Olivier Bron on Making Bloomingdale’s Desirable Again

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Background:

For most of the last 30 years, the American department store has been a story of decline: store closures, bankruptcies, endless discounting and floors packed with racks that looked the same from one store to the next.

Bloomingdale’s is starting to tell a different story. Last quarter, its comparable sales grew more than 11 percent, its second quarter in a row of double-digit growth, at a moment when much of the luxury industry is struggling to grow at all.

The man behind that turnaround is Olivier Bron, who arrived in New York nearly three years ago to become the CEO of the venerable department store chain which had lost its lustre. Bron believes that Bloomingdale’s can still matter to shoppers and to brands, but only if it gives people a reason to walk in.

This week, Bron joins Imran Amed to talk about how you make a brand every American knows desirable again, and why some of luxury’s biggest brands are wrestling with exactly the same question.

Key Insights:

• Art, science and care: Bron’s retail philosophy, distilled from his years at Bain & Company, rests on balancing instinct with data. “The magic is happening when you have this touch of inspiration and point of view that you don’t get with just data,” he says, adding that the second ingredient is simpler: “You need to care for others. You need to like serving others and helping people by bringing joy.”
• Execution is essential: Asked about the biggest lesson from turning around Galeries Lafayette’s 70-store network, Bron points not to vision but to delivery. “You can have the best strategy, but if you fail in execution, then your experience will land flat,” he says.
• Fewer brands, more space: Bloomingdale’s has deliberately shrunk its brand count to deepen its relationships with the ones that remain. “We probably have 10 percent less brands, but probably expressed in a better way,” Bron says of the store’s luxury renovation.
• The US market keeps getting wealthier: Bloomingdale’s wealthiest base of customers is not only expanding but also spending more. “We’re seeing more wealthy people and the already wealthy people have become wealthier,” he says, though he acknowledges the midterm elections and AI-driven market jitters as real risks.
• Awareness isn’t desirability: Bron draws a sharp distinction between the two, and applies it as freely to his own brand as to European luxury houses. “Everyone knows about Bloomingdale’s, everyone. In the US, the awareness is very, very strong. But the desirability, the credibility of the brand in this luxury world is not where it should be,” he says. “We were so obsessed about financial returns, about short term performance that you lose ground on this long term perspective.
• Top personal shoppers run businesses inside the business: Bron says Bloomingdale’s incentive for its personal shoppers is having the brands, inventory, systems and space for them to maximise sales. Home has widened what each associate can sell: “When a customer is spending millions in fashion, I can tell you that these customers are spending millions on their homes as well.”

Additional Resources:

• Bloomingdale’s CEO on the Future of American Department Stores
• Luxury Brands Target ‘Desirability First’ — But How to Measure It?
• Pete Nordstrom on the Enduring Power of Retail’s ‘Best Mousetrap’