Hibbett Sports Is Making Solid Progress with City Gear

Hibbett Sports is a leading athletic-inspired fashion retailer with more than 1,000 stores. Shop the best in sneakers, shoes, fan gear & more! – Hibbett | City Gear

When this merger was taking place I thought it was going to speed up the demise of Hibbett Sports. I even wrote that issues within City Gear would be impossible to fix. I wrote that post although I knew it would bring a lot of attention to me that would lead to confrontation and frustration with my predictions. I wrote about that here:

Hibbett Sports Has More To Fix With City Gear Than They Think

In this post I discussed store openings by City Gear and Workplace Practices. I stated that Hibbett Sports would have a lot of work to do and that e-commerce wouldn’t be a fix that would help.

Since I wrote this article City Gear has cleaned up it’s C Suite and they have closed under-performing stores like The Vault. They made the outlet locations into 50/50 stores (stores that carry both full price and outlet items) and now they only have one true outlet instead of three here in Memphis. A number of managers have been moved within the Memphis district and there are new employees. Stores have been redesigned and in one of the best consolidations I’ve seen, the e-commerce, what I wrote about here:

Hibbett Sports Corrects a Big Mistake

Has been implemented… and it looks amazing! The company has integrated products like Staple into the homepage and combining the urban account products with the more mainstream products carried by Hibbett Sports gives the site a well rounded product mix. They have a feed with content which will improve search and in essence they have blended two sites one that registered a paltry 258,000+ visits per month for City Gear and a Hibbett Sports site that has grown from 1 Million+ visits per month in 2017 to 4  Million+ visits per month today.

Two Problems In the Sneaker Market Being Overlooked 

Hibbett Sports is making smart decisions in their acquisition. While I still feel that a heavy reliance on the Nike wall should be a concern, in the short term the retailer should see considerable improvement in e-commerce.

This is definitely one to watch.