After years of living in a dysfunctional relationship with Sears, Lands’ End has found a good home in Kohl’s. Lands’ End has a healthy brand, but it was being compromised by being associated with Sears. This is terrific for Kohl’s as well. They need quality brands and Lands’ End fits the bill. I’m not sure Lands’ End warrants store-within-a-store setups, but I’m sure Kohl’s will figure out how to make the most of this new relationship.

Lands’ End AND Kohl’s would both have to do a bunch of things wrong for this partnership to have a worse outcome than the Sears deal. We wish Lands’ End the best of success. Love the brand!

Price point will be critical. Can I use my Kohl’s coupon and Kohl’s Cash for Lands’ End merchandise? If not, they are just going to make everything else at Kohl’s look better priced – good for Kohl’s, bad for Lands’ End.

This partnership holds strong potential for both parties. The easy, and wrong, execution would be to simply flow Lands’ End product into the existing classification floor sets. The better, and more difficult, execution will be to set up Lands’ End shops by gender. Just because Sears couldn’t make that work doesn’t mean Kohl’s won’t make it work. Take a lesson from Target, where they have both brand and classification shops in apparel. Get credit in the eyes of the customer.

Yes, this is a much better home for Lands’ End to survive — and hopefully thrive. Kohl’s is more focused on everyday necessities and “living” than Sears’ “catch-all” and increasingly haphazard approach to merchandise offered and the overall experience. Kohl’s has the right demographics to bring appeal to the Lands’ End brand. Good luck to both in this newfound relationship (and two Wisconsin-based companies with Midwestern values certainly doesn’t hurt!).

Well look, it can’t be a worse home than in a dismal Sears store with little traffic and a gloomy atmosphere! I always felt rather sorry for Lands’ End within Sears as the section usually looked neat and was very out of place.

That said, while Kohl’s is a better fit in terms of environment and customer demographic, the chain has a lot of work left to do in allowing brands like Lands’ End to shine. At present most Kohl’s stores are a densely packed jumble of merchandise which is hard and unpleasant to shop. If Lands’ End gets shoved into this mess, it won’t reach its potential.

More exposure and better consumer traffic, Lands’ End inside Kohl’s is a win-win for both retailers. The merchandise should be displayed in a separate department, a store-within-a-store, that is maintained to Lands’ End standards.

Mixing Lands’ End product in with other Kohl’s merchandise won’t make it special. Have you seen a Kohl’s sales floor and fitting rooms on a busy day? It’s a merchandise presentation disaster.

It makes more sense and is a better fit, but I hope they separate it as a micro-store or micro-department. It is too easy for it to get lost in the way the clothing department is laid out in a Kohl’s.

Even if this deal isn’t great for Lands’ End, it will be better than where they were. No matter online or in-store, Kohl’s will offer more traffic and better execution than Sears ever could. Today, as yesterday, retail is about traffic, online or otherwise. Kohl’s will offer that.

But please don’t mix the Lands’ End product in with general merchandise. It is a valuable brand and mixing it in just makes it like everything else. Make it a special department which will reflect more positively on both brands.

Kohls’s will be a good fit for Lands’ End. Sears was an odd choice since the chain was slowing down and apparel is not the first thing most people think about buying at Sears. Kohl’s will get a strong brand, and Sears will get desirable locations with a retailer that focuses on apparel. Time will tell, but Lands’ End is such a well known brand, a store-within-a-store concept should work best. Customers will provide data as to whether the brands should be mixed.

So I can speak from quite a bit of experience here, as I was instrumental in the Lands’ End acquisition, including leading the integration team, when I was an executive at Sears. Today it’s not even worth debating whether Lands’ End is better at Kohl’s than it has been at Sears in recent years. What’s important is understanding the intended strategic role for Lands’ End at Sears, learning from the lessons of poor execution and what needs to happen going forward. At the time we did the deal, our strategic insight (which was valid) was that to reignite growth Sears needed to do many things including attracting new customers, driving incremental traffic, converting traffic better and building average transaction value. It was also critical for our softlines business to have a (mostly) exclusive brand similar all the success we had in hardlines with Kenmore, Craftsman, DieHard, et al. Lands’ End needed expanded physical reach for an emerging multichannel (now called “omnichannel” or my preferred term, “harmonized”) world. Most of the points are still instructive for… Read more »

Stephen asks a good question: How will Kohl’s overlapping discounts be applied to Lands’ End merchandise? Will it be subject to “no discounting,” along with a few other premium brands in the store?

The bigger question — especially in the 150 launch stores — is where to put the Lands’ End shop. It was easy in Sears (where the partnership was a failure) because those stores had apparel space to burn. Not so easy in a Kohl’s store, unless the shop goes into full size stores that have not yet been “right-sized.” But some assortment editing will probably be needed to make this work.

Despite these cautions, the deal looks like a win for both sides, especially on the e-commerce side of Kohl’s business.

This makes much better sense. Lands’ End in Sears didn’t work because, well, Sears didn’t work. Also today the online channel is much better developed which should allow a Lands’ End shopper the ability to get colors and sizes not available in-store easily enough.