Lessons for the High Street: Goyard

Welcome to our brand new series of articles on retailers that are operating in ways that provide some interesting and valuable lessons to the wider industry. Name: Goyard Location: Mount Street, Mayfair, London In a nutshell: Forcing people to come to come to the high street and queue to buy their goods as they are…

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Contactless not universally convenient

Not long ago it was only at small independent coffee shops located in places like London’s Soho and trendy Shoreditch, towards the capital’s eastern end, where cash was regarded as a little bit of an unwelcome commodity. After ordering your flat white you would immediately be presented with a card payment device with the expectation…

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More than shop work: Redemption Roasters

There are some very unique jobs and people employed in retail. In this new series of posts Retail Insider will profile some of the more unusual jobs or innovative employment practices across the sector. We continue the series by talking to Max Dubiel, founder of Redemption Roasters, about training and employing young offenders as bean…

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Coffee shops: A parallel retail universe

Time, we are always being told, is of the essence. People don’t have it anymore. They are time-poor. They want convenience above all else. Even punching their PIN number in to a payment terminal is too much waiting around, they want facial recognition and they want it now. Grab and Go is the mantra. Which…

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Digital Retail Innovations Q&A: YourStudio/Virgin Holidays showrooms

Highlighting some of the entries in the latest Digital Retail Innovations Report (sponsored by Webloyalty) a series of Q&A’s with the leading figures behind some of the key innovations in the report are being published. Here is a Q&A with Howard Sullivan, co-founder and creative director of YourStudio, which featured in the report for its work…

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More than shelf stacking: Let’s move on from our retail past

It sometimes seems as if every single month brings with it more predictions of doom and gloom in the UK retail sector. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) seems to record declining levels of retail employment each quarter without fail – in the last three months of 2018 it reported 70,000 less jobs than at the…

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Changing face of stores happening in the background

It is clear that technology is changing the way customers use stores and that this in turn is driving retailers to adapt their physical outlets to better service these new requirements of shoppers. The latest example of this came from Tesco that announced the implementation of some major changes at many of its stores. The…

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Ensuring employees deliver value-added experience to customers

Many high street retailers are sadly missing out on the capabilities of workforce scheduling solutions that is leaving them dangerously exposed to operating inefficiently and failing to maximise the value of their employees. Numerous businesses find themselves operating in the same way they always have done – with an Excel spreadsheet that was set up…

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Lessons for the high street: Crabtree & Evelyn’s Islington Townhouse

Welcome to our brand new series of articles on retailers that are operating in ways that provide some interesting and valuable lessons to the wider industry. Location: Upper Street, Islington In a nutshell: Everyone’s favourite hand cream provider is going off piste with its newest incarnation – a shop called the Townhouse in North London…

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Innovative Retailer: Freshippo

Name: As of very recently Freshippo, having renamed itself from the former Hema. Either way, it’s owned by Alibaba. The Place: China. It’s totally a Chinese thing right now and there are around 100 of them in 16 big Chinese cities as we speak. But they do things on an epic scale over there so…

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