5 Surprising Things About Target
5 Surprising Things About Target
5 Surprising Things About Target
5 Surprising Things About Target
Private brands are crucial to Target, which owns 10 billion-dollar brands.
Popular house brands are a key way for retailers to stand apart from competitors since shoppers can't find those products elsewhere. Target gets about one-third of its sales, or $25 billion, from its own brands, including Archer Farms and Market Pantry food and Merona clothing, and half its profit. Some 10 such Target-owned brands generate at least $1 billion a year.
From Missoni to Lilly Pulitzer, Target has done 150 designer collaborations.
Though Target had long striven to be a discounter with style, the retailer kicked that into overdrive in 1999 with a home goods collaboration with famed designer Michael Graves. While such collections don't typically move the sales needle for the $75 billion a year retailer, they are critical to its "Tar-zhay" reputation and fashion cred. Indeed, the Missoni and Lilly Pulitzer lines were so popular in recent years, they overwhelmed Target's web site on launch.
There is a Target chain in Australia with the same bull's eye logo.
Target has an Australian doppelgänger. There is a discount department store chain down under with the same name and very similar logo. But the two retailers have nothing to do each other, and never have. In any event, after Target's disastrous Canadian expansion, now aborted, it's unlikely the retailer will look abroad again any time soon.
Target originated in a department store basement.
In 1902, Minneapolis banker George Draper Dayton was looking for a way to get some rent from a newly erected but unused building. He convinced the Goodfellow department store to move in; a year later, he bought the store and renamed it Dayton's Dry Goods Company. In 1962, seeing the popularity of the closeout sales in the store's basement, the Dayton family launched a discount version of the store and named it Target.
Target mascot Bullseye has been immortalized in wax at Madam Tussaud’s in New York.
Bullseye has been Target's mascot since 1999, and proven to be a marketing boon for the retailer. Three dogs, female bull terriers, perform as Bullseye, with two others being trained to play the character. The pooch has been central to many Target campaigns including its 2003 "See. Spot. Save" marketing
and is trotted out for many occasions, from ringing the opening bell at the Stock Exchange to opening new stores.