The greatest challenge facing retailers today may be to rediscover their gut instincts. As the Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell puts it: “Instinct is the gift of experience.”

Consumers don’t want to be dictated to, but they welcome trustworthy suggestions that enable them to define better who they are. They yearn for guidance, and the best guidance comes from a gut educated by experience . . . but ever open to seeing the world in a new way.

Remedial customer service, I have often maintained, is the wrong angle. Retailers need to help customers become active agents in customer design. The product domain might be a new bedroom interior . . . or customization of the perfect back pack to accommodate your specific array of gadgets.

I look enviously at the St. Louis-based Build-A-Bear Workshop chain. It’s surely a pioneer. The next giant step will be to move beyond customizing stuffed animals to an entire retail world of “Build-A-You” that allows shoppers the opportunity to customize purchasing identity and to become artisans in crafting the world they want to buy.

More and more retailers of the future offering wanted differences will be responsive “Me Salons” in which the chief product designers will be customers themselves, guided by skilled retail coaches at the store level and on the Internet.

The logic of this “smart-is-the-new-cool” world can’t be tracked with charts and graphs. It’s a world you assimilate through direct experience in observing consumers behave in stores . . . at home . . . and on the Internet.

When I was 19, I had my first experiences as a buyer for a retailer, and I remember trying to please my General Merchandise Manager. Despite my good instincts to pick the right patterns and products, but it didn’t seem I could ever please her. So, I continuously second-guessed myself.

The result: I began to lose touch with myself and my knack for making the right choices. It took me quite some time to regain this instinct. As to gut instinct, if you don’t use it . . . you lose it.

What makes a merchant successful? The core strength is the ability to instinctively recognize value and to make the right choices quickly and decisively. I have to credit the recovery of my gut instinct to a guy I was fortunate enough to meet along the way in my career. . . . A guy named Mickey.

Mickey Drexler is a retailing legend. He cut his senior-management teeth at New York’s Abraham & Straus in Brooklyn, back when it was the training Mecca of the retail industry. After Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, Mickey went on to become the transformative spirit of the Gap.

When I worked with Mickey, I concluded that his most powerful asset was that he didn’t have any memory! Is this a criticism? Not on your life. Perhaps there is no higher praise.

Every time Mickey looked at something, it could be quite different from what he saw before because he always assessed it in a fresh light.

This isn’t a knowledge thing. The future of retailing, I contend, is in regaining this sense of continuous realization. Retailers must accept the following reality: Your customers are going to reconstruct retailing . . . with you or without you. Your goal is to be recognized and rewarded as the helpful guide who helped them navigate this new world successfully.

Tags: "Build-A-You", gut instinct, Me Salons, Mickey Drexler, reconstruct retailing