Online Beauty Startup Brings Personalization into Real World
Personalization is helping an online beauty startup bring its unique approach to makeup into a mall near you, and it recently got $25 million in in venture capital funding to do it. Founded in 2013, Madison Reed is an online beauty retailer. They have a questionnaire and algorithm that helps determine a customer’s ideal hair color based on photos customers upload to their site. The company now has two “Color Bars” in San Francisco and New York “where customers can receive coloring services and consult with professional colorists,” Business Insider recently reported. The company plans to have 25 Color Bars open by the end of 2019.
Increased Personalization Among 2018 Trends in Food Retail
Not only is personalization trendy in hair coloring, it’ll be one of several trends we see next year in the food retail industry. Retail Leader magazine recently defined five key trends outlined by Mintel, a market intelligence agency, that will impact food retailers and suppliers. Chief among them, according to Jenny Zegler, Mintel’s Global Food and Drink Analyst, is that “technology will help brands and retailers forge more personalized connections with shoppers.” Also important for food is how it sounds and feels to consumers. “Texture is the next facet of formulation that can be leveraged to provide consumers with interactive—and documentation-worthy—experiences.”
More Competition for Walmart – and it’s not from Amazon
There’s a new low-price retailer in town, and its name isn’t Amazon… it’s Lidl. You may not recognize the name yet, or its cousin Aldi, but the German companies are making waves in the U.S. in the brick-and-mortar retail world. Bloomberg recently noted they are successfully “tapping not only its traditional shopper base of bargain-hunters, but more affluent consumers, too.” In South Carolina, consumers will have both stores in the same area competing with home-grown shopping centers. The competition is encouraging, and indicates in-store retail shopping is still appealing.
DMM Publisher Takes Part in Pitney Bowes Conference
Tama J. Shor, the publisher of the Directory of Major Malls and ShoppingCenters.com, co-presented last month at a Pitney Bowes Business Summit. The session Tama participated in was called, “Shopping Centers: An Industry in Transition” and was joined by Gary Faitler, Senior Manager, Client Services, Pitney Bowes. “Indeed, there are dramatic changes occurring in the retail industry, but it’s not a ‘retail apocalypse.’ ” DMM keeps a close eye on the ongoing anchor tenant changes. We regularly update our tenant lists to reflect announcements of openings and closures. A recent study showed we currently list over 100 properties with two or more major anchors closing or already vacant. Subscribers to the DMM database can easily locate these properties via our online query tool and stay up-to-date.
