Opening Ceremony Company Overview

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Table of Contents

Introduction
History
Key Dates and Events
Location
Mission Statement
Employee Relations, Philosophy and Programs
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Opening Ceremony is a Specialty store located in West Hollywood and was founded in the year 2002. The West Hollywood store is a shop that deals in fashion, art, and traveling products. The store has also cleverly rolled out a traditional client interaction strategy as part of its business channel.

This element revolves around investing money by offering unique and diverse products to customers who buy in the store. In addition, the Opening Ceremony’s customers have better offers due to consistent and attractive discount. The store has always aspired to provide quality products and services to customers. The store currently offers direct sales to its consumers within admirable standards of flexibility.

Apparently, the success of the physical specialty store channel forms the rationale for this research since it motto is provision of diverse, high quality, and unique fashion apparels. This channel has been customized to ensure that clients are served within the most reliable and efficient methods.

The success of the channel could be attributed to its partnerships and quality assurance to its diverse customer segments. Despite the high prices for its high-end apparel, many high-income customers prefer the store because of the high quality apparel besides the customized shopping experience.

The location of the store is strategy to tap into the celebrity market segment since more of its customers are celebrities residing around Los Angeles. The company has interesting customer care services and strategic partnerships with other designers as a strategy for improving its product visibility.

The mixture of elements such as appropriate mission and vision, tactical and relevant market positioning strategy, and specific market segmentation, the Opening Ceremony store has become a global leading fashion brand in the US and beyond.

History

The Opening Ceremony store was founded in New York by UC Berkeley graduates Carol Lim and Humberto in the year 2002 as a joint partnership venture. After a trip to Hong Kong, the dynamic duo decided to start the company through the integration of the Olympic Games mission statement, which is to adopt a multinational strategy to their retail business.

The company is renowned for retailing household and emerging fashion designs. The designs range from known brands to small brands that are emerging in the domestic and international market. As a result, the specialist store has been able to proactively transform the Los Angeles store into an open and expansive market for international capacity and exotic souvenirs. The Opening Ceremony is currently a privately owned enterprise in which the two members are equal shareholders.

Key Dates and Events

2002: The first store was established in New York.

2003: The Los Angeles store was expanded to include the children apparel and opened a branch in Brazil.

2004: The Opening Ceremony opened a subsidiary branch in Germany.

2005: The Opening Ceremony successfully established a subsidiary brand in London.

2006: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in Sweden.

2007: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in Los Angeles.

2008: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in Japan.

2009: The Opening Ceremony signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate with brands such as “Rodarte, Topshop, Pendleton, and Maison Martin Margiela” (Opening Ceremony par 3).

2010: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in France.

2011: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in Argentina.

2012: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in Korea.

2013: The Opening Ceremony opened a new branch in Belgium.

Location

The Opening Ceremony has headquarters in, 35 Howard Street, New York, NY 10013. The store has three subsidiary branches in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. The company has more than ten subsidiaries across the continent. These subsidiaries are located in the UK (London), Japan (Tokyo), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), Argentina, France, Korea, Belgium, and Sweden.

Mission Statement

The Opening Ceremony has been consistent in growth within its business mission “of exploration and friendship, working with a family of contributors to forge a creative environment that reaches far beyond the fashion world” (Opening Ceremony par 3). The mission of the Opening Ceremony is to be a superstore with quality fashion apparel and services that guarantee customer satisfaction.

The business vision for the Opening Ceremony is designed to continually build sustainable business with customers through quality service provision and offering competitive prices. The vision promotes a proactive relationship with the customers, suppliers, and employees of the Opening Ceremony. The three main elements in the Opening Ceremony’s mission statement are superstore, fashion center, and value for money.

Customer Service Philosophy and Programs

The Opening Ceremony has a unique motto of customer satisfaction which is achieved through careful selection of different fashion products displayed in the store. The store has an active contact management which provides a decision support system to select the best market access on suitability, distribution structure, and integration of contact channels among the customers.

The contact management system in the store takes the form of Debit card services and a 12-hour call center to connect to their customers (from 8.00am to 8.00pm) (Opening Ceremony par 3). The store operates from 8.00 am to 8.00pm from Monday to Saturday in all branches.

In order to guarantee customer satisfaction, the Opening Ceremony’s customer management system is built using standard operating procedures to promote consistency in processing customer orders and all other channels. For instance, the Opening Ceremony’s call center has been successful in addressing client concerns in a timely and professional way (Best Buy, par. 5).

Opening Ceremony has employed the laggard activism strategy to not only capture the global market, but also leapfrog its dominant competitors. The store operates on the Business-to-Customer (B2C) platform which enables it to directly interact with the customer interested in a product. As a result, the Opening Ceremony has penetrated the fashion market due to a balance in factors such as the Western business style, global business approach, and flexible business channel.

In order to infiltrate the expanding global fashion market, Opening Ceremony’s business platform includes services such as premium customer experience, compact support from the local community, and low charges for loyal customer.

For instance, the company’s product multi-branding as a positioning strategy has enabled it to survive competition. For instance, the direct shopping is tailed to address the individual customer needs. Besides, the company has managed to balance the elements of intangibility, inseparability, and heterogeneity in the 4Ps of its market mix due to improved product visibility for each target customer segment (Rai 23).

The goal of the Opening Ceremony’s customer relationship strategies is to concentrate on the local market through use of an open-system business model. The strategy was meant to take advantage of the challenge of ‘smallness’ as compared to other giant specialty stores offering similar products.

The store depends on the closed-system approach in execution of its business strategies. Unlike other stores which developed a fixed entry strategy in the market that was characterized by overconfidence and inertia, the Opening Ceremony was packaged as a humble and flexible fashion products trading platform (Opening Ceremony par 5).

The Opening Ceremony store has made the shopping experience an easy task with its strategy of all-under-one-roof, from renowned designer products to upcoming designer products. A customer is in a position to literally find all types of fashion products within a single location.

This saves on time besides allowing a customer to plan for a single shopping activity that covers for all his or her needs. To support this mission, the store has one of the most attractive reward plans for its loyal customers in the form of shopping points that are redeemable, seasonal discounts, and annual rewards.

For instance, the store has special promotions and discounts of up to 25% on assorted products on holidays such as Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, Independence Day, Black Friday, and spring sale. The store has a 24 hour return policy for goods sold as long as the product is returned in its previous condition (Opening Ceremony par 7).

Employee Relations, Philosophy and Programs

In the Opening Ceremony store, there is a laid down structure formulated in order to keep its staff in healthy and stable mind in their duty of serving the store’s interest. The store uses the iCIMS software to manage its human resources. The system is significant in skill tracking, allocating monetary to employees, and managing the master payroll.

The store’s human resource management team has been active in building a strong and healthy workforce. At the Opening Ceremony store, programs are periodically designed in line with objectives and goals for sustained happy employee-employer relationship through the human resource department. This department is also mandated with the duty of hiring and firing employees, promoting health organization culture, and discovering special talents at the Opening Ceremony.

The methods used at the Opening Ceremony include direct participation by the employees and promotion of healthy organization culture through different training programs (Opening Ceremony par 8). The Opening Ceremony store has attractive employer paid benefits that offer health cover, mileage, work compensation, retirement, and disability among others.

The compensation plan for the Opening Ceremony inspires optimal performance through job satisfaction since the total annual compensation and different benefits are relatively attractive. Besides, the store has a continuous 401k retirement plan for employees. Each year, employees are given the opportunity to buy 1% of the Opening Ceremony stocks at a discount of 10%. The actual hourly salary for the sales associates is $50, besides a comprehensive medical cover and annual salary increment of 5% of the previous year salary (Opening Ceremony par 9).

The corporate governance structure of the Opening Ceremony store has a strong system for promoting the elements such as culture, structure, systems, and strategic alignment among the employees. The compensation plan for the Opening Ceremony store are aligned to a supportive work environment, concrete learning processes, and personal development that reinforce competency.

The company has annual promotion plan and continuous employee training program. The promotion is based on performance and academic qualifications. The training program is in-house and is managed by the HRM department (Opening Ceremony par 6).

Employee selection at the Opening Ceremony is focused to evaluate resumes of applicants for essential requirements which in this case include possession of management and analytical skills in fashion design environment. In this case, the process is systematic, and through aptitude test, elimination of those lacking analytical skills is possible within minimal prejudice or biasness. In the Opening Ceremony store, social and highly skilled employees are allocated the right duties than keeping them in a secluded environment (Opening Ceremony par 4).

Conclusion

Apparently, the store has the strengths of strong brand presence, expansive distribution channel, diverse product multi-branding, and strong customer base within the specialty channel. The Business-to-Customer platform adopted by Opening Ceremony has created and successfully implemented the marketing strategy to ensure customer loyalty and market expansion.

In addition, the store has special vouchers that target corporate organizations and private customers as part of its strategies for building a strong customer relationship management system. For instance, adoption of the hybrid system of customer service management by the Opening Ceremony is meant to ensure direct contact with customers within the shortest time possible. The hybrid system is very successful in contact management and positive attitude reassurance at the store.

Since the company has not invested heavily in offline and online advertising, it is currently facing strong competition from similar stores such as Satine, Boutique, Madison, and Kitson. Besides, the store operates in a dynamic market where changed customer preference may negatively affect its profitability. In addition, the Opening Ceremony is facing the challenge of increasing its customer based since most of its products are considered expensive my ordinary Americans.

Works Cited

Rai, Alok. Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Cases, London, UK: Kogan Page, 2012. Print.

Opening Ceremony. About Us. 03 Dec. 2014. Web.

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