On Jan. The board of directors then tapped Edwards, an executive vice president and chief merchandising officer at the time, to temporarily take over the role. Edwards became the company's fourth CEO in five years. The company badly needed to stabilize its balance sheet and Edwards was set on making that his number one priority — it all seemed like a pretty simple task to him at the time.
If Borders was a traditional turnaround story, he thought, the retailer would need to downsize its store footprint and tune up its operations. Amazon released its first Kindle e-reader in and it sold out within hours. With sales migrating online, Edwards realized that every Borders store — 25, square feet on average — had about 10, square feet too many.
Managing a company on the brink of bankruptcy teaches you a lot about leadership, he said. For him, the process was difficult, but Edwards said he tried to be transparent and emit a sense of urgency. He was blunt with employees, acknowledging that he ultimately could not predict the future. Some chose to leave; others yet were let go. By August , the retailer only had about workers left at its corporate office. In one example, Edwards woke up one day and decided to take tags, which gave information such as which department books belonged to, off the books they were selling.
Mike Edwards didn't know what to expect when he returned to Borders' flagship office after filing the paperwork to liquidate Borders. But when he and then-CFO Scott Henry walked through the doors, they were greeted by hundreds of Borders employees, who applauded them for 20 minutes. There was a lot of pride in the brand. Most of the decisions that led to the end of Borders were made long before Edwards' plan to save the business. By the time he became CEO, the company had already spent years employing Amazon to sell its books online and had failed to seize on the e-book trend before it was too late.
You can be in the hotel business and then Airbnb can surround you with 20 properties with a great size at a lower cost. From experience, Edwards says crafting the right omnichannel experience for an over-stored traditional retailer is no easy task. Today, retail stores need to function with a level of exclusivity and experience. Otherwise, the brutal reality is that Amazon will cater to customers with a higher level of convenience and speed.
And I learned a lot. But his true passion has always been to run his own company, and Edwards now has a home as the CEO of eBags, an online seller of luggage and handbags. In making the decision to join the company, Edwards realized he was ready to be on the disrupting side of retail for a change.
While it feels good to be in a position to drive forward mobile and omnichannel strategies, he acknowledges that retail is facing a difficult moment. Whether you're in the online, omnichannel or traditional brick-and-mortar business, it's a time of constant transformation. Follow Corinne Ruff on Twitter. Those who've declared the Saks online-offline split a success now want the same for Macy's and Kohl's. The store was founded in the early s by Tom and Louis Borders, University of Michigan graduates who developed an inventory tracking system that, by the standards of the time, was as sophisticated as computers allowed.
When I came into publishing in the middle s, I was impressed with the shrewd team of buyers who dealt with publishers' sales representatives and the store staff that made the most of the simple aluminum fixtures where books were displayed. The Borders brothers began licensing their inventory system and began to expand to locations in Michigan and around Philadelphia. I especially remember a night in at the height of the presidential primary season when a Borders events coordinator filled an auditorium in downtown Philadelphia by featuring political books I was publishing: a model for how a store could become a venue for public engagement and customer loyalty.
In retrospect, that was when the trouble began. Kmart already owned Walden mall stores, which were an awkward commercial fit with the Borders culture. Kmart itself was at the start of a downward spiral, and in Borders was spun off in an IPO. For a time, the newly named Borders Group seemed to be working.
The losers were the local independents who couldn't keep up with the marketing and promotional resources of these national corporations. It was also in the mid s that Amazon launched as an online book retailer and Borders made what, in retrospect, was a serious strategic mistake. This global expansion seems to have blurred the focus on Borders' business in the United States.
Ultimately, the international strategy failed. Borders also was slower than it should have been in adapting new techniques for marketing.
I was startled to find, on a visit to Borders in Madison, Wisconsin, in , that the store still had no Internet access, instead channeling all communications through Ann Arbor. And there still seems to be a place for traditional bookstores — just not in the size and scope as they were.
Last year, the number of independent bookstores in the U. But the reality is that people are increasingly turning to digital books. In February, e-books outsold paperbacks for the first time ever , growing percent compared with the same month last year. But the days of the massive shopping mall-like stores appear to be numbered. Send to Kindle.
0コメント