Target overhauls baby shop to compete with Walmart, Amazon

CLIFTON, New Jersey — Along with aisles of diapers and colorful onesies, Target shoppers in some of the retailer’s big-box stores can now find baby brands typically carried by specialty boutiques.

Shoppers can see, feel and test strollers, car seats and high chairs outside of cardboard boxes at about 200 stores, or roughly 10% of the retailer’s footprint. They can find merchandise from high-end brands, including a $1,000 UPPAbaby stroller. And customers can browse nearly 2,000 new baby items, which are available across all of the retailer’s stores and online.

Target’s “baby boutiques,” which have rolled out over the past two months, are just one piece of a broader push to refresh stores and woo a crucial customer base: busy families, who have increasingly turned to rivals like Walmart.

Whether Target makes progress with those shoppers will help determine whether CEO Michael Fiddelke, who stepped into the company’s top role in early February, can follow through on his pledge to end the company’s three-year sales slump. The retailer is scheduled to report its first-quarter earnings on May 20, its first three-month period under the new CEO.

In an interview with CNBC, Chief Merchandising Officer Cara Sylvester said families with children ages 5 and under spend two times as much, and families with children across age groups visit stores twice as much as the average Target shopper.

She said Target recognized it had a large share of sales from young families when it took a hard look at its business after Fiddelke got tapped to lead its turnaround efforts. She said the realization inspired Target to lean more into that competitive edge.

“We see an incredible opportunity at Target to really deepen our relationships with busy families and become their first choice for even more of life’s everyday needs,” Sylvester said.

That strategy, which hinges in part on improving the quality of its offerings, stepping up its store experience, and expanding convenient options like same-day pickup and delivery, is critical to boosting sales and fending off Walmart and Amazon.

The big-box retailer said in March that it expects to return to annual sales growth this year. It said it anticipates net sales will rise about 2% year over year and will grow in every quarter of the year compared with the year-ago periods.

While customer traffic across Target’s stores and website has dropped for the past four quarters in a row, there are some promising signs that store traffic is growing again, according to Placer.ai, an analytics firm that uses anonymized data from mobile devices to estimate visits to locations. 

Even so, Target faces challenges to its turnaround plan. Among them, it must overcome stiffer competition from rivals, a fresh threat of a boycott from a major…