In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, J.Crew CEO Mickey Drexler made a shocking admission: that he missed the boat on technology’s ability to rapidly transform retailing. And now he’s leaving the company.
In an era when technology obviously has had a massive impact on the evolution of shopper preferences and habits, Drexler’s admission shows that even the most-seasoned execs can totally whiff when it comes to predicting the future.
The RTP team discusses what retailers — CEOs in particular — can do to learn from this mistake, especially as they aim to keep a more open-minded point of view regarding their brands’ future.
Debbie Hauss, Editor-in-Chief: It’s difficult for us, as retail editors who write about retail technology every day, to believe that a longtime retail CEO would miss the mark on new technology to that degree. To me it sounds a bit like an over-reaching excuse for failure. That said, it is an ongoing struggle for retailers to juggle the priorities of “keeping the lights on” vs. implementing the latest shiny object. And often it is the right decision to hold off and let others experiment with new tech before jumping in. But at some point they have to jump in or face FOBLB (an acronym I just invented: Fear Of Being Left Behind). Once all your competitors have implemented and are succeeding with mobile POS, RFID, AI or IoT, then your lame attempt at jumping in too late may just be that — too late. In today’s fast-moving, digitally motivated society, retailers really do need to speed up the decision-making process when it comes to innovative technologies that will improve the customer experience and exceed customer expectations. It’s okay to test and learn in order to stay in the game.
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Adam Blair, Executive Editor: Mickey Drexler’s mea culpa is a welcome bit of honesty, but he’s certainly not the only one who missed a bunch of signs that now seem crystal clear in hindsight. Personally, I’m still surprised that people buy as much as they do on mobile devices — despite the fact that, like every other first-world citizen, my phone is rarely more than a few feet away from me, 24/7. For J.Crew, it appears the past decade’s rapid changes in technology did more than put price and convenience ahead of brand loyalty and product quality in consumers’ minds. As this WNYC radio report noted, the ocean of choices available via e-Commerce chipped away at the aspirational appeal of the J.Crew brand. The Wall Street Journal article quotes J.P. Morgan Chase analyst Carla Casella, who sums up the problem quite succinctly: “The days of people wearing head-to-toe J.Crew are over.” That’s a shift that was accelerated by technological changes, but it likely would have happened in any case.
Glenn Taylor, Senior Editor: CEOs and their fellow C-Level execs must take data collection seriously if they want to understand shifting consumer desires in real time, but they also are going to have to rely more on crowdsourcing. Drexler’s gaffe reveals that there simply wasn’t enough attention being paid to the fact that shoppers increasingly valued convenience. I remember when I first started covering retail nearly four years ago, I was astounded by how many technologies appeared at conferences such as NRF. My first NRF in 2014 brought a lot of hype to beacons, and the naïve version of myself was truly convinced that we’d see them in the majority of stores within the year. Although the technology definitely has value from a data collection standpoint, the prospective nationwide proliferation of beacons turned out to be an overreaction to hype on my end. It shows just how easy it is to get caught up in an idea before seeing whether it has true practical applications.
Klaudia Tirico, Features Editor: Mickey Drexler’s admission about missing the boat on technology’s ability to transform retail just goes to show that even though someone has many years of experience in the retail industry (or any industry for that matter), there is still more to learn. It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of new technologies — Chiefmartec.com’s Scott Brinker recently released his 2017 marketing technology landscape “supergraphic,” for example, and revealed that there are more than 5,000 technologies in the space for B2B and B2C marketers. That’s sure to be overwhelming, so it’s important for brands and retailers to keep their business objectives in mind before investing in the “shiny new toy.” Personally, I see where Drexler missed the mark when he thought that quality of product would reign supreme over anything else. But Janet Kloppenburg of JJK Research said it best in The Wall Street Journal piece: “The rules of the game have changed. It’s not just about product anymore. It’s also about speed and pricing.” Change is good, but it’s unfortunate for J. Crew that Drexler took so long to realize it.
