ECONIKA refuses men's shoes

The EKONIKA shoe cassette chain is ready to radically change the situation in the shoe market. November 12 at the First International Women's Festival Women Party the chain's top management announced a change in the company's positioning. Starting next year, EKONIKA will become the first specialized women's shoe network in Russia.

This means that men's shoes will be completely withdrawn from stores. And her place  will take new products for women.  The decision to switch to a new format was made after studying the market situation, consumer behavior and mood, as well as  taking into account the experience of Western retail chains.

In October 2010, the results of a special study by GFK-Rus were obtained, which revealed that:

- the main buyers of the EKONIKA stores are women;

- compared to the 2007 year, women are ready to buy more expensive shoes;

- Buyers choose, first of all, those stores where, in addition to the goods they like, their professionalism and the atmosphere of the purchase correspond to their expectations.

The survey was conducted in six Russian cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Rostov-on-Don, Kazan and Novosibirsk.

“We make the decision to specialize in women’s and abandon the men’s assortment after a thorough analysis,” says Sergey Sarkisov, vice president of Econika corporation. ago we changed the ratio by 30 to 70 and made sure that this did not lead to a drop in sales across the network as a whole.

And now the shoe network wants to concentrate fully on that audience, which it already understands very well.

Future success, in the opinion of EKONIKA Marketing Director Irina Chechel, is based on three factors.

Rebranding, carried out in 2007, showed that the distribution network has become brighter, more understandable to customers, more stylish and, paradoxically, more feminine.

Over the past years, the company has opened many stores in the regions, due to which the brand has become more recognizable.

And finally, perhaps the most important, but least noticeable factor - in three years, the company's designers have done a lot of work to improve the collection.

As noted by one of the country's main advertisers, the president lmh Group Igor Ganzha, "ECONIKA" - the first in Russia to build an adequate brand, supported by the format, business processes, complex solutions for organizing the work of stores, is moving in the right direction, only accelerating more and more every year ”.

According to Irina Chechel, already the spring-summer collection of 2011 will be stylistically refined, the general principle is: each style in fashion will have its own brand (recall that now EKONIKA has four brands of women's shoes).

In addition, the direction of accessories will be expanded.

As an experiment, men's shoes have already been removed from sale in several stores of the chain, a small sales failure was quickly compensated by the arrival of new customers.