Limited Brands (Columbus, Ohio) was named the winner of the VM+SD/Peter Glen Retailer of the Year award at VM+SD's second annual International Retail Design Conference last week in Pasadena, Calif.
Limited was honored for “continually examining ways to refresh and reinvigorate its retail brands,” said VM+SD editor Steve Kaufman. “And, perhaps most important to this industry and to this award, it always understood the integration of store planning, design, merchandising and the shopping environment into the overall emphasis on what it is trying to accomplish.”
The retailer, which will be celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2003, was chosen, said Kaufman, because it exemplified the values held dear by Glen, a consultant and speaker and a VM+SD columnist for 18 years, who passed away in October 2001. “Peter Glen felt retailing was all about retailers understanding who they were or should be,” Kaufman said, “understanding how to present themselves to their customers in the best possible light and understanding how to burrow inside themselves to figure out what they should be doing.”
Limited Brands, the name the company adopted this year after being The Limited Inc. since 1963, owns and/or operates a variety of specialty retail chains. Its stores include The Limited, Express, Lerner New York (in the process of being renamed New York & Co.), Henri Bendel and Structure, which it is re-branding as Express Men's. It also owns Intimate Brands: Victoria's Secret (lingerie stores and catalogs); Bath & Body Works (personal care product stores); White Barn Candle Co. (candles and fragrances); and the new aura science operation, a joint venture with Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido. It still owns a part of former subsidiaries such as Too Inc., Galyan's and Abercrombie & Fitch.
VM+SD's second annual conference attracted some 600 attendees, who heard a variety of speakers including retail consultant and publisher Kurt Barnard; Barney's creative director Simon Doonan; Nike creative executive John Hoke III; Peter Dixon of Lippincott & Margulies; Michael Bodziner of Gensler; Michael Fisher of Apple Computer; Christine Belich of Sony Style; Heather Amuny-Dey of Nike; Tim Heard of E*TRADE Financial; Chip Israel of Lighting Design Alliance; Ira Kalish of Retail Forward Inc.; Tony Mancini of Walt Disney Imagineering and Parks & Resorts; Ste4ve McGowan of FRCH Design Worldwide; N.V.R. Nathan of the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Hyderabad, India; Ron Pompei of Pompei A.D.; Laura Rose of REI; Christopher Barriscale and Marta Salas-Porras of Fitch Worldwide; Paula Stafford of Callison Architecture; and Irma Zandl of the Zandl Group.
Complete coverage of the three-day conference can be found in VM+SD magazine, beginning with the November 2002 issue.