Picture this – a radical new grocery concept designed to revolutionize how Americans shop. The store is much smaller than your typical supermarket, around 10,000 square feet and stocking an edited range of just several thousand products. The store doesn’t feature banks of traditional checkouts; instead it’s a heavily automated Read more…
What’s in store for the retail sector in 2020? First, let’s be clear about what’s not changing. We’ll continue to see a bifurcation of winners and losers as the industry sheds itself of status quo retailers (translation: brace yourself for more doom and gloom). The ubiquitously connected ‘on-my-terms’ shopper is here to Read more…
Subscriptions have become the holy grail for retailers as the sector moves away from competing purely on product and increasingly on service. Recurring revenue and driving loyalty with your most important shoppers—what’s not to like? Tesco has become the latest retailer to jump on the subscription bandwagon. Britain’s biggest supermarket Read more…
Is this the future of the high street? According to Next’s CEO Lord Simon Wolfson, a partnership with Amazon is one of the ways they can stay “relevant” to shoppers. And I have to agree. In the UK, Amazon is the 5th largest retailer. Nearly 20% of retail sales now Read more…
I’m so excited to launch, in partnership with retail technology leader Red Ant, the first of a three-part series of whitepapers to explore how the retail industry will have to embrace the digital store and seamless shopping to survive, from frictionless checkout to hyper-personalisation and clienteling. There’s no doubt that Read more…
Whenever I give talks on the store of the future, I always sum up with this line: the store won’t just be a place to transact but also to eat, play, work, discover, learn and borrow. There’s usually a lot of nodding heads until I mention the b-word. Fair enough Read more…
What a fantastic couple of days at The Retail Summit in Dubai. I had the pleasure of moderating two sessions on e-commerce and ‘new retail’ and interviewing a number of retail CEOs over the course of the event (to be shared in the near future!) Here are my 5 key Read more…
It was a pleasure to work with Dropbox on this future of retail campaign. There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there, but I believe the future is bright for those retailers willing to reconfigure for the digital age. In the future, retail will be more blended in that Read more…
British supermarkets don’t have a great track record when it comes to running discount chains in parallel with their mainstream stores. But that’s not stopping Tesco from launching Jack’s – its final answer to the persistent threat posed by Aldi and Lidl. Why now? Aldi and Lidl have been trading Read more…
Weather. Calendar shifts. Experiential spending. Retailers have many “dog ate my homework” excuses for when trading is less than stellar, but when a late snowstorm forces you to temporarily shut over half your stores, it’s bound to impact the top line. While it’s important to acknowledge the impact of the Read more…