Urban Outfitters Reports Record Holiday Sales

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

Company prepared for holiday season with mobile investments; continues to secure its name as an omni-channel retailer uniting “bricks with clicks”

While many retailers are lowering their full year outlooks following the highly promotional holiday season, Urban Outfitters announced that it had a successful holiday season for the two-month period ended December 31. The company reports record net sales, increasing 8 percent to $716 million. While comparable retail segment sales were a bit lower for the Urban Outfitter’s brand, its other two brands Free People and Anthropologie saw “outstanding” increases of 21 percent and 11 percent respectively, despite the highly promotional atmosphere, CEO Richard Hayne says.

In its progression toward the holiday season this year, Urban Outfitters made a name for itself as one of the retailers leading the omni-channel charge. Barbara Thau for Forbes says the company’s focus on its e-commerce channel is not just an effort to boost online sales in the age of Internet retailing, but also to draw shoppers into stores. While many retailers began amping up their e-commerce strategies for the holidays to draw customers into stores (especially with the buy online, pick-up in stores programs), Urban Outfitters was one of the companies leading the charge into the “clicks and bricks” concept earlier this year. Thau cites an L2 report revealing that Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie were among the 22 percent of brands that enabled customers to locate online items in a store nearby. It also fully utilizes the store locater function on its site to encourage customers to make it to the physical stores. In a really clever merging of in-store and online characteristics, the brand even went so far as to feature a “now playing in store” music playlist on its mobile store locator pages.

Innovative ideas can combine “bricks and clicks”

In fact, mobile was a key part of its holiday initiatives this year. In October, the company overhauled its app adding the Urban On rewards program as well as barcode scanning capabilities. The company’s web and customer analytics director Jim Davis told Ad Age that mobile is the way to keep the company moving ahead and garnering higher traffic levels. However, for a company hoping to keep mobile a large part of its brand identity, senior marketing manager Moira Gregonis says that the company has been pretty low key in encouraging downloads; rather, they let the customers do the work. “We’re not being very pushy in stores at the moment. Once our engaged customers get on it and start using it, they’ll spread the word. You can scan your phone at point of sale, so it will be a bit like the Starbucks phone movement, where you see people using it and say, ‘Oh, what is that?’”

In the past, the brand has also proven that it knows its demographic well and is there to meet its needs in any ways possible — even beyond the goods they have on sale. Back in July, the company began offering customers iPhone charging stations in certain store locations. So, for Urban Outfitters’ target text-happy, social-media surfing generation who might need to recharge their batteries, they’ll find they can do that in Urban Outfitters and maybe get some shopping in while they’re at it.

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