Eddie Bauer

Turnaround CEO Neil Fiske, who took over Bellevue-based Eddie Bauer in 2007 and led it through a bankruptcy court auction in 2009, will soon leave the top post, according to a company statement. No reason was given for his departure.

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Nov. 30, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Customer experience analytics firm ForeSee today released its annual analysis of Cyber Monday customer satisfaction suggesting that some online shoppers may not be as satisfied with the holiday shopping season as retailers likely are. ( Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110819/DE54780LOGO ) Sponsored by: Comscore reports that compared to last year, online commerce was up 26% on Black Friday and 22% on Cyber Monday, and the National Retail Federation is reporting that sales over the four-day holiday weekend increased 16% over last year. But while sales are up, website browser satisfaction is down. A browser

NEW YORK — Talbots said on Tuesday that its board of directors has adopted a shareholder rights plan -- or a poison pill -- to protect its stockholders after a private equity firm disclosed it had acquired a sizeable stake in the company. On Monday, Sycamore Partners LP revealed it had acquired a 9.9% stake in Talbots and said it planned to attempt to talk with the retailer about strategy and operations. Reports put Talbots’ market value at $288 million, and suggest a buyout would exceed $400 million. In its move to protect shareholder value, Talbots adopted the poison

Let's take a look at social media in 2010: We continually hear about brands that have a half-million or million Facebook fans. Well, that’s wonderful. That’s validation that social media provides a channel for consumers to interact with a brand. It isn’t, however, validation that social media creates orders.

New purchase channels can achieve success if marketing and merchandising are aligned to the interests of customers.

In 1998, Eddie Bauer was a very profitable multichannel marketing brand. As its director of circulation at the time, I was responsible for maximizing ROI in catalog marketing. We spent a lot of money on catalog marketing. We also spent a lot of money offering various discounts. Our favorite was “20% off your order of $100 or more.” When customers last purchased seven or more months ago, we began offering them this promotion. And it worked.

Clothiers have worked the catalog and retail combination for decades. Knowing the strength of multiple channels, they were early adopters of online marketing. But in multichannel branding, have they maintained their lead? To find out, we recently conducted a secret shopper exploration of Eddie Bauer, J.Crew and Anthropologie. (For the first part of this ongoing series, check out our Multichannel Shopper investigation of food merchants in our January 2009 issue, which is also archived at CatalogSuccess.com.)

A chat with Terry Powers, founder and president of ComputerGear, a catalog/multichannel merchant of computer-themed apparel and games — T-shirts, gadgets, books, among other things.

This month, we bring you the second in our exclusive quarterly reporting of Abacus Consumer Co-op data, the Quarterly Catalog Success/Abacus Consumer Co-op Data Report.

Below is the first in a quarterly series of charts featuring purchase data compiled from Abacus Consumer Co-op members. Abacus is making this data available exclusively to Catalog Success. The first one contains data from Sept. 1, 2006, through Aug. 31, 2008. This analysis is limited to co-op members who were active through the entire time frame and includes only catalog, online and retail transactions. Consumer sales growth was solid for the first two months of 2008, before falling off at the end of the first quarter, according to a subset of Abacus Consumer Cooperative members with catalog, online or retail transactions from Sept.