JCPenneyCopied

By 2019 JCPenney was struggling with declining sales, shaky finances and creditors worried about its future, The Robin Report noted, competing in a shrinking middle market with around 850 stores. Chief executive Jill Soltau was pursuing what the company called a holistic plan to rebuild and renew the 117-year-old retailer, based on more than a year of customer research.

On 1 November 2019 it reopened its store at North East Mall in Hurst, between Dallas and Fort Worth, under a new name: Penney's. Chief customer officer Shawn Gensch told the Dallas Business Journal that the nickname customers had long used became the store's rebrand, inspired by the research. The signage pairs a vintage, retro Penney's script with the red JCP box from the short-lived Ron Johnson era. Gensch stressed it was not a flagship but a testing ground, and Soltau called it the fullest articulation of the brand strategy, to be used as a lab.

The store was organised around occasions rather than departments, with zones called All Day, On Point, Move, Chill and Shine, a barber shop called The Barbery, a Sephora shop, fitness classes, a selfie studio with Shutterfly, a Pinterest style station and 11 lounges taking up 13 per cent of the floor. Merchandise on the floor was cut by about 13 per cent.

The Robin Report found it open, airy and full of detail, unlike anything else in its market, but noted that the clock was ticking for the company.

The company's announcement described the store as built on more than a year of customer research and organised around the occasions in shoppers' days, weeks and years. Beyond the beauty and grooming zones, it added two Styling Rooms, one for women and one for men, with Style @ Your Service technology to fetch new sizes or colours without leaving the fitting room and free style experts on hand. Chief executive Jill Soltau called the store a lab to inform decisions to return the company to sustainable, profitable growth. Calling a flagship a lab is candid. It admits the new Penney's name and look were an experiment, not a settled answer.

The script is genuinely charming, warmer than any JCPenney mark of the previous decade, and naming a store what people already call it is smart. But a beautiful sign in one Texas mall was not a rebrand of an 850-store chain running out of time.