Chico's Fas Case

Chico's FAS is a Florida based clothing retailer, consisting of two more primary clothing lines, White House Black Market, and Soma. For the purposes of this paper all three brands will be referred to as Chico's unless specifically noted otherwise. They operate 1,151 stores and have an extensive Direct to Consumer (DTC) online market place. In order to operate this large business, Chico's must constantly employ the three functional strategy concerns of product, people and support systems.

Chico's offers their customers trendy, original designs which Chico's itself controls. Chico's ability to have its own in house designers allows it to not have to rely strictly on another firm's vision of fashionable. It can instead research what is in style now, forecast later trends and design their product line accordingly. This is very beneficial as long as the trend forecasters are accurate. It does seem though that Chico's is a powerful enough brand that it does have some say as to what is fashionable. In this light even a designer flub can become the next big thing.

As any profitable retailer does, Chico's places a great emphasis on marketing its product. The ever growing arm of e-commerce has forced Chico's to marry

its marketing strategy to the electronic world. Chico's has mad large investments in paid search engines, and high traffic website ads. Along with the above e-marketing Chico's had capitalized on the booming social media websites, allowing their customers to advertise for them.

One if the more innovative ideas Chico's has implemented in the marketing department is that they encourage managers and associates to participate in community events. These events can be charity or community building projects. Having employees show community support is an outstanding form of advertisement, and hopefully one that is seen more and more in times of difficulty.

Chico's sales associates are given extensive training in how to provide the best customer assistance, and wardrobe advice (Chico's, 2010). Chico's training regimen focuses on the "Most Amazing Customer Service" standard which puts emphasis on employee's abilities to deliver a more personalized customer service (Chico's, 2010). The theory behind this brand of employee training is to empower the employee to make decisions based on customer needs instead of strict blanket policy. An example given in the annual report is that if a specific item is not available at the store, a sales person is expected to locate the item either online or at another store and have that item shipped directly to the customer (Chico's, 2010). This empowering of employees will raise morale and give the staff member a feeling of accomplishment when they help a customer. That help is then appreciated by the customer who will return to Chico's for the outstanding