Nordstrom’s off-price Rack concept is helping draw sales and traffic to the retailer’s full-price stores, said Co-President Blake Nordstrom on a second-quarter earnings call. “The growth of Rack is also an important element of our strategy to gain new customers and increase engagement across channels,” he said, noting that Nordstrom Rack represents the chain’s biggest source of new customers, attracting some 4 million last year. “The Rack also serves as an entry point to the Nordstrom brand, providing opportunities for customers to cross-shop,” he said. “For example, last year we had 1 million Rack customers start to shop at our full-line stores or Nordstrom.com for the first time.” Nordstrom said the retailer will open 16 Rack stores in the third quarter, for a total of 194 stores by the end of the year.

“We consider full-line stores to be the core of our brand, providing our customers with a high level of service they expect from us,” Nordstrom said. “Not only are we serving more customers through new stores, we are benefiting from synergies across our channels. This is important, because we know that when customers engage with us across multiple touch points, their lifetime value and spend increase significantly.”

To meet mobile shoppers’ rapidly changing expectations, the company is rolling out new features at a rate three times faster than last year, Nordstrom said. “We launched a unique text-to-buy feature for our salespeople, enabling customers to buy product via text,” he said. “As customers continue to want a more integrated shopping experience, we view mobile as a long-term priority to provide a richer experience for our customers.”

The company’s total sales grew by 9 percent year on year in the second quarter, while same-store sales grew by 4.9 percent.

http://www.icsc.org/sct/newsletters/article/rack-stores-boost-nordstrom-sales/