The Voice Of Global Retail

Co-hosting a retail dinner last night with Oracle, it was fascinating that much of the discussion focussed around the importance of people, morale and service. For the assembled retail executives, there was of course an acceptance of the current tough trading environment. Some retailers in the value sector of fashion were even, quietly, admitting that [...]

Visiting Berlin this week on the day that the giant Arcandor group filed for bankruptcy was a sharp reminder that this recession still has some way to go before it is played out. This is despite the fact that over the last few weeks, commentators have been latching onto any positive indicators that have been published [...]

In just the space of a day I have heard about two happy customers of the Nike iD “design your own shoe” service. Available both on line and in store, Nike iD allows customers to design their own trainers based around many different options to customise to your own look - style, colour, fabrics and [...]

Three days, 90 speakers and over 800 attendees later, the 2009 World Retail Congress has drawn to a close. In trying to put it all into perspective, its interesting to look back over the substance of the sessions, read the many press cuttings and to recall the countless conversations we all had. How best to summarise the mood?
From [...]

The first day and the very first session of this year´s World Retail Congress and we got not one, but two top economists calling the recovery from recession. According to Mirae Asset´s Ajay Kapur and Deloitte´s Ira Kalish, the US economy should start to show signs of an uplift by the end of the year. [...]

Writing on May 1st, with the sun shining and the newspapers reporting that a long hot summer is coming Europe’s way, it is tempting - just a little - to feel optimistic. Spring is certainly here and maybe, just maybe, an economic spring could be too.
Before anyone gets too carrried away, the media is doing its [...]

With a background in journalism and magazine publishing, it is with understandable dismay that I have been reading about the slow but steady death of local newspapers in many countries. The pace of their demise, brought on by the collapse in advertising revenues as result of recession, has been alarming. In the US, advertising revenues [...]

Its a big week for the World Retail Congress. One of the important new initiatives that forms a key part of the programme for 2009 is the Retail Futures Challenge - a global competition amongst retail business colleges to create a new retail concept for the year 2012. Three colleges are participating in this launch [...]

Its been a week of sharply contrasting events and signals. The US stock market rallied strongly as did many others around the world. There was much talk of the housing market in the US seeing its first positive blip last month and President Obama was making reassuring forecasts about the ability of the American economy [...]

The value of any major conference is in being able to test the mood of an industry. Over the last two days here in London, Retail Week has been holding its annual conference which brought together close to 600 people and delivered some great insights into retailing’s collective psyche. As mentioned in previous blogs, UK [...]