Harry & David is making a return to physical retail after closing nearly all of its stores during Covid
Harry & David, the gourmet food company known for Royal Riviera pears and Moose Munch popcorn, is ramping up its physical retail presence five years after the pandemic prompted it to shutter nearly all of its stores.
Earlier this month, Harry & David opened a new store on Long Island, New York, near the headquarters of its parent company, 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., which acquired the brand in 2014. The move comes several months after Harry & David held six holiday pop-ups at Macy’s stores in New York City and Los Angeles — a pilot that “got the juices flowing” for Harry & David to focus more on brick-and-mortar retail, said Greg Sarley, Harry & David’s svp of merchandise revenue.
Both the new store and the Macy’s pop-up are “learning opportunities for us to dip our toe back in the water,” Sarley told Modern Retail. “The times are a lot different now than they were before the pandemic,” he said. “You see a lot of DTC companies that started as online-only now opening traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Our product is very tactile, and it’s great to interact with, and it presents itself very well in a retail environment.”
In August 2020, Harry & David closed 38 storefronts — all of its locations, except for its flagship in Medford, Oregon — to focus on its e-commerce business. At the time, the majority of Harry & David’s revenue already came from online, according to 1-800-Flowers. Now, Harry & David is focusing more on physical retail at a time in which shoppers are showing more of a preference for buying items in stores.
Recent data shows that upward of 70% of consumers would rather shop in-store than online, Kassi Socha, senior director analyst at Gartner, told Modern Retail. That’s especially true for Harry & David’s core market. A 2023 consumer survey by Gartner found that 78% of respondents prefer to buy food and nonalcoholic beverages in person, compared to 5% from desktop and 12% from mobile.
Harry & David is upping its store count at a time in which it’s also looking to boost sales. In January, 1-800-Flowers reported a 4% year-over-year decline in its gourmet food and gift baskets segment, which includes Harry & David. As a whole, the 1-800-Flowers business “experienced a softer than anticipated and highly promotional consumer environment,” 1-800-Flowers CEO Jim McCann said in a statement.
To try and kickstart growth, Harry & David is taking a different approach to its new store. Traditionally, Christmas has been one of the busiest times for Harry & David, with customers flocking to the site to buy holiday gifts. With its store on Long Island, though, Harry & David is trying to position itself as a year-round destination for everything from self-gifting to parties to everyday occasions.
“There’s more of a focus on grab-and-go and recipes and entertaining,” Sarley said, pointing to offerings like spiral-sliced ham and cheesecake. “There is an opportunity to be more relevant 365 days a year for our customers.”
Rebekah Kondrat, founder of the consultancy Rekon Retail, believes that this shift from holiday and gifting-only to self-gifting “could yield results” for Harry & David. Older consumers may be more familiar with Harry & David than younger ones, she said, but Gen Z has a high interest in hosting themed events at home, like charcuterie-board parties. To better reach this new customer base, “[Harry & David] will need to use compelling merchandising displays and clear messaging,” Kondrat said.
To help with this effort, Harry & David’s new store will be a “bit more experiential” to show customers how they can use products in their everyday lives, Sarley said. For instance, the store has a tasting area and event space that it hopes to use for demonstrations. It’s also exploring partnerships with Alice’s Table, another 1-800-Flowers brand that holds workshops on everything from flower arranging to charcuterie-board building.
In fact, the store is big enough that it can sell merchandise from other members of the 1-800-Flowers portfolio, including Scharffen Berger chocolate, Wolferman’s English muffins, Vital Choice seafood and Cheryl’s cookies. Harry & David plans to carry Shari’s Berries and The Popcorn Factory — two other 1-800-Flowers brands — in the near future. 1-800-Flowers has been on an acquisition kick since 2002, and Harry & David hopes to use its new store to showcase its many sister brands.
Also in the works at Harry & David’s new store are local delivery and same-day delivery, both staples of 1-800-Flowers’s core flowers business. Fulfillment options like these are key to succeeding in physical retail nowadays, Gartner’s Socha said. Compared to several years ago, “the expectations of in-store have drastically changed,” she told Modern Retail. “In-store needs to either be a convenient experience or a service-oriented experience that drives additional value than what [customers] can find on an online marketplace.”
Ultimately, at Harry & David, “the goal is to further expand [retail] concepts as we head into this upcoming holiday season,” Sarley said. Long term, he added, “My vision would have us have a brick-and-mortar location where we have a high concentration of [online] customers already: the bigger cities on the coasts, as well as in the Midwest.”