Sophisticated Sell

Customers: What (Certain) Women Want
Anthropologie is an oasis of offhand sophistication where you can shop without feeling like some SUV-driving, gold-card-wielding, will-my-kids-get-into-the-right-school suburbanite; where you can buy into the season's runway-sanctioned trend without feeling like a fashion victim; and where, miraculously, almost everything fits. That formula, replicated in each of Anthropologie's unique, custom-designed spaces, holds an almost magnetic appeal for an affluent and influential set of customers -- a set of customers that most other retailers only dream about.

Anthropologie has never advertised, yet its customers stay longer in the stores than most chain shoppers. Their average visit lasts an hour and 15 minutes. And some visits extend to an epic four hours. They spend more -- the average sales per square foot is over $600, and the average customer spend per visit is a relatively high $80. And they keep coming back: Net sales have grown at a 40% compounded annual rate over the past five years; and same-store sales growth was 16.8% in Q4 2001, a rate surpassed in the first half of 2002. The 10-year-old division of Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters Inc. continues to evade the fate of small box chains in a dismal season for retail and is on target to grow revenues from $121 million to $200 million this year. (That figure includes online and catalog sales.)

According to Senk, there isn't anything offhand about the retailer's connection to its customers. "Most stores cater to a broad base of customers or specialize in a product category. We specialize in one customer. And we offer her everything from clothing to bed linens to furniture to soap."

A veteran merchant who began his career at Bloomingdale's more than two decades ago, and who ran retail and mail-order for Williams-Sonoma Inc. before joining Urban Outfitters in 1994 to build the fledgling Anthropologie business, Senk has a healthy disregard for the conventions of retail. "In my experience, retailers spend most of their time looking at things from the company's perspective or the marketer's perspective," he says. "They talk about trends and brand but rarely about the customer in a meaningful way. We're customer experts. Our focus is on always doing what's right for a specific customer we know very well."

Wendy Brown, director of stores, adds, "We have one customer, and we know exactly who she is. And we don't sit around a table and say to each other, What do you think she'd like? We're out there. We're in the stores, we're in the marketplace. We live where the customer lives."

Ask anyone at Anthropologie who that customer is, and they can rattle off a demographic profile: 30 to 45 years old, college or post-graduate education, married with kids or in a committed relationship, professional or ex-professional, annual household income of $150,000 to $200,000. But those dry matters of fact don't suffice to flesh out the living, breathing woman most Anthropologists call "our friend." Senk, 46, says, "I like to describe her in psychographic terms. She's well-read and well-traveled. She is very aware -- she gets our references, whether it's to a town in Europe or to a book or a movie. She's urban minded. She's into cooking, gardening, and wine. She has a natural curiosity about the world. She's relatively fit."

While most retailers today are obsessed with the highly lucrative and populous "tween" (preteen and young teen) and boomer markets, Anthropologie has cultivated an understanding of and connection to the ultimate tweener: the thirtysomething sophisticate, once known as a Gen-Xer, who has carried her mildly rebellious, against-the-grain independence into a serious career and family life. She's defined less by static qualities and more by a set of dynamic tensions. If the tween anthem is Britney Spears's "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman," the Anthropologie customer's plaint is more Alanis Morissette: "I've got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is giving the peace sign." Translation: "I can't pick up my children or sit through a meeting in low-rise jeans, but I'm not nearly ready for an elastic waistband."

The Anthropologie customer is affluent but not materialistic. She's focused on building a nest but hankers for exotic travel. (She can picture herself roughing it with a backpack and Eurail pass -- as long as there is a massage and room service at end of the trek.) She'd like to be a domestic goddess but has no problem cutting corners (she prefers the luscious excess of British cooking sensation Nigella Lawson to the measured perfection of Martha Stewart). She's in tune with trends, but she's a confident individualist when it comes to style. She lives in the suburbs but would never consider herself a suburbanite. (This is where Senk's kinship to his customer is most apparent. He had lived in cities all over the world -- London, San Francisco, New York, and Philadelphia -- before settling in an elegant turn-of-the-century house in the Philadelphia garden suburb of Chestnut Hill with his partner, Anthropologie antiques buyer Keith Johnson. Says Senk: "We're city people -- we'd never dreamed of moving to the suburbs. But Chestnut Hill is sophisticated. It's like a suburb in the city.")