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At a time when algorithms know your shopping habits better than you do, brick-and-mortar retail is far from dead.
From Barnes & Noble’s surprising resurgence to Warby Parker’s store boom — even as Amazon retreats from its own storefront experiments — successful brands are discovering that physical presence remains vital.
This paradox sets the stage for a critical strategic question: how do companies navigate the tradeoffs of using simultaneously digital and physical channels of distribution without losing their identity?
From Clicks to Aisles: Brands Bet on Stores
In 2025, it might seem the consumer experience should be fully digital. Yet consumer data points to a careful balance of brick-and-mortar expansion alongside online accessibility. There is still something powerful about walking into a store, feeling the products, and experiencing the brand firsthand.
Take U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble, which has more than 600 stores, and plans for more. Before activist hedge fund Elliott Management bought the bookseller in 2019, Barnes & Noble had closed more than 150 stores. In April, the company announced plans to open more than 60 new locations in 2025, following 57 new stores in 2024.
Pure direct-to-consumer strategies have often struggled to scale profitably, with digital-native brands such as Warby Parker building out physical footprints to complement their e-commerce operations, and even shuttering programs such as at home try-ons. Warby Parker’s expansion began in 2022, when it opened 40 new stores, and the company has continued to invest in retail locations as critical to its growth.
Despite its dominance online, Amazon has struggled with the brick-and-mortar transition. The largest e-commerce retailer in the U.S. shuttered its experimental bookstores and scaled back its ambitious AmazonGo convenience and grocery concepts. However, the acquisition of Whole Foods has provided growth and scale, targeting 2,300 cities by end of 2025. The tech giant’s mixed results raise a compelling question: How do some brands succeed at omnichannel retailing while others falter?
The Omnichannel Dilemma: Scale vs. Control
At its core, omnichannel strategy asks how a brand can seamlessly integrate multiple distribution channels including online, physical retail, and wholesale, while maintaining a consistent brand identity and customer experience.
Raj Venkatesan, professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, says omnichannel strategy involves tradeoffs between ease of access for consumers and the company’s control of the way the brand is portrayed on the platform.
“The allure of platforms like Amazon is the reach, accessibility and logistics they offer,” he explains. “However, brands can sacrifice pricing control, have slimer margins, build direct comparisons to competition, and hand over their customer data in exchange for convenience and scale.”
Caspari’s Case: Boutique Prestige Meets Amazon Reach
Our new case explores this tension through Caspari, a brand headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1945 as a European greeting card company, Caspari has grown into a brand renowned for its collaborations with artists, designers, and museums. Its products, including greeting cards, stationery and luxury tableware, are mainly sold through wholesale channels to high-end retailers, specialty boutiques and upscale grocery stores.
But like many premium consumer goods companies, Caspari faces a shifting retail landscape. While its sales are primarily driven by business-to-business (B2B) customers, the company’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels — including its Shopify-powered website, and Amazon storefront — are growing in importance.
What Luxury Brands Can Teach Us About Brand Integrity
The challenge mirrors decisions by companies like Burberry Group, which partnered with Amazon to control distribution, and Nike, which exited the platform to preserve brand integrity.
Some luxury brands decided, nonetheless, to sell select products on Amazon, including fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, which debuted on the site in 2020. Its Winter 2024 collection is featured in Amazon’s high-end category, Luxury Stores. This category only features jewelry, clothing, fragrance and skin-care products.
“In certain product categories, brands are finding it increasingly necessary to maintain both digital and physical retail presence” says Sam Levy, an assistant professor at UVA Darden.
Some companies have their own storefront on Amazon, including L’Occitane International and Caspari. While established niche businesses benefit from Amazon’s platform, our research shows that start-ups also found it useful for bringing their products to markets and promoting accessibility.
At the same time, companies are trying to figure out how to leverage their unique sites so that they can maximize consumer loyalty and customer preferences.
Saks Global recently announced a new personalization strategy, stemming from its newly formed parent company, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marus and Bergdorf Goodman. Even a company of this size and scale continues to grapple with how to leverage its consumer data — rolling out personalized homepages in combination with data science models to generate predictions for users’ actions.
Early results are promising, yet the company is still betting on brick and mortar playing a role in ongoing customer loyalty.
Four Questions Every Leader Should Ask
While each company’s journey is unique, the broader lessons for omnichannel strategy can be framed through four key questions:
From our research, one theme is clear: the path from boutique to online is rarely linear. Rather, success belongs to companies that truly understand their customers and prioritize the channels that best tell their story.
This article is based on the new case “The Chronicles of Caspari: Should Caspari Expand Its Online Marketplace” (Darden Business Publishing), written by Rajkumar Venkatesan, Samuel Levy, Katherine Nunner (’25), Saru Guneja (’25), and Stephen E. Maiden.
Venkatesan is an expert in customer relationship management, marketing metrics and analytics, and mobile marketing.
Venkatesan’s research focuses on developing customer-centric marketing strategies that provide measurable financial results. In his research, he aims to balance quantitative rigor and strategic relevance.
In 2012 Venkatesan published “Coupons Are Not Just for Cutting Prices” in Harvard Business Review. He also co-wrote “Measuring and Managing Returns From Retailer-Customized Coupon Campaigns,” published in the Journal of Marketing in 2012. He is co-author of the book Cutting-Edge Marketing Analytics: Real World Cases and Data Sets for Hands-on Learning.
B.E., Computer Science, University of Madras, India; Ph.D., Marketing, University of Houston
Samuel Levy is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business, where he teaches the marketing core course for the full-time MBA program. His research focuses on solving marketing problems using empirical methods, particularly in the areas of customer analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), data fusion, and privacy in marketing. He develops innovative methodologies such as digital marketing twins, leveraging probabilistic machine learning techniques to provide detailed, individual-level counterfactual insights regarding brand affinity and service performance from multiple data sources. Additionally, his work on privacy-preserving data fusion combines multiple datasets while ensuring user privacy, addressing the challenges of merging customer survey data with CRM databases in the US telecommunications industry. This approach enables marketers and researchers to understand customer satisfaction and run effective customer retention campaigns without compromising privacy.