Jeff Rusinow

With unprecedented success and speed, Kohl’s Department Stores over the last 15 years has established itself as a dominant, high growth national department store. The combined value proposition of providing the customer with value and convenience has allowed the company to enter new markets, often when the naysayers were predicting doom and gloom. [...]

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Wednesday, October 9, 2002, was a most unusual day for the company.
That morning, Kohl’s announced a comp store sales decline. That in and of itself, while unusual, was certainly not unheard of. Often weather-related or tied to shifts in the advertising calendar, the best way to judge how things were going was to [...]

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It’s pretty clear that virtually anyone who was  either involved at the senior level or who had invested in Kohl’s Department Stores during the period of the leveraged buyout in 1986 until the last stock split in 2000 did well financially. The success of Kohl’s has made a lot of people rich.
For [...]

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Around 1998 or so, under the stewardship of former Wal-Mart executive Pat Peery and under Larry Montgomery’s persistent nudging, Kohl’s Real Estate department was starting to get itself organized. In earlier years, Real Estate had essentially been the domain of Bill Kellogg, and in all candor it ran loosy goosy. Now there was [...]

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Kohl’s reaction to the birth and development of the Internet as an additional revenue stream is a great illustration of their corporate culture’s approach regarding all things new: never ever be a first adopter, be methodical in your due diligence, and don’t lose focus on your core business.
As one of the original [...]

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It’s fair at this point to ask, how does a retailer that began as a chain in the Midwest become a major national player? Was there a Master Plan? Actually, the decision to go ‘national’ actually came about as more of a natural progression. As the number of new stores throughout the [...]

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Bill Kellogg and the management team at Kohl’s were well aware that the retail landscape was always changing, a sort of revolving door for many of the existing stores in malls and strip centers across the country. They knew that new retail business models, including their own, were coming into markets and gaining market [...]

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(Note: This post is my first entry to another ‘book’ of sorts (different than The Rise and Fall of Kohl’s Department Stores) that I will be periodically ‘releasing’ on this blog, the result of years of writing about all kinds of things that I have experienced. This entry, on Virent Energy Systems, is [...]

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What was once a small regional niche department store chain soon started to grow into new areas on its way to becoming a national powerhouse. In the mid-1990’s, Kohl’s expanded into over ten other states, almost all of them markets that were close to existing markets. By ‘back-filling’ in existing and opening contiguous [...]

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By around 1995, having defined the key components of the business model, Bill Kellogg and his senior management team was positioned to take the show on the road. Their model was being increasingly accepted in their home base of Wisconsin and in certain Midwestern cities, and they knew that was only the beginning. [...]

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