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Non-Tech : Sunglass Hut RAYS- Will it ever breakout? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brian R. who wrote (915)	12/25/1998 7:39:00 AM
From: Gary105	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 971

Brian, RAYS season is on its way, one of the few seasonal stocks to look forward to (as busy season for most retail/etail stocks is ending). A few comments: A purchaser of the stock should do so with seasonal play as primary emphasis, web site should be a tertiary emphasis. A possible bonus is watch business. Not for the Watch Station stores themselves (they are very attractive but a small percentage of business), but for the opportunity to sell watches in existing sunglass hut stores. The display cases are almost identical and they are experimenting with this. If this experiment works out then it has potential for dramatically increasing same store sales during off season (fall and winter) - ie emphasizing sunglasses during spring/summer and watches during fall/winter. This is an experiment right now. Re. web site - this is a 1999 story. During the last few months the web site has advanced from a boring site to a site showing attractive people wearing attractive sunglasses. The theme of the site is very fitting with RAYS customers. The site is meeting is current targets for information - about the stores, products etc. It should address transactions in 1999. The site uses the correct meta tags for key words used by search engines. It just so happens that there are a zillion sites whose titles have "sunglasses" in them (eg if you type "sunglass" RAYS site pops up right away in search engines, if you type sunglasses they are one of many) - so what they need are banner ads to attract people to their site - but there is no need to attract people until the e-commerce portion is added in 1999. E.g. - if you type in "books" you also get a zillion sites - only through banner adds are you attracted to Amazons site. RAYS knows how to publicize and when they are ready to publicize their site there will be very few of us who will not know about it. Another analogy, even though there are many sunglass sites and book sites, the key point when their site is set up for e-tail will be "mindshare" (thanks to Steve Harmon for that term) - RAYS certainly commands mindshare when people think of sunglasses. Happy Holidays, Gary