How Sports Authority Plans To Grow

By Kara Murphy, contributing writer, Integrated Solutions For Retailers

New CEO gives details of e-commerce, expansion plans

News Sports Authority CEO Michael Foss laid out his plans to gaining more of a market share in sporting goods in a recent interview with the Denver Business Journal.

Foss said his approach to improving business includes:

• Running the existing business better by responding to customer issues and doing a better job of getting inventory on the shelves at the right time.
• Getting smarter in terms of promotional effectiveness by better leveraging loyalty databases.
• Better direct marketing efforts. “One of our challenges has been that our customers have been a little confused as to what we stand for. A lot of work our marketing team has been doing is how you segment customers and where do we want to target?” he said. “So you’ll see a lot more of what we call a brand refresh, where we try to focus on a subset of the customers and be more meaningful for them — with a positioning that will resonate with them.”
• Focusing more on e-commerce by making a more robust site so it becomes a primary channel for shoppers, which will in turn, it’s hoped, facilitate more in-store sales.

“We’re getting everyone aligned around the importance of e-commerce,” he said.

In addition, Foss said the store is moving away from carrying hunting and fishing supplies. The chain has slowly been remodeling stores since 2012 and the stores that have the new format generally don’t carry hunting and fishing supplies, Foss said.

“We have slowly been exiting out of it,” he said. “For us, it’s been a relatively low-return business. We’d much rather utilize that space for expanding categories that I think are more robust for us.”

Foss also told the Denver Business Journal that while he wouldn’t talk exactly about the company’s strategy for expansion, the goal is to add more stores in 2014 than the chain added in 2013 and hasten the remodeling of existing stores into the new format, pushing the new-store development to the highest-priority markets.

“We know how the economics work for us, so we’re going to invest a fair amount of money to continue down that path,” he said.

Read more about Foss’s plans for the future of Sports Authority.