Teen-Focused Apparel Chain Turning Web Outages Into Sales Promotions

Delia's, a 113-store national apparel chain (stores in 33 states, almost all in malls), is trying to master finding the sales promotion silver lining inside various Web crash clouds. On at least three occasions over the last several months, the chain's site suffered a non-trivial outage. It happens. But Delia's cleverly turned these outages into a marketing opportunity by sending an E-mail to all of its customers, where the chain apologized for the outage and offered to show its sincerity by offering free shipping on all products—but only for a couple of days, if that.