With physical stores going away, a lot of brands are left attempting to navigate their own online transition. These growing pains and this fundamental shift in how retail does business, and will do business in the future, is bigger than most realize. Yet with this sense of impending doom, to the old ways of brick and mortar, adoption of new ways has been slow.

 Let’s Talk Process First

In the “old days”, large wholesalers like Nordstrom and Macy’s had buyers. Those buyers would find designers, designs, brands, trends, and bring those into the store often by purchasing large bulk orders from that designer or brand. The buyer would say, “I will take this, this, and this”, the designer would get a purchase order, and then take that to manufacturing, where they would have the order shipped to the store. Now, if a wholesaler has traffic, they expect the designers to come to them, to figure out the dropshipping, and to promote on their own as well. This is such a huge shift, and really only one element of the changing retail landscape ahead of us.

Operating Systems That Operate

Sales and marketing, especially for midsized brands, is a tough place to be right now. Margins are tight, budgets haven’t moved, yet plenty of these brands have lost a lot of physical sales to the digitization of retail. Jan-Christopher Nugent, from Branded Online, pointed out that when these brands lose thirty to forty percent of brick and mortar sales, they often only make about fifteen to twenty percent of that back in the digital world, leaving a lot on the table. Branded Online offers commerce operating systems and solutions for this level of midsized player who needs to compete with bigger brands, but with a smaller budget and often with less teams or expertise in-house.

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