Throwing in the towels … and sheets - Home - Sears, Roebuck and Co

DSN Retailing Today, August 4, 2003 by Mike Duff

Sears is playing catch-up in home but has taken strides--particularly in domestics--to revitalize a category that had fallen behind the competition.

Sears has launched Lands' End domestics, and a recent store visit in Queens, N.Y., revealed that the retailer is featuring the label in tabletop aisle displays.

"Lands' End home products, of the good/better/best, they are considered best,"said spokeswoman Lee Antonio.

However, the key to domestics' revitalization is the Whole Home brand. Sears developed Whole Home to simplify its domestics assortment and merchandising as it has with Covington in apparel. Sears launched a Whole Home merchandising program dubbed Colormate Coordinates to help shoppers match everything from bath accessories to towels to bedding.

Yet to make its private and proprietary labels work, said Doug Garnett, president of marketing firm Atomic Direct, Sears has to decide if it wants to pursue true brand building or take an approach like Target's in using own brands to build the store's image. That figures into a second challenge: to convince customers that Sears is the kind of store where they should shop home goods. "Sometimes format determines if a private label is going to be successful," he said.

"For their customers, I don't think Sears has been a place to buy heine," noted Phil Zahn, a Fitch analyst.

Today, mass marketers feature luxury fibers such as Supima, pima and Egyptian cotton, but Sears only carries Supima and Egyptian in a limited array of bedding and bath rugs. In towels, Lands' End items are long staple cotton, Antonio said. Also, Wal-Mart recently offered Springmaid pima bath towels at a metropolitan New York store for $5.92 while private label Common Sense 100% cotton bath towels sold for $2.88. Whole Home 100% cotton bath towels were on sale for $4.99 in July but were listed as a $6.99 standard price at the Queens store, while Lands' End bath towels were $10.

"If Wal-Mart is ahead, then Sears is behind the eight ball." said Fitch analyst Michelin Barishaw. "If they are going to catch up at Sears, they have to start immediately."