Fifth & Pacific CEO William McComb on Retail's Altered Landscape

What do shoppers want? Experts discuss the forces reordering the retail industry.

What have you experienced in the years since the financial crisis?
We had had a fundamental collapse in our business model a year and a half before Lehman Brothers collapsed. So at a time when things were great, we were a disaster. So that’s my preface to the answer to this question. The headline is that in some ways the economic downturn further commoditized the business. It kicked off a race to the bottom. The use of promotions increased dramatically. There was channel consolidation and brand consolidation. And at the same time the global power value players—H&M and Zara—got stronger. That segment of the market, what I’ll call the value segment, is harder than ever. And that was the bulk of what our company was. We don’t play there at all today. We’re virtually 100 percent out of it.