Zeina Mohamed, Emma Bernet, Jennifer Veyuidea 10/30/19 A Tale of Two Markets Write-Up Background Lynn Lambert, the creator of NYCSL was a successful actress in New York City. Lynne thought the subway presented a glance at the true nature of New York City, with its diversity of cultures and people. NYCSL was born in 1995, the first MTA apparel licensee. At the time it was a small company licensed by the MTA to manufacture merchandise with MTA symbols on it. The first attempt at a big department store “Macy” ended up with a loss to the company’s bottom line in the second order. The NYCSL needs to understand its target market and their segmentation. To do this they had to strategically introduce the product in a different setting. The company so had to set sight on a different market, the upscale gift market. To be successful in the gift market, price competitiveness and wide distribution are key. NYCSL product is different than the average gift merchandise and thus despite the higher price point, customers seemed to appreciate the content of the product. The products sold very well in the gift stores, often at prices even exceeding those of the trendier SoHo apparel boutiques. NYC subway Line garnered some periodic success attracting fashion-forward stores such as Kate’s Paperie, the Terence Conran store, and Takashimaya, the famous Japanese department store. By 2008, Lynne had established relationships with over 300 resellers. As of 2009, NYC Subway Line offered a range of men, women and children's clothing and accessories, including approximately 90 different products. Popular products included t-shirts, hoodies, bags, belts, hats, wallets, etc. Lynne generally designed her own apparel. Zeina Mohamed, Emma Bernet, Jennifer Veyuidea 10/30/19 A Tale of Two Markets Write-Up Recommendation: 1. Improve SEO so that the NYCSL appears on the first page of Google. The website is extremely hard to locate when typed into a search engine. 2. Focus on Urban apparel (hip hop and general) and Brand improvements 3. Continue with the promotional strategy but add a higher budget to create more awareness 4. Hire additional sales from New World Sales 5. Create apparel differentiation from gift merchandise Rational 1. Optimizing the search engine (SEO) to improve website traffic quality and quantity. By making the website or more accessible to web search engine users. SEO enhances unpaid results and excludes direct traffic / visitors and pay placement purchase. NYCSL can start with keyword research, with google AdWords or other free sites. Also, by doing research to understanding their competition. What they doing well? What content themes do they have that you’re lacking? Do they structure their site differently to target more valuable keywords? Do they have interesting features to better engage their prospects? 2. On page 73 you can see that Apparel in Urban General and Urban Hip Hop the sales totaled $763,670 in an average of 4 years. This is a total of 23.82% of total sales from 2004 to 2008. Out of those 23.82 percent ($763,670), 38.28% ($292,339) comes from HipHop apparel that was introduced in 2005. Even though sales decreased by -234 percent by 2008 ($50,662), this is a market worth enticing. This is the only market that seems to truly identify with out brand image and style. Zeina Mohamed, Emma Bernet, Jennifer Veyuidea 10/30/19 A Tale of Two Markets Write-Up The over all goal is to increase exposure to the outlets and their average consumer. We have to focus our understanding on what is the Urban HipHop style and stay relatively close to the trends in the classification. By increasing our value proposition statements of what we do, how we do it, and who we do it for, and what makes us different than our competitors. This will help in knowing exactly who our target audience is by building a buyer persona that allows us to improve our brand based on what is interesting or valuable to our target audience. It also helps build content that fits each stage of the journey they take to becoming a customer. The most important part is the strategic plan to attract new customers and keep them loyal to the business. Loyal customers increase the company's turnover; the increase of company's awareness is a great tool to increase customer’s loyalty. Raising awareness among the young people is particularly important for every company for successful expanding of the business in the future, because if the business is not done in time, no new clients grow older existing loyal. 3.
