Staples Unveiling New Products, Categories

As Office Depot/Office Max (Boca Raton, Fla.) move forward with their newly unified company, office supply chain Staples (Framingham, Mass.) has plans of its own aimed to increase store profitability and sales. New products and categories are debuting in Dallas-area stores today, and will hit the shelves at Staples stores across the U.S. later this month. They include medical scrubs, educational toys and expanded educational supplies, and construction gear such as safety cones. Other new products include Keurig coffee makers and supplies, travel-sized toiletries, and safety items such as fire extinguishers.

Once on shelves, new products will account for 20 percent of Staples’ inventory. According to the Dallas Morning News, 1,000 items, from typewriter ribbons to some small furniture pieces, will be pulled from store shelves and moved online to make room for 1,600 new offerings. As office supplies are one of the best-performing categories in online sales, hundreds of the big-box operations have closed in recent years and more, including dozens of Office Depots, Office Maxes and Staples, will close in coming months. Staples’ new store format, just 12,000 square feet, is half the size of its previous generation of stores. According to the company, the smaller footprint, combined with online sales can generate 95% of the sales of a traditional big box store.