Direct specialty apparel retailer Lands' End, which launched an interactive website specifically targeted at female swimsuit shoppers in May 2009, is aiming another interactive website at another niche audience and product. Lands' End is offering Packland, a virtual fantasy environment designed for kids shopping for back-to-school backpacks. Packland lets customers choose of one of four online environments – jungle, ocean, fantasy world or spy lab, where they then create a personalized virtual backpack, writes Retailer Daily. Options include themed pack art, different colors, add-on gear and gadgets, and custom monogramming. A social shopping feature allows users to share or email images of their custom backpacks with or to friends.
Packland follows in the footsteps of The Island, Lands’ End’s swimsuit shopping microsite that offers similar functionality. Customers can scroll through swimsuit items in a fashion show runway format, with enhanced zooming capabilities and front and back views of products. In addition, customers can select pieces from different swimsuit collections and create their own outfits with the same runway viewing options.
The Island also offers a social networking component that allows customers to share on-screen images through networks such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. As Packland’s target audience is under 13, the minimum age requirements for most major third-party social networks, it makes sense that Lands’ End omitted this feature.
Lands’ End decided to promote The Island despite problems in the women’s specialty vertical. By selecting back-to-school shoppers as its next target audience, Lands’ End is once again devoting online resources to a segment showing signs of softness. According to recent consumer surveys by Deloitte and the National Retail Federation (NRF), the continuing recession will negatively impact the 2009 back-to-school shopping season.
Research by Deloitte indicates 64% of consumers plan to spend less on back-to-school items, compared with 71% in 2008. In addition, 43% plan to cut back their spending by more than $100, down from 48% last year.
Partially countering these figures is recent research from Price Grabber and Market Reporter indicating online consumers are spending more time online and are more optimistic about spending than they have been in the past year.
