Gap beats feet to online shoe retailing
Looking to boost flat e-commerce sales and appeal to more youthful buyers as well as adults, Gap Inc. will become an online shoe retailer.
The company, No. 24 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites, plans to launch a new online footwear business through its e-commerce division, Gap Inc. Direct, and feature leading brands for women, men and children. The new business is expected to go online in time for the 2006 holiday season with a broad assortment of footwear offerings from designer to casual brands, Gap says.
“The highly fragmented, rapidly growing online footwear market offers a tremendous opportunity for Gap to leverage our expertise in e-commerce, merchandising and marketing to deliver a distinct fashion point of view,” says Toby Lenk, president of Gap Inc. Direct. “Customers will be able to put together complete looks online from head to toe.”
Online footwear sales are growing nearly 15% annually and will become a $5.5 billion market by 2010, according to Forrester Research Inc. “Almost two-thirds of our online customers surveyed last year said that they would buy shoes online from Gap,” Lenk says. “Gap.com, OldNavy.com and BananaRepublic.com all are consistently among the top 10 specialty apparel sites in terms of traffic, so we believe we already have an active and loyal customer base for online footwear.”
Gap is looking for new ways to attract customers and turn around its multi-channel sales. In Q1 2006, total sales decreased 5% to $3.44 billion from $3.63 billion in Q1 2005. Gap has yet to report Q1 e-commerce sales, but in 2005 web sales increased just 5.7% to $595 million from $563 million in 2004. “Our goal is to complement existing brands by giving our customers another way to complete their look. Our brands will continue to offer shoes and our brand web sites will link to our new e-commerce footwear site,” says a Gap spokeswoman.
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