Dick’s Sporting Goods has a lot to be thankful for this holiday season.

After a rough second quarter this year that plummeted the company’s stock, Dick’s reported a strong rebound going into the Black Friday weekend, which is hopefully the start to the company’s strongest quarter of the fiscal year.

• Dick’s strategy for the holidays includes an expansion of same-day delivery at its stores, which also serve to help the company’s digital business.
• In Q3, the company added 1.6 million omnichannel customers, a base that is responsible for a majority of Dick’s sales, the company’s president and CEO Lauren Hobart told investors.

“In combination with our stores, our digital experience remains an integral part of our success, and the investments we are making in technology are strengthening our athletes’ omni-channel experience and driving increased engagement,” Hobart said. “As we invest in data science and personalization, we’re excited to continue building one-to-one relationships and better serving these athletes.”

Back to basics: In 2022, Dick’s had to mark down some of its excess inventory in outdoor and apparel in order to match comparable sales in stores. That’s not the case this quarter, as Hobart explained that Dick’s has made a distinct effort to move inventory so there is now space for fresh products.

Keep reading here.—KM

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) saw a huge lift in engagement with loyalty programs this year. Need some figures? Stamped saw 3m customers earning 3.3b rewards points and spending 176m of ’em.

Wanna know more about creating a points program that could increase AOV by a whopping 205%?

If you’ve been focusing on new customer acquisition and conversion this holiday season, it’s time to start planning reengagement campaigns now that the BFCM rush is behind us—and that’s where Stamped comes in.

Stamped can help your biz maximize LTV with points, VIP tiers, and referrals. Check out their best-in-class loyalty program examples to see how a simple program can boost repeat purchase revenue.

PS: Retail Brew readers receive 60 days of Stamped for free if they sign up by Dec. 31.

Black Friday spending grew an impressive 7.5% over last year, but it was on the cannabis industry’s answer to the shopping day, Green Wednesday, when the growth was really—in every sense—smoking.

For the day before Thanksgiving, sales at retail recreational dispensaries were up 11.43% over the same day last year, according to data provided to Retail Brew by Jane Technologies, a digital provider whose platform is used by more than 3,000 retail and medical dispensaries.

While Jane represents only a portion of the industry, its retail customers rang up $9.2 million in cannabis products on Green Wednesday.

Hopefully, the dispensaries had an extra budtender or two on the floor, because compared to the average of the three Wednesdays preceding it, sales on Green Wednesday were up 90.5%, according to Jane.

Keep reading here.—AAN

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Devanshi Garg is founder of vegan and cruelty-free skincare brand Motif.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I’m on a mission to improve skin health.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? I almost had a career in food entertainment. I was the host of a food show and I’ve been cooking since as far as I can remember. In many ways, entrepreneurship is like cooking—taking the resources you have available to you to create a unique vision, often in service of others.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Formulating our award-winning Abundance Plumping PhytoCeramide Cleanser. I was a first-time mom and my daughter was only six months old. I had recently gone back to work after being on maternity leave. We were in the midst of Covid and had moved out of the city, our home for the last 12 years. I was working with our dermatologist and these were calls I usually took in the evening after everyone was asleep. I remember holding all these doubts about whether or not I could build a meaningful beauty company. And I remember receiving our very first submission from our lab one evening.

Keep reading here.—EC