Whilst there is no indication on their site, the world’s biggest clothing retailer for big and tall men, Casual Male XL [site: www.casualmalexl.eu], will close its UK online operations at the end of the month; we do not know whether all the other European sites will close as well. The Casual Male XL stock will still be available after June, from its sister site Rochester Clothing Big & Tall UK [site: www.rochesterclothing.eu].
However, as there is little difference between the online stores, will Casual Male XL be missed? The Rochester online store includes much of the same lines as Casual Male XL and at the same price; however, Rochester features higher-end fashion apparel in addition. Casual Male XL features many respected names such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Nautica, Cutter and Buck, and Reebock. The range from Rochester remains the same with the adition of John Varvatos, Michael Kors, Robert Graham, and Joseph Abboud.
The websites themselves appear almost identical. Both use the same layout and the navigational options are exactly the same. The colours are slightly different and as mentioned before, Rochester sells more top end market brands; however, with the introduction of the Casual Male XL range into the Rochester range, the Rochester store can only become a stronger entity in the male plus size and tall market.
There is little press about the pending closure of the UK Casual Male XL but on the face of it I think the change will not be noticed as the stores are so similar in style the transition will appear seamless. From a business point of view the closure would seem to make sense.
What do you think of the mending closure and merge?
The way i see this is, correct me if I am wrong,
A lot of these big and tall websites are underground affiliated and owned by one entity. Basically one or two big warehouses with a master company and ten child companies with sites.
This way they dominate the search engines. With all the same products and few originality but it works for them. They do squeeze competition and small shops of the internet this way.
The top corp used to be the publicly traded casual male retail group; i believe they had a child corp bigandtallliquidators.com , underneath that you would find child corps with other similar sites. They are changing everything now.
When Google gets the hang of this, they will suffer the spam policies. Maybe one day smaller, more personal big and tall initiatives will get a chance!
a break in this Google block will increase diversity of the products.
Here is the Google cache on their corporations.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7RgtKLXIrKQJ:www.bigandtallliquidators.com/
Have to agree with John. Having recently had an absolutely diabolical shopping experience with the Rochester webstore I have been trying to find an alternative way to purchase a Ralph Lauren Big & Tall Rugby Top in the UK, but the options are severly limited, and most US companies (inc the RP Website) refuse to deliver to the UK. So, rather than continue to do business with a company that has treated me so, so poorly I shall have to miss out on getting the item I wanted. It’s a bit like biting my nose to spite my face, but I’m damned if they’ll get any profit out of me now.
I think this article gets the information a little twisted and is a bit misleading. They did not shut down the website, but simply merged the two into one – making the shopping easier and more of a one stop experience – to John’s point. Instead of having the customer shopping in two places with two url’s, they can now go to one site and access all the product the Corporation offers.
Darren, sorry you had a bad experience on the site – you should try calling customer service and asking for the manager. I am sure they would do their best to help you!