Sleep in, pull on some warm gear, and head to the woods or the beach or the mountains.
That’s Recreational Equipment Inc.’s big plan for the shopping frenzy turned marketing gimmick known as Black Friday. The outdoor-oriented retailer will close its 143 stores the day after Thanksgiving and pay its 12,000 employees to go on their own adventures, or crush some leftovers and take a long nap.
“While the rest of the world is fighting it out in the aisles, we hope to see you in the great outdoors,” it wrote in an e-mail to its customers late Monday.
These days, it’s no longer enough to sell things on the critical shopping weekend after Thanksgiving. A retailer needs a Black Friday strategy, a way to double down on the event and turn it into a marketing opportunity. Recently, companies have risen above the din either by giving away expensive products or by opening earlier and earlier.
REI, meanwhile, tapped straight into the growing ranks of people who are increasingly frustrated (or sickened) by the whole idea of getting up in the dark and wrestling with strangers over a free TV.
Given their appreciation of places that have more trees than parking spaces, REI lovers are likelier than most to fall into that camp.
It was a masterstroke of marketing, which REI wrapped up under the tagline #OptOutside. Twitter this morning filled up quickly with messages.
REI’s opt-out publicity could outweigh the opportunity cost of closing its stores for a day. And in truth, REI doesn’t need to sprint into the holiday sales season. It’s already beating some of the biggest retailers in the world. The gear seller’s sales growth has bested the Standard & Poor’s Retail Index for seven of the past eight years.
“We had a great year last year,” REI CEO Jerry Stritzke told Bloomberg in March. “We’re having a better year this year.”
REI, which functions as a co-op rather than a traditional corporation, already has it own shopping holiday. It’s called dividend day. Every spring, REI’s 5.5 million co-op members get a dividend equal to about 10 percent of what they spent on full- priced items the previous year. So the retailer doesn’t need to entice customers with a big, one-day sales blitz.
And though REI still lures a lot of people to its stores, where they can scale climbing walls and see how to set up a tent, almost one in four of its sales dollars these days comes through its web shop. It won’t be “processing” digital orders on Black Friday. Surely it will be taking them.
