Digital is no panacea, the online boys ASOS etc are not getting the basics right and making no money either, trashing their
own market pricing. The discount mantra is flawed, in the retail turnarounds we have led / supported Wolsey Ireland, Aspace and a few others The challenge is to get the business models assortments and gross margins right. The retail selling model is complex and means / cost of recruiting new customers is key. It does have a future, but the inflated fixed costs of UK property make it impossible to weather a dip. I was talikng with a retailers yesterday re Mothercare turnaround has been very slow and weakly led for years, but will likely survive, but with the right degree of sophistication required to make money could be a great business. when we have recruited CEOS for these businesses we’ve found the main issue is that the traditional retail skills to run retailers form days a yonder don’t now have the skills and it needs a fresh degree of sophistication to make money. Thats what icebreaker bring to get these businesses solvent. we got Aspace back to solvency in 3m , whose CEOs mantra was customers being hooked on discounts – that’s flawed. Lets catch up sometime, cheers Tom
