The news about Lord & Taylor joining forces with Walmart.com and selling it’s iconic NYC location to WeWork has caused an outcry of nostalgic regret over the loss of one more grand cathedral of commerce. But what seems on the surface like a luxury retail surrender, could well hold the keys to the survival of the department store as a species, and carry the too often ignored but much loved Lord & Taylor brand into the future, bigger and better than ever.
Many of the comments that I’ve read suggest that a partnership with Walmart and WeWork will tarnish if not completely obliterate the Lord & Taylor brand. Pairing a venerable luxury brand like Lord & Taylor with a populist brand with discount roots like Walmart seems crazy and even a little sad to Lord & Taylor loyalists. And having those storied hallways of their limestone location on Fifth Avenue filled with movable walls and WeWork cubicles seems unthinkable.
In reality, however, both of these initially jarring steps are very much in keeping with the history of the Lord & Taylor brand, and just maybe, are a brilliant re-imagination of what the Lord & Taylor tradition might look like for future generations. If this experiment is successful, it could pave the way for other department store giants to find their way back to relevance in a millennial, and increasingly e-commerce driven marketplace, by reinterpreting the grand traditions of their past for a digital future.
Here’s are 4 ways that the Lord & Taylor experiment might save the department store:
1. Know your customer
While Lord & Taylor is a luxury brand, it has never targeted the wealthy, but rather, the upper middle class who aspire to wealth. Lord & Taylor was the store for people who bought into the dream of wealth and success that New York City represented, and travelled in from the suburbs to work and to shop at Lord & Taylor, to be a part of that vision. Today that same aspirational upper middle class is made up of entrepreneurs, who are building their vision of the American dream behind temporary walls in cubicles rented from places like WeWork.
2. Be where your customers live, work and play
Perhaps more than any other retail brand, Lord & Taylor understands the crucial importance of location, and has always gone where their customers lead them. As the upper middle class in New York City at the turn of the last century migrated uptown, so did Lord & Taylor; moving from Catherine Street, to Grand Street, to the Ladies Mile on 20th Street, and finally to their current location on Fifth Avenue in 1914. When the middle class moved to the suburbs, so did Lord & Taylor, building the “first ever branch store” in Manhasset. The deal with WeWork allows Lord & Taylor to flip that model on its head and bring their customers to them, turning their flagship in NYC into a thriving hub of work and play, while simultaneously expanding their suburban footprint by allowing customers to pick up and return at Walmart stores nationwide.
3. Be a logistics company
From the beginning, Lord & Taylor placed an emphasis on logistics and technology to improve customer experience. They were the first store to provide home delivery, to fully automate, and to have an elevator. Their big idea? To eliminate the human equation from shopping and provide a seamless and consistent experience. The alliance with Walmart, a logistics company, simply interprets this brand pillar for a modern era, once again relying on state of the art technology to control quality and ease of effort.
4. Create fresh and shareable retail experiences
Lord & Taylor always understood that shopping needed to be more than shopping, but a multi-media event. L&T was the first store to do a purely decorative Christmas window that did not include anything that was for sale in the store. Their first installation was a pair of silver bells that swung in time with a recording of bells ringing. It was the holiday sensation of the season, and made Lord & Taylor a Christmas destination. The advertisement announcing the store’s opening on Fifth Avenue in 1914 whetted the public’s appetite for spectacle by describing their displays as “like realistic theatre, displaying evening wear in real evening shadow.” By inviting WeWork into their NYC flagship, Lord & Taylor is creating a new and fresh, twenty first century retail experience that is shareable across all social media platforms once again projecting Lord & Taylor’s aspirational, big city imagery into the suburbs through their expanded digital real estate.
