Macy's Herald Square carries hundreds of thousands of things to buy. But it's no coincidence that so many shoppers left the store early Friday morning with one of the same four items: Rampage boots for women, Justin Bieber perfume, Ralph Lauren pillows and Black & Decker toaster ovens.
The department store always promotes tried-and-true draws like jewelry, housewares and coats, but it starts mapping out less predictable best sellers almost as soon as the annual event ends each year.
The company scours purchasing data, drafts shopper profiles and tests its customers' appetites to make sure products don't run out until the first round of sales ends at 1 p.m., said Patti M. Lee, district vice president of Macy's Herald Square flagship store.
Getting it right on the highest-profile shopping day of the year is crucial if Macy's Inc. is to attract consumers' attention and boost its sales in what has become an fiercely competitive and discount-driven shopping environment. So far this year, Macy's has fared better than rival chain's like Kohl's Corp. and J.C. Penney Co., with revenue up 5.7% to $17.7 billion in the nine months to Oct. 29, same-store sales growth of 5.3% in that period and its stock up more than 16% in 2011.
For Black Friday, Macy's tried something new this year, opening its stores at midnight rather than the usual 4 a.m. It tested the idea by opening six locations at midnight last year.
During the trial, executives noticed flocks of teens and young adults at the midnight sales, a shift from Macy's usual audience of Baby Boomers. The pattern repeated itself in a three-day period before last Christmas, when a number of Macy's remained open around the clock as they have for the past several years.
Armed with that information, Macy's targeted teen spending heavily this Black Friday. Employees put together 900 Justin Bieber "Someday" perfume gift packs at the Herald Square location. The store ordered thousands of pairs of Rampage boots and priced them at $19.99 instead of the usual $49 to $59.
"I'm betting on the $19.99 boot we have. It's an absolutely ridiculous price," Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren said while waiting for the doors to open at Herald Square just moments before midnight. He beamed as Ms. Lee counted down to the opening, when the doors swung open to admit hundreds of deal-seeking customers, many of them young.
"Just look at this," he says. "We knew the younger crowds would stay up all night while the Baby Boomers went for a nap." Minutes later, teens congregated around a life-sized Justin Bieber cutout in the fragrance department where the gift sets were displayed. A half-hour earlier, operations manager Bruce Franco had met with his team around the same cutout to talk about the Bieber sets.
By 12:15 a.m., Jessica and Erica Derral of Little Rock, Ark., had already bought three of them. Other teens swarmed the checkout counters with similar purchases, while others kissed the cutout and snapped pictures.An hour into the sale, the junior's floor was in disarray. Shoe boxes were toppled, boots and their stuffing were strewn around, and young girls crowded around dressing rooms.
Teens and women alike mobbed the Rampage boots, calling out sizes and colors to employees working in a roped off section around huge stacks of the coveted footwear.
"I just knew," Mr. Lundgren said later that morning.
He had some help. He and his team noticed in prior sales that Rampage boots sold well when marked down to $49 from $59. A month ahead of Black Friday, they decided to beef up Black Friday staffing in the boot department.
Meanwhile, women carrying puffy Macy's bags stuffed with Ralph Lauren pillows made their way through crowded aisles, inadvertently knocking over displays and jostling their fellow shoppers.
Macy's ordered 6,000 of the pillows for Black Friday this year after selling out its supply of 3,000 at Herald Square last year, Ms. Lee said. Large cardboard crates of the pillows lined the linens department. The store sold them at $6.99, down from a usual $20.
Macy's prices some of its specials at or below cost to drive traffic, said Martine Reardon, the chain's executive vice president of marketing and advertising. The store has learned that many people come in with fiscally responsible intentions only to blow through wads of cash.
Case in point: Gueisa Alvarez arrived at midnight for a $20 Haier microwave. At 1:30 a.m., she and her daughter were waiting in a line 20 people deep with two Sleepwise contour pillows, Ralph Lauren pillows, a Calvin Klein comforter set, a coffee maker, an iron, a necklace, and a microwave. She estimates she'll spend around $350.
Macy's is able to pinpoint which items will resonate because of tests it conducts right up until the holiday. A one-day sale on Nov. 16 at Herald Square may have seemed like just another sale to customers. For executives, it was reconnaissance.
Ms. Lee spent the day walking the flagship store's 1.1 million square feet of retail space to see which deals were drawing the best response. Afterward, the team crunched numbers and made last-minute tweaks to its Black Friday inventory orders.
The weekend confirmed consumers' interest in a Black & Decker toaster oven, a product that has sold well all year after a similar item proved popular last Black Friday.
"This is purposeful," Ms. Lee said, slapping the top of a giant stack of the toaster ovens, which sold for $19.99 on Friday instead of their usual $44.99. The appliances were "double exposed"— with another stack displayed prominently at the other end of the home appliance department —so there would be enough on hand, she said.
On Friday morning, shoppers clamored for the toaster ovens. Kim LaPrince waited in line shortly after midnight with two of the toaster ovens—one for herself, one a gift for her mom. "I didn't think they would be this inexpensive," she said.
