SILVER SPRING, Md. — RadioShack, a fixture at the mall for decades, has been pulled from brink of death, again.
It’s the most prized name in the basket of brands that entrepreneur investors Alex Mehr and Tai Lopez have scooped up since the coronavirus pandemic bowled over the U.S. retail sector and sent a number of chains into bankruptcy protection. Those brands so far include Pier1, Dressbarn and Modell’s.
Mehr and Lopez plan to make RadioShack competitive again, this time online, rather than on street corners or in malls. However, unlike RadioShack’s glory years, it’s Amazon’s world now.
The big question is: How much value does the RadioShack brand have when the prized target audience of millennials or Gen Z have likely never owned a radio, let alone stepped inside a store?
“It’s a very thin line between being iconic and being dead,” said Robert Passikoff, founder and president of Brand Keys Inc., a marketing and research consultancy. “Being iconic a lot of the time just means people have a memory of it. I’m not sure that just remembering something is leverageable enough to be able to convert something into success.”
Success is something that’s been in RadioShack’s rear-view mirror for quite some time. The company, which would celebrate its 100th birthday in 2021, appeared to be on top of the tech world in the pre-personal computer days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the place kids and hobbyist would go to buy radios, walkie-talkies and all the parts to fix them, or even build them themselves.
Somewhere along the way, “The Shack” got lost. Unable to capitalize on the PC boom that began in the mid-eighties, it also found itself largely on the outside of the portable device revolution of the aughts and drifting toward irrelevancy. It booked its last profit in 2011. After store redesigns and other changes failed to draw customers, the Fort-Worth, Texas, company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2015 and then again two years later.
Mehr and Lopez have no designs on rebuilding the brick-and-mortar RadioShack empire. But they say there is a path back to profitability, and it all starts with the name.
“We bought the raw material to build a big business,” Mehr said. “Brand means trust. And the brand is very, very strong. I have quantifiable data that the brand is very strong.”
Mehr said REV’s formula for measuring public opinion of a brand differs significantly from the way other experts value such things, including their own polling and analysis of how the company might work in a specific “ecosystem.”
The plan, in short, is to build a vast online marketplace on top of the RadioShack brand. Trust in that name will get consumers to the site, where the quality and variety of merchandise will dictate whether or not shoppers click the “Buy” button, they say.
Since it was founded in 2019, REV has been in the hunt for other names that could once be described as “household.” It’s turned Pier1, Dressbarn and Modell’s into online-first businesses.
