new style store TORONTO — with ash wood flooring and exposed brick, doesn’t look anything like a typical Sears outlet.
“Internally, we have banned the word ‘department store’ — we have tried to abolish it, because we are not a department store anymore,” executive chairman Brandon Stranzl said as the company readied its newest store concept, a 2,100-square foot pop-up outlet set to open this weekend on Toronto’s trendy Queen Street West strip.
“The department store’s whole business model is fundamentally broken,” Stranzl said. “I don’t think it will work and in 10 years, it’s probably not going to exist.”
Stranzl is comfortable disavowing what once defined Sears because the Toronto-based company has been “reinvented,” he said, following a vast overhaul of its house merchandise and pricing model. Sears Canada also spent last year reconfiguring its IT platform and consumer-facing website after Sears.ca lost ground to Amazon and other online retailers.