Struggling Sears unveils ‘lighter’ new store format

Sears Canada has a new logo and a brand-new store format. Now what it really needs are some new customers, but it’s a gamble after years of sliding sales, revised retail strategies and ever-changing executives.

The department store chain unveiled its latest store makeover on Tuesday at its Promenade Mall store in north Toronto, and it’s a sizable shift away in appearance from its predecessor: The walls and ceiling-high displays that once divided the store into physical departments are gone, giving way to a territory where shoppers can see clear through in all directions to the furthest reaches of the 75,000 square-foot-retail space.

“This doesn’t look like a Sears,” Brandon Stranzl, the company’s executive chairman, said as he led a walk-through of the revived space. Becky Penrice, chief operating officer at Sears Canada, added that the new format gives executives the ability to test new ideas quickly. “It just feels lighter. We can change the configuration of the store regularly so that it is new and exciting for a customer ... in the old stores, everything was very hard to modify.”

The permanent clothing and home goods fixtures have been replaced by minimalist black metal fixturing on wheels, allowing merchandise displays to be moved easily and quickly on the polished concrete floor.

In parts, the layout resembles large self-serve specialty and offprice retailers, such as Designer Shoe Warehouse (DSW), Bed, Bath and Beyond or Marshalls, but with more attractive and coherent merchandise displays. Bold merchandise displays accompanied by the message WTS (What the Sears?) encourage shoppers inside the store and wider mall area to check out the new format.

It’s an influence not lost on Stranzl, who praised DSW’s format.

“A lot of what we have done around the store is take ideas from the best in the business, whether it’s in shoes, outerwear or appliances, and we have tried to bring that to our customers,” he said.

“If they have a model that they can roll out without a lot of investment that’s great because they have not been investing back into the business significantly,” said Catherine Saul, retail consultant at Catherine Saul Strategies in Toronto, said of Sears’ plan to take the new model to the remainder of its network over the next few years.

Same-store sales at Sears Canada have fallen 7.4 per cent and 5.5 per cent in the past two quarters, respectively, after falling 2.3 per cent in 2015 and 8.3 per cent in 2014. Poor performance is eating into profit: Sears posted a $91.6-million loss in its second quarter compared with earnings of $13.5 million a year earlier, when it posted a $67.2 million one-time gain from the sale and leaseback of two logistics centres, one in a number of lucrative sale-leaseback transactions over the past five years.