Getting Customers To Smile
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Just for Feet knows how to walk all over the competition. The athletic-shoe retailer, based in Birmingham, Ala., has exploded to a projected $500 million in sales this year from just $23 million when it went public in 1993. It has 70 stores around the country-it had just 45 a year ago and one in 1988. Ten thousand people work at Just for Feet.
But each store is nearly the same as the single suburban-Birmingham outlet that launched the chain. Just For Feet is a fun-for-all-ages, hypermetabolic playpen that features an indoor basketball court, an entire wall of video screens, laser light shows, a hot-dog restaurant, all-night sales, a nursery, a drive-through window, appearances by celebrity athletes, and an area just inside the door called the Combat Zone, where Just for Feet makes a show of matching competitors' prices. The store's concept has become a model for the retailing industry.
"The best fit I've seen between entertainment and retailing is Just for Feet," says Howard Davidowitz, a consultant on national retailing. "The store is fun from beginning to end. They sell basic merchandise; [they] married it to entertainment and ended up as the hottest retailer in the country."
Just for Feet's achievements reflect the think-big approach of Harold Ruttenberg, founder and CEO. The 55-year-old Ruttenberg, who previously was the proprietor of a single surf-wear store, forecasts $1 billion in sales by 2000 and isn't shy about asserting that he was "the first retailer ... to ever bring entertainment into retailing."
In 1977, Ruttenberg-whose accent blends his South African roots and his Southern U.S. home-owned a 2,500-square-foot sportswear store in a Birmingham mall. Ten years later, after being inspired by the glitz of a huge sporting-goods trade show, Ruttenberg decided to apply the same big-show approach to retailing. He opened his first Just for Feet on land he owned nearby.
"The most difficult thing to do is to get the customer to smile while they're paying you money," he says. "That's what we've been able to do."
In addition to including a basketball court so customers could try out his shoes, Ruttenberg's formula has relied from the beginning on other elements, including wide selection, deep inventory, and use of the store-within-a-store concept for major vendors.
Ruttenberg also believes in customer service, with employees who know their sports shoes. "The good thing about our concept is that it's not just entertainment," he says. "If it was, people would only come and look."
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