Off-Price Retailer Bealls Finally Builds the App Everyone Else Built a Decade Ago

Bealls, the off-price retailer with more than 650 stores across 23 states, is launching its first mobile app, built to connect shoppers across channels and support the chain's loyalty, acquisition, and customer-lifetime-value goals. The app ships alongside Bealls' first national integrated ad campaign, "For the Haul of It," which organizes its marketing around different "haul personalities": the deal seeker, the strategic planner, the fashion lover, the family shopper. Senior Vice President of Marketing Leana Less summed up the thinking: "Marketing creates the reason to come, and our stores create the reason to return."

The timing isn't an accident. Bealls is also opening 13 new stores and expanding its New York City buying office, following the same growth math as off-price rivals Ross and Burlington, both of which are expanding their own footprints while full-price retail slows. Adobe is forecasting a 6.7% jump in US online holiday sales this year, to $275.1 billion, and Bealls clearly wants more of that running through an app it controls rather than a third-party marketplace.

What's notable is how late to this particular party Bealls is. Off-price chains have historically been slow to build the kind of digital loyalty infrastructure mall-based competitors figured out a decade ago, on the theory that treasure-hunt shopping doesn't translate to an app screen. Bealls is betting that theory is wrong, that a shopper chasing a deal still wants a notification when one shows up. If "For the Haul of It" gets people opening an app instead of just wandering into a store they happen to pass, Bealls will have cracked something most of off-price retail has left on the table.

Source: Retail Dive

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →