koreanjohn32

What Will Save the Bombay Company?

Having actually worked at Bombay, albeit a short six months, I can say that the issues are more about a stagnant organization that has grown accustomed to underperforming and a missed consumer focus. Bombay started to ignore it's real customer base, a 60-something woman with fairly conservative taste, and tried to be the next player next to Pottery Barn, which is also doing badly at the moment. It moved quickly, but without really giving too much thought to how it could effectively shift so radically and still maintain growth.

How does one shift market perception about what a company is about? Abercrombie and Fitch moved from being a sort of "Brooks Brothers" men's store into a hip, sexy fashion statement, and like LG (Lucky Goldstar), A&F was able to leverage it's name in a new way. Unfortunately, Bombay Company hasn't been able to do the same. Would it B&C?

Maybe I'm being a bit of a geographical snob, but perhaps high fashion is just not going to emerge from someplace as landlocked as Fort Worth(though they do have some great museum architecture). The cool designers seem to like Los Angeles, or New York. Even so, perhaps the biggest failure that this business model suffers from is that, being a design house, design was never the focus. Rather numbers were, even as the brand image suffered. How does a company like this survive such long-term abuse?