Education

Learn about educational events, informative webinars and special reports, designed and prepared to help members stay up-to- date on current business topics, trends and issues!

Stats: Back-to-School All Year Long

Every day is back-to-school shopping day. Almost. Back to school shopping, (which includes household items like kitchenware, tableware and home decor among those college-aged folks) has become hard to pin down, according to a new study from The NPD Group. While U.S. students usually go back to school around Labor Day and traditional back-to-school shopping also had a…

Trends: Here Comes the Registry

As the wedding season peaks for retailers over the summer and fall months, a new survey finds that registries aren’t going out of style: wedding guests continue to choose wedding registries for selecting gifts over other gifting options. According to The Knot’s 2016 Wedding Guest Survey, guests prefer registries, with 37 percent of wedding guests and attendants (bridesmaids…

Location! Location?

When Money magazine named Sioux Falls, S.D., on its list of the top 50 places to live last year, it caught some retailers living in Sioux Falls by surprise. Not that they didn’t enjoy the city, but the honorific came along after they had sweated out building a retail business. There was a time Sioux Falls wasn’t close to being on that list. Many independent retailers start…

Retail Profile: The Gourmet Warehouse

If Caren McSherry wasn’t the owner of a popular, successful gourmet store, she could be a candidate for the job of Energizer Bunny. When not traveling the world on buying trips for her Vancouver, BC store, The Gourmet Warehouse, McSherry is teaching cooking school, making weekly radio and television appearances, writing cookbooks (her seventh is due out this fall), raising…

Stats: Meal Kits Still Out at Home

Despite aggressive social media campaigns, meal delivery services are not coming close to replacing home-cooked meals. Yet. According to research from The NPD Group, the buzz around meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron and HelloFresh, “may be greater than those who currently use the kits.” NPD says only about 3 percent of the U.S. adult population (18 and older) tried…

Trends: Organic Goes Mainstream

If you’ve thought you have heard more about organic this year, you have. Sales of organic everything, from produce to prepared foods to clothes are spiking. Organic is not just a category for hippies anymore. The numbers show it is likely your customers are shopping organic as well. Organic sales in the U.S. for 2016 totaled $47 billion, up nearly $4 billion from the…

What’s Trending Now?

Despite vast differences in geography, climate and clientele, retailers across the country point to similar consumer trends they say are helping drive business this summer. For instance, from the Deep South to the Far West, products that inspire healthier cooking are a hit with shoppers; the market for grilling tools continues to flourish year round in all sorts of weather…

Retail Profile: Pamplemousse

Retailing is like parenting: adding another kid (or location) to the family doesn’t double the work— it triples the effort. Diana Manahan, who opened the doors to the second location of her successful store Pamplemousse in Reading, Mass., more than a decade after opening her first store in Salem, Mass., agrees. Partly because the second store is the one she always wanted to…

Stats: Americans Seek the American Dream

Despite reporting that their current financial position is healthy, most Americans still aren’t satisfied. It is a dour mood that could have an impact on what you sell at retail. That’s according to new research from Mintel, which says that half of all Americans consider themselves “middle class,” even though most report they can pay their monthly bills with money left…