operations, which oversees
store operations, including areas of customer service, retail staff management, training and store maintenance.

“The other is retail merchandising, which is product-related and includes visual merchandising, product life-cycle management, assortment planning and pricing markdowns, as examples,” he
continues.

While the two departments comprise different scopes, the retail chief attests that both components need to work together in order to “drive store performance and business results”.

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