A True Multichannel Experience

More recently, however, Sears has done at least a little better job displaying Lands’ End products. It appears that the ultimate goal is to have little Lands’ End boutiques within Sears stores, which I believe would make the most sense of all. Still, the Sears/Lands’ End marriage remains an odd pairing and continues to look like a work in progress. A little more than two years ago, Kmart bought Sears. So these days, you can find some Lands’ End items in Kmart stores (now, that’s a little scary).

Of All Places

But back to my Sears visit. Considering the somewhat oddball marriage between Sears and Lands’ End, it’s a little ironic that I had a complete multichannel experience (“revelation?”) in the Danbury Sears store in December. My wife and I looked high and low in Sears’ Lands’ End area for the right size of a pair of walking shoes from the Lands’ End catalog that we thought would be ideal for my mother. We had a clerk check the stock room, but Mom’s size wasn’t available in that store.

A store clerk, who had a computer terminal at her disposal that was preset to the Lands’ End Web site, said she could order the shoes on the site and they’d be shipped directly from Lands’ End in a few days to us at no extra charge.

So there it was, in Sears of all places, the happy marriage of all three channels: My wife and I inside the Sears store, showing the clerk the shoes in the catalog, and the clerk ordering the right size pair for us online. Oh, and the shoes arrived in three business days, even though we were told it would take upwards of a week. Not bad. For at least one moment, Sears seemed to get both the marriage of multichannel — and Lands’ End — just right.