How Foot Locker is tweaking its marketing & assortment to appeal to more women
Foot Locker is working to put its best foot forward with women.
To start, the company is placing more women at the forefront of marketing campaigns and activations, working with rappers like Coi Leray and Flo Milli and WNBA athletes like Aerial Powers and Jewell Loyd. Foot Locker hosted two events at the WNBA All-Star Game this past weekend: a basketball workshop for young women (taught by former WNBA player Linnae Harper) and a press panel about leadership and the evolution of women’s basketball. Foot Locker is also building out its assortment of women’s products and giving more space to the women’s portion of its stores, Chief Customer Officer Kim Waldmann told Modern Retail in an interview.
Waldmann declined to specify what percent of Foot Locker’s business is women’s but said the company’s women’s division has seen “rapid growth over the last several years.”
“We’ve increased the penetration in our total business,” she said. “I would also share that there is growth overall in the category, and we are still not at the total level of the marketplace in terms of our women’s business. So while we’ve grown it, there’s still a lot more headroom.”
Foot Locker, which is helmed by CEO Mary Dillon, is in the midst of a larger turnaround effort to grow sales and streamline operations amid slowing demand. In March 2023, Foot Locker announced a strategy called “Lace Up” to relaunch the brand, close 400 underperforming stores and open more store formats like House of Play, which are large in size and cater to toddlers and kids. The company also cut some corporate and support roles in hopes of saving $18 million per year, according to an SEC filing in January 2023. In April of this year, Foot Locker rolled out a store strategy called “Store of the Future.” The plan involves increasing the selection of footwear and accessories, highlighting new product at the front of stores and offering lacing customization services.
Already, Foot Locker is seeing some of its efforts pay off. The company posted better-than-expected comparable sales for its most recent quarter and reaffirmed its full-year outlook for 2024. Still, Foot Locker’s reported net income for the three-month period that ended May 4 was $8 million, compared with $36 million a year earlier.
Here’s what Waldmann had to say about the company’s plans to win over more women shoppers.
On picking talent for brand campaigns
“We’ve really shifted to prioritize women-centric campaigns and highlighting all the amazing women athletes and influencers at the forefront of our biggest brand campaigns. The really exciting one that we just concluded is our ‘Start with Sneakers’ campaign. That was in partnership with Adidas and New Balance, and it was really born out of this deep consumer insight… that more and more women are actually dressing from the shoes up. They’re choosing the sneaker to wear first, and they’re actually building the outfit and the look around that…
We leveraged [rappers] Coi Leray and Flo Milli, who are great artists, to really showcase that idea and appeal to fashion-forward consumers across social channels… Coi and Flo Milli were ideal faces of the campaign because they’re both rising stars with very distinct styles that resonate with young, diverse, trend-forward women. They’re also both, I think, unapologetic in their self-expression and like to experiment with taste and style, and that really resonates with our consumers…
We [also] did a spot with [Nike and Jordan] featuring WNBA star Jewell Loyd, who’s a member of the Seattle Storm. That was an awesome campaign that we did featuring her. It was called ‘Dropping Gems‘, and it really told her story, showcased her in Nike basketball product and had a great commercial outcome as well.”
A three-pronged plan for building the women’s business
“I would put [the plan] into three buckets. One is product assortment. Two is marketing approach. And then third is experience.
On the product side of things, we’ve definitely done a lot of work over the last several years in making sure that we have the right brands, the right styles and the right colorways to appeal to women. Examples being, really growing our seasonal business or our classics business, which over-indexes towards female consumers.
On the marketing side of it… I would be remiss not to point out that the culture of basketball and women’s sports is obviously a huge trend in the overall ecosystem. The heart of what we do at Foot Locker is obviously basketball. And so, as we think about leaning into the amazing WNBA athletes who are influencers in their own right, that’s something that we’re really excited about as a way to tap into the zeitgeist and grow our women’s business.
The third piece is experience. We just launched our ‘Store of the Future’ concept in New Jersey, and a lot of the thinking around that experience was, ‘How do we elevate the women’s portion of the store, give it more floor space and make it a lot easier to tell trend-driven stories?'”
Keeping up with trends
“We’re always looking at new brands in the ecosystem that we think will resonate with our consumer. I think what we’re really focused on right now is making sure that we have the trend-right product across all of the different key categories that resonate with women…
Color is definitely a trend for the summer — lots of lots of bright colors and really getting back into that. We see really strong performance in product like the Adidas Samba, New Balance 530 and then the Hoka Clifton. [These] are some really key styles that are winning with women this summer.”