This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Retail Recharged shakes up the retail innovation landscape with interactive day & some intriguing insight.
Retail Recharged is Rich Insight's inaugural innovation event for the retail and retail technology communities and took place on Tuesday afternoon 20th October.
The event had an audience of over 160 from the retail community, 15 top retail thought leaders speaking, 12 emerging innovations pitching live to a voting audience all gathered on the 3rd floor of RBS' London HQ in Bishopsgate.
Breaking the mould of a 'traditional conference', the attendees were senior decision makers within retail to lead the dialogue on innovation and the format was interactive using a tailored event app on Ipads provided to all the delegates.
Key speaker highlights on the day included a keynote from Simon Calver (Chairman of Moo.com, ex CEO of LOVEFiLM and Mothercare) on bringing the customer closer through digital, an interview with Alessandro Carnicella (The new Brand/Business Development Director at Lands' End, and ex Bugatti and Ferrari) on getting noticed globally, and a talking head with Edd Read (Co-Founder & CTO of Graze), Bob Willet (Ex Co CEO & CIO of Bestbuy International, Chairman Anatwine), John Burns (Commercial Director of Bremont) about retail in 2020. Other retail speakers included Intu Digital, Ralph Lauren, Google, River Island and A Suit That Fits.
The audience as well included senior individuals from leading brands such as Marks & Spencer, Ann Summers, Russell & Bromley, Crew Clothing Company, Speedo, Aspinal of London, Joules, Nigel Hall Menswear, Jaeger, McDonalds, Reiss, Muubaa and eBay.
The event app enabled attendees to message each other, ask questions to the speakers, find more info on speakers and sponsors.. Data from the event app provided us some of the following audience insights. 48% of the audience judged themselves 6/10 or less when asked how innovative their business was. 47% of the audience thought culture was the biggest barrier to innovation.
The audience of retail experts thought here was a equal opportunity for harnessing innovation across e-commerce, m-commerce and bricks and mortar retail (at 32% each). When asked what was holding back their international growth the most, 39% of the audience cited the investment required, whilst 21% said operational ability.
We are thankful to our sponsors NatWest, Ve Interactive, SimilarWeb, Mobify, PwC, Esri UK and Apptus for supporting the launch of this innovation event.
"Retailers are very time poor and having a format which harnesses innovation to fast track their knowledge of emerging retail technology seemed to resonate with all the attendees. We have had an overwhelming response to this new event concept and are over the moon with how the event was received. We are looking forward to developing the concept further and for new events in 2016." Richard Hurtley – MD, Rich Insight
The winning innovators by category were Viewsy (Accelerated Market Entry), Rotageek (Operational Excellence), Loyalty Lion (Adaptive Marketing), Localz (Connected Customer).
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