Long live retail. Retail is dead.
The last twenty years have been witness to seismic economic, technological, social and political change. Unsurprisingly, the way we buy has changed beyond recognition. This is a revolution that has only just got underway.
Kieron Weedon, Director of Strategy discusses the changing value of ownership
The rise of the Sharing and Subscription Economies will continue to disrupt standard business models. The most obvious disruption has been to the sectors that have traditionally relied on very transactional models; the car industry and ZipCar; the hotel industry and AirBnB; the music industry and Spotify; the entertainment industry and Netflix.
We will see in 2017 how this trend will redefine the way retailers engage with customers. We are seeing an increasing direct impact on retail as new subscription services are being launched across food (HelloFresh) fashion (Fabletics) and cosmetics (Birchbox).
Jonathan Staines, Planning Director examines rediscovering ‘discovery’: can charity shops save the British high street?
It’s been a very tough few years for British retail. The metonym so often used to denote the UK’s retail fortunes, the ‘High Street’ has evidently suffered. According to IPSOS, national retail footfall was down 0.9% in the first quarter of 2016, compared with the same period in 2015*.
Rob McCardle, Innovation Director looks at how digital destroyed physical retail in order to create it.
The story of the last twenty years in retail is predominantly that of established businesses with incumbent physical footprints, relentlessly adding digital channels to augment their existing business models to become omnichannel, enabling customers to browse & shop fluidly.
Against this landscape, purely digital retail businesses (e.g. Amazon, Jet, Boohoo) made significant inroads in a parallel, value-driven model where the physical store was deemed an unnecessary expense on the bottom line.
