Sears Shop At Home

In a roundtable discussion held on April 11 during a Hudson Valley DMA luncheon in Greenwich, Conn., Hanover Direct Vice President of Corporate Marketing Amy Schilder led a group on the best practices involved in partnership marketing. Specifically, she pointed out that partnerships with other marketing companies require several key components in order for them to work for both parties. Below are several take-away pointers from the discussion in which she focused primarily on Hanover’s own partnership with Sears, in which Sears offers a line of clothing from Hanover’s Silhouettes catalog. * Make sure both partners’ goals are in line with one another. In the Sears-Silhouettes

While in the library doing research for a graduate course in marketing, I analyzed some catalogs such as Spiegel, Lands’ End, and Smith & Noble. Then I came across two old Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogs published in 1897 and 1908. At first, I read the Sears books only out of curiosity. The catalogs ran to almost 1,200 pages and included a seemingly endless selection of food, clothing and machines. The company sold more than 100,000 items at the time, consistent with its tag line, “We Sell Everything.” Indeed, the cataloger even sold kit homes, and customers could furnish those homes with kitchen

The executives at Sears were busy last month. First, they bought controlling interest in Lands’ End—news that sent shock waves through the retail industry. Seems that Sears is shelling out $1.9 billion undoubtedly in an attempt to capture the cataloger’s younger, more upscale customers. The move also catapults Sears back into the U.S. catalog business, an industry that the retailer pioneered before scrapping its Big Book back in the 1990s. The benefit to Lands’ End, of course, is that it instantly gets a nationwide, brick-and-mortar presence for its branded products. Sears’ officials said the deal effectively puts Lands’ End’s merchandise within 75 miles