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This month, American shopping malls received another nail in the coffin. Francescas, the women’s fashion and accessories chain, has reportedly quietly begun shutting down all its stores. Heres what you need to know. Whats happened? The women’s fashion and accessories chain Francescas has reportedly begun the process of going out of business, which will involve shutting down all of its stores. The news of the closures was first reported by Womens Wear Daily. Per that report, a customer service representative confirmed it is currently closing all its stores, with liquidation sales underway. However, the chain has not broadly announced the news. Fast Company has reached out to Francescas for comment. An automated recording on the company’s customer service line said all associates were busy. Emails to Francescas went unreturned. We’ll update this post if we hear back. The womans fashion chain was once ubiquitous in shopping malls across the country. Founded in 1999, the retailer rose to prominence during the early 2000s as malls were at the height of their cultural relevance just before online competitors began to reshape the shopping landscape. In 2011, Francescas debuted as a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq, but by 2020, the retailer was facing severe financial struggles, not helped by the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns and the decline in mall foot traffic. That year, the company filed for bankruptcy and was delisted from the Nasdaq. After exiting bankruptcy, the chain attempted a comeback, and even now its website lists 457 boutique stores in 45 states that employ more than 3,400 individuals. But Francescas has struggled over the past few years, incurring significant debt. One vendor told Womens Wear Daily that Francescas owes approximately $250 million in unpaid invoices. What has Francescas said about its shutdown? As of the time of this writing, Francescas hasnt made public comments about its going out of business. Currently, its website continues to operate as normal, with no mention of store closings. The only information on the website that even implies its stores are closing is its updated Return Policy page, which now states that As of January 14, 2026, all sales are final. It also says that gift card sales are final and gift cards won’t be returned. Employees were also reportedly blindsided by the shutdown, with a source telling Womens Wear Daily that merchants were laid off last week with no warning. Which Francescas stores are closing? Reportedly, all of them. When stores close, they usually only keep their doors open until all their remaining inventory has been liquidated. Francescas shoppers looking for good deals in liquidation sales are advised to contact the store directly before heading there to confirm it is still open. When are Francescas stores closing? It was not immediately clear when all this will happen. As of Monday, Francesca’s was still posting on Instagram as if everything were normal, although it is being inundated with questions from users about the reported closures. Mall retailers have had a bad year Unfortunately, Francescas is not the only mall retailer to have faced financial struggles over the last 12 months. In the first half of 2025, fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 closed hundreds of locations in America. And in August, teen and tween fashion and accessory chain Claires also decided to shutter hundreds of stores. The story behind such closures is the same for many retailers involved: rising costs, consumers who are increasingly more choosy about where and what they spend their money on, and foot traffic that never fully recovered after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Category:
E-Commerce
The CEO job description has remained remarkably stable for decadesbut the times they are achangin. That stability persisted through wave after wave of technological change. The internet, mobile, cloud computingeach transformed business operations, but none fundamentally altered the CEO’s core responsibilities. Strategy, culture, resource allocation, organizational designthe essential functions remained constant even as the tools improved. AI is different. It isnt just a tool that executes; it is also a system that makes choices. It makes judgments about customers, employees, and strategy. And this means that when you deploy AI, youre not just installing software. You are importing a decision-maker with its own values into your organization. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} That changes what it means to be the CEOthe person who is ultimately responsible for how the organization thinks and acts. Four competencies will be central to CEOs who want to thrive in this new reality. 1. Chief AI Orchestrator Effective CEOs do not simply delegate AI to the CTO and then just forget about it. They actively orchestrate their organizations innovation portfolioa curated collection of initiatives that balances transformational ambition with incremental wins. This means excelling in three areas. Vision setting: articulating how AI aligns with organizational purpose. When employees understand why AI matters beyond cost savings, adoption accelerates and resistance diminishes. Boundary setting: defining where AI should and shouldnt operate. Which decisions require human judgment? Which processes can be automated? If a CEO wants to remain in control of the organizations actions and culture, they must draw these lines deliberately rather than allowing them to emerge by default, depending on what kind of product the AI labs ship. Cultural transformation: personally modeling the mindset shift AI requires. When the CEO publicly shares their own AI learning journeyincluding their mistakesit fosters an organizational culture that legitimates the kind of experimentation needed to adopt and adapt this new technology to the companys needs. Organizations stumble when they become intoxicated by grand visions while neglecting smaller victoriesand they also fail when they ignore the big picture and get lost in the weeds. The key, as always, is balance. CEOs must operate on both macro and micro levels simultaneously. They need to be just as comfortable asking how AI might reshape their entire industry as they are asking how AI helps a product team ship improvements next month. 2. Business Philosopher AI systems make choices about what is true, what matters, and what is allowed. When you deploy AI, you are importing an entire philosophy into your organizational decision-making. This creates three types of misalignment risk. Ethical misalignment occurs when AI absorbs values that are at odds with your organizations stated principles. Amazon developed a hiring algorithm trained on years of historical data. The system mirrored those years of data perfectlyand systematically discriminated against women. It translated past discrimination into automated future decisions. Epistemic misalignment emerges when AI systems apply different standards for determining truth than your organization would under other circumstances. A healthcare AI that privileges peer-reviewed studies over clinical experience embodies a specific stance about formal knowledge versus practitioner wisdom. These architectural decisions, made by engineers who may never meet your team, become constraints your organization lives with. Strategic misalignment happens when algorithmic tactics undermine broader organizational goals. An algorithm designed to maximize ad views might place advertisements alongside any high-engagement contentincluding content that damages brand safety. The AI-ready CEO must develop philosophical literacythe ability to recognize when AI outputs reflect built-in value systems and to evaluate how those value systems align with organizational purpose and culture. 3. Paradox Navigator The test of a first-rate intelligence, wrote the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. The hybrid reality of human-AI business demands exactly this. Every significant decision now involves navigating tensions that must be managed: personalization versus privacy, automation versus authenticity, speed versus reflection. Most leaders instinctively try to resolve these tensionspick a side, optimize for one value, move on. Thats a mistake. Fully prioritize efficiency over employment, and you lose the institutional knowledge that drives innovation. Fully prioritize privacy over personalization, and competitors who found the balance take your customers. The tensions dont go away because you chose a side; they resurface as consequences. Traditional leadership resolved contradictions. The new CEO holds them in creative tension, responding not with either/or but both/and. And this creates opportunity. For example, At Moderna, AI helped design the COVID vaccine in just 42 days. AI created mRNA sequences, scientists tested them, AI analyzed the results. Neither could have succeeded alonethe breakthrough emerged from holding human intuition and algorithmic analysis in productive tension. 4. Ecosystem Steward The three competencies above focus on your organization. This one looks beyond it. Every CEO faces pressure to use AI for cost-cutting through automation. The math looks obvious: automate tasks, reduce headcount, boost margins. But theres a collective action problem hiding in plain sight. When every company simultaneously eliminates jobs to boost efficiency, they collectively undermine the purchasing power that sustains their markets. You cant sell products to people your industry laid offor to communities where mass unemployment has cratered demand. Unlike previous technological disruptions, AI can hollow out employment faster than new opportunities emergeover quarters, not decades. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half their middle management roles. And CEOs who think our layoffs wont matter in the grand scheme are making a serious errorindividual rationality creates collective destruction. Companies that resist the race to the bottom gain three competitive advantages: Talent magnetism: Top performers increasingly choose employers who demonstrate responsibility. When your industry races to eliminate humans, being the company that augments rather than replaces becomes a recruiting superpower. Knowledge retention: Institutional memorythe kind that knows why that process exists, which client relationships are fragile, what the last restructuring actually brokelives in people. Fire them and youre training AI on an organization that no longer understands itself. Relationship preservation: Customer relationships that took decades to build cant be replicated by chatbots. Companies keeping humans in the loop preserve connections that their automated competitors are quietly severing. The ecosystem steward sees beyond their own companys efficiency gains to the systemic risk that executives are creating together. Four Moves for Tomorrow Adopt a portfolio approach: Balance quick wins (1-3 months), strategic bets (3-12 months), and moonshots (12+ months). The high pilot failure rate42% of companies scrapped most AI projects this yearpunishes all-in bets. Stress-test for values alignment: Before deployment, ask three questions. What does the data say? How will stakeholders feel? Should we do this? Run red-team exercises to surface hidden philosophical boundaries. Protect human judgment deliberately: Schedule regular no-AI problem-solving sessions. Maintain decision logs documenting AI overrides. Watch for dangerous dependency creeping in. Model the second-order effects: Before announcing automation-driven layoffs, ask: What happens if every company in our industry does this simultaneously? Map the impact on customer purchasing power, talent availability, and supplier stability. The CEO who sees only their own efficiency gains is optimizing for an economy that wont exist. The Stakes Have Changed No board will hire a CEO who cant read a balance sheet. Were approaching the point where they wont hire someone who cant articulate an AI strategynot because AI is fashionable, but because its becoming inseparable from strategy itself. The job description has changed. Orchestrating an AI portfolio, detecting values misalignment, navigating paradoxthese arent optional upgrades for the technically curious. Theyre becoming as fundamental to leadership as financial literacy. But you can master all three and still fail. If you optimize your way into an economy that can no longer sustain your businessif your industry collectively eliminates the customers, talent, and communities it depends onno amount of AI fluency will save you. The companies that thrive wont just be the ones that deploy AI best. Theyll be the ones whose leaders understood that the race means nothing if you destroy the track. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? 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Category:
E-Commerce
Want to be wealthier? Get married. According to a study published in Journal of Sociology, the net worth of a married person grows approximately 75 percent more during their thirties, forties, and fifties than the net worth of an unmarried person. (Thats per person in the relationship, not per couple.) Want to make a higher income, and feel more satisfied with your job? Get married. A Washington University in St. Louis study found that people with relatively prudent and reliable partners tend to perform better at work, earning more promotions, making more money, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs. What the researchers call partner conscientiousness predicts future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion (even after factoring in the participants original level of conscientiousness). According to the researchers, conscientious partners perform more household tasks, exhibit more pragmatic behaviors that their spouses are likely to emulate, and promote a more satisfying home life, all of which enables their spouse to focus more on work. As one researcher said, These results demonstrate that the dispositional characteristics of the person one marries influence important aspects of ones professional life. Or in non-researcher-speak, a good partner sets a good example and helps create an environment where you can be a better you. Other data backs up the above findings. A 2021 Census Bureau report found that married adults tend to earn substantially more than unmarried adults, and have three times the net worth. A 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found that married couples spend about $10,000 less per person than unmarried people. Making more and spending less? Great formula for a higher net worth. Thats why deciding whom to marry is one of the most important decisions youll make where your overall happiness, career prospects, and financial success are concerned. Clearly, you have to choose the right person to spend your life with. But just as clearly, you have to choose to be the kind of partner they deserve to spend their life with. For example, a study published in Journal of Physical Activity and Health found that people in romantic relationships exercise less than people who are single, especially where moderate to vigorous physical activity (running, lifting weights, cycling, etc.) is concerned. Why? Become a couple and youre more likely to do couples things: eat meals together, watch TV together, hang out together. Over time, Lets go to the gym is much less likely to top the list, even if you consistently exercised before you became a couple. As the researchers write: For those with a partner, current (exercise) levels are substantially lower when the partner is present than when the partner is absent. When partners spend leisure-time activities apart, their (exercise) levels are higher than those of individuals without a partner.The results suggest that it is not the mere existence of a romantic relationship but the current co-presence with a partner that affects physical activity behavior. Bottom line? Spending time together means youre a lot less likely to exercise.And then theres this. A study published in Health Psychology found that after four years in a stable relationship, people tend to gain significantly more weight than they would from the natural result of aging. A Social Science & Medicine study found that people in a long-term relationship are more likely to gain weight, and less likely to exercise. (Unsurprisingly, the study also found that when a relationship ends, people tend to lose weight and exercise more.) When time together feels short, going to the gym doesnt sound like couples time. Granted, youre together . . . but only in proximity. The researchers also speculate that feeling secure in a relationship tends to cause people to focus less on their appearance, and therefore less on healthy behaviors, like exercise and diet, that affect appearance. Which takes us back to whom you choose to marry. Clearly you shouldnt choose your life partner on the basis of how conscientious they are, or whether you think they not only eat well and exercise but will continue to eat well and exercise. To paraphrase the Washington University in St. Louis researchers, marrying a conscientious partner could sound like a recipe for a rigid and lackluster lifestyle. But it does appear that having a conscientious and prudent partnerboth in a practical sense, and in a healthy lifestyle senseis an ingredient in the recipe for a better, more rewarding career, and for a healthier and longer life. So what should you do? Instead of expecting your partner to change some of their habits, think about what you can do to be more supportive of their goals. In a practical sense, maybe you can take on managing the finances. Or take care of more household chores, or repairs, maintenancethe things that keep your trains running on time. After all, the best way to lead is by example. Take health and fitness. You can decide to make exercising and eating better a priority, and do things to support that goal. You can take on the grocery shopping. You can cook some meals. You can fix a healthy lunch for your partner to take to work. You can choose to be the conscientious one. Thats the real key. Marrying the right person helps, but being the right person to have marriedbeing supportive, encouraging, and leading by exampleis the best way to help your marriage be successful, both practically and, more important, emotionally. Because the person you choose to marry mattersbut what you do for your partner, and what that does for your relationship, matters most. Inc.
Category:
E-Commerce
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