The Challenge With Nordstrom’s Merchandising Strategy

Check out a few Nordstrom headlines in the last year:

June 2, 2020 "Nordstrom crushes inventory optimization"

December 3, 2021 "I Was Wrong. Nordstrom's Big Inventory Bet Paid Off"

March 3, 2021 "Inventory mismatch squeezes Nordstrom's holiday quarter"

Tricky right?

So now you know why last month prior to earnings, Nordstrom announced a realignment of its merchandising strategy with its vendors, more dropship, less wholesale, etc. It missed. It missed pretty big, especially relative to other retailers. Daphne Howland gets to the root of things. It's not that online didn't do well. It's not that other retail stores also weren't hurt by the pandemic.

But why particularly Nordstrom's. The only proximate cause worth surfacing is that it had too much stuff people didn't want. That's it.

Sometimes you miss, and then you recover. Two holidays like that, however, and Nordstrom's which is usually seen as a leader could easily be seen in the same bucket as Macy's, fighting for its retail life - despite its aggressive investments in technology, etc.