The company is moving forward with its My Macy's program, a national effort that's been tested in 20 markets -- including Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati -- and is aimed at tailoring stores to local tastes.
In Columbus, that has meant adding more golf-style clothing, both for on and off the greens, given the area's many courses.
"We've found that there are a lot of men in that area who attend church in high-end golf apparel," spokeswoman Andrea Schwartz said.
Other Columbus-specific merchandise ranges from the obvious to the unusual.
"It's Ohio State country, so our stores in Columbus have a lot of licensed product," Schwartz said. "Also, it's a college town, so what do students wear? Denim. So we stock our Columbus-area stores with more denim in more brands."
The city's climate affects purchasing, too.
"Before My Macy's, things were bought for Columbus in Atlanta. With My Macy's in place, district planners are able to start offering cold-weather assortments earlier, end later and have more stock."
The goal is better sales -- and relationships with customers -- in the wake of a period of great change for the chain.
The program began in light of Macy's consolidation of well-known brands such as Lazarus and Kaufmann's, which allowed Macy's to eliminate more than 5,000 jobs.
The move saved hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few years, but there was a downside. "We lost touch with customers," said Susan Robinson, Macy's vice president of investor relations. And losing touch with customers meant a loss of sales, something that was hardly welcome as the worst recession in decades pummeled retailers.
The program sent a district planner out to malls and into stores to talk with customers, managers and employees, Robinson said.
"The idea was to push the decisionmaking down to the local level," she said.
That's what Macy's should have been doing all along, said Chris Boring, who leads the local retail consulting firm Boulevard Strategies.
"When they had those different nameplates -- Lazarus, Kaufmann's, etc. -- that was the advantage over other companies that have the exact same thing in every store around the country," Boring said. "Now, it seems like they're going back to a more decentralized concept, closer to the customer, which I'm in favor of."
The test program worked well, with participating stores "quickly outperforming the rest of the country," Robinson said. During the spring, My Macy's districts outperformed the rest of the stores by 2.6 percentage points. In the first half of the year, eight of the company's top-performing 10 districts were using the program.
"Having seen that success, we rolled out the program to the rest of the country," she said.
While the localization program is helping sales, the company's newly centralized structure in other areas -- including streamlining buying, planning and marketing into New York offices -- has strengthened relations with vendors, Robinson said.
Partly as a result of the new initiative and the new structure, Macy's boosted its profit outlook after reporting that its second-quarter earnings beat expectations. Macy's earned $7 million, or 2 cents per share, in the quarter that ended Aug. 1.
"There's differences, big differences," in what customers in various markets want, Robinson said. "That's what we're hoping to exploit. … We're now well-positioned to weather the current economic downturn and participate fully when the economy recovers."
tferan@dispatch.com
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