Archive for February 2016
Movers & Shakers Q&A – Gillian Drakeford, country retail manager, IKEA UK & Ireland
Gillian Drakeford, county retail manager, IKEA UK & Ireland 1. What is the greatest opportunity for your business? The biggest opportunity for IKEA is a transformation in the customer experience. We’ve worked hard over a number of years to invest in the physical and digital spaces for our customers and this has brought a lot of…
Read MoreRetail 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 MoreThe 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 MoreCMA 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 MoreInnovative 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 MoreSmall 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 MoreTime 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…
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