Fully Stocked Shoe Displays Let Lord & Taylor Capture More Sales

Lord & Taylor faced an all-too-common retail problem: you can’t sell what you don’t show.

In the fast-changing, high-turnover arena of fashion, hot items fly off the shelves – and unless the display floor is quickly and properly stocked, the next potential sales opportunity can fly away, too.

The shoe department was particularly challenging. In Lord & Taylor’s flagship Fifth Avenue store in New York, thousands of different styles and colors of shoes are on display every day.

Sales associates worked hard to keep up with restocking the floor, but a complete display inventory required associates to physically touch every shoe to capture its bar code, so compliancy could only be performed weekly.

That meant days might pass with dozens of styles missing from the display samples. Ironically, high traffic and successful sales actually compounded the problem – as more shoes were sold, more display samples went missing and staff were too busy serving customers to attend to review and restocking.