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Retail Brew hopped across the pond to Barcelona, Spain last week for our first trip to Shoptalk Europe to get a global perspective on retail’s current challenges and triumphs.
During the show, we learned that conference-goers in Spain dress much nicer—save for a pair of Swarovski crocs that hit the stage on Day 2—than they do in the states, and, beyond that, gained a lot of insight into the topics on European retail leaders’ minds.
Navigating disruption with agility
Tariffs—or “the ‘t’ word,” as they were colloquially known at the show—were surprisingly mentioned and alluded to only a few times. (To be fair, the show’s theme was “Shoptalk’s Guide to the Retail Galaxy,” and there are no taxes imposed on space—yet).
Several discussions instead were focused more broadly around agility as a solution to disruption. Lessons learned during the supply chain tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic are similarly valuable now as brands and retailers’ face tariff-driven disruption and other geopolitical uncertainty, leaders mentioned during a panel on supply chain resilience.
Jamal Chamariq, SVP of global supply chain at the Estée Lauder Companies, said disruption is the “new normal.”
Melissa Malik, chief supply chain officer at Canadian fashion retailer SSENSE, noted during this “uncertain time,” retailers should be “obsessing over capacity,” and that it’s important to “know your bottleneck” to be aware of any possible blind spots.
“Double down with your suppliers and where they need help,” Malik said. “Problem-solve with them. We don’t expect them to just give us answers.”
And that agility can only come if organizations’ leaders welcome it, Kellanova’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Loretta Franks said in a panel centered on “managing change during disruptive times.”
“The world and the environment and the choices that we’re making at the minute are changing so rapidly, if you’ve got a rigid project plan and a very rigid leader that’s not prepared to see that actually our environment’s changed, or the foundation’s changed, [or] the choice that we made needs to be a different one now—you’ve got to be able to bring that agility into the team,” she said.
Minding the shops
While unified commerce was an oft-mentioned phrase, in-store experiences—often unique ones—were crucial for the retailers who took the stage.
In beauty brand Rituals’s stores, shoppers are given a cup of tea and a head massage, its CEO and Founder Raymond Cloosterman said, and its flagship House of Rituals store in Amsterdam has a new consumer experience every month.
Hoka Co-founder and Creator Nicolas Mermoud chatted about Hoka’s brand new three-story flagship store in Shanghai, which he dubbed an “experience center,” featuring elements like a Fly Run Lab.
Immersive in-store experiences are also core to luxury outerwear brand Canada Goose—to a degree. Its buzzy, experiential no-inventory store unveiled several years ago now has inventory because, well, people want to leave with something, Carrie Baker, president of brand and commercial at Canada Goose, said. But “cold rooms” and “snow rooms” across many stores persist, not only helping the product “come to life,” but also creating stronger sales conversion compared to standard dressing room try-ons, Baker said.
And at iconic British department store Harrods, attention to detail and product curation and availability are key—the retailer offers more than 90% of its products in physical stores, Harrods Managing Director Michael Ward said. And through its sales assistants, it serves as a “curator of their dress, rather than simply being an order taker,” he said. Similarly, for SSENSE, 80% of revenue at its flagship store comes from online appointments consumers make with a personal stylist, Malik said.
Utilizing data and AI
Leaders also touched on the new ways they’re gathering and analyzing data. Ward said he took a class at Oxford to learn about AI, an experience that was “like taking scales from my eyes,” leading Harrods to establish a data science team. Now, it’s using AI to create more accurate universal size curves (the term for the mix of product sizes it sells), and planning for markdowns, establishing better sell-through, he said.
For British grocery chain Tesco, an effort to make physical stores double as online fulfillment centers has produced useful consumer data, Oliver Vogt, CEO of Tesco’s Transcend Retail Solutions, said. Understanding shoppers’ basket composition has assisted in inventory planning and forecasts, he noted.
And it appears that CPG brands’ gripes over standardization of measurement across retail media networks isn’t limited to the US. During a panel on RMNs featuring Unilever, AB InBev, and BIC, leaders noted the lack of standard data reporting of sales conversion across retail media networks has continued to be a pain point.
“We need to have the confidence that actually the investment we’re putting in is going to deliver this conversion and at the same time also help to build our brands,” Afke van de Klashorst, VP of digital, media, and e-commerce at Unilever, said.