Forever 21 CEO Winnie Park talks physical stores and sustainability

Forever 21’s recovery after its bankruptcy in 2019, has been a major challenge for CEO Winnie Park, as we recently reported.

While a big part of Park’s efforts have involved targeting Gen Z and tapping into the brand’s core millennial consumer, as Park previously told us, another aspect of it has been reinvesting in brick-and-mortar stores and integrating sustainability while keeping costs low.

In speaking with Retail Brew, Park broke it all down.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you revamping the physical stores for this new era at Forever 21?

The physical presence of the store really was about very large stores, where you fill them up with product and for us, you need to help the customer really navigate through storytelling. For instance, we’ve converted all the front of stores into what’s called a Now Trending Pad. And we like the term “now trending,” because it really is about your social feed. You want to look at what’s trending, and bring that experience to the front of the store in a physical format. And that Now Trending Pad literally turns every two weeks—the newest trend, the hottest looks, we drop it in, it evaporates, we move on to the next thing. It’s 360-degree storytelling where it’s not just ready to wear, but if it’s a festival moment, we’re going to have the amazing accessories, cosmetics, makeup, and color looks. We’re going to have amazing footwear to kind of dress you head to toe and engage one experience. So that’s one of the big changes.

The other piece is as you navigate the store, just making more than storytelling and making more of the occasions clear. So you should be able to walk in our stores today and say, “I’m looking for something for my first job interview. Where can I find great pieces to wear to work?” versus “I’m hanging out for a casual brunch with my friends on the weekend,” versus “I literally am just going to the gym, and I want to look cute.” So how do we create, for all intents and purposes, the departments who are the future, and help the customer navigate that journey. All the stories we tell in the store, we reflect online as well. It should be a seamless journey.

What is your bigger focus: the physical store or online?

[It’s about] how you create this ecosystem where a customer sees the connectivity between the story you’re trying to tell and allows them to engage in it so that there will be no difference between the channels in the way we show up for the customer. We think that consistency is key to our success.

In pursuing sustainability, how do you keep the costs affordable?

The big thing for us is picking our spots, and also leveraging scale. One of the big initiatives within Forever 21 is: How do you basically have certain fabrics that we build styles into, and we can keep the costs down? Because we’re building so much into those base fabrics, it’s really being smart about our design, merchandising, and our sourcing strategies. I’ll use the example of recycled denim. We’ve taken steps where we started with women’s fashion denim. Let’s go ahead and put recycled in and let’s see how far we can push the prices. Talk to our customers about this. Let’s see if there's a reaction. As we’ve seen success, we see the opportunity to broaden that and build more volume into that fabric and build more styles into that fabric.