Staples 2014 Annual Report Download - page 3

Fellow Shareholders,
Throughout 2014, the Staples team
made great progress as we continued
to reinvent our company for the future.
We entered the year with aggressive
plans in a number of areas: build scale
and credibility in categories beyond
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expenses to fund investments in our key growth initiatives. I’m
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these areas.
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The needs of our customers are rapidly changing. Over the
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ness machines and technology accessories have been under
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2014, we achieved more than $200 million of growth beyond
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breakroom supplies, copy and print, and furniture. Today, nearly
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and we are extremely well positioned to build on our success in
2015 and beyond.
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A few years ago, we transformed our $7 billion North American
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The model is highly collaborative, focusing on expanding
relationships with existing customers, and acquiring new
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breakroom supplies, furniture, technology, print and promotional
products. Over the past two years, we’ve increased the number
of specialists who are focused on driving growth in these
categories, and we’re seeing solid returns on this investment.
During 2014, we delivered double-digit growth in our adjacent
categories, and this momentum was a key driver of the 7%
local currency sales growth that we achieved in North American
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We’ve also built strong momentum in staples.com, and achieved
double-digit growth in the second half of 2014 in local currency.
We’ve reduced pricing and implemented dynamic pricing tools to
improve value perception. We’ve invested heavily in ecommerce
capabilities and talent to create a better customer experience,
and improved the quality of our desktop and mobile websites.
We’ve also invested in increased business customer acquisition
and retention. Over the past two years, we’ve expanded our
online assortment from 100,000 products to well over 1 million
products. We’re building scale and credibility in categories like
retail store supplies, restaurant supplies, healthcare supplies and
education supplies – products that our customers need to run
their businesses.
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important steps to broaden our assortment, enhance the quality
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experience. Our retail copy and print salesforce continues to
increase its productivity. During 2014, we implemented new tools
to simplify the selling process and improve the in-store customer
experience. We built a strong pipeline of business customer
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acquired PNI Digital Media, a copy and print software company
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channels.
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As a result of customers reducing consumption of paper-based
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2014, we took aggressive action to address these headwinds.
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of these stores across the chain. We also dramatically reduced
retail expenses to bring our cost structure in line with our current
retail sales base. Over the past three years, we’ve reduced the
number of retail stores in North America by more than 10%, and
we’re on track to close approximately 60 stores in North America
in 2015.
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we’re creating a better customer experience by bringing together
the strengths of our retail stores and online platforms. During
2014, we launched Buy Online Pick Up in Store, which has been
very well received by our customers. We also enhanced the user
experience on our in-store staples.com kiosks and continued to
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