Digital Recovery Can Hide a Store-Traffic Problem
Optimization captures existing demand. Brand and experience must create the trip.
Owl Illustration Agency
There is an encouraging number in Bath & Body Works’ latest results: direct sales grew for the first time since 2021.
There is also a more consequential number: U.S. and Canadian store sales declined 5.4%.
Direct sales increased 3.0% to $275 million, but they were not large enough to offset the store decline. Total second-quarter sales fell 2.3% to $1.51 billion, and management said underlying trends remained pressured. Bath & Body Works expects third-quarter sales to decline between 2.5% and 5% and full-year sales to fall between 2.5% and 4%. The company also ended the period with ten more company-operated stores than it had at the beginning of the fiscal year, making the store-sales decline difficult to explain as footprint reduction alone. Bath & Body Works’ second-quarter results
This is not an argument against the company’s digital improvements. A more seamless website, stronger discoverability and better conversion are all valuable. Their early results deserve recognition.
But they also illustrate an important distinction:
A digital recovery is not necessarily a brand recovery.
A website can make it easier for someone to buy after that person has already developed an interest. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that enough people will develop that interest or decide that visiting a store is worth their time.
The structural advantage behind digital growth
E-commerce is once again growing materially faster than retail overall. In the second quarter of 2026, adjusted U.S. e-commerce sales increased 12.2% from a year earlier, compared with 6.7% growth for total retail sales. E-commerce represented 17.1% of retail spending. U.S. Census Bureau quarterly e-commerce report
That creates a natural digital tailwind. A retailer can improve online sales because the channel is growing, its conversion tools are getting better or existing customers are shifting purchases from stores to the website.
All three are useful. None, on its own, proves that the brand is creating more demand.
For a predominantly physical retailer, the real questions are more demanding:
Is digital growth bringing in new customers, or migrating existing ones?
Are store sales falling because of traffic, conversion, transaction value, or all three?
Is digital activity generating incremental demand or redistributing it?
Are stores creating discovery and future purchases that conventional attribution misses?
Does the brand give people a reason to visit beyond convenience or promotion?
Bath & Body Works is particularly instructive because fragrance is sensory. Discovery often begins with smelling, sampling and comparing products. The physical store should therefore be more than a distribution point. It should be one of the brand’s most powerful demand-creation assets.
If that asset is losing productivity, a more efficient checkout cannot fully solve the problem.
Bath & Body Works is not alone
Kohl’s reported a similar channel divergence in its second quarter. According to management’s earnings-call commentary, digital sales increased 2.8% while store sales declined 2.0%. Yet net and comparable sales both fell 0.9%, marking another quarter in which digital improvement did not translate into total growth.
Tractor Supply offers another version of the same warning. Its total sales grew 2.3% to $4.54 billion, and digital sales contributed positively. But management said total growth was driven by new-store openings. Comparable-store sales declined 1.5%, while comparable transaction count fell 1.7%. Average ticket increased only 0.2%. In other words, the company became larger while its established-store customer activity weakened. Tractor Supply’s second-quarter results
Marks & Spencer makes the relationship even more explicit. During its 2025 Christmas trading period, Fashion, Home & Beauty sales declined 2.5%, with like-for-like sales down 2.9%. Online growth was offset by declining store sales, which the company attributed in part to reduced high-street footfall.
But M&S also supplied a constructive clue: its new and renewed stores outperformed the rest of the business, with several new or expanded locations exceeding expectations. Marks & Spencer Christmas trading update
That matters. It suggests consumers have not stopped going to stores. They have become more selective about which trips are worth making.
What real omnichannel recovery looks like
Target’s second-quarter results offer a useful contrast.
Target’s comparable sales grew 3.8%, driven by a 3.6% increase in comparable traffic. Store comparable sales rose 2.7%, while digital comparable sales increased 8.7%. Net sales grew 5.3%.
The result was not digital growth compensating for store deterioration. Both channels grew together, supported by more traffic.
Target connected this performance to investments in style, design, newness, value and the overall retail experience, including price reductions on more than 10,000 items. Target’s second-quarter results
That is the more meaningful standard for omnichannel health: digital makes shopping easier, while the brand, merchandise and experience give more people a reason to shop in the first place.
The store must earn the trip
Physical retail is no longer the default path to purchase. That means every trip carries an implicit value exchange.
Why should a customer spend the time?
The answer cannot always be “because the product is there.” The product is probably available online, often with more assortment, easier comparison and home delivery.
Stores must perform jobs that pixels cannot perform as well:
Enable touch, trial, taste or scent.
Turn product education into human interaction.
Create serendipitous discovery.
Provide social and cultural participation.
Make launches feel like occasions.
Give customers something worth sharing.
Reinforce the brand’s meaning through space, sound, service and behavior.
For sensory and discovery-led categories, these are not decorative extras. They are commercial functions.
Conversion-rate optimization, retail media, paid search, personalization and retargeting help capture intent. Brand ideas, product innovation, creators, events, partnerships and differentiated experiences help produce it.
Retailers need both.
How Left Off Madison can help create the trip
At Left Off Madison, we see the assignment as bigger than choosing between a store campaign and a digital campaign. The opportunity is to build a connected demand system: diagnose why the trip has lost relevance, develop a compelling reason to visit, use media and culture to issue the invitation, and measure whether the experience generates incremental behavior.
Our work with Technics and HypeGolf demonstrates what that can look like.
Rather than treating the partnership as a logo-placement sponsorship, we turned it into a platform spanning golf, music, fashion, nightlife, retail and community. During HypeGolf’s month-long SoHo Clubhouse, Technics products did not sit passively on a display. Turntables powered the DJ booth, speakers shaped the environment, and earbuds became part of the product-discovery experience.
The activation delivered impressions 176% above the original measured projections, enabled one-to-one product engagement with every player at the HypeGolf Invitational and generated encouraging retail momentum. Technics and HypeGolf case study
The lesson is not that every retailer needs a DJ booth. It is that physical experience works when the brand becomes integral to what people came to do—not when it merely advertises beside it.
Our work for Red Door Spa addressed the invitation from another direction. The heritage brand had an aging, loyal and gradually diminishing audience. We identified an opportunity among younger, globally influenced women who saw wellness as modern self-care rather than an occasional indulgence.
Instead of relying on one national awareness campaign, we built locally calibrated programs across markets including New York, Miami, Dallas, Washington, D.C. and Phoenix. Geo-targeted media, influencer ecosystems and localized luxury placements connected aspiration to proximity—helping give a new audience a culturally relevant reason to step inside. Red Door Spa case study
And across a five-year engagement with Panasonic, Technics and LUMIX, we connected strategy, creative, media, performance, e-commerce, retail and culture into one operating system. More than 25 product launches moved from brief to market in as few as two days and never more than ten, while custom dashboards gave the teams a continuing view of performance and optimization. Panasonic North America case study
That combination is essential because a visit-generating idea still has to be operationalized and measured. A retailer should be able to see whether an activation changed:
Local store traffic.
New-customer acquisition.
In-store conversion and transaction value.
Product trial and sampling.
Branded search and social conversation.
CRM enrollment and repeat behavior.
Digital sales within the store’s trade area.
Incremental performance versus control locations.
No single metric tells the whole story. Store sales are the product of traffic, conversion and transaction value, and physical experiences can influence digital purchases days or weeks later. A useful measurement system needs to capture the relationship between channels—not reward one for taking credit from another.
Efficiency is not the same as magnetism
There is nothing wrong with making digital commerce more efficient. Retailers should remove friction wherever they find it.
But friction reduction and demand creation are different jobs.
Optimization helps more of the people who arrive complete a purchase. Brand and experience determine how many people want to arrive and whether they see the trip as time well spent.
The central question for retail leaders is therefore not simply:
Is our digital business improving?
It is:
Is digital growth evidence that our brand is becoming healthier, or only that our website is becoming better at serving the customers we still have?
If stores remain important to the economics of the business, the answer is not to force customers offline.
It is to make the trip worth taking.
