Fields department store was staring into oblivion when FHC Holdings swept in to buy the Vancouver-founded retailer in 2012.
Then-owner Hudson’s Bay Co. (TSX:HBC) had already announced it was closing all 177 of its subsidiary’s outlets across Canada. But when it agreed to a last-minute sale of 57 western Canadian outlets, the retail giant saw fit to hand over just two pieces of information to the new owners.
It wasn’t a list of vendors and payroll information.
Rather, FHC received only the phone number and first name of each store manager.
“We bought the banner [and] the name, but infrastructure-wise, we had to really start from scratch,” FHC owner and Fields CEO Jason McDougall said. “In the vendor community, we were treated as a new vendor.”
The chain has since regained its footing in both the vendor and business communities and is now one of the top 100 national companies operating in B.C. by head count, according to BIV research. (See Top 100 list, page 27.)
Dean Petruk, Fields’ president and chief operating officer, likened the relaunch to a “57-store startup.”
“We had customers reaching out to say, ‘You have to stay in our communities; it’s so important to us,” he said.
“In some instances, based on that, we actually did. Maybe as a business model it didn’t make sense right now, but being part of the community we felt it was important to do that.”
Without inheriting vendor or sales information from Hudson’s Bay, the operators had to precisely track and quickly adjust their merchandise sales right out of the gate.
Petruk admits there were challenges, and some of those stores later closed. But the number of outlets has grown to 64 since 2012.
McDougall said much of the relaunch’s success is due to the relatively small size of the chain.
Fields has taken a more locally minded, hands-on approach to stocking merchandise, allowing it to react more swiftly than larger retailers can.
“If you’re buying out of, for instance, Toronto headquarters, climates are a lot different in the West than they are in the East,” McDougall said, “so your product mix may be not as accurate.”
And with the Canadian dollar’s big decline over the past year, Petruk said Fields has also had to get creative when it comes to keeping costs low.
Instead of continuing to rely on vendors in Toronto and Montreal, it now orders more of its products directly from China. In March, the company hired 25 more employees to operate a new distribution centre adjacent to its Delta headquarters, reducing the length of time it takes to get products into stores.
And over the summer it opened a concept store in Gibsons, which offers the same mix of merchandise as a typical outlet but product placement is different.
For instance, clothing and other fashion products are in the front of the concept store and the hard-line products – items like camping gear or sporting goods – are in the back.
“Some of the legacies you carry with yourselves when you’re a brand as old as we are, some of those things have a hard time integrating and changing,” McDougall said.
“The flow of the store with products serving beside other products, we really felt that it [took] us into the modern day.”
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