Hillstrom's Merchandise Forensics

For whatever the reason, the companies I work with chose to cut back on new item investments following The Great Recession. This allowed businesses to return to healthy levels of profitability faster. Today, businesses are paying for reduced new item investments.

if you do not develop winning new items today, you don't have winning existing items tomorrow.

When a business shifts to a discount-centric model, demand pours out of some timeframes (January - October in this case), into other timeframes (Christmas in this case ... and Cyber Monday in particular). This business is just moving deck chairs around on the Titanic, moving demand out of full-price timeframes into promotional Christmas / Cyber Mon

actively evaluate new merchandise today, identifying future "winners", promoting those items, giving them every possible chance to succeed.

companies that experience success have robust new item development programs.

A website converts because customers want to buy the merchandise presented to them.

free to define your own "comp segment" however you like,

All of this online marketing wizardry and conversion theory doesn't move the needle, on an annual basis. Seriously.

the vast majority of differences we find in a comp segment analysis, year-over-year, are going to be caused by differences in merchandise productivity.