Why Hudson's Bay Failed: The Downfall of a Canadian Icon

(00:00:00) The Rise and Fall of Hudson's Bay
(00:10:40) Identifying the Cracks: Early Warning Signs
(00:18:30) The Lack of Identity and Customer Experience
(00:25:32) Generational Disconnect: Evolving with Consumers
(00:36:43) The Final Days: A Retail Time Capsule
(00:40:36) Reimagining Hudson's Bay: A Path Forward

Garrett Gaudet explores the decline of Hudson's Bay, a historic Canadian retailer, focusing on the retail and customer experience aspects that contributed to its bankruptcy. He discusses the missed opportunities, lack of identity, and failure to adapt to changing consumer behaviours over the years. The conversation underscores the importance of understanding customer needs and adapting to the market, ultimately prompting a reflection on what could have been done differently to save the iconic brand.

Takeaways

• The decline of Hudson's Bay was not sudden; it was a result of years of neglect in adapting to consumer needs.
• The expansion into the Netherlands was a costly failure that highlighted the brand's lack of identity.
• The store's bland design and lack of Canadian identity contributed to its downfall.
• Younger generations viewed Hudson's Bay as a store to walk through rather than a shopping destination.
• The lack of personalized customer service diminished the shopping experience.
• Hudson's Bay failed to evolve with changing consumer behaviours, particularly among millennials and Gen Z.
• The final days of Hudson's Bay felt like a time capsule, showcasing outdated practices and designs.
• There was a disconnect between the brand's legacy and its current offerings, leading to a loss of consumer connection.

Connect with Garrett Gaudet
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garrettgaudet/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@garrettgaudet
Email: [e-mail]
Website: https://www.garrettgaudet.com/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's Garret and welcome back to the podcast. Today
is a podcast episode that I've been waiting to do
for years and I'm not exaggerating when it comes to years,
because today I'll be talking about what went wrong for
Hudson's Bay from a retail and customer experience perspective. And
it's not that we have a lot of history. We
do have a lot of history, and it's not just

(00:23):
the lead up to the bankruptcy is kind of what
all the headlines have been about. But I want to
do a deep dive into really what went wrong and
it just didn't happen overnight. So I am a college professor,
I am a marketing CX customer experience consultant, So that's
kind of the lens I'll be using for this analysis.
So it's not so much focusing on the finance part.

(00:44):
I know that private equity did play a big part
in this, so I'm not naive to there's more than
just the retail side or the financial side, but that
is the focus for this week's episode. For this episode,
so for some context, if you aren't familiar, maybe some
international listeners aren't familiar with what Hudson's Bay is there

(01:04):
a legacy department store was depending on when you're hearing
or listening to this, but in early twenty twenty five,
in early March twenty twenty five, Hudson's Bay filed for bankruptcy.
So on March twenty fourth we learned that all but
six stores will be liquidated and closed. In late April,
HBC confirmed that all eighty stores will be liquidated and closed,

(01:27):
marking the end of the three hundred and fifty five
year old retailer. So it predates Canada as a country.
There's lots of history which I won't get into today,
but it does definitely contribute to the significance of the
loss of this retailer in the Canadian marketplace, and everyone
has been talking about it. Everyone has been talking about

(01:49):
even if you didn't shop at the Bay. So Hudson's
Bay or also called the Bay, also known as the Bay,
has been on the mines of Canadians everywhere. Whether you
went to Hudson's Bay frequently, or maybe your parents did,
or you have memories as a child going through there,
or if you've been to a mall recently, maybe you

(02:10):
are familiar with Hudson Spay or have some shopping experience
with Hudson Spay. So, like I said, this is kind
of a series that I've been waiting for for the
last couple of years. And by no means have I
waited for the demise of Hudson Spay. It's the last
thing that I would have wanted. But I've had a
lot of thoughts opinions about Hudson's Bay. So the first

(02:30):
time I really talked about Hudson's Bay was in one
of my e business classes in twenty twenty, and in
that class, we were talking about the omni channel strategies
of having an online store and having retail that really
is synchronized with both of the models of the business.
But even back in twenty twenty, I had a lot

(02:50):
of criticism and we had a full deep dive when
it came to Hudson's Bay as a store that was
five years ago. A lot's changed in five years, but
yet the store has not. And that was one of
the first anecdotes that I kind of talked about vocally
about Hudson's Bay. Because students, a lot of gen z,

(03:12):
a lot of millennials, we came to the conclusion that
Hudson's Bay was just the store you walked through to
get to the mall. And I'm going to put a
pin in that. We'll come back to that later, but
that is a good segue to they should have hit
the panic button a lot sooner. The panic button should
have been ringing for years. I would say almost a
decade that the wheel should have been in motion to

(03:35):
change what they've been doing, because it hasn't been working
for the longest time. A lot of people might think, hey, this,
what do you mean I went bankrupt? They're everywhere just
because of business is everywhere and in a lot of malls,
and it looks prestigious, and it has this history doesn't
mean it's not vulnerable to the modern consumer. And really

(03:59):
the product of the store hasn't been good for a
while and it hasn't changed in a long time, which
I'll get to in the customer experience segment of this episode.
So why do I think the panic bunch should have
been hit a long time ago? Where I first started
to see the cracks in Hudson's Bay was when they

(04:19):
expanded into the Netherlands. So if you aren't familiar from
twenty seventeen to twenty nineteen, Hudson's Bay operated in the Netherlands.
So what they did is it's very similar to what
Target candidate did with Zellers, is they acquired a lot
of leases from Zellers at the time, which is kind
of ironic that we're talking about another Hudson's Bay company,

(04:41):
but they did try to break through in the country
of the Netherlands. So they acquired leases from former day
and Day stores and invested over three hundred and fifty
million Canadian into this Dutch expansion and this expansion into Europe.
So they acquired about twenty leases from the d stores
or Bay and Day stores, and they were very much

(05:03):
like a Hudson Spa, your typical traditional legacy department store
with everything you kind of are familiar with a Hudson Spay, a, Macy's, etc.
So they acquired twenty leases, but they only got fifteen
done and they only lasted two years in the Netherlands.
So it's a very expensive experiment, and that's why it

(05:24):
feels and went the way of kind of how Target
Canada went because it was such a poorly done expansion.
So I did have a couple of experiences at the
Dutch Hudson spay. So I went to one in Amstream
Underbroken in the main kind of street of the ursy

(05:45):
central area of Amstream and Amstream Centrum, and it was
a really nice store. However, it just lacked a lot
of personality and you couldn't tell it was Canadian. And
you know, from World War Two in the liberation of
the Netherlands and partly credited to the Canadian soldiers, there

(06:05):
is a longstanding history between the two countries where when
I go to the Netherlands, I'm Dutch Canadian. My mother
was born there, and anytime I mentioned Canadian, there's kind
of a switch, especially when there is such that still
good relationship and fond memories of Canadians, so there is

(06:27):
that relationship, and yet there is no signs of Hudson's
Bay being Canadian. In the Netherlands, the stores looked very
much like they do here. They looked kind of more
like the Yorkdale kind of more premium, high end modern
style stores that some consumers are familiar with Hudson's Bay,

(06:49):
but it didn't really show a lot of personality and
that was kind of odd to the Dutch. And when
I would talk to my family, my aunts about what
they thought of Hutson in Spay is like it just
kind of feels like the store they're replaced, And that's
again a huge red flag because if the store you're
replacing is simply the same thing with a different brand,

(07:12):
why do you think that's going to go different. It
shouldn't go different because it's kind of the same thing.
If you're not bringing something new to the table, if
you're not reimagining the retail experience, if you're not trying
to be different than the store you've replaced, you're not
really accomplishing anything at that point. And then they also
found it to be kind of expensive for what it was.

(07:34):
They already had a well established store of the biancre As,
this premium department store retailer. They didn't really need Hudson's Bay,
and for a long time Hudson's Bay has kind of
lacked that identity. Like I said, the stores were really
nice and nicer than a lot of the Canadian stores,
especially the one I just visited this weekend, which I'll

(07:56):
get to in a bit, But that was my experience
at the Dutch nice stores. But what was the value
proposition to the Dutch consumers there? Really really wasn't something
that made you go, oh, I've got to go to
Hudson Spay. Oh I have to experience a piece of Canada.
There's no sign that they were Canadian enough, because we

(08:19):
could have thrown at least a maple leaf, because that's
what every retailer is doing nowadays, especially with the by
Canadian movement, but there's no sign of that. There's no
visual identity that they were Canadian. It could have even
been branded Hudson's Bay of Canada and that would have
been a lot more significant to the Dutch consumer, or
even just introducing them to who the Bay is, because

(08:42):
I don't even know if Hudson's Bay could do that
to Canadians alone, a population that doesn't have that three
hundred and fifty year history with them or that significance
of growing up experience in the Bay or going to
the malls and shopping at Hudson Spay. So it just
that was the first time they should maybe the second
time that should have hit the panic button because we

(09:04):
also had the Seiars Canada bankruptcy in twenty seventeen, and
that's really when alarm bells should have went off because again,
much like the Bay Sears Canada was that typical traditional
legacy department store that had a similar value proposition. If
I'm in the mind of consumer, Hudson's Bay is probably

(09:25):
a little more premium and Sears is a little not
as premium, but still very two storied department store brands,
and one just hung on a little longer than the
other because they failed about a decade sooner, and they
tried to make an effort to change their business model.

(09:48):
So there was a Seiars two point oh store in
the mid twenty tens because that's when it was starting
to really fall apart for Sears, and Sears again was
another big anchor store in a lot of Canadian shopping
mall and what they tried to do was become more
of a Winner's a Marshal's, where it was these brands

(10:09):
at a discount. It wasn't this full price premium store.
It got rich a lot of their appliances and other
things that consumers knew to be located in a Seers
and it was just too little, too late. They could
not adjust quick enough and it was just great idea,
but too late, and there were a lot of stores

(10:29):
doing it better than Seers at the time Winners a
lot did it a lot better, so did Marshals. So
the competition didn't make sense, and the overhead of a large,
large store like Seers really didn't make sense in the
Canadian marketplace come to the twenty tents, and I would
say it was ineffective beyond that because the consumers started

(10:51):
to change and the stores just felt allD tired. And
that's kind of how I feel with some modern Hudson's
Bay stores. And I call it modern because it's current,
but not modern because of the design of them. So
I was as I was preparing for this episode, I
was on YouTube trying to do some research on Seers Canada,

(11:11):
and City News posted a video to YouTube published on
October twenty third, twenty seventeen. The title of video is
could Hudson's Bay go down the same path as Sears Canada?
So already news media business analysts were kind of predicting
or the long foreshadowing almost a decade before it actually occurred.

(11:34):
Was the writing was already in the wall because it
didn't take in it an above average consumer to go. Yeah,
they're kind of alike. I don't really shop there as much,
but again that's almost a decade earlier that consumers and
the news media was already talking about stuff like this.

(11:57):
Business conversations, business networks were already saying, hey, do we
think Hudson's Bay is going to go down this road?
And in the video they brought on a professor of
marketing or retail and he said, I wouldn't say it's
a definite yet, but it certainly could look that way.
And now we know it as a definite, and we

(12:18):
know it certainly did go that way. And one of
the biggest reasons, and we'll switch gears to the lack
of personality and identity, one of the biggest reasons Hudson's
Bay failed in the Netherlands and in Canada, because if
the stores are closing, it is a failure. Is the

(12:38):
lack of personality, is the lack of identity. To say
that the Hudson's Bay failed and have an identity is
I feel an obvious statement. I feel that of course
it did, because what does a Hudson's Bay store look like.
There's no color, it's been bland for decades. You can't

(13:00):
really if you didn't if you weren't Canadian and you
didn't know it was Canadian. You wouldn't know it's Canadian.
There is no visual identity, there's no imagery, there's no
nothing that really tied them to being Canadian. And that
is something that really works in Canada is being Canadian,
embracing that Canadian identity, that Canadian heritage. And there's no

(13:25):
other company in the world or in Canada that has
a longer identity of being Canadian and being in Canada
than Hudson Spay three hundred and fifty five years. No
other company can replicate that, and no other company ever will.
There's stores and retailers or brands like Tim Morton's iconically

(13:45):
Canadian owned by Americans, yet they're still so beloved by
millions of Canadians that they are the go to every
morning and part of the routine for millions of Canadians.
And that's not overstating that there still is that Canadian identity.
They've done campaigns with Ryan Reynolds, another iconic Canadian Hollywood star,

(14:07):
about being Canadian and trying his new scrambled eggs, because yeah,
of course Tim Morton's is doing these collabse in side
projects with celebrities like Ryan Reynolds about his scrambled eggs.
Of course, why not. But when they're so generic, you
become really forgettable. And that's what a lot of Kane consumers.

(14:33):
That's what happened in a lot mind That's what happened
in a lot of minds of Kane consumers is they
just forgot, like, you don't have to go to Hudson's
Bay anymore. It was no longer that destination that you
had to go to it. There's nothing inside the stores
that really drew you in or felt a sense of
connection or even strengthened the relationship with the consumer, because

(14:57):
it just looked like another wide, open department store. There
is nothing that really engaged you at all. I said
this earlier in the episode, but it is that store
that you enter to get through to go to the
shopping mall. You park by Hudson's Bay. You might stroll
through it, or you might just beline it right to

(15:19):
the mall. And when I talked with a lot of
my classes, that's kind of what the consensus was amongst
young people is that, yeah, my parents shopped there, but
I only know it because we park by the store
when we go to the mall, and there's this how
we cannot captivate that store traffic. How we can't captivate

(15:43):
that foot traffic to even engage them to be curious
about Hudson's Bay or even do something further than just
be that entrance point to the mall is such a
missed opportunity. Foot traffic in retail is very hard to
come by, millions of dollars every year on marketing and
getting people from their houses to the store because nowadays,

(16:06):
with alternatives like Amazon and other online retailers, you don't
have to go anywhere. So to get a consumer to
go to the store, you have to level up when
it comes to the customer experience. And that's really what
it needed for Hudson's Bay to become relevant again, or
stay relevant, or just give someone a reason to go there,

(16:30):
because there really wasn't a reason to go to Hudson Spay.
It wasn't for the customer experience. It wasn't because it
was a destination. It's not like an iko where it's like, oh,
this is cool. This is like an outing. There's a
restaurant there, you can look at all the furniture, build
the furniture. There's nothing tangible that tied someone to Hudson Spay.

(16:53):
They had a loyalty program great Hudson Bay Rewards. I
was a part of that, and I was still a
consumer of Hudson's Bay till this year, where I was
on their website looking at clothing and was just an
option for me as a consumer. But ultimately, when we
don't have an identity, when we have a lack of identity,

(17:15):
when we don't know whether we want to be a
luxury store, a premium department store, or a budget brand
or maybe something more affordable, more attainable to the general population.
So if we aren't a Nordstrum, if we aren't a
Giant Tiger, if we aren't a Winners, what are we?

(17:36):
Who are the target customers? Who is the target market?
And it never really felt clear because we had the
high end thousand dollars Jackets, but then we also had
Jockey and a lot of more attainable brands for consumers,
and it's just such a wide divide, but they didn't
really capture either segment of the market feel like a

(18:00):
premium experience, but then it also wasn't inviting to the
more budget consumer, So it's like, what are we doing here?
So when we are trying to be a premium it
does require premium service. And the reason that a luxury,
high end customer isn't brought into Hudson's Bay is because

(18:20):
the service level simply wasn't there. If you went to
Hudson's Bay in the last decade, you would be familiar
that it was either hard to find someone, or you
didn't have the assistance that you needed, or it was
just an empty store and you happened to see someone
at a cash register, or you happen to just find

(18:41):
someone by fitting rooms. But there's no one engaging you
in that process. And when we talk about a premium
a luxury experience, it is that personalization. It's that attentive service.
It's ensuring that their expectations can be met. Because when
we price items high, or or when we pride them
above the competitors, there has to be some sort of

(19:04):
reason to say to consumers that this price point is
worth it. Because if we don't give them a reason,
if we don't provide a rationale behind oh yeah, it's
about fifteen ten dollars twenty dollars more expensive than our competition,
they're not going to choose us because we're not providing
that ten twenty dollars value of that experience if we

(19:28):
have those attentative sales associates that know the brand or say, yeah,
I like this, but it's just not in the right size,
or can you recommend another brand that's kind of like
our Ralph Ren or Polar ref Loren or a Calvin
Klein but at a lower price point, Or I want
a shirt that looks like this and I just I

(19:49):
just don't know what to get. It's going to a
store to provide that expertise, or to have that expertise
to lean on when you don't know exactly what you're
looking for, because a lot of times consumers will know
I need this item if we're talking a peril for
a wedding or an interview or for work, and you
kind of want to lean on whoever's working at the

(20:10):
store because they really should be the experts of what
we're purchasing. And if we're just helping ourselves, then there's
no reason to go to the store for that. A
lot of specialty stores are still relevant and go to
for a lot of people because of the go tos
for the consumer. They feel confident that whenever they go

(20:31):
to that store that they're going to get, they help
the service and the expertise that they need when they
go to that store. Whether that's a mensware store, or
that's a flower shop or that's a coffee shop. It's
all in the small details and the interactions that we
can build these relationships with the consumer. Because when we're
not building the relationship of the consumer, it's falling apart.

(20:52):
It's fracturing and giving people reasons not to come back.
And when we don't provide reasons to stay, or we
don't pay attention to the customer or the relationship, it
falls apart. Very similar when the context of a romantic relationship,
Hudson Spey did not evolve with the consumer. I've grown

(21:15):
up with Hudson's Bay. I've probably been going Hudson's Bay
for over twenty years, first experiences as a child, and
it's very easy for it can be easy for a
brand to grow up with a generation. Obviously, Hudson's Bay
has made their money on boomers and some Gen X,
but now we've seen the shift to millennials being a

(21:39):
big part of the purchasing power that consumers have. And
they did not simply grow up with millennials. Millennials saw
technology evolve. Did not happen as much with Hudson's Bay
because when we are talking about millennials, who is going
out of their way to go to the all for

(22:00):
a brand called Chaps? And when you google image Chaps,
you certainly don't get the brand you want to give
that a Google So it really doesn't give much confidence
in a consumer like myself to go I don't even
know what that brand is? What is that brand identity?

(22:21):
Because when we're talking about what brings someone to a
store as a clothing retailer, those are things that you
want people go, oh I need that, or oh I
have exclusivity for these brands, or I really like that brand.
Let me go to Hudson's Bay for something like that.
And when there's still Chaps clothing. When I went on

(22:44):
Saturday to go to Hudson's Bay, it obviously wasn't working.
If Chaps are still left over at a liquidation clearance
sale with up to eighty percent off the retail price,
it wasn't working. They weren't, wasn't they. It wasn't a
brand that I want to go to. It wasn't a
brand that had any relationship with a consumer, and it

(23:06):
wasn't a brand that identified with the consumer that the
Bay wanted. So when we talk about not evolving with
a customer or a consumer, think about all the logos
on the walls of the Bay. When's the last time
they changed those up? Have they stayed for a decade
or two? Is there a reason to keep them around

(23:28):
after a decade or two. We've seen in other clothing
retailers that brands come and go, Brands become relevant and
fall off. There's trends, there's fads, there's influential pop culture
moments that bring a brand back. We've seen this with
other clothing retailers like Abercrombie really hot, really not, and

(23:50):
now they're hot again. It just happens that way. But
Abercrombie being a good example, is they've happened to grow
up with millennia. They were the customers that they were
in the early two thousands and still are a big
part of their business model. They found a way back
to the millennial consumer, and yet Hudson Spay really never

(24:13):
got into it. The Bay had the boomers on lock.
They really did. If you talked to the average consumer,
if you looked at who was shopping inside the bay.
It was definitely much an older generation because they have
the nostalgia. I still have the nostalgia, but it didn't

(24:33):
serve me like it did to them, because it served
a consumer behavior and a habit and that's just not
part of my consumer behavior. So when a millennial or
a gen Z walks into a Hudson Spay, it feels
like a time capsule. And there are differences in Hudson's Bay.

(24:54):
If you've been to, let's say, a Yorkdale Hudson Spay,
is a lot different than a regional Hudson sp Bay,
like the one at Wyoak Small in London. I went
to this past weekend. It looked like a time capsule.
I posted a video to my Instagram at Yarcadet of
just the final days of Hudson's Bay because I want
to capture this. I went to Zeller's as it was closing.
I went to Hudson's Bay as it was closing, and

(25:18):
it just felt old. Nothing changed, carpet was stained, there's
stains in the drop ceiling tiles. The computers that the
catch registers have aren't in color. It's a black screen.
With green text. I didn't grab a video of it
because I was kind of shocked. But you kind of

(25:38):
think of, like, okay, so if a younger person comes
into our store and they see kind of the technology
we're working with, what is that going to say to
the consumer. It still might work functionally, But if any
young person sees like it's not even running Windows XP,
what is that telling a consumer? What is that saying
about the relevancy or the innovation of a company? Like

(26:01):
it might still be functional, but it doesn't speak to them.
It says, yeah, we're old and we know it. It
should It serves a purpose. It sends a statement to
the consumer that oof, this company's old. This company hasn't
really changed things up. This company hasn't thought about changing
their computers, or if they have. This is kind of

(26:23):
where the technology is. It's not innovative, it's not new.
It looks as old as their stores do. And when
I walked through the stores, it's like, you know, what
felt like a museum felt old, felt dated, felt very empty,
and it was being liquidated. That didn't change it. It

(26:45):
felt very irrelevant. And that's simply what happened to the
company is they became irrelevant A long time ago, a
very very long time ago. At the liquidation store when
it was being liquidated, it was the busiest I've seen
the Bay in years, especially even comparing that to Christmas.

(27:07):
And that should be a retailer's easy time of year
as far as sales go. Now, to get someone to
a store a lot different, but that should be a
lot easier. So when this news broke this past semester,
I was teaching a retail management course with my Business
Entrepreneurship Group program, and I had them do a case

(27:29):
study of observations of Hudson's Bay because I introduced it
a couple weeks earlier where the news about Hudson's Bay
started to break about their bankruptcy, about them really just
crumbling and falling apart. And then it was announced, as
I alluded to earlier of top the episode, that they

(27:51):
were liquidating and closing all the stores. So I asked them,
and this is a room filled with I would say
from ages nineteen twenty to forties, so it's a good
sample size, but definitely Lean's younger. And they had such
impactful observations that any market research group would have come

(28:13):
up with and again, when the panic button should have
been hit over a decade ago, more than a decade ago,
this should have been happening. This should have been happening,
asking and interviewing people what they think. The feedback is
pretty important. Any fast food restaurant you go to, odds
are there's a receipt on the back for a survey

(28:34):
or feedback to fill out and you'll get a free appetizer,
a free burger. Wendy's does it a lot, but feedback
is important to these companies that are still relevant. And
if Hudson's Bay took time to even consider doing some feedback,
they might find out something. So some of the observations

(28:54):
my students had was a fifteen dollars delivery fee in
the era of Amazon. And I know all the retailers
can't do that, but that was a turnoff for them
even before they even start to get into the website.
That's something that they checked. So even if there is
like a spending threshold they need to hit, there's so
much of a turnoff that that was the case. Some

(29:14):
other things that they said, organize unorganized stores, dated layout,
perception of retail store doesn't match expectations, doing too much
so a lot of stores will niche down or identify
the brands that sell the brands that don't. They said
they were rigid, lacked clear identity, too much product, long

(29:36):
time for deliveries, failed to develop technology, they weren't clean,
they didn't communicate well enough. Lack of competitive pricing undercuts
perception with low cost. So that's again, if we don't
have an identity to be either premium or low cost,

(29:57):
then what are we doing If we can't appeal to
one or the other, and you can do both. You
look at the airline industry, they do to do both.
It just doesn't motivate someone to go out and go
to Hudson's Bay. It didn't respond to different generations, It
didn't use data analytics. Store quality, some of the escalators

(30:18):
barely worked, and that's an accessibility issue. But also says hey,
store is not really in great condition. So there was
really minimum level of efforts to really adapt to the consumer.
So they were very vocal about this, and would it
surprise you that not a not a lot of my

(30:39):
students would shop at Hudson's Bay. No, for all the
reason that I just mentioned, But there is no connection
to the company there's no connection to the brand itself. Yes,
you can respect the brand, and I understand the significance
of their history and how impactful they were to the
development of Canada as a nation, but it's not there.

(31:00):
You can only go so far on nostalgia. Hudson's Bay
tried to bring back Zellers, and that again was very
half baked. When they said and announced that Zeller's was
coming back, you would expect, okay, so it'll be like
a discount store and they would have some affordable products
or products that were more attainable to maybe some of

(31:20):
the premium clothes that they had of the Hugo Boss,
of the Calvin Klein, of the costs, all these luxury
premium brands. But no, there's a store within the store.
Was one of the departments within the store, but it
wasn't even all of their stores. And when I went
to Hudson's Bay with the Zellars, it was underwelling. You

(31:41):
had all this hype and you were banking on the
commodity that is nostalgia to bring customers into the store,
and it didn't work. It just fell short again. And
that's kind of the effort level that I think really
spoke to consumers of they're not trying anymore. They're not
trying to win my business. They're not trying to say, hey,

(32:02):
you should be shopping here. It just didn't work like
that anymore because the example of Zellers within the Hudson's
Bay was kind of like that. Now, it was nice
to see a more affordable kind of product range with
the Zeller's brand, and it could have been much more
prominent within their stores, but it was such a small
dedication of floor space of square footage that really didn't

(32:25):
really make a difference, and again falls really short the
layout of the store. I've talked about store experience a lot,
but the layout of the store didn't help. The layout
felt very open, which you know, an open floor plant

(32:46):
is fairly modern, but it didn't feel like it did
anything to a consumer. You look at stores like a
Hollis store or some of the other retail stores that
really took a lot of focus into crafting and image
and understanding what the consumer would want and how to
make it different, and it just felt like this big,
gaping store that really didn't do anything. It just felt cavernous.

(33:13):
Sometimes the lighting was poor. The one at White Oaks
definitely was poor where it just like, it just feels
very sterile. It doesn't feel like I want to be there.
There's no track lighting that was illuminating the clothing or
the merchandise or the products in a way that made
them look appealing. It's just very underwhelming. And when you

(33:37):
went to Hudson's Bay, you weren't sure what you were
getting into because, like I said, if you're going to
a Yorkdale Hudson's Bay, it feels like a premium store.
If you're going to White Oaks Hudson's Bay in London,
it just wasn't good. And that was kind of my
last visit Hudson Spay. I'm a big fan of reaching, y'all.

(34:00):
I enjoyed Hutson's Bay. I've gone to Hudson's Bay. When
I'm thinking about clothing, I was still thinking about Hudson's
Bay because I liked the brands only in Sons and
Scotch and Soda, and they had those brands, and I
was happy that they had those brands. But that can
only do so much, and especially when you talk about
the in store experience, it just wasn't great. So I

(34:23):
did go to Hutson's Bay, and all I could think
of is the Andrea Bocelli song time to Say Goodbye.
It was like time to say goodbye to the store
that hasn't changed since two thousand and two. So that's
how I felt about the store. It was just so dated,

(34:47):
so irrelevant that as a kid, I can't point out
what's changed. And in twenty years you should definitely see
some changes. Every store has gone through some transformations. Canadian
Tire has one an excellent job with the retail of
innovating with technology, utilizing an app. What is Hudson's Bay done?

(35:08):
Walmart twenty years ago? Very different store didn't really have
grocery now one of those main grocery stores for a
lot of Canadian consumers. So what have we done differently?
The price tags still had the old Bay logo. There
was a pair of sunglasses for over three hundred dollars
with the old Hudson's Bay tag. For what reason? Why

(35:32):
are we still clearing liquidating this product out that we
haven't used a logo in over a decade. It's still
so old, still dated. None of the products refreshed And
why was that we had so much opportunity with such
a legacy. If I had a company that I want
want to have my products in Hudson's Bay might be

(35:53):
one of those products that say, oh, your PROCs are
in Hudson's Bay, because it did hold that level of
prestige amongst consumers. But they still had the old priced tags,
and it just the final days really showed what went wrong.
It was a dated store. It wasn't clean, it felt old.
You didn't really feel like you're in a place where

(36:15):
it's like, oh, this is this is a nice store experience.
It wasn't a nice store experience. Chaps are still available
again if a brand's still available during a clearance liquidation sale.
They were never bring people into the store anyways. And
they also had lots of mannequins for so and I

(36:35):
want to buy a mannequin just for the joke, But
the mannequins were three hundred and fifty dollars. And I'm
always committed to the BIT, but not that committed to
the BIT. So here's what I would have done as
CEO of Hudson's Bay. I would have shrunk the store
size to about three thousand square feet, much much smaller

(36:56):
than what they have nowadays. It's too big, there's too much.
They were doing too much. It was so unnecessary, and
we know with a business like that, that's a lot
of high overhead, that's a lot of expense to hold
that rent, to hold that retail lease. There's no reason
for them to do that anymore. And that's a one

(37:16):
way we could have kept the cost down. But we
know when it goes to private equity, they only see
the value in the real estate and not the brand
or the store itself. You could have easily kept the
value of the real estate and reused that for other
retail You could have sold that off, become more of
a landlord or whatever the case was. For the dozens
of stores across Canada, there was ways out of that.

(37:39):
We could have maximized the value of that retail space.
But now now what Now there's no stores, Now there's
no huts in Spay I would have operated or introduced
a franchise model. So a franchise model meaning that you
could buy your own Hudson Spa and allow Canadians to
have a Hudson Spay. It would be a franchise model

(38:02):
with one hundred percent Canadian brands supporting an effort to
be produced in Canada. They are iconically Canadian, yet, like
I said, off the top, no one felt it as
much to compared to other brands or other stores like
a Canadian tire. Canadian Tires kind of now owned that
as the quintessential Canadian retailer. It's in the name, but

(38:24):
they really stayed true to that. They have kind of
franchise model. They have operations where individuals can own and
operate stores of their own, much like a home hardware.
They've both done a really great job in their retail game,
so it would be owned by Canadians for Canadians. It's
a really easy I'm gonna be careful with saying easy,

(38:48):
but especially in twenty twenty five and the first half
of twenty twenty five, there's so many Canadians that are
just motivate and patriotic and almost nationalistic about buying Canadian,
supporting can and it's a movement that definitely could be
captured nowadays if you really put an effort into it.
And one of the biggest things I've heard from people

(39:09):
is just I really wish there was an alternative to
Amazon that was Canadian. You could easily have and facilitate
a marketplace that was Canadian. Thebay dot Com churned it
into an online marketplace for Canadian brands or produced in Canada.
It's it's such a valuable ip that now can entire owns,

(39:29):
which I'll get into that in a little bit, but
it does have the option to be that Canadian brand
still and there's still some equity in the brand. There's
still some consumer sentiment in the brand. Now are is
the consumer population ready? Are Canadians ready for a reintroduction
of Hudson's Bay. I don't know, because it's going to

(39:51):
have to be a lot different than what it was.
Because if it's just coming back as a slightly different
version of itself, nobody is going to be interested. The
prestige of the brand will be so diluted if you
tried to bring it back in a lackluster effort. I
don't know if that's possible, but I do have trust
in Kinney entire Like, like I said, I'll get into that.

(40:14):
It would focus on personal shopping. Some of the best
retail experiences I've personally had were people that genuinely helped
me out or wanted to provide the service of helping
me find what I'm looking for or understanding what I'm
looking for, because there's a big difference of helping me
versus understanding. They can just push product or they can say, yeah,

(40:39):
I think I know what you're talking about. Let me
show you two where that is. The product mix would
be apparel, but also kind of like a general store.
It would allow for smaller towns, tertiary markets, not even
secondary markets. I would say populations fifty thousand ish to
have their own Hudson's Bay. I think it'd be an

(41:02):
option for a smaller town to have an authentic Canadian
retailer and a retailer that has a purpose and has
a mission behind it. Because there are retail stores, there
are clothing apparel stores even in the city that I
live in, Woodstock, but it doesn't have that brand power

(41:23):
that is Hudson's Bay. And to have the mix of
different stationary if you want to think of a Dutch comparison,
it'd almost be like a Hayma that does really well
and they are proud of all their Dutch products or
Dutch specialty products that they have. It'd be great if
this Hudson's Bay would carry indigenous products from Indigenous owned

(41:45):
companies and brands and provide a platform for national and
international even provincial distribution for companies like that, providing them
a platform. Considering the history of Hudson's Bay and the
relations with Indigenous people, it would be a great way
to have some reconciliation but also be a great way

(42:08):
to showcase different products that not a lot of stores
do in Canada. I can't see a lot of representation
of indigenous brands in Canada. And there's a lot of
Canadian brands, Loblaws, Metro, all the food brands, and you
just don't see that, and I wish there's more of them.

(42:28):
But I also wish there's more local support for producers
in the community that they served. So in all the
stores that would be located in these communities would be
an initiative that you would have to dedicate certain square
footage to local producers, whether that's food producers, whether that's
your local coffee shop where they can sell their coffee,
whether that's confectionery, chocolate. Maybe that's the delicacy that is

(42:54):
Canadian maple syrup, because you could have maple syrup outlet
or something like that. Just get really creative, embrace the
communities that you serve embraced being Canadian and be that
place to have community, to be that third place that
we've missed so much. You could even have in store
cafes or have a pop up within the store, so

(43:17):
it brings the community into the store, but also is
that facilitator for that Now there's such a big opportunity
with them. And lastly, I lean into being Canadian and
Canadian visual identity with Canadian imaging. It's such a missed
opportunity and I think would have done a lot for
Hudson Spay if you went into the stores and you

(43:39):
saw murals of Canadian landscapes or notable Canadians like a
Terry Fox. There's so many different ways we could have
leaned into being Canadian and we just didn't. For whatever reason,
it just didn't happen. So when we have these retails,
these new retail stores, or these reworked Hudson's Bays, it

(44:03):
should be a lot of Canadian imaging and imaging from
the communities that we serve, where of those local landmarks,
notable people really embrace the community that you serve, and
not a lot of companies do this. So let's close
things out the future of Hudson's Bay. It was announced
Canny Entire announced in early May that would pay thirty

(44:24):
million dollars to take over Hudson's Bay intellectual property, including
its famous four stripes motif, various company names, logos, and
the retailer's coat of arms. So Hudson and Spay is
now in the hands of the very capable Canadian Entire
Corporation and we will see what happens with Hudson Spay.

(44:45):
They haven't made any announcements of what they're going to
do with the products. I would anticipate they would carry
Hudson Bay as a brand within these Cannean Entire stores
as a way to keep the brand alive. I don't
know if there's any retail p but if anyone at
Canane Tires listening, take notes or I'd love to jump

(45:06):
on a call with you to see what we could
do with the future of Hudsons Bay. But for now,
Hudson's Bay has said goodbye for the last time to
Canada and all of its more than eighty stores. It's
the loss of a major legacy retailer and a loss
to our retail landscape of what we can do when

(45:27):
it comes to Canadian alternatives, Canadian shopping. And yes, I
am aware that it hasn't been really Canadian for a
long time and went to private equity two thousand and eight,
but it's still meant something to Canadians, and there's still
a lot of Canadians that are emotional about it and
trying to process the closure of Hudson Spay. And there's
a reason I've done a podcast on it because it

(45:49):
is worth talking about it. There's so many learning outcomes
for small business entrepreneurs, retailers on customer experience alone of
what could be done differently, and there's a lot that
could have been done differently and this did not have
to happen. One of the main reasons I'm doing this
podcast is just because I'm so frustrated because it didn't
have to be this way, and it didn't have to

(46:10):
go this way, and yet it did because they had
so many resources, so many stores, so many really smart
people working at the company or amongst the company, that
it did not have to go this way. So, in closing,
thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I'm
going to get back to trying to do monthly episodes again.

(46:32):
So this will be May's episode for the garcdet podcast.
If you want to hear more of my thoughts or
follow me along on Instagram, it's at garcadet. My website
is garkdet dot com. Like I said, I am doing
consulting for marketing and customer experience. So if you liked
what you heard or you liked some of my observations analysis,
I love to work with you, So please reach out

(46:54):
to Garrig dot dot com and thanks for listening and
hear me very soon