Great piece in The Information about how “salespeople at department stores like Saks, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom are using Instagram, and to a lesser extent TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn, to attract new, often younger audiences and expand their reach beyond local shoppers … It’s a new way of doing business: the sales associate as an in-store influencer, albeit one who’s wired into the old-school department store machine.”
An example cited in the story:
Tyler Bell was encouraging all her clients to “tag your bag.”
Every time Bell, a Saks Fifth Avenue stylist in Troy, Mich., closed a sale, she asked the buyer to show off their purchase on Instagram and tag her account, @tyler.saks. Bell posts Saks inventory multiple times a day on Instagram Stories. Her 27,000 followers will message her directly, asking her to buy a pair of shoes, a sweater or some makeup for them. Then she’ll charge their cards and ship them their purchases.
The story goes on:
Bell started working at Saks in 2020 after getting laid off from a job with the Detroit Pistons. Now the vast majority of her sales come from Instagram, she said, not the sales floor. She averages $2.5 million to $3 million in sales annually—in the top 20% of sales associates at the company. She’s part of a new class of department store clerks who operate this way, using social media to replace in-store sales, and she earns 4% to 10% in commissions on everything she sells.
And:
The arrangement also works for the corporate offices. Beleaguered department stores are still losing sales—the value of the American department store industry has declined 4.1% per year, on average, between 2018 and 2023. At Nordstrom, the company’s net sales in the third quarter of 2023 decreased 6.8% compared to the same time last year. In-person retail on the whole has seen a fair number of casualties this year, as major retailers close thousands of stores across the country.
Though some executives were skeptical of selling via Instagram at first, department stores are now fully sanctioning the practice, as it can bring in new customers from different locations and within different age groups, and may appeal to people who’d rather shop at home.
Jessica Cloutier is the senior director of sales and styling at Nordstrom. She pointed to the pandemic as a turning point for sales on Instagram. But, according to Cloutier, Nordstrom is still seeing year-over-year growth in digital styling sales, meaning sales made by employees online. Instagram is the most dominant platform, but sellers are experimenting with Facebook groups, on TikTok and even on LinkedIn, though those are all much slower growing. Nordstrom is now encouraging all sales associates to make Instagram accounts.
KC’s View:
Let’s be clear – department stores are facing all their own challenges, trying to figure out how to be relevant and resonant in 2024 and beyond. Not all will survive.
But I love this development, and not just because it has analog employees taking advantage of digital innovations to grow their customer bases, sales and profits. (Though this is ingenious.)
I really love it because it would appear that the employees involved feel a sense of ownership over their own careers and the businesses for which they work. They’re innovating in a way that matters to shoppers, which brings benefits to everybody. And while some executives may have been “skeptical” in the beginning, they are smart to know that their digital footprints to goi beyond traditional lanes/websites. Those footprints have to go in new directions and create organic connections.
If department stores are going to survive as a species, these kinds of adjustments are necessary.
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