Dive Brief:
- Dick’s Sporting Goods’ investments in in-store and online experiences helped power a strong quarter, with comparable sales up 4.5%, President and CEO Lauren Hobart said on a Q2 2024 earnings call Wednesday.
- House of Sport, an experience-focused store concept, and Field House, an updated version of the traditional Dick’s location with experiential elements, each drove high in-store engagement, according to Hobart.
- Dick’s also added new features to its mobile app and website experience, including the ability to view certain footwear in 3D and AI-powered chat.
Dive Insight:
The CX focus at Dick’s House of Sport is bringing customers in more frequently and from further away, while encouraging them to spend more time in-store, according to executives.
“Our engagement with our customers — we call them athletes — is as high as it has ever been, and that's a credit to the experience that we have in the stores,” Hobart said during the call.
Dick’s will open the 15th House of Sport later this month, with plans to reach 20 locations by the end of the year. The company opened four Field House locations during the quarter, bringing its total to 17, with plans to open nine more locations this year.
House of Sport locations emphasize elevated service and features like rock climbing walls, indoor tracks and simulated driving ranges to help them stand apart from traditional sporting goods stores.
The Field House concept is designed to take some elements of a House of Sport experience and fit them into the smaller footprint of a traditional 50,000 square foot Dick’s store. Existing Dick’s locations can be renovated into the newer design, and “there's no set limit on how many stores could be upgraded to Field House” in the future, according to Hobart.
“With House of Sport and the Field House, we continue to push what a reinvented model for serving athletes can look like, and those learnings continue to trickle down through our entire company,” Hobart said.
Dick’s ties its employee experience to customer experience as well. Investments in employee experience have improved turnover across the chain, and skilled associates play an important role in making the Field House concept work, Hobart said.
“Our store teams are doing a fantastic job of leveraging the assets that they have in store,” Navdeep Gupta, EVP at CFO at Dick’s, said during the call. “That is what is giving us the confidence that you see with us taking the House of Sport learnings and translating that into the Field House concept.”
