Dive Brief:

• Finish Line executives Thursday said the company will spend some $15 million in tech improvements this year to improve its logistics and customer experience.

• The sportswear retailer recently suffered supply chain problems that came after it established a new warehouse system, for which it has employed a vendor to make improvements. 

• Finish Line's Q4 consolidated net sales were $580.3 million, an increase of 5.2% year over year, and same-store sales rose 4.6%.

Dive Insight:

Finish Line is facing stiff competitive in the sportswear space, as well as fallout from self-inflicted wounds from supply chain changes that were supposed to improve logistics but instead stymied them.

New Finish Line CEO Sam Sato, a Nordstrom veteran of more than 20 years, presided over the company’s Q4 conference call with analysts. “The upgrade to our platform will provide improved stability and also provide more flexibility for our teams to make changes more frequently and enhance the customer experience,” Sato said, according to the call transcript. “You’ll also see improvement in a more seamless customer experience between desktop and mobile and then, lastly, it will have a much more robust search engine. So all of those benefits will come with the platform upgrade and will certainly help us drive our greater sales in the digital side.”

Sato said that athletic shoes and women’s sportswear will be a focus as the company looks to improve sales and customer engagement. He added that, in addition to continuing to improve its logistics infrastructure, Finish Line will invest in its loyalty program. Its concessions in Macy’s stores and Macy’s website also are doing well, he said, and the company will continue to focus on those efforts.

Finish Line additionally will spend $40 million to remodel its better-performing stores. Earlier this year, the company announced it would close about a quarter of its 600 locations. 

Finish Line hardly needs more obstacles in the already competitive sportswear space, although the bankruptcy of Sports Authority, which could result in that retailer closing entirely, might help give Finish Line some room to improve its operations.

“I’d say Finish Line is in the sights of failure,” Lee Peterson, executive vice president, brand, strategy and design at WD Partners, a customer experience expert for global food and retail brands, told Retail Dive earlier this year. “As an example, a while ago, Finish Line’s CEO [Glenn Lyon, replaced in January by Sato] moved to open a showroom store, but after the ideas went through the executive team, the concept came out the same as the current stores. That’s stagnation.”