Great Stores Still Stop Us in Our Tracks!

Some stores just stop you.

You walk in, and for a moment—maybe longer—you forget you're in a place built to sell. You're in something more. A feeling. A point of view. A brand that knows who it is.

This episode is a love letter to those stores—and the people who know how to spot them.

Steve sits down with two of his favorite retail minds (and friends), Jack Stratton and Ian Scott, for a fast-moving conversation that feels more like a pub chat than a panel. Together, they unpack what they’ve seen, what leaders keep missing, and why a well-done retail safari might be one of the most underused leadership tools in the industry.

A deeper look at:

• Why the best stores aren't just places to shop—they're spaces that show you what matters now
• How curiosity is still one of the best skills a retail leader can have
• What most companies get wrong when rolling out tech, and how store teams quietly absorb the fallout
• The subtle power of retail culture—and what happens when you stop paying attention to it
• What Lush, IKEA, and Gentle Monster understand that many legacy brands still don’t

You'll hear real stories, playful jabs, and honest truths about what it takes to build—and notice—a store that makes people feel something.

For retail leaders wondering how to stay inspired, how to lead store teams with more empathy, or how to reconnect with the part of retail that still excites them—this episode is a reminder: stores are still cool. You just have to know where to look.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_05 0:50

Okay. So I need a disclaimer. I need to provide a disclaimer for this episode already. And I and here's why. Because I love these two guys. I love them to death. Jack Stratton and Ian Scott are on the podcast today. And I'm just going to let you know, and I even think I even say it is that this podcast will go off the rails. And I mean that in the most positive way. Because when you have people that you genuinely love to be around, and we're just having conversations around retail design, stores, retail leadership, all these things. And it's just going to be an amazing show. So I'm excited for you to listen in on really a com the conversations that we have if we were sitting in the pub or we were walking or doing something in New York City, doing store tours with these guys. So please buckle up, enjoy yourself for this episode of Retail Leadership with Steve Worthy.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Welcome to Retail Leadership with Steve Worthy, where we go well beyond the corporate playbook to unpack major opportunities, hidden challenges, and critical issues that senior retail leaders face every day. So let's get started right now.

SPEAKER_05 2:10

Welcome to Retail Leadership with Steve Worthy. I, audience, I gotta tell you, and I gotta put a disclaimer out before we even get started. This podcast episode actually will go off the rails at some point in time today. And it's not because of Jack and I, right? Jack and I are extremely professional at what we do and how we communicate. We have somebody else that's actually on the podcast that was just dying to be here, and we allow them to come in, and we know that at some point it's just gonna go off the rails. I just want to apologize up front.

SPEAKER_03 2:46

Steve, can I swear on this podcast?

SPEAKER_05 2:49

Yes, you can, sir.

SPEAKER_06 2:50

I feel like I want to swear. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:52

Without further ado, I really want to, I really want to take the time and allow these gentlemen. You guys have already got the introduction about the episode, but I do want to allow these guys the time to introduce themselves, and I'm gonna go to my right. I'm gonna start with Jack. And Jack, you want to talk a little bit about yourself and introduce yourself, please?

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Yeah, thanks, Dave. My name is Jack Stratton. I run Insider Trends. I'm director of Insider Trends. We are a retail trend spotting agency based in London, working globally. We say we help big retail brands spot what's coming next. But more specifically, and how I think I became really close to Ian and a little bit known in the retail world is around my insights, focus, and really love for physical stores, and through that running retail tours all over the world. So I spend a lot of my life as my son in a really simple way puts it, walking around places, looking at shops and looking at people shopping. He actually gives the forget consulting. That is what I do. I look at shops and I look at shoppers. You know how kids are so much better at expressing things directly and rather than wrapping it up in stupid language. So yeah, that's what I do. I look at shops, I look at shoppers, and yeah, I love it.

SPEAKER_05 4:04

Excellent, excellent. All right. Without further ado, my both of you are my good friends, but uh Ian Scott, could you introduce yourself?

SPEAKER_03 4:11

Yeah, sure, thanks. It's interesting because my son also describes me as going shopping and taking photos, and it is wonderful. You set your own business up, you decide how you're going to brand yourself, and you spend ages naval gazing, and it takes a child to just nail it in one sentence after you spend months trying to how do I capture what I do? But as Jack says, we there is a lot of similarity in what we do, which is why we've ended up gravitating towards each other instinctively and collaborating. I like to go out and look at physical stores, it's my first love while still understanding how they fit into the whole ecosystem. But also it's looking at the behavioural aspects, the display, the design, the communication, how brands utilize these stores and picking up on some of the trends that are coming through as people are using their physical stores as part of their ecosystem.

SPEAKER_05 4:58

Excellent, excellent. The interesting thing, and I I want to start with this, is that, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I know both of your backgrounds. Like neither of you have had the traditional sort of like retail jobs that like like I've had or had for 27 years, right? So you are definitely both of you are coming from this outside perspective. How much do you think that has helped you with actually what you do? I'll start with Jack.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

You're listening to retail leadership with Steve Worthy.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

That's such a good question. And yeah, so I started my first few jobs when I was a kind of teenager. Yeah, I worked in a supermarket, so I did those kinds of jobs like really early on. Worked at Waitros in the UK and did a bunch of different service jobs, but post, so I went to university post that for that first sort of adult jobs. Yeah, I was nowhere near retail, so I started out as a journalist and a copywriter. I was writing, I was in the advertising world. I like writing, I like communicating, I liked speaking, and I was playing around with those things, but trying to figure out what I was interested in. Wrote about retail and did all kinds of different jobs, but moved more and more into what I do now. But long story short, I think how how my background has become really useful is I look at retail differently to most of the brands that I work with. Um the retailers themselves, the store designers, tech companies. And it's primarily because I don't have that background. And I'm very honest about this. I say, look, don't bring me on. I tell people, don't bring me on. If you're looking for a big consultant on a retainer to help long-term store strategies, and you need someone with that knows how every little aspect of retail works, don't come to me because I'm going to be shooting because I'm not the guy. I say what I'm really good at actually is because I look at it differently, I'm quite good at spotting or looking at things in it from a different angle. So I'm quite good at the macro stuff. And that's because I think probably my journalistic background. So my approach always is not just to look at the industry and inside the industry, but to look at everything else. So if I'm looking at trends in retail, to be honest, I'm just as much looking in the rest of the culture. What are people interested in? What are they watching? What are they eating? What are they consuming? What do cities look like? How are our behaviors in the wider world kind of being shaped and reshaped? And I always try and bring all of that in because generally when I do that, I realize I end up at a slightly different place. Now, I might not always be right, but what it does do is tend to trigger really interesting conversations that they maybe aren't getting from the people that know retail inside out. So I think it's a really good question, Steve, because I think sometimes actually those totally different perspectives can be useful.

SPEAKER_05 7:44

Yeah, 100%. And Ian, I we've I don't know how many conversations we've had, and I've always loved hearing your story around how you actually got started. But also when you think about when you are conducting your safaris or how when you moved into the space, could you talk a little bit about when you moved into the space and why it actually fit your personality? And then also along the same lines around the fact that you have this external perspective, like how does that play out when you actually do your safari so we're gonna talk about the safaris here in a second.

SPEAKER_03 8:16

Sure. Like Jack, I didn't work in retail. I've had a number of people say, So, which brands and retailers did you work for? And I went, none. I didn't go to university or college. I was straight in as a salesman, do business development in printing brochures, and then transitioned towards design. I was gonna be a graphic designer when I was 14, and then I saw how good they were, and I went, my coward of doing it. Um and so I I enjoyed that because I think that was almost the start of the journey that we've ended up on now, in that as a business development person, you need to observe and understand and then communicate the benefits, which is a sort of skill set that Jack and I apply now as well. We didn't work in retail, but we've learned the ability to observe and understand. And I do find it really interesting because I started to develop an opinion and start talking on LinkedIn about shots that I liked and didn't and why, probably seven or eight years ago. And it to me, it was instant. I was never trained to do it, and I worked in retail design, selling retail design and various aspects of that. But to me, I was looking at it going, that's common sense. I didn't feel I needed a degree or to work in the industry to just look at it. And to me, retail is the absolute epitome of human behaviour because we're all shoppers. We're all and I often say this to my clients, I say, take your Tuesday afternoon meeting head off, put your Saturday afternoon shopping head on because everyone has it at the weekend and think like your customers. So to me, 90% of retail is understanding humans. It's not a clever design or a technique or AI or it's understanding humans. How do you revert into that to tap into things that appeal to them and make it easier? Now I also aware that's a nice statement you can say on stage, and most retailers is about five million dollars and 18 months' work to give to do something like that if they're not there already. And I'm and Jack and I are both very conscious that we can make throwaway comments that leave them with huge problems to sort out. But yeah, to me, it was just I was fast, I was just fascinated. The first time I worked for a design agency focusing on retail, I thought, wow, this is the sharp end of business. If you think everything in commerce is a design or a development, a product or a service, that ultimately ends up with the end consumer putting their hand in their pocket and going, This is cool, I'll buy this one. Yeah. So to me, retail is the sharp end of everything that humans do where you finally find out whether all that work has paid off and someone's gone, yes, I'm gonna spend my money. And to me, it's quite unique. I do not know of another industry where you can come up with an idea, put it in your own space, and your target audience comes to you to give you money so you can find out if your idea works. And I wish more retailers would think like that, where you're all of e-commerce, but particularly the physical store, is a playground, it's a test lab, it's experimentation, it's never final and complete. The moment you open it, things need to change. And I thought if you think like that, what are you if you were making nuclear submarines, how would you know what your competitors are doing? How would you test something? It's impossible. Retail has so many unique attributes that are often an underappreciated and underutilized.

SPEAKER_05 11:31

No, that's so good. I just did a uh I saw a post on Instagram. It was Jeff Bezos, he was talking. He said that as human beings, we tend to we overestimate the risk involved in something and we underestimate the opportunity, right? And I I loved I love that because that actually speaks to exactly what you're talking about. You and I'm gonna stay with you for a second on this one, and Jack mentioned the word culture, right? And I know that we we didn't really talk about this one, but I'm gonna love to hear your perspective on this because you both have an outside perspective on the retail culture, right? The industry. I'm gonna use the word culture, and it's not just industry, I think there's a retail culture. And could you talk a little bit about your perspective when you think about that word culture and retail together? Because I I'm interested to hear what both of you have to say, because I don't I don't think there's gonna be some variations, but I think there's also gonna be some similarities.

SPEAKER_03 13:51

Certainly. I think as culture, as Jack talked about it, is it's trend, it's interest, it's fashion, it's uh but it's also long-term behavioural things, right? A legacy as well. It's not just uh one specific thing. And I think retail reflects fashion. Beauty and fashion are probably the extreme examples where you literally respond to culture and it can be changing. I was just listening to the radio this morning, and there was a podcast with the founder of Inditext at Zara, and he started Fast Fashion, where he says, within 15 days I can see something and I can have it on the shelf. That's the ultimate reflection of that type of culture from a fashion perspective. But I think culturally as well as it can be behavioural. When you look at COVID and the impact that had on our behaviour, not our habits, our habits were put on hold and they're reverted back. But our behaviour was forcibly changed by legislation and fear of a pandemic. And you see there were some subtle cultural shifts there a little bit. A lot of them bounced back because we're now back doing what we were doing before. It was a temporary prediction. But it helped us start to analyze, and I think one of the biggest impacts on culture, I think, was COVID helped us appreciate the power of human-to-human contact because we were denied it suddenly. And you're not just shopping, it's seeing your grandma, having a haircut, going to the cinema, going on holiday. And there was a real issue for people where they were denied something they took for granted. Now, the the sad reality is we're back to taking it for granted now. Oh, we've learnt this and the legacy of the no, it's not because we all go back because that was four years ago now, it's in the past, and hopefully it'll never happen again. So you you you're cult your the culture I think you're referring to is a very permanent overriding thing, and you'll get sort of shifts like temporary fascia, but the culture and attitude and behavior, which I think Jack will do a better job of diving into, there's a more it's uh an oil tank on our motorbike. The shift of that is much slower over time, is my perception. I mean you'd just see what Jack thinks.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Yeah, I I would echo so much of that, Ian. And what we I we worked on something recently with a client, and broadly it was to do with sustainability and sourcing in fashion companies around the world. Basically, how much are big fashion retailers prioritizing sustainability and sourcing? And what one of the things we found out, I think, is a brilliant illustration of this point about culture and business. Because one of the things I've realized, so long story short, the report suggests that there's quite a few retailers who actually are slightly deprioritizing sustainability in their businesses this year versus maybe a couple of years ago. Lots, and that isn't that surprising when you think about it, right? Inflation has carried going up. There's been more financial pressures on businesses all around the world. Maybe it's been harder for some of those big retailers. So naturally, maybe they've focused a bit more on value for money over the consumer, and if that meant being slightly less sustainable, that's what happened. Or maybe it's just they had a sustainability team of five and now it's of four and it's been deprioritized slightly. But what I've realized alongside it is in that time, if you look at the culture and culture by just wider societies all around the world, I was thinking we're all talking a bit less about sustainability. Greta Thunberg was the number one news story right a few years ago. There isn't really a Greta Thunberg anymore, or there is, but no one talks about her as much. And I was thinking, even kind of climate-caused sort of natural disasters around the world, they're obviously they're happening just as much, but they're not as reported. And I realized what's happening is the culture's become slightly numb about that, and not because people don't care, but it's just we heard so much, so it's not quite at the front of everyone's mind. And then guess what? Because businesses reflect culture, all of a sudden, they're not talking about sustainability as much. And I've realized, God, that's what's happening. And suddenly, if you're a retailer and it's just one example, and you actually want to really focus on sustainability, you've almost got to kind of go slightly against the culture if you're gonna lead with it and talk about it because people are talking about it. That's right. And if you said to people, okay, ESG at the moment, what's happening ESG-wise in the culture, I bet people would start talking about something other than sustainability, it'd be something social, wouldn't it? Like neurodiversity or something else for environmental sustainability. So that really, I suppose, is my point that, and I think, Steve, this is so significant, is that because business reflects culture, that's what is so interesting about retail. Because when I look at it at a macro level all around the world, I just constantly see how brands and retailers in different regions and sometimes globally just reflect back whatever we as people are doing and saying and feeling. You see that all the time.

SPEAKER_05 18:30

Correct, correct. That's all great, great. I'm glad I actually went down that route with both of you. Um amazing answers. Here's the other area I want to move, I want to talk a little bit about where the whole retail safari piece. Right, because I've had so many years of retail experience, like actually in the stores, right? Visiting stores, markets, and all of that stuff. I look at it probably, I look at it from a completely different lens. I look at stores typically from this understanding the plight of what it took to get there, understanding the plight of the hourly person, understanding all of those different dynamics around the internal side of the business. And so I I probably look at it with a sense of empathy when I go into certain stores. I don't think either of you do. Um you look at the empathy, but you're very thoughtful in how in what you say. So I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna let you guys answer this in a second. Just wanted to make a little bit of a of a point. And the reason I say that is because I've been able to visit stores with both of you. And yeah, it's very both of you have a completely different styles and how you do your retail safaris. When you think about somebody like me and probably all the other people who are going on, some of the people are attending your retail safari, how do you reconcile the fact that you know what? I know these guys and guys are probably looking at it like this, but I'll be damned. I have to like speak my truth in this situation around what I see within the store. Is there any sense of that, or are you just naturally going after what's within that store and not even and not disregarding sort of the audience?

SPEAKER_02 20:15

Yeah, I mean you get Yeah, I was immediately because something popped into my height, so I'll start. I'm gonna jump in. I love to be honest, I love talking over Ian. It's one of my favourite things to do. So very good at it.

SPEAKER_06 20:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:28

But I think I won't talk over I won't talk over you, Jack. Don't worry.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

That is what it is.

SPEAKER_03 20:33

It would be very rude if I did that.

SPEAKER_02 20:35

Yeah. It's like when we're the pub, this is what it is, just talking over each other for three hours and then hugging at the end and going home. I do know what I think that when I approach every safari, sometimes it's with an incredibly specific brief, and that's different. So obviously, sometimes a brand might say, Yeah, we're opening a new store here and we need to know what kind of stores like ours are there and what they're doing and what people are entertaining. If it's super specific, that's different. But generally, when I'm just high-level trying to get across my view on the retail world, the first thing I do is I always think what I always treat everyone, and this is the ground zero for me, is I assume everyone knows as much or more than me about retail in general. I always look at it first. I go, I uh these people are super smart, so I don't start talking about stuff I think they'll know. I'm not talking about square footage and how many stores this brand has. And I'll say, look, I can give you all of that after, but I focus immediately on what can I tell them that they probably won't already know and what perspective can I give them that will make them not give them answers, but just get them thinking differently. That's what I see as my role in those things. How can I make them engaged and inspired? And most of all, the thing for me, the look of success after a tour, is that people go off with two things. One, they're looking a bit differently and having discussions, but two, honestly, that they're like quite excited about talking about retail in stores. That's in a way, it's a love of physical stores that drives that. I'm like, I want to get some people, because I think there's always a few people on the tour who've been in the job 20, 30 years, and and they lose a bit of that love. And I want to show them some things and some ideas and say, God, yeah, there's a lot happening out there. And so the number one, to be honest, the number one way I do it is I think the one thing I've got, and Ian absolutely has this as well, and this is why we work together so much, is I am looking at news stores around the world constantly. I look at as many news stores as possibly anyone in the world other than Ian, basically. That's what we do. That's the one unique thing I feel I can guarantee. So I go, when I show them this store, I can give them a global perspective. So I'm gonna stay, right, we're in Glossier, but let me tell you, there's another store that looks just like this in Berlin and another one that looks just like this in London. And guess what? This is part of a bigger global trend that's happening. So what you're seeing here might just seem like a cool isolated thing, but it's part of a much bigger thing that's driven by maybe some consumer activity, driven by other things. That's what I think I try to bring, that genuinely global perspective that just makes them think, okay, maybe there's a bit more going on here than just what I'm looking at in the store.

SPEAKER_05 24:36

Yeah, I saw that. I'm gonna let you answer that question here in a second, Ian. I saw that when when you and I, when we went into uh Gentle Monster in New York for the conference that just took place in November. And I think I ran up to you. I was like, okay, Jack, I was like a little kid, like running up to their dad, asking him something about a question. I just run in, I kept running back and forth up to Jack. Like I would go away and I'm looking at something, I run back to Jack. And I run up, I go look at something, I run back to Jack. It was just it was funny this to see. I admittedly was like thinking about that. Jack's gonna get tired of me, but I didn't care.

SPEAKER_02 25:07

And now I've got kids, I love it.

SPEAKER_05 25:11

What the interesting part was that what I felt I was doing, and not that you, and you actually just said it, was I was falling in love again back with the experience of retail, right? Because there was a curiosity that I was able to uncover, you know, during our visits. And I was just like, what about this? What about that? And it actually just had me thinking very differently. So it was just interesting. I was like, I remember the Gentleman, I was I kept running back and forth to you asking all these different questions. So it Ian, give me your perspective on conversation we were just talking about that internal versus external.

SPEAKER_03 25:51

Yeah. Firstly, I left that Jack has that sort of macro view because I think the first time we walked around stores together was Chicago last year. And we went into a lush store, and anyone that follows me on LinkedIn knows that I rave Jack. But Jack was like, come on, give me your love, give me your lush pitch. And I was talking about the communication hierarchy and how they break up the paradox of choice of having all long rows of things that look the same. And Jack was like, Oh my god, you look at this completely differently to me. Because Jack will be talking about why they're not on social media anymore. And I'm going, look at the price ticket, how they've designed it. Because I've come from a retail design background. So Jack and I, anyone listening, please employ Jack and I to visit the same stores together. Because when we do projects, we divide and go separate ways. And we would look because his view and my view, there is an overlap, but it's not a massive overlap, it's a small overlap, and there'd be an amazing view on all of the brands from two perspectives. So the problem is it costs twice as much to stick both of us in the same store at the same time. So maybe one day. But personally, I think they're missing a trick because I have a lot of the I've done a lot of these gigs, particularly when I started out, and I call them voyeurism. People get their team together or bring some of their clients, and you show them some really cool stores around central London or something like that. And then they go away the following day, open the laptop, carry on like nothing happened. And I always think, what a shame for all this time and effort and cost to not leverage what you learn here. So I often say to some people, like Jack says, What do you want to see? Not just what do you want to see, but what's going on in your business that's causing you to arrange this day? And it could be like, oh, we've got a new competitor, we're launching new products, we're going to target a different demographic, we want to do this, want to do that. And I'm going, Great, that helped shape. Some people have some specific stores in mind. I took a Swedish beauty retailer around London recently, and they were like, We want to go to Glossy, you know, I want to go and see the AI machine in the fragrance shop. I want to go to Liberty to see the fragrance. And specifically, but what I often do as well is I go forget about the product and the category. I'm not showing you, you know, I took a massive toy retailer, a brand and retailer out a few years ago, and they said, I can't wait to go to Hamlet's, the massive international toy shop. And I went, I'm not taking you to Hamlet's. You should know Hamlet's. Okay, that is supplier, client, competitor analysis. How are you going to differentiate and be better if your point of reference is your competition? And I said, You I'll show you Nike, I'll show you Gymshark, I'll show you Rafa Psyche. And what you will see is a brand that's already developed this type of solution. They've done all the RD to make it work in a physical store. You can take that and be revolutionary in your category, even though they've been doing it for 10 years in theirs. So I said, the inspiration is not the category. And so many people come in with this very sort of binary, linear approach. I want to see this and I'm gonna go, I'll show you this, but let me show you these other four things that will blow your mind. No, and Lush was all, I mean it always comes back to Lush. Jack can't do a podcast with me without half the conversation. I didn't talk about I took Vodafone, who were a massive uh media phone cell company, Verizon type of for American audience, and uh they were going, why are we going to the smelly bath bomb store? And they for 18 months afterwards they were talking about Josh, the guy who gave the tour and what went on in the start. And I think how do we hire Josh? How do we clone Josh and put him in our stores? Because their mindset was smelly bath bomb, and I was going retail best practice, and I will show you people, which is your word, Steve, people will blow your mind because they're recruited well, they're trained well, and they're trusted by the business to go out and add value. And so that's what I love. I love I'll accommodate some of the things they weren't, but it may be 20%. The rest of it is stuff I know that will add value to their objective. And what I've also started to do is one final point, is Jack and I both normally start with a brief presentation, ideally. You get together, everyone has a coffee, and you set the scene, and then you do. What I'm starting to do now is pulling them back to the office afterwards and sitting down while it's fresh in their mind, and you go, What did you enjoy? What caught your mind? And working with the bosses and going, you could capture three or five action plans or insights or points of interest. And the great thing is they're all infused, they're there in the moment, and you go, okay, what were the three things that everyone did? And we go, what are the top five? How are we going to implement these in our business? And suddenly you have an action plan so that the retail safari goes from voyeurism to the launch pad for evolution and innovation. And to me, that is a much better way. Because I think one of the frustrators I have, and I was saying to Jack the other day, is when you do a retail safari, they tap into you for the briefest moment and then they're gone. And you don't get to see, not I mean we'd love to be involved, but you don't get to see the end result. And it would be lovely to contribute, even if you're not there for the whole journey, to contribute to them actually making a difference with the information and the innovation and the motivation that comes from seeing what's out there because it's so accessible. And the reality is most retailers do not have time to visit stores. So a retail safari gives you that opportunity to curate a day where you can actually go, let's go and see. And so many people go, I've been meaning to see this radius. Oh, I heard about this. And there it is. Let's go in and have a look, let's talk to the store manager. And this is what I love is where you engage the store staff who love the brand, the enthusiasm when you go to them and go, I want to bring a group of people in here because I think what you do is really good. And they deliver, I stand back with a lot of those stores, they deliver it way better than I will because they live and breathe it 24 hours a day. Excellent, excellent.

SPEAKER_05 32:01

And what I want to I want to get into the to the uh to the uh the front-end team and the store team here in a second, but you bring up a good point. Have either of you done these safaris and a company will ask you based on the brief, and you do the safari and you provide all these different action plans and ideas. Have you seen a company actually put into implement is something that you have done where you've gone back five, six months later and you know, Ian, not a point of pride. I know Ian probably will poke his chest out. Jack, you're very humble. But I'm responsible for all of this, right? Jack's, hey, it is what it is. But have either of you had that experience when you've gone on the safari with the company, you'd have to mention the name. But they were actually implemented something that you did on the safari and that you suggested.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

So I'm I'm gonna surprise you and brag. I'm gonna go for it. Um for a second, hold on for a second, hold on, I got I was spot the American in the room. Steve, I didn't know you had a brag horn. That's incredible.

SPEAKER_06 33:03

I did, that's for you.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

Oh man. No, it's good. It feels it you're right. I am I tried to be humble, so this feels nerve-wracking, but I'm gonna go for it. Yeah, I was in, so I had a Scandalaven client, big beauty company, and uh I talked to them in a presentation and then a bit on a tour in London about how they basically had really good football in their stores and they were but they're a very kind of low margin business. And I didn't talk about retail media, I basically just started talking, I showed them a few examples of stores that were starting to understand that if you had a huge amount of provably a huge amount of people with a certain demographic that was seen of real value to certain brands in your store, then maybe you could be charging for certain spaces in the store. If you're driving that kind of football in the online environment that doesn't charge for traffic, not to mention the fact, and me and Ian could talk all day about this, online traffic for advertising is a waste of time most of the time. Terrible ROI, really difficult place to play. It's getting worse all the time. Stores, it's not like an online advert, there's real people there, the chance of conversion, all the emotional connection. So I was like, maybe just little chunks of your store, think about it as advertising space. And I played around with that idea on this tour. And then, yeah, a few months later, I went in a bunch of their stores. They had a brand that was paying for a bit of an advert in a certain part of a store, and they said that was because of what you showed us. So I was uh that was a really lovely moment. I say it because it doesn't happen that much, or if things do happen, Steve, maybe you don't hear about it or they trial it and then it doesn't work or whatever, or it's just for these giant brands and it goes in an endless list of stuff that they might one day do, but never sees a light of day. Yeah, that was really pleasing because there was like a diary, a very specific idea that I shared and it happened, and they said it's working. So yeah, I I was very happy.

SPEAKER_05 34:49

Excellent. As you should be. Alright, Ian, go ahead and I know you got a story that you gotta tell. Yoda for a second, you ready?

SPEAKER_03 34:58

Throw me off a stride out. But the one thing that I do remember is during the um the presentation where I do it to set the scene, I talked about forget about Gen Z, or to forget about profiling your customer by socioeconomic or what car they drive. I often say you need to understand the missions, why they are coming to the store. And I often use a grocery store as an example. Coming for your lunchtime meal deal is a completely different trick to your weekly shop or preparing buying ingredients for a fancy dinner party. Same person, same shop, same age profile, driving the same car to the store. Your lunchtime meal deal is speed, your weekly shop grocery for the family is value, and your dinner party is quality. And so I talked about trying to understand why people are coming to buy the product. And I did have one client turn around and say, We've completely shifted our focus on how we try and develop the solutions based on that what and it was like a 30-second comment, but he said that really resonated with us. And he said, Oh, can you send me the slide? And then he said, We're actually shifting our focus. So that was quite nice because it wasn't something I show them in the store, but it was something in the scene setting, which was really I suppose jacks as well. You make an observational comment, and it's one of the things I do love about the safari is you're with them for three, six, seven, eight hours, and the conversation expands. It's not a 40-minute Zoom call. You get to understand the terrible football teams that they follow, I said referencing you to, or the weather, or what they want to do, or you know, the exact you want to talk about it, you can do. You can't bring it on. I I don't get the little hooter for that one, do I? But it's like we what but coming coming back to the serious of the conversation, if you're walking around with her for half a day or a day, what you'll suddenly find is you delve into these conversations and they'll walk past a shop that you're not even going to show them, and they'll go, Oh, we tried to do that, and that didn't work. And you go, Ah, actually, let me show there's something coming up too sure's time where you can see where it has been done, and they just open up and suddenly the conversation is they're immersed in their world, that's their job. Everything around them is their job, it's retail and it's shops, it's people of displays and technology and logistics, and they're seeing it, and it just prompts them to open up and start talking, and you have wonderful conversations. And I often we do a lot of work with technology companies who invite their retail clients, a lot of retail safaris, and the number of clients that were said to me, This is amazing. We've now got three new conversations from off-the-cuff throwaway things that these guys said, almost thinking out loud. You go, we've got a solution, we can help you with this. So that's what I love about the safari is it opens up their mind and they have the time to respond and see and get proactive and comment. And all of this stuff is really insightful because you get a much better understanding of what's going on the head, the problems, the challenges, the opportunities, and the directions that you can help go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 37:53

I gotta go back to something you said real quick, Jack. You and I can I can't let this one lie. You talked about online advertising and marketing. And so you and you say you and Ian could go on and on. I couldn't let that one, I couldn't let that one slide. One, because when I think about our conversation once again when we were in Gentle Monster, and you spoke about the idea that the store is it's not meant to sell anything anymore. It's that store, that model, and they're like one of the first companies to actually come out and say it. You can come in our stores, but and you can buy something if you want, but they're really for advertising. So that always stuck with me. So can you talk a little bit about that commentation that you made around the advertising space?

SPEAKER_02 38:32

Yeah, I think there was a fair bit of data that came out, and I think actually a bunch of stuff's come out around Black Friday recently, which is that I mean, none of it is surprising. It's basically there's more brands online, more brands using the same search terms, therefore paid search online is delivering worse returns because at least there's no real way, even I think with AI and different technologies, they are often the same search terms. If you're running a Gen Z beauty brand online, there are certain terms you've got to use, and that space just gets more and more expensive at a pay-per-click level. There are people who know so much more about this than me, but I think in a really simplistic way, more brands and more competition for adverts means that you that it's getting more expensive. But also there's more, you're fighting over more consumers because there's more brands. The same amount of customers a lot of the time divided over a greater number of brands. And I've just noticed, and I know Ian has, and we talk about this a lot, that you have, I think a lot of retailers and brands are starting to realize do you know what? Our stores are brilliant places to do brand awareness, to do marketing, to do advertising. Now you have extreme examples like Gentle Monster, Sunglasses, Glasses brand from Gore who sell in other channels, their stores are for marketing and they have marketing KPIs, and that's it's a revolutionary model. But me and Ian could tell you Lush again. I know we've been over talking about Lush. I love Lush too. Like we always have a joke too, me and Ian that I don't, but I absolutely do. And Lush, see, Lush are a brand that are they're not doing, they're not bothered about selling much online. This is a brand that believes in stores. I mean, what Ian do they have more than a thousand stores around the world? I don't know. Yeah, and they are sell and these are stores that sell, right? And a lot of what they do is old school, great stuff, loads of product in the store. But I tell you, lush are doing marketing in their stores. There is tons of marketing in their stores. Think about when you're in a lush store. I always say you could take a photo of any corner of any lust store and it will look good. You will come up with a beautiful little Instagram moment. You can't get it wrong because it all looks great because the merchandising's incredible. But that's because Lush get it. They get so it's not as extreme as Gentle Monster, but Lush know, yeah, this isn't just a place to sell stuff, this is a place to do the marketing. We don't need to do marketing online. The stores do the marketing and they do the selling. So, as an idea, it's not just those stores like Gentle Monster. I think really smart brands and retailers in the future. Do you know what? In stores, you can do selling and marketing, selling and advertising. That's my feeling. And I think it's been driven a lot by how hard it is to advertise online.

SPEAKER_03 40:56

Agreed. Just one quick thing there, Steve. Also, Lush have been off social media for a couple of years now, and they took a conscious decision more from mental health point of view of the downside of social media, not affected their sales at all. But I also wanted to add this comment about online versus offline. There's there's a couple of things to remember 75% of all global retail sales happen in the physical shop. So this the physical store is dead, is utter rubbish. 75%, it dwarfs any other channel and it will do for decades, possibly forever. So the store is always that the biggest source of revenue. So you I love that you get the extremes like Gentle Monster and Lincoln Co. the Chinese electric car company, or another one where they're just amazing visual experiences, and it's not about money in the till in that physical space. But also, 67% of our purchasing decisions are made in the store at the fixture. So you can do all your amazing advertising as a brand and all the awareness you can have Johnny Deck playing a guitar in the desert or whatever you want to do to promote it. If you go in the store on the shelf, your competitor communicates better or appeals more strongly, you will drive them into store and your competitor will literally steal that sale off the shelf from you. Two-thirds of our decisions. So the power of how a store works communicates and advertises. And it's like for me, it was a facelap moment when everyone's excited about retail media now. And as someone who was selling conventional in-store design for 25 years, I was like, first of all, hallelujah, you finally understood the power of the store for influencing sale. But it's almost like, why does it take a bunch of technology which is really poorly applied, to get people to open up their budgets and start investing in influencing purchasing decision in store? And online cannot do that. You go, you go online, you think, I'll go on the Nike website, I'll look at the Air Max sneaker. And the Air Max appears, and on the bottom, there'll be four or five other products. You go in the store, and there's a thousand products in front of you. The opportunity to upsell is exponentially bigger in the store. And humans are like magpots. We like shiny new things. And we've all done it where you go in a store to buy one thing and you come out with three other things, hopefully with the one you came with, but it doesn't matter because you bought three others. IKEA or another one. How many times do you go on and go, I want to buy a rug, and you come out with a sofa and wallpaper and a lamp and go, how the bloody hell did this happen? Because they're geniuses at selling you a dream and selling a whole solution. And that's the power of a physical store, and it's why Ikea's website will never perform as well as the store. As Jack says, lush, they display it brilliantly, they demonstrate it, and they have people that will encourage you to interact and try. Impossible to do on a website. You you don't have the breadth of opportunity to engage people, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:53

And I yeah, tiny point on all of that, but just to say, because Ian Brup IKEA, I've worked with Ikea a few times, and basically, a lot of people don't realize this. Ikea are like the one of the absolute OGs of stores that make you buy a lot of stuff, right? They're the masters of that. They, for God knows how long, have thought of stores as marketing spaces. Me and Ian always say you go to any Ikea store, some of the best little product adverts and displays eventually much better than brilliant ads you'll see on the tube or the subway. Within a store, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the Midlands in the UK, you'll see the most brilliant bit of retail advertising in the store. So this is the other thing is you it they're brilliantly inspiring things like Gentle Monster, but I always say, look, this is in the real world, this idea of marketing in a store has been there a long time, and I think the best brands really know about it already. They're doing it. Yeah, that's good.

SPEAKER_03 44:44

But you if you just quickly about IKEA, I'll you'll eventually ask another question, Steve. With IKEA, I can stupid guy but name me another retailer that makes you walk one mile on a set route, exact, go into the warehouse, making yourself, and then assemble it yourself. It's absolute marketing. You do three quarters of the work that any other retailer does yourself when you go to IKEA, it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_05 45:08

Yeah, and then just okay, just to keep on with the IKEA love, right? I love it that it leads me, it forces you to go and see everything in the store, right? So if I walk in any other Target, Walmart or whatever, I don't have to go to the other side of the store, right? I can just literally just go in to this side of whatever it is that I need, and I can just forget about the other side. But in IKEA, man, I'm forced to literally walk through, even if it's like on the second level. I still sometimes you still gotta go through that first level, then go down.

SPEAKER_03 45:39

Oh, but there's that moment of clarity when you look at the mountain. There are normally two shortcuts on the map when you look at the I'm an expert now because I can cut out all of the bedding and go straight to the sofas.

SPEAKER_05 45:52

Yeah, but it's an experience, but it almost forces you to take in the experience of this journey of like just seeing oh, that's uh to your point, Ian. Around I just came to get a rug, but hold on for a second. That that lamp will actually look really good with this rug. And then you take yeah, here's the thing, I just is my own personal thing. I take a picture of it, I'm like, oh, okay, maybe I'll come back to that. And then sometimes you go back all the way through and you're like, hold on for a second, let me go back to get that lamp that I just took a picture of. It's it's a complete experience. Uh, this conversation leads me like nicely into this idea around the when we think about stores, we think there's an ideal and there's a reality that sort of takes place, right? I've worked for some of the biggest retailers in the world and listen in on a couple of their corporate conversations around initiatives and different things like that. I even did a podcast episode talking about everything works at home office, right? Because it's perfect up there. But when you get into the stores, the reality actually hits. And then you have the frontliners who the people who actually have to deal with some of these new initiatives that that the company's trying to implement. What are companies getting wrong with that? What are companies getting wrong with like this ideal scenarios of what they want to do and what they want to see? And then when you get into when you get into the stores, it doesn't translate well because I think there's a big gap that's missing. Who wants to go first on that one?

SPEAKER_02 47:19

I'm happy to.

SPEAKER_05 47:22

I would prefer you to do it. I would prefer you. I was just I was really open that you would go first. Love you, Ian.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

So I actually my points are quick. I've got two points. Firstly, that I think it's a very obvious point to make, but I think I I really I read a lot of your content, Steve, and I know you would I know this would really resonate with you because you've talked about similar things. First, an obvious point is that it's distance. Between head office and frontline. That's one of the things. Because head office, and it's easy for one side, one team to criticize the other, but in reality, head office might come up with a genuinely good idea. Classic example for me, I remember when, and there were good and bad moments of this, but I remember with the Nike app or some kind of new version of a Nike app, and there was a big announcement online, and Nike had done something different. Then I was in Nike Town in London, and there was an in-store aspect to this development in the app. And I go and ask the store manager, who was brilliant, about it, and he knew absolutely nothing, and immediately tried to just talk to me about products and other things, right? Just doing his job. And that wasn't the guy's fault he was great, it was because there was no communication with head office. Head office had done this huge announcement about the app, and now it's everything because the customer goes, Brilliant, this app sounds amazing. You go to the store, and it's a disconnect between head office and frontline. And the other side of that is that you see it with a lot of, I think, newer brands, younger brands. And I all the time, right? My classic scenario on a safari is on I work with a lot of big brands, um, with a big brand, and I take them to a smaller brand store that's really great and is doing well. Now, not everything will be perfect about this smaller brand. One of the things that you'll see is the staff of this smaller brand will have a kind of energy and an understanding of the brand and a passion for what they do and a knowledge of the product that big brand is could only dream of. And again, what's happening there? Well, the person in the store, they know the founder of the business. It's not just they have a connection. And that is hard to replicate if you're IKE or an IKEA. I get it, it's incredibly hard. But the lesson is how can you bring them closer? Because the closer they are, the more those people on the shop floor feel empowered, are armed with the knowledge they need and all that good stuff. So I I see that in the real world. And my final or second point is again, Lush. Lush have the best staff in the world near enough. Why do they have the best staff in the world? My theory is one of their big, not their sole recruitment strategies, one of their big recruitment strategies is that they try to hire as many people as they can on social media. I remember reading this years ago. Apparently, they act on social media for people who are talking about Lush. So if there's a load of students talking about them, they'll just approach them and be like, hey, do you want to work some you want a bit of holiday work at Lush? Because what they think to themselves is, who better to we can teach them how to sell. We can teach them how to stock check. We can teach them how to merchandise. What we can't teach is passion for our brand. And they already have that. And they have that kind of energy enthusiasm. I think that's there's something in that approach from Lush that's really brilliant because they've understood actually sometimes maybe brands are not valuing the right thing in stuff.

SPEAKER_06 50:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:16

I think that just having energy and passion and teaching everything else. That's my sort of two page.

SPEAKER_05 50:21

That's interesting. I'll let you answer in a second, Ian. And but that's interesting because the fact that if they got this big push to hire from offline or from online, but they're not doing a lot of advertising online. So it's almost like you're really getting the cream of the crop because you're not pushing your brand online, but they are still people talking about you. And so now that's the genius of it.

SPEAKER_02 50:45

Ian said it earlier, and I was gonna jump in there, but that's the brilliant thing about it. The confidence to Lush know that that not having an official presence online doesn't do any harm to them online because everyone still talks about Lush, everyone's still taking pictures and sharing and tagging them and hashtagging Lush and all whatever else, but it feels more authentic because it isn't led from a corporate social media account.

SPEAKER_05 51:08

Oh wow. Did you forget the question? Did you forget trees when you bit? Did you give did you forget? Did you forget the question? I know you're you're getting up next. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 51:21

But in all due seriousness, all three of us are huge fans of the value of people in store. They I often say they're the living embodiment of the brand. They will make or break the experience more than technology or even product on shelf. Because it if and and and uh again, we'll use the L word again. Lush recruit on personality, as Jack says. I had a good conversation with Sarah, who's the store manager in Oxfestry, and she says we'll recruit, and as Jack says, they will recruit people who are already fans of the product, which means you're three-quarters of the way there already, because they absolutely love the brand. But when they do their job interviews, they'll do things like just so you know, we're gonna ask you to apply products to another person. A member of staff will sit down and they will have a go at applying face packs or creams or things like that. And it's a test of how comfortable people are interacting with other humans. As Jack says, they recruit on personality and they train product knowledge because you can't do it the other way around. The fact that you've worked at the body shop for 10 years as a forward doesn't mean you're perfect for lunch because if you're the wrong type of person and personality, you're not going to fit in. They have the most neurodiverse staff everywhere. Uh, they have people learning difficulties, neurodiverse, transgender, all sorts of mix of people. But the common thread is they're enthusiastic, they're engaging, and they're people persons for one of a better phrase. And it's it's like that little story that often crops up on LinkedIn where you've got a chief financial officer talking to the CEO, and the CEO's going, We've got to invest in training. And the CFO goes, What if we train them and they leave? And the CEO goes, What if we don't and they stay? There's always a half-empty, half-full mentality. And it's if you infuse people about your company and communicate more, they'll stay longer. And then the hidden benefit that never gets caught on the cost sheet is your recruitment and training costs go down because people are staying there for eight years instead of 18 months. And it's these sort of secondary benefits that aren't obvious and it's annoying because most decisions are made via a spreadsheet. And it's and one of the best things I've seen on retail so far is when the marketing director brings the chief financial officer on to Trip. Get him out from behind his spreadsheet, and he walks around and he sees real people, real stores, real product, and it blows their mind most of the time because they I understand and they see it. And enthusiastic staff, you know, Gymshark's another one to finally get off Lush. Gymshark probably have staff that compete with Lush at that top level. They love the brand and they buy into the brand. When they do a store tour around the Gymshark store on Regent Street in London, they host it and they'll give free smoothies if it's a big enough. It doesn't do it all the time. Peter, the assist manager, will kill me for saying that because it doesn't always, it's not always free smoothies. But there'll be three or four of them, and they'll be so enthusiastic talking about you just fall in love with the brand when you spend 20 minutes listening to the staff talk about how they work the space and what they do and all the stories about how people have engaged and stuff like that. And you come away going, that's the sort of people you want to interact in any shop you go to as a customer to buy anything, and you get little touch points like that. And it's don't and the problem is that staff training is one of those easy things to cut. First of all, you get rid of the people, and then you cut the amount of time you spend training the ones that are left. This is your world more than our Steve. And it's it's heartbreaking because it is a slow and then becomes a very fast decline. When you go, Oh, these the staff are crap now, they're not engaged. And I go, that's because you've created a culture where they don't care, where you don't demonstrate care for them. So why should they care for you when suddenly you've got rid of the staff canteen, you've turned the music off, and you're asking them to do more, but there's no pay rise, and you haven't told them about the new product. Why are you surprised that half of them leave and the other half of them just don't care anymore? That's your fault, not theirs. And that's what needs to shift.

SPEAKER_05 55:11

Uh and this I know we we've been talking for a while. We've got two more things I want to talk about. I want to talk about a good segue into AI, and then the last thing I want to get your predictions for 2025. AI. Come on, I come on, I I had to bring it up. I had to bring it up. It's you gotta talk about it, and it's almost I don't know what to think about. I got my own opinions on it and my own thoughts on it. But this is why I brought you guys on the show. And I want to get your perspective around except for you, Ian. Jack, I'm gonna give it all to you. I I wanna I want to talk about the idea that AI is supposed to and it does if you think about it from a practical standpoint, but in the retail space and in the worlds that you live in and what and what you deal with and the conversations, the communication that you're having with with leaders, how big of an idea is AI going to be, is now or is going to be as it relates to whether store design, over overall experience. I'm gonna leave it open for you guys to give your own perspective on that. I'll start with you, Jack.

SPEAKER_02 56:13

So I think I I'm gonna briefly shout out to someone who I get most of my store-related AI ideas from. He's uh he's great. Steve, you can probably hopefully you'll be able to meet him in if you haven't already, in New York NRF. Florian Vestadal, who's this head of technology at Lindex. Lindex are a big fast fashion brand in Europe. I don't know. They've got like a thousand stores. He's he's one of these guys who and they're quite rare, but I the reason I'm talking about him is he's really important. I think he people like him are very important in this because he's someone who understands AI, like actually understands it, understands the difference between generative and predictive and all these different things, and probably gets he's a head of technology who could build software and all that good stuff. He's a proper engineering sort of person, but he is really passionate about stores and about people from the outset. So he's one of those rare people where he's really uh passionate about both. He thinks tech can change the world, but he also genuinely believes that it should and can only change the world if people are very much at the forefront of whatever it does. He's innately like that. He's not just saying it to sell stuff, that's what he believes. And uh, he does things, he's always trialing things in their stores. So they've done they call it a co-pilot where it pumps information on an in-store screen, but the AI is used in order so that, for example, people can find clothing quicker. Or it's he only uses it if he thinks there's something that can be done in a store that is quicker or saves time. He never ever looks at it in a can this get rid of someone's job. It's not that kind of thing. He's just, can I make something quicker? Can I make it more efficient? Can I repeat and not just boring tasks? Because I think he's not one of those people that is patronizing and thinks, oh, unskilled jobs, if there's no such thing as an unskilled job, and I hate that phrase. All jobs have skills, right? He doesn't look at any of it like that. He just goes, can this get rid of some, do some things that can improve our bottom line a little bit, save a little bit of money? He thinks of it as like boring stuff so that overall peace benefits and people can do more of what they love in store, and then we can have conversations. Can we get rid of annoying tasks that staff have in a store so they can just talk to customers? So they could be standing there smiling, saying, Do you need help? That's what he that's how he approaches it. It's quite a simplistic view, but I to me it's everything. That's how it has to be looked at. And there are now, in my opinion, retailers who are doing that kind of there's another tech company to give a shout out to Corso. Corso are great because they're Corsair really funny. I've met them before and they talk about what they do as grunty retail, right? They say we do big, ugly, boring stuff that through AI that basically can help a massive store. They work with lots of big American brands and work attracts to supply company, and but they do it all they're focused on is efficiency. It's like pumps into this kind of tool that staff get that helps them to stock check, helps them to get information quickly. But their whole view, and this is my belief in AI, is can we use it to do really big aggregated tasks quicker, more efficiently, save money, make the stores a bit more money, so then we can pass on time and savings to do great stuff with people. That's my belief. I think where we're getting AI wrong is a bit too much of an evangelized belief that it can do amazing creative stuff that totally replaces people. I'm not going to do any of that, and I just think it's a dead end. Why would we want to push it anyway?

SPEAKER_05 59:27

That's that's no, I agree. Ian, I'm gonna ask you a different question around just not so much AI, but around tech. I have a I have this philosophy around tech. I call it the the Thor perspective, the Thor hammer perspective. We all know that Thor has his hammer and only he can wield it. But if we think about carrying the analogy around technology and the Thor hammer, there are only certain people within a store typically we always feel that can actually wield that new technology that's actually out there. And we sort of place that person on a pedestal and we think about them like differently when we see them. We actually had this experience, you and I, when you volunteered me in in Chicago to have my skin analyzed at Sephora, and we saw that there was like just like this, it was like one or two people who knew how to utilize this technology. Where's the disconnect, right? Because technology, almost to Jack's points around AI, is supposed to be there to help us become faster and smarter, but stores are still getting this incorrect.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:28

You're listening to retail leadership with Steve Worthy.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:35

I think that there's like a there's an aspirational goal and a sad reality sometimes around that technology because using that Sephora example, it may well be that there's like only two of those machines per stock because that's all they can afford, or they choose to spend. And if already two people can use it, so two people per shift because they're going that's there, they we don't need to train everyone else, or maybe they don't have the resource for everyone to do it. But what I particularly loved about that example was you had this machine that scanned your skin, and it looked like we needed to rush you to A and E straight away in the deep dive. There's obviously a bit of visual full of theatre because you're wow, that's what my skin looks like. So you have this technology that starts this thing, but at the end of it, the member of staff was going, Your skin is like that. What it means is this. And here are two products I will recommend. And to me, it was one of the best examples of using technology because there was a wow to the tech and then a human interaction and the power of personal recommendation that could actually close the sale, otherwise, it will be back to that voyeurism I was talking about. This is fun, oh that cool. A picture for Instagram and off you go, and you don't buy anything. The guy with the skill to interpret that and in and the interpersonal skills to interact and respond to an individual, and then make recommendations and he'd be like, yo, I use this one myself. Could be bullshit, but it doesn't matter. You believed him, and there was credibility. So the tech qualifies the requirement and he personalised the solution. So forward doing that sort of thing really well. And I often say three unique things about a physical store. You've got human-to-human contact, touch and feel products, and that peripheral vision I mentioned before, where you can see them all. So I think any type of technology should enhance those unique attributes when they're being applied to a physical store. I read about a store in Dubai recently, I think, and it's a store where it's unmanned and everything was on screen and you could come in and interact. And my first thought was, why are you paying rent for your website? It just there was no apart from the novelty of it and all the techie early adopters getting hard on because oh, this is the future of retail. I go, no, it's not. You you've stripped out all uh you had the proof of vision because the screen showed loads of stuff, but you didn't have the human vision, you couldn't try the product. And I go, and these are the unique things that make a store different, that digital channels cannot compete with. So why replace them? And so that comes back to what Jack was saying about staff as well. You invest in technology not to get rid of staff, to enhance what staff can do. So any type of technology, be it AI, simple tools in your hand, so you can tell what's in stock. This stuff makes it easier for the staff that you recruit well and train well to do a better job to surprise and delight your customers. And that's in a nutshell, is where I think technology should play.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:21

This guy, you sound like you sound like retail one-on-one, surprise and delight. You sound like you you just did a like a whole HQ quarterly meeting or something like that with that phrase, man. I just want to talk me.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:32

I spend 18 months following chat, just quietly recording the conversations girl. Because this will also annoy me because he's answered most of these questions first, and I was sad again, I was gonna say that.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:42

That's why I always gotta do that's that's what you've got to do. Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:47

Basically, my response is what he said. Move on, let's go.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:50

Yeah, you do it's a problem we have a lot. We do basically agree on 99% of retail, so it's there's a lot of overlap.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:57

Yeah, yeah. He could have got rid of one of us. I was yeah, you know what? Uh anyway, but no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna talk about that. No. I want to end with one one last question, and it's I'm gonna let Ian go first, right? Because he's whining about Jack going for his son. I'm gonna let I'm gonna let Ian go first on this one. You're welcome, you're welcome, son. 2025, man. I I don't know. There's a lot of changes taking place, of course, over here in the States and all over the world. I really want to get, and we talked earlier about culture, the retail culture and different things like that. I really want to get your like sort of prediction. Maybe it could be for the industry, it could be for companies, or it could be for like the individual sort of retail leader. Whatever it is that your thoughts are around what to expect in 2025 for the retail industry and a culture, I would love to get your perspective on that. Ian, I'll start with you.

unknown 1:04:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:50

We always expect change to be more and bigger and faster. And like COVID global pandemics aside, it very rarely happens. Most of it is incremental gains. And to me, I think particularly post-COVID, I think what we're getting is a better integration of channels. I call it symbiotic retail, unified commerce, whatever you want to call it. I think there is a better appreciation of this. There is too much siloing. There's still too much siloing between departments and channels with different budgets and KPIs. Nothing more annoying than an online OV price when you check on your phone before you go to the store and find it's $20 more when you arrive. It's stupid stuff like that. And I think brands are getting better at removing those silos. And I think a better appreciation that, you know, everyone has the world in their hand when they come into your store. So you're going to know what time it recorded is programmed. But it's and it's one of these challenges. Um slightly diversifying here. Poor member of staff coming in, and there's a thousand SKUs in the stuff, and a member, a customer comes in who spent four days researching one product online, and he'll know 10 times more than the member of staff because the member of staff's a generalist, and you become an expert in two days on what product. So that ability to understand and appreciate how you can gather that information or how you arm people, whether people are coming from online into your physical store with the way around. So I think that merging of channels, so you're having a cohesive retail ecosystem is a step closer. It's not perfect, but I think we there's a there's an appreciation of that coming more, and I still think that's a shadow of COVID, where certain channels were forced to massively respond and expand quickly, and they're the smaller challenger channels as far as sales go, yeah, brought them closer to the physical store. We now have a greater appreciation of the physical store. So all the e-commerce evolved quickly, and we still we fell back in love with the physical, and you combine those two, and what you're gonna have is more cohesive experience that is more customer focused.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:52

So I got I get a follow-up question with that one. So if I'm a if I'm a senior leader, right, in retail, like how do I how do I lead through that, right? Because the this change and everything that you're talking about, this sort of synergy and convergence, if you will, is going to take place in one form or another. How do I lead through that? Because I I've been so used to leading 2024, 2023 way, but now there's going to be all these different changes. How do I lead through that process?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:23

I think, first of all, internally within the head office, they've got to understand that it freaks people out going, your spreadsheet is one of the limiting factors now, because there should be one spreadsheet, not 400. Suddenly, oh, how do you determine what happened? If I put this new display in a store, how do I monitor the online sales that happened? Because people that visited the store liked it, downloaded the app and bought on social media. It's harder to measure that. So I think first of all, it's important for leaders as the group of leaders at the head office to understand and buy into that principle. Because your individual brand managers and channel managers aren't going to have any chance of understanding unless you get it and endorse it. So I think it's a case of okay, if you're going to shift in that direction, the C Twick has to really get their head around how it works. Because any changes have to not only be told from head office, which they always are, they have to be endorsed and explained and embraced by head office, because they're monumental shifts in in some businesses, particularly legacy retailers, their ability to get their heads around it and implement change to roll out to a thousand stores. Big shift. So if you're going to do it, you have to buy into it and understand it and then communicate the benefits of this to everyone as well. Because you'll have in some situations where you'll have a franchise operation for your stores on a corporate website. So that individual franchisee doesn't want people going online, it'll actually obstruct it. And so you end up with these problems or salesmen at their own commission going, I've just demonstrated this product and he's gone and bought it on the website. I've lost my commission. How do you the restructuring of how you incentivize, reward, challenge, educate people becomes a cohesive ecosystem, not this little bit of channel? So it's got to start a head off is fully understanding and buying into it. Because if they don't buy into it, you're not going to convince the guys on the shop floor because they're going to go, You don't believe this so much of it.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:19

That's good. I that was actually a really good answer, Ian. That's good for the day. That's your one for the day. You're done, man. This is I'm glad we wrapped up with this question. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:31

It took you an hour to get there to talk some sense. Hold on for a second. There you go. That's you, there you go. That's the one. Get in. Get in. All right. What Jack's gonna say, Jack's response now is what.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:44

He said we can Yeah, then we can exactly 2025.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:52

So I've I'm gonna share something I've uh I I've a couple of times, I'm sure he and the same, have started to share 2025 predictions in a couple of places. I'm gonna do one and it's I think we're gonna see it's not that this isn't already happening, but I think we're gonna see it like grow much more quickly is brands um becoming starting to move more into becoming mini retail marketplaces. What I mean by that is selling other products, selling other brands' products. I think what that's one of the consequences of margins getting tighter and brands trying to figure out how they can find new ways of growing, it's happening online, but I think we'll see it in stores as well, is brands say, for example, fashion brands. Look at HM and Zara, for example. All of a sudden, HM and Zara clothing brands, they've been homewares brands for a while now and opening stores and doing that stuff online, but they're now doing beauty. You'll see in HM stores now all the time. Suddenly they're a beauty brand as well. I think before long, brands like HM will go, we'll do our own beauty range, but actually they'll start to sell some other brands in there as well. And before you know it, they've like a mini department store, they'll start selling everything. And I think we'll see a lot of brands slowly doing that more. And you see this in all kinds of places. Me and Ian were in KIF in New York not long ago. And KIF were always to me like a mono brand, like a great brand in lots of ways. But actually, the real brilliance of Kiff is that they've gradually built become this kind of curator, right? So Kiff, you go for KIF clothes, but actually in KIF, you'll get really good Nike sneakers, you'll get they me and Ian were in the kids' store and they were selling bugaboo kids push chairs, buggies. So I think we'll see all kinds of brands going, do you know what? If we've got a really loyal following of a certain customer group, why are we just selling them our clothing and our stuff? Actually, let's curate a selection of other brands' stuff. And I just think that started to happen for some time now, but I think we'll see a real explosion of that. And it's happening in a real mass market where ultimately, if you look at Sheehan, Sheehan started out as a clothing business online, but they're starting to sell every product under the sun. And why would they? Because they have God knows how many hundreds of millions of followers on the app, so they're just like, let's sell them more stuff. It's an easy way of selling more stuff, introduce new products. So I think all over the world, every level, you could call it the growth of marketplaces. It's not gonna be Amazon and Tim and She, and I think brands everywhere are gonna be moving more into that. Let's sell more stuff in different categories, whether they're curating a little range or trying to sell everything, they're all gonna become their own kind of marketplaces.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:20

That's gonna and Keth is a is a phenomenal example. I have two pairs of their sneakers downstairs from that brand. I wanted to follow up because you and I we visited because this actually goes in line with what you're talking about. We visited that one store in New York. It was actually the first store we went into, that pop-up cafe that was selling, she's selling so many different brands.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:40

Oh, yes, yeah, yeah. I forgot the name.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:42

Yeah, pop up pop-up grocer grocer. And I thought that was such an interesting concept because it almost speaks to what you're talking about. Where it's if you want to explain a little bit of that concept, because I think it validates a little bit of your Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:55

So Pop-Up Grocer, yeah. Thanks, these pop-up grocer is a like a mini supermarket that only sells new food brands, and every few months the range of brands change, and it's a load of other brand new brands. So it's like a purely a place of discovery. You go there to discover new cool food brands. And I guess to this point, it is like a mini marketplace, the goal obviously being the introduction of new products. But I think what's interesting is that's a very small curated version of the same phenomenon, and you're absolutely right. What it shows is I think at that end of the market, you're gonna see lots of these marketplaces, and then you'll also see giant retailers like H ⁇ M at Shean and all these other companies approaching things in the same way. And essentially, it's uh it's part of yeah, it's part of the same phenomenon. You're absolutely right. And pop-up grocer to that point, what's really interesting about them, and I think we'll see more of this, we'll probably see more mini discovery marketplaces popping up in other categories, fashion marketplaces that just stock brand new brands and new stuff. Places basically to the customer that say, look, here's a place where you can find some brand new products or some different products, because after all, customers sometimes actually have too much choice. So places where you can minimize that choice really works. And probably, Steve, that's why you like KIF, right? Because if you look at the Nike range at KIF, you're not gonna be overwhelmed, you're just gonna get a selection that speaks to you, and that's what it's all about.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:16

100%, 100%. Oh my gosh. I okay, we can talk all day. I I knew this was gonna be an amazing episode, barring by Ian Scott. Okay, we can hopefully everybody knows and understands that this is nothing but love with between the Ian and I. And uh I I just want to thank you both. I really want to thank you both for being on this podcast on this episode. So many learnings, so many things that I love hearing from you guys, love you know, hearing you guys speak. But I think the audience is gonna get so much out of this. I just want to say thank you so much for being on the podcast. And uh I can't wait for us to connect very soon at the next conference and and chat some more as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:56

Uh thanks for having us, Steve. But so much on that.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:59

I just want to say thank you to giving us an opportunity to really talk at length about the safari because we have a lot of people that often say what goes on, and I can almost send them to this podcast and go, okay, way through this from the abuse. But right in the middle is a lovely bit of where we get to talk about the benefits of the safari. There's at least five minutes around all the abuse that would actually be quite useful. I thought I'll let all you out and I'll just keep that as a little clip I think for people to do.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:29

We get all the other stuff.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:30

Yeah, and I'll let it out all about all the answers where Jack goes first, because it looks like he knows more than me, and I'll just have the answers where I go first.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:38

So listen, man, I have tried, I was able to very, I think, very professionally move the questions to you answering half the questions first, buddy. So I don't want to hear that excuse. Everything with a weak questions. I tried to give you some softball questions that help you out, to help you help your help your confidence, but you know what? Just didn't happen. Just didn't happen. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your the rest of your day. And I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, alright.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:13

Thanks, D. Thank you too.