The Peak of the Omnichannel Era, in One Simple Graph

Nordstrom became a private company several weeks ago. I saved the multi-year trend of their stock price. What year was the peak of the "omnichannel era"?

If you answered "2015", trust your instincts.

From 2016 and beyond, the loss of traffic in stores became untenable.

• It was too easy to buy online.
• Amazon absolutely mulched everything in their sights.
• Generational shopping differences cut off younger customers from older brands (I'm looking at you, Macy's).
• What I now call "Customer Media Marketing" began to take shape in this timeframe.

I was in meetings in this timeframe with retail brands ... Executives were furious that store traffic was SO BAD ... they'd bark at the Online Marketing Director that thirty years of store presence caused the online channel to succeed, not a banner ad on a shady website where the marketer couldn't possibly track down the bad players who were siphoning marketing dollars from the brand. They'd spend all this time trying to attribute (sound familiar) online sales to the store that likely "caused" the online order.

Eventually, CFOs figured out it was all nonsense, they told the world that square footage was untenable in the modern world, and the omnichannel movement ended.

Our world evolves, in an unending manner.

• Startups need funding from VCs.
• VCs need to get paid via IPOs.
• Banks lend when Publicly Traded brands fail to grow or need to grow in an expensive manner.
• Private Equity scoops up the remnants when brands begin to die, allowing banks to get paid while not having to publicly publish failures anymore.
• Private Equity (sometimes) loads the brand up with debt, pumps the numbers, and then sells to a "less smart" buyer, who is left holding the bag.

The secret to success in business is to not be the person left holding the bag.