IKEA is a Swedish-founded, Dutch-headquartered multinational conglomerate that designs and sells ready-to-assemble furniture, kitchen appliances and home accessories, among other goods and home services. Started in Sweden in 1943 by 17-year-old Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA has been the world's largest furniture retailer since 2008. The brand used by the group is an acronym that consists of the founder's initials, and those of Elmtaryd, the family farm where he was born, and the nearby village Agunnaryd.
A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections. This kind of store is larger and has a wider selection than earlier grocery stores, but is smaller and more limited in the range of merchandise than a hypermarket or big-box market. In everyday U.S. usage, however, "grocery store" is synonymous with supermarket, and is not used to refer to other types of stores that sell groceries.
Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN) is a multinational lifestyle retail corporation headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It operates in the United States, Sweden, United Kingdom, Spain, Denmark, France, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the United Arab Emirates. The Urban Outfitters brand targets young adults with a merchandise mix of women's and men's fashion apparel, footwear, beauty and wellness products, accessories, activewear and gear, and housewares, as well as music, primarily vinyl records and cassettes. Much of the merchandise is designed and produced by the company's wholesale division on multiple private labels.
British Home Stores, commonly abbreviated to BHS and latterly legally styled BHS Ltd, was a British department store chain, primarily selling clothing and household items. In its later years, the company began to expand into furniture, electronics, entertainment, convenience groceries and fragrance and beauty products.
Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd., or Muji is a Japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods. Muji's design philosophy is minimalist, and it places an emphasis on recycling, reducing production and packaging waste, and a no-logo or "no-brand" policy. The name Muji is derived from the first part of Mujirushi Ryōhin, translated as No-Brand Quality Goods on Muji's European website.
Food Basics Ltd. is a Canadian supermarket chain owned by Metro Inc. The company operates over 130 stores throughout Ontario.
A big-box store is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain of stores. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store.
Habitat, is a brand of household furnishings in the United Kingdom and the main homewares brand within the Sainsbury's group.
Crate and Barrel Holdings is an international home decor store headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois. They employ 7500 employees over 100 stores in the United States and Canada, with franchises in countries in Europe.
Esprit Holdings Limited is a publicly owned manufacturer of clothing, footwear, accessories, jewellery and housewares under the Esprit label. The company is headquartered in North Point, Hong Kong, and Ratingen, Germany. In the 2019–2020 business year, Esprit generated a worldwide sales of around €1.05 billion. Esprit operates 225 retail stores worldwide and distributes products to more than 4,500 wholesale locations around the globe. Esprit has more than 234,000 square meters of retail space in 30 countries.
Visual Merchandising is the practice in the retail industry of optimizing the presentation of products and services to better highlight their features and benefits. The purpose of such visual merchandising is to attract, engage, and motivate the customer towards making a purchase.
Retail design is a creative and commercial discipline that combines several different areas of expertise together in the design and construction of retail space. Retail design is primarily a specialized practice of architecture and interior design, however it also incorporates elements of industrial design, graphic design, ergonomics, and advertising.
The Fort is a Nebraska-based multi-channel marketer specializing in western lifestyle merchandise including jeans, shirts, cowboy boots, hats, saddles and tack, old west clothing, work wear and home décor.
Nakajima USA, Inc., is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nakajima Japan, a family run company founded in 1919. A seasoned company in the design and manufacture of licensed plush, collectible and seasonal toys and gifts, Nakajima USA currently produces and distributes a wide range of lifestyle products under a master license agreement for Sanrio Inc. as well as the company’s signature characters.
Design Research was a retail store founded in 1953 by Ben Thompson in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and which introduced the concept of lifestyle store. In the 1970s under subsequent ownership, it became a chain of a dozen stores across the United States, but went bankrupt in 1978. Thompson's goal was to provide "a place where people could buy everything they needed for contemporary living", notably modern European furnishings and in particular Scandinavian design.
Originating in India in 1999, Lifestyle is an Emirati retail fashion brand which comes under Dubai-based retail and hospitality conglomerate, the Landmark Group.
Bouclair Inc. is a Canadian privately owned company and a lifestyle brand that offers home fashion and decor products including furniture, window coverings, bedding, lighting, home accents, wall décor and seasonal products through its own retail stores across Canada and online. The company is headquartered in Pointe-Claire, Quebec and operates 62 Bouclair Home stores across Quebec, Ontario, Western Canada, and Atlantic Canada. As of 2015, Bouclair has over 850 employees.
The retail format influences the consumer's store choice and addresses the consumer's expectations. At its most basic level, a retail format is a simple marketplace, that is; a location where goods and services are exchanged. In some parts of the world, the retail sector is still dominated by small family-run stores, but large retail chains are increasingly dominating the sector, because they can exert considerable buying power and pass on the savings in the form of lower prices. Many of these large retail chains also produce their own private labels which compete alongside manufacturer brands. Considerable consolidation of retail stores has changed the retail landscape, transferring power away from wholesalers and into the hands of the large retail chains.