Staples Inc. Case Analysis

Staples Inc.

Case Analysis

Submitted to

Prof. Venkataraman K

In Partial fulfilment of the requirements of the course

Retail Management

By

Group B10

Anupam Piyush (166017)

Mehul Gupta (166080)

Mrinmoy Choudhury (166084)

Niyanta Chowdhury (166098)

Saumya Baldi (166153)

Venkatesh Janakiraman (166191)

Q1. Is furniture, at present, a liability to the company?

Staples Inc. mainly sells standardized furniture. They offer 200 SKUs of furniture. The shopper visiting Staples inc expects high quality furniture at low price point. Also, according to table 3, they think that furniture provided by Staples Inc. are of limited selection and poor quality. The sales staffs are not trained well enough to sell the office furniture.
The most important factor is that the sales sq. feet for furniture category is very less for furniture category as compared to the others as we can see from table 2.

Combining all these factors, we can say that furniture section is currently a liability for Staples Inc. As the Harry Nassela, President, Staples Inc. quotes, “ No one knows how to sell furnitures.”

Q2. How should the merchandising of furniture be improved?

Ans) To improve the merchandising mix of furnitures in Staples Inc., we can use following parameters:-

1. Variety and presence of assortments:- Though Staples provide 200 SKUs in the furniture category, still customer complains about the limited selections of furniture. That means people are not happy with the current mix. Staples Inc. can do a market research to understand the current trends in furniture industry and starts providing those selection.
2. Customers (Purchasers) :- According to Table 3, 63% of purchasers of Staples Inc have less than 7 employee. This also includes self-employed customers. Thus, Staples Inc. can arrange their product mix accordingly with providing furniture for small or home grown businesses.
3. Product Categorization :- As most of the furnitures sells in form of standardization items such as Chairs, Banquet tables hence Staples Inc. should try to put more standardized products in their stores.

Q3. Would it make sense to have free-standing furniture showrooms?

Ans) Currently in the retail store furniture section takes space of 17000 sq ft in a store with an average area of 4000 sq ft. Also, the sales per sq ft are very low for furniture section. But at the same time they are trying to solve the problem by renovating the furniture section by upgrading the furniture setting by keeping it in more formal setting and including carpeting to give the setting a formal furniture store’s feel. Also, they are keeping wide range of product from $100 to $1000 rather than just keeping products equal or below than $300.