Ramped up wedding business is designed to woo key demographic.
Macy’s is upping it game when it comes to the wedding business, adding higher-end bridal jewelry to its offerings and providing new training for its personal shoppers to deal with couples with pre-wedding jitters. This is all an effort to target the $60 billion U.S. wedding market, and particularly to draw in millennials, according to Fortune.
The effort is being led by Shawn Outler, who took the reins as senior vice president of the revamped wedding services strategy in 2014. Outler set as her goal the revitalization of merchandise and service opportunities for customers planning their nuptials.
A 2015 survey of brides conducted by wedding marketplace The Knot found that the average length of an engagement is 14.5 months in the U.S. Macy’s apparently has been missing out on the earlier phases of engagements Fortune reported.
“We have an opportunity to service the couple throughout the entire wedding journey, not just at the point of registry,” Shawn Outler, the Macy’s senior vice president overseeing the wedding strategy, told Fortune on a tour of the retailer’s Manhattan flagship. “We weren’t quite messaging to those opportunities but we knew we were selling the product.”
Macy’s Inc’s Chief Financial Officer Karen Hoguet explained that the initiative, internally called “All Things Wedding,” is an important effort to foster cross selling and perhaps more importantly, “build ongoing loyalty with millennial customers,” as she put it. Since the average age for people getting married for the first time is 27 for women and 29 for men – millennials – it makes sense to pursue this initiative to help boost Macy’s sagging numbers. The retailer has seen several quarters of sales declines as many shoppers defect to discount chains like T.J. Maxx or simply shift their spending patterns away from apparel to areas like home improvement and car repairs.
The “I Do” initiative is designed to engage and support customers from the ring, to skin care, tuxes, honeymoon apparel, home goods and beyond.
“This is one part of the couple’s life you can’t mess up on,” Outler told Fortune. “We want this to lead to first anniversary shopping, the first baby, the first home. We want these customers for life.”
