Retail Briefs

Saks Incorporated will close its 113,000-square-foot Montgomery, Ala. Parisian store in the Montgomery Mall in early March and add new stores in Birmingham, Ala. and Detroit, as well as enter Little Rock and Rogers, Ark. in the next 18 months.

Regional food retailer HEB, which serves about 150 communities in Texas and Mexico, has begun testing textiles along with other general merchandise categories in its newly opened Plus! store format.

The retailer's new bed and bath category offers towels, bedding, sheets, pillows and bathroom accessories. HEB Plus! stores feature 40,000 new SKUs in the categories of furniture, bed and bath, healthy living, school and crafts, and Texas Backyard, an indoor/outdoor garden center.

Among the Plus! stores with textiles are 190,000-square-foot stores in the Austin and Corpus Christi areas and a 161,000-square-foot unit in San Antonio.

Williams-Sonoma continues to dig deeper to reach more finely sliced customer segments, leveraging its multi-platform presence. Stores, catalog and online formats drive business into the each other's channels. Depending on the nameplate, for example, between 40 and 60 percent of Williams-Sonoma's e-commerce revenues are being driven by consumers who receive its catalogs and then go to the websites to buy, Patrick Connolly, executive vp and chief marketing officer, told the S.G. Cowan Consumer Conference.

About 40 percent of the Web business is incremental, he said. “These are new customers who have not shopped with us previously.” The company has a database of more than 38 million households, including 65 percent of all households with incomes over $100,000.

Connolly offered glowing reports on most of Williams-Sonoma's businesses, including Pottery Barn, West Elm and Williams-Sonoma Home. But several days later the company said it would close the remaining eight stores in the sputtering Hold Everything chain by the end of the year, folding some merchandise into other segments.