'Now's The Time To Get It Right'

With Sears'turnaround plan in place, now is the time to get the execution right, chairman and ceo Alan Lacy told the Executives'Club of Chicago at a breakfast meeting on Friday.

“The execution risk here over the next six months or so is what keeps me and my management team up at night,” Lacy told the audience, according to a report in Crain's Chicago Business.

Lacy acknowledged that perhaps Sears'biggest challenge is executing his plan to remodel about 600 of its full-line stores, to make them less cluttered and more shopper-friendly. The new stores will feature centralized checkout stations, improved layouts and simplified signage. “We've had an inconsistent and overly complicated store,” he said. “We've made it more complicated than it needed to be.”

Lacy said the company in the past “spent way too much money advertising 'what's on sale at Sears'versus 'why to come to Sears,'” a practice he said he aims to change with the “Sears: Where Else?” ad campaign launched last year.

On the merchandising side, he said Sears has focused on “exiting and editing” its product lines, such as getting out of the cosmetics business last year. And he expressed high hopes for Sears'new Covington apparel brand, which it plans to roll out in September to replace eight other store brands.