Retail Insider Breakfast – Anthony Fletcher, CEO of Graze

Retail Insider held its first Breakfast Event of 2016 with Anthony Fletcher, CEO of healthy snacks company Graze, who highlighted how data has been fundamental to the success of the business. Senior executives from Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, Monsoon Acessorize and Amazon were among those who heard how the company was good at logistics…

Read More

The day Venda tried to sue me out of my house

Watching Powa Technologies call in the administrators Deloitte last week was very sad but not necessarily that surprising to the market. In my opinion, even though its founder Dan Wagner had been claiming it was worth almost £2 billion a few months ago, his businesses suggest this was more about over-hyping than actual reality. The…

Read More

CMA crack-down on unmarked sponsored content

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) publicly shamed five brands in February for suppressing negative reviews and not providing a ‘complete picture (for consumers) when making buying decisions’. The CMA renewed its commitment to ensure transparency in user generated content (UGC) in January, and is on the prowl for firms misrepresenting themselves on third-party sites…

Read More

Innovative Retailer – Bloom & Wild

The Name: Bloom & Wild The Place: In your letterbox right now! Actually it’s an online business started in the Autumn of 2013 but letterboxes are going to figure highly, trust me. The Story: We’ve just had Valentine’s Day when Bloom & Wild were probably dealing with a lot of stressed and difficult people with…

Read More

Small independent retailers need to embrace digital

Everybody likes Independent shops. Even those people who never cross the threshold of such businesses would undoubtedly say they are great fans of them if ever questioned in a survey about their shopping habits. What this says about surveys is that they have to be treated with a little dose of scepticism – some more…

Read More

Time to think about artificial intelligence

Retail’s Big Show (organised by the National Retail Federation), aka NRF, in New York City each January is the big opportunity for IT suppliers from around the world to showcase their latest retail technologies. Most are simply the latest iterations of existing solutions and as such there are never many genuinely radical things on show…

Read More