According to WeatherOptics predictions, a major storm will move across the country from today (Wednesday) to Friday, with 80 million people under some sort of winter weather advisory and a large forecast impact on retail sales. Today’s Insight Flash shows where the biggest sales losses are expected to be as the storm moves across its path, with discounters the most likely to lose business. As the storm moves across the country, there are varying impacts by retailer by state by day.
Before the PayPal Mafia ran tech, the Traitorous Eight were the “it” entrepreneurs that founded unicorns after having left Shockley Semiconductor. And before them, it was the folks from Bell Labs. But how about today? Is there a new PayPal Mafia in the making, whose employees will shift the tech landscape? Which companies are churning out the most successful entrepreneurs of tomorrow? Although consulting companies continue to boast the number of alumni who founded unicorns, we see that big tech companies still have an edge.
Our latest white paper dives into 10 retail brands that have shown significant growth in 2021 and are well positioned for an even stronger 2022. Below we highlight two of these retailers to watch – Blink Fitness and Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. According to the National Health & Fitness Alliance, over 20% of pre-COVID fitness club locations have permanently closed since the pandemic began – which means that there will be significant unit expansion opportunities for the fitness chains that have managed to weather the storm.
Q2 2020 will go down in history as an unprecedented period for the mobile economy. People stayed home and downloaded a lot of apps. With gyms closed in many countries, health and fitness app downloads surged from 565 million to 811 million in that single quarter (Q2 2020). After that dramatic spike in the early days of lockdown, download volumes of health and fitness apps settled down last year. Aside from the covid-induced anomaly year, the long term trend for the category was still growing as we head into 2022.
When hair salons temporarily closed at the beginning of the pandemic, many consumers turned to DIY haircuts—with varying degrees of success. Hair salons gradually reopened as COVID-19 cases slowed and state and local authorities lifted their shelter-in-place orders, but sales at Regis Corporation (NYSE: RGS)—the parent company behind salon brands such as Supercuts, Cost Cutters, and SmartStyle—remain below pre-pandemic levels. Our analysis of consumer transaction data shows that sales recovery for Regis Corporation has varied by state, especially early in the pandemic.
Amazon has emerged as a leading brick and mortar grocery player through its Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh brands. We dove into foot traffic data to understand how the company’s offline grocery ventures performed and interacted with each other in 2021. Over a year has passed since the first Amazon Fresh location opened its doors in Woodland Hills, California. The company now operates over 20 stores throughout the United States, with the highest concentration of Amazon Fresh locations in California and Illinois.
We've just released our data-packed report, Benchmarking the Global Mobile Retailing Landscape. The report looks at the global and regional shopping app leaders across Q4 2021 and the full calendar year. We then dive into the specific U.S. markets of Brick n' Mortar retailers, Fast Fashion, Direct to Consumer, C2C Marketplaces and Luxury retailers. For the top 30 Brick n’ Mortar apps, the .2% growth YoY in 2021 suggests mobile took a backseat to the physical stores that operated at near-normal in 2021.
When the mobile phone first emerged, it was a communication tool. People used phones to talk. Later, they texted. Then, around 2006, industry insiders started re-positioning the phone as a multimedia computer you could carry around in your pocket. They were right, of course. The smartphone did become a tool for information-gathering, shopping, banking — touching virtually every facet of our lives. It changed mobile behavior forever.
While our latest Coffee Deep Dive broke down the unique opportunity in the coffee and breakfast segment of the wider dining space, there was a specific need to call out the strength displayed by Starbucks in 2021. Considering the wider impacts of COVID on shopping and work behavior, it would have been fair to assume that visits would remain below normal levels throughout the year. And that is exactly how 2021 began, with visits down 16.1% and 18.4% in January and February, respectively, compared to the same months in 2019.
Disney+ has surpassed a major milestone of $2 billion in lifetime global consumer spend through the app stores. Disney+ joins the coveted $2 Billion Dollar Club — in the company of only 34 other mobile apps and games as of January 25, 2022. Within this group, mobile games represent 26 of the 35 apps — alongside only 9 non-gaming apps. Furthermore, Disney+ is 1 of only 5 video streaming providers to reach this coveted milestone, alongside Netflix, YouTube, Tencent Video and iQIYI.
Our Q4 Retail Quarterly Index Reports analyze the performance of five key retail sectors – grocery, home improvement, fitness, superstores, and apparel – from a location analytics perspective. The reports provide insights into the quarterly performance of each category by diving into foot traffic patterns in the sectors as a whole and evaluating visit metrics for leading brands. You can check out the full reports in The Square.
Across demographic cohorts, by age and gender, we’ve seen clear indications of preferences emerge. While some trends hold true, However, the intensity of the skew varies by country, along with the apps most likely to be used by each demographic cohort. However, it is important to note that our analysis is limited to males and females only and is not representative of all gender identities.
In early January 2022, Mattress Firm filed for an IPO. The mattress company was taken private in late summer 2016 after about five years of trading on the NASDAQ. Consumer spending data shows that Mattress Firm’s sales have grown over the past two years, as average transaction values at the retailer have increased compared to before the pandemic. Mattress Firm has experienced increasing sales since early in the pandemic. Between Q2 and Q3 of 2020, sales grew 49 percent and have remained elevated through the end of 2021. Notably, Mattress Firm temporarily closed about 50 percent of its stores in March 2020, with most reopening by late May 2020.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how toxic work culture is driving the big resignation, in our joint article with Culture X that appeared in the MIT Sloan Review. Today, we want to know which aspects of work contribute the most to employee satisfaction and what companies that do well have in common. Using employee review scores, we look at which topic ratings impact overall company ratings the most. Below shows the effect other topics have on overall satisfaction, holding constant time and company, only identifying from the variation of scores within a company.
Few companies in retail have been under a more intense spotlight of late than Kohl’s. From potential takeovers to splitting its online and offline businesses, the attention on the department leader has only increased in recent weeks. So where does the company’s physical retail performance stand and how is it trending? Kohl’s had seen a steady and significant recovery throughout the first half of 2021 with the year-over-two-year (Yo2Y) visit gap declining from 18.8% in February to just 5.7% in July.
Over the course of the day yesterday, WeatherOptics’s highly sensitive forecasting systems began to show increasing probability of a Northeast blizzard this weekend. With this early warning, today’s Insight Flash demonstrates how to use CE’s unique set of weather impact tools to assess which companies will see the biggest impact to their sales in the Boston area and nationwide. Looking at the brands whose sales are most heavily indexed to the Boston area, which is extremely likely to be one of the hardest hit this weekend, discretionary retailer Marshalls stands out as having the largest impact, with a -60% sales decline due to weather over the two-day weekend.
We've just released our new and data-packed report, Benchmarking the Global Mobile Retailing Landscape. The report looks at the global and regional shopping app leaders across Q4 2021 and the full calendar year. We then dive into the specific U.S. markets of Brick n' Mortar retailers, Fast Fashion, Direct to Consumer, C2C Marketplaces and Luxury retailers.
The fast growing China cosmetics market has been increasingly gaining investors’ attention. The emergence and rise of domestic players widened choices for consumers and exerted fierce competition into the market, encouraging brands to adapt quickly and seek more effective strategies. Meanwhile, constant change in consumer appetite within yet another year under the pandemic have led the landscape to evolve.
Etsy, even moreso than most marketplace businesses, has built success on sourcing a unique set of one-of-a-kind items from a diverse set of creators and collectors. What is inside the Etsy basket has changed dramatically over the last two years, with its ability to quickly take advantage of a demand for custom masks filling a void in the mass production marketplace. In today’s Insight Flash, we demonstrate how our CE Receipt and CE Web data can work together to show what’s happening below the Etsy top line
Netflix's 13 mobile games have been installed more than eight million times since they launched on November 3, 2021. Not all 13 games were released simultaneously, but five did go live on day one. You can see the staggered release schedule in the image below. Last November, Netflix began bundling mobile games into its subscription at no extra cost. You can find the games in your Netflix app or through the app stores, as they are available to download and launch separately. However, a Netflix subscription is required to play the games.
