COVER STORY
Sears' Sizzling New Vitality
Once frumpy but now fashionable, the largest retailer turns style into big profits
Forget Sears, Roebuck. Nowadays Sears, Tiegs might be more appropriate. In 12 million American homes, the first image Sears customers are seeing as they flip through the new fall-winter catalog is the cover picture of Model Cheryl Tiegs, wearing a cardigan sweater and an autumn plaid skirt, her smiling face and long blond tresses beckoning potential buyers into the magic world of America's largest retailer. Sears has taken a fancy to Tiegs, embracing her in its catalog and TV commercials and identifying itself with her wholesome all-American looks. The chemistry has been sizzling. Just two years short of its 100th birthday, the once staid and conservative Sears is showing the friskiness of a teen-ager who has won a date with Tiegs. In fact, some people would say that Sears has become downright sassy.
That new image is a result of the vitality that is reinvigorating one of America's most famous companies after a period of drift and uncertainty. Last month Sears changed its logo to something resembling slanted racing stripes, only the second redesign in its history and the first in 21 years. In addition to the Tiegs cover, the "catalog of the future," as Sears now calls it, contains twelve pages of Tiegs in color and, in one 24-page section, appeals to the upwardly mobile young woman of the '80s with sexy models sporting slightly punk hairdos and clad in leather skirts, silk dresses and wool blazers. "Come share the excitement," teases the copy. "Looks that say you're going places." For the homey image with a difference, the catalog also carries twelve full-page photographs that are wry takeoffs of Norman Rockwell's paintings of American family scenes.
Change is also sweeping the aisles of Sears' 806 retail stores in all 50 states, where some 39 million American families shop. Under Chairman and Chief Executive Edward R. Telling, Sears* boss since 1978, the company has launched a $1.7 billion capital-improvement program to build 62 new stores, remodel 600 others and update the company's whole approach to selling. By October, Sears will have 107 "stores of the future," which will depart sharply from its traditional selling places. They have a friendlier, more welcoming look than the Sears stores of old, with more aisles, lower ceilings and merchandise displayed with flair and style at eye level. Fashion labels with big names—Arnold Palmer, Joe Namath, Diane von Furstenberg, Johnny Carson and Evonne Goolagong—stare back at the customer. To make self-service shopping easier, products will have clearer, more informative labeling. A new cash-register system decreases the average check-out time from three minutes to 90 seconds.
At Sears Tower in Chicago, the world's tallest office building (110 stories), executives are busily devising ways to entice Sears shoppers into buying more and more with each visit to a store—"leveraging off the customer base," in Sears jargon. In the ultimate one-stop shopping, it is now possible at many Sears stores to buy a house, pick all the needed furniture and appliances and then take out insurance on the whole bundle. On a more usual level, says Edward Brennan, 50, who is in charge of the giant