Trimming the fat - hautelook to be dropped - post regarding Nordstrom layoffs

Trimming the fat - hautelook to be dropped

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nordstrom-drops-hautelook-moves-flash-sales-to-rack-business/

Aside from Stores closures Nordstrom is really starting to trim the fat.
Since 2020
• all Jeffery locations closed
• all truck club locations closed
• hautelook to be closed/rolled into rack.com
Hautelook has always been a logistical nightmare for the rack, so I believe a negative is definitely a positive here.

A question I wanted to pose. The only major piece of Nordstrom fat left besides a major portion of there FLX stores, the indoor restaurants. Most department stores have heavy reduced indoor dining options at most location such as Macy’s or complete gotten rid of them like Boscovs & L&T

I’m not sure company wide; however my store which is mid-tier, loses 500k a year on the restaurant (pre-covid). Do we think Nordstrom will start to look to close the restaurants at least at the bottom half of performing stores?

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Used to work at the Rack, Hautelook was a never-ending nightmare! People would return large quantities of items all the time. Since most of the merchandise was not sold in stores, we had to create tickets to resell it. Processing Huatelook return was a very time-consuming process. Sure, free returns in store sounds great to the customer, but there were people who would literally bring in boxes of items, sometimes nearly 100 items at a clip. If they had just ticked all the online merchandise with the same tickets we use (like Nordstrom.com does), it would have made the return process at least twice as fast. The company's reasoning for the free in store returns was if the customer comes to the store, they will buy something else. While it sounds reasonable, I rarely saw it happen.

What it sounds like is they are just dropping the Hautelook brand, not sure if much else is going to change. Of course, I haven't worked for the company in nearly four years, so maybe the inventory has become more streamlined since then? Nordstrom was not wrong to invest in a online company (it has become a huge part of their business), but it was poorly integrated, even after more than 5 years of ownership.

So is this the Next Big Project in technology — building out the digital partner marketplace? Can they just plug into the Retail Service Platform APIs? Did that ever make it out the door in any proper way?

Hautelook and Trunk Club were GREAT investments... 🙄

Still seeing 80 headcount to hire in Seattle Technology, and 15 more in Denver. Flashy expensive titles!

Why is Denver even there? Did someone botch the project to shut it down?

Thread regarding Nordstrom layoffs

Trimming the fat - hautelook to be dropped

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