retail Archive

Duty-Free fragrances: Buy at your own risk.

Duty-Free fragrances: Buy at your own risk. After a couple of trips recently through airports and seeing some questions bantered back and forth on public blogs, I felt it was time to give my own take on the pitfalls of duty-free shopping, and why not to shop duty-free for fragrances. Everyone who has traveled internationally [...]
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Why niche? The focus on covering niche fragrances.

Given that our readers have most likely noticed that a high percentage of our content focuses on niche fragrances that aren’t common or don’t receive wide coverage in the mainstream, I wanted to examine the topic and attempt to answer the question: Why niche? Let’s start from the background. If you’re reading this site, you fall into [...]
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I’m not rich enough to afford cheap things.

I made a recent comment using the above quotation, and in it I requested people to provide comment: Mostly, people understood the concept when I related it back to things they could understand. It was the hallmark of a quote that an uncle of mine used constantly: ”Buy cheap, buy twice.” All of us [...]
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Retail 101 (Part Five): Why quality matters.

(The conclusion of a series on how retailing misses the customer message) In the last installment, I mentioned some key differentiators between the low-end and high-end of the retail markets, and why that difference can be meaningful to the customer. During this recession, savvy retailers have figured out where they can compete, and it hasn’t [...]
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Retail 101 (Part Four): Our identity in the market

In the last installment, I left off proposing a question: How does a retailer know who or what it is? If the “Great Recession” has taught us anything, it’s that consumer behavior can be changed by countless market forces in play, including the simple availability of cash. If cash isn’t available, the consumer might revert [...]
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Retail 101 (Part Three): Who’s the customer?

Working in retail is perhaps one of the world’s crappiest jobs, and I should know. One of my first jobs while I was in college was to work in a women’s shoe store on New York’s Fifth Avenue. I’ll pause whilst everyone has their good laugh over the fact that — for an entire month [...]
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