Creating a Luxury Experience at Value Retail

Jose B. Alvarez; Matthew  Preble

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2013 (Revised March 2013)

Creating a Luxury Experience at Value Retail

Abstract

Value Retail PLC owned and managed a number of premium shopping destinations (Villages) across Europe. Soon the company would be moving into an entirely new market: China. The company's Villages had proven popular with both shoppers (many of whom were international tourists who had come to Europe specifically to visit one of Value Retail's Villages) and brands, a number of which were luxury brands that had historically avoided selling product at outlet locations. The company's Founder and Chairman, Scott Malkin, looked to the future challenges his company might face in China, as well as to the challenges his company faced around human resource management and organizational control as the company grew in size and formalized parts of its processes, and how his company would be impacted by the ongoing changes in the retail industry, including the rise of online shopping.

Keywords: retailing; tourism; luxury; brand building; brand positioning; brands and branding; real estate; Brands and Branding; Human Resources; Retail Industry; Tourism Industry; Real Estate Industry; Europe; China;

Language: English

Format: Print

30 pages

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Citation:

Alvarez, Jose B., and Matthew Preble. "Creating a Luxury Experience at Value Retail." Harvard Business School Case 513-009, January 2013. (Revised March 2013.)

WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey was concerned about the culture of his rapidly expanding global venture. In particular, he wanted to ensure that WeWork continued to be a great place to work, both because he cared about WeWork's people and because a better work experience was core to the company’s brand. In the summer of 2017, he had made a presentation to the company at an all-hands meeting. In it, he proposed the creation of a culture operations team, and he announced that he would take the title of chief culture officer to lead it. In this case, which describes the founding and growth of WeWork from 2010, we encounter McKelvey planning for his new role with co-founder Adam Neumann and envisioning a “culture OS” that he and Neumann would use to lead the organization internally—and to offer as a “product” to scaled enterprises externally.

Chef Wolfgang Puck oversees a disparate business empire that includes fine dining restaurants, a catering business, and various licensed products that run from cookware, to soup, to fast-casual restaurants. His businesses activities are divided between three separate entities—Wolfgang Puck Fine Dining Group, Wolfgang Puck Catering, and Wolfgang Puck Worldwide—that share some formal and informal linkages. But the key person holding this all together is Wolfgang Puck himself. Now in his late 60s, Puck wonders what he needs to formalize—in terms of systems, processes, and management—to ensure that his different businesses will endure long after he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of these three businesses.

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised November 2018)

Index

Jose Alvarez and Julia Kelley

In December 2017, Marc Freed-Finnegan and Jonathan Wall, the co-founders of retail technology company Index, had to discuss the company’s direction as they entered 2018. Five years earlier, Freed-Finnegan and Wall had founded Index after observing the technological advantages that Amazon and other online retailers had over brick-and-mortar retailers. Index’s first product was a customer database tool that allowed brick-and-mortar retailers to collect customer contact information (e.g., email addresses) at the time of checkout. Index soon added automated marketing tools and payment/security tools (e.g., encryption) to its product portfolio. However, selling to large retail chains had proved challenging—many stakeholders were involved in the buying decision, creating a long sales process, and some retailers did not understand why they should trust a small, young company with their payment security. By late 2017, Index had made some changes to reduce the average sales cycle, but there was still room for improvement. Now, Index was preparing to launch a new product, Index Connect, that would essentially allow retailers to pool customer contact data and be more competitive with Amazon. Participants must evaluate whether Index was taking the right approach to sales and marketing and consider how the company could position Index Connect to be a success.

Keywords: Product Launch; Product Positioning; Sales; Strategy; Marketing Strategy; Retail Industry; Technology Industry;

Citation:

Alvarez, Jose, and Julia Kelley. "Index." Harvard Business School Case 518-038, January 2018. (Revised November 2018.) View Details

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