Retail : Now + Next August 2014

TOMORROW GROUP

The Tomorrow Group looked at the convergence of retail & technology. !

Here are retail trends from the past that are dying & those that are about to explode.

Dying Trends

Daily Deals: The most flawed premise of all time. Discounting below cost to attract the least desirable customers you could imagine. Destroyed perceived sense of value for a generation. !I see no future for companies like Groupon, Living Social and a billion others within their current model. !

Flash Sales: The evolution of daily deals towards physical items. A model based on the premise that scarcity would drive up excitement and limited inventory would keep costs down. Failed to realize that people like choice and that the scarcity wasn’t real. !Fab.com & Zulily were the original proponents.

If everyone joins in, you save. It makes so much sense on paper & in the internet world, but most people don’t want to wait for others to join in. Economies of scale already drive down the cost in large retailers. The model has never worked, but it’s never stopped new attempts. !Ever since Woot in 2004 , the later iterations like Yumani or Flubit all seem to fail.

Group buying:

Dying models

Name your price: Sites that offer match your price just never work because it takes a miracle for everything to match up. Perishable items hold more promise, but often speed is more important and knowing your bid could have been lower a deterrent. !From Greentoe to Priceline, give it up.

Membership sites: Initially it seemed rather exciting to be member, the login screen offering you personalized deals, now we’ve seen them all a million times before and it feels like cheap way to build an email list and swamp you with offers. !Please Frank and Oak or made.com, wake up.

Dying models Pop up shops: They still come and go and this idea won’t be dead for a long time, but neither will it be exciting again. What started as a way for brands and retailers to get press and boost street cred, will no longer have that effect the 852nd time. !From pop up containers, to malls, perhaps the time has come to move on? Shop within a shop?

http://500px.com/wecand

Future Retail

Scarcity and promotion are strong driving forces. While scarcity drives prices and sales up, promotion can lower them. So what better way to drive excitement, footfall and boost sales, without reducing perceived value than spontaneous flash sales. !Location based mobile marketing, especially iBeacons could easily empower physical retailers to use Flash sale techniques to draw in customers from a close perimeter at a precise moment in time. !Works particularly well with perishable items, anything from haircut appointments to the daily muffin supply. !One of the unique advantages of physical retail is it’s much easier to up-sell other items once people are in store and take advantage of impulse purchases.

1) Local Flash Sales Future models

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!The future role of technology is about automation and reducing cognitive burden, while we may enjoy shopping for some items, seek new things and experiences, this isn’t true for a large majority of the things we buy. !From toilet roll, milk, eggs, toothpaste, and washing powder, to beauty products or even functional underwear, there are many baskets of goods each week that would benefit enormously by being delivered automatically and without us needing to think about. Just in time delivery and the inevitable price savings make this a promising model well beyond the current users like fruit and veg. !Soon thanks to better grocery networks we will find autofilling of our fridges a common solution and one that could be aided by the connected home and internet enabled fridges.

2) Commodity Subscriptions Future models

Companies like Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club and Tesla have done an incredible job of disrupting industries with either lazy competitors or monopolistic attitudes, but what really makes them work is they are vertically integrated or “full stack” and offer just one or two specific products. !Buoyed by the cost savings of specializing in one product, helped by plug in companies that offer better delivery mechanisms and payment processing solutions, this is the age of ultra specific retailers than sell one item. !Shops that just sell shavers, bedsheets, one type of mattress are here, so is a online bacon shop. !Unbundling in retail is here……(until someone bundles it up again), but there is time to make money from specialization in the mean time, and many more ways to make money providing a service layer to these companies

3) Single Product Retail Future models

With e-commerce sites becoming almost free to operate, technology like Square allowing much easier credit card payments and a population bored with mass produced blandness, this could be the rise of the small retailer. !When you bring easier creation of items on a small scale due to technology like 3D printing, the idea of pop up stores, funding engines like Kickstarter and the populations thirst for crafted products, it’s easy to see why small scale retailers could end up taking over our shopping streets where space left by retailers who could not compete with online retail is used.

4) Small Retailer Future models

As more of our possessions start recording and sharing more data and as people routinely use allow Facebook to be used as a way to sign into Online stores, I see a trend arising where retailers will make timely offers of goods around your predicted needs. !Coats could be offered days before a cold front reaches your town, items could be suggested to you based on the TV shows you’ve watched, Celebrities you liked & status updates you’ve made. !Sites like https://www.stylitics.com/already monitor what you buy, with the hope of making suggestions around this. !All these data points could then be blended with current Social Shopping Sites like Wajam and Fancy where you can start to act as affiliate marketers to your friends and be given money off for persuasion.

5) Predictive Retail Future models

!The democratization of creativity and new production techniques allow much more efficient and interesting creation of units in tiny numbers. !Better sizing, better production techniques and better distribution all come together. !It’s likely that soon we’ll see more players like bowanddrape. com who make entirely personal clothing based on your exact size. !You could soon see personalized cosmetics and beauty products sold on the basis of your genetic make up, local climate, age and other factors that make a great selling story. !Sites like Etsy that align makers with buyers offer an increasing number of people who make products around your exact needs, as a reaction to the current world of IKEA and CB2. !And of course 3D printing could make one offs the normal.

6) Bespoke Retail Future models

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!Zara changed the nature of Fashion retailing by changing their store’s line up one or twice a week, as a result large fashion houses have upped their centuries old game of 2 seasons a year, and now the likes of Prada and Louis Vuitton may make 4-6 collections per year. !But in this age of decreasing patience, the incredible power of celebrities and taste makers and the ability to make Bespoke clothing and better supply chain model perhaps we will soon see sites like “As seen on screen” and retailers working off the back of paparazzi images to offer identical items to people a day or so later.

7) Ultra Fast Fashion Future models

Apps are getting ever more simple, from the new UI of Tinder where you can like someone with a flick of the finger, to a messaging app like “yo” that allows you to nothing useful, but very easily. !What if such simplicity and mobile first thinking came to retail, Amazon brought us one touch buying, but what if buying met Tinder, or Instagram was buyable. !Mallzee, Bzar, Kwoller and this week Spring, all offer you the chance to buy things with as much effort as blinking. !With Touch ID from Apple gaining popularity, soon it could be as simply as placing your finger to buy something instantly. !I don’t see this model working that well, but I do foresee a plethora of companies trying it.

8) Seamless Impulse Future models

The line between the physical and digital makes no sense in an age where the youth have no concept of offline. !We've innovations like the new Amazon Fire phone designed entirely around a new world of commerce where the worlds blend together, we've apps like ShopSavy or Red Lazer that do the same, but search many shops. !We've devices like the Amazon dash that turn just our intentions into shopping lists, so anywhere we are, even with no mobile phone, we can be committing to buy. !What is online and offline will soon blur, we will be buying instore, but getting delivered later, buying at home and collecting, the closing of the loop will be more transient across the line of online and offline than ever.

9) Through the line retail Future models

10) Thin’ternet retail. Future models

The storefront will be everywhere, the internet soon becomes a pervasive layer that touches everything. !Open API’s could allow every app to become a store. Uber has now made buying Uber services a scrape-able layer for others to become storefronts, and affiliate marketing could allow everyone to allow plugin’s to mean that the storefront becomes omnipresent in everything. Buying from Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest is one thing, but what comes next is buying from Google Maps as you walk past, or social shopping via OTT messaging apps. !New digital outdoor ads may be internet connected and allow people to buy from them, and stores may offer adaptive projected windows allow retailers to turn stores into storefronts out of hours and offer personalized retail experiences.What about empty stores being used to allow eCommerce players to take over the highstreet for lower costs? !We could also be buying from Advertisements direct since soon TV ads and online banners could become buyable layers to convert interest into sales.

11) Personalized Promotions Future models

Coupon cutters will soon seem more old fashioned than ever with an array of high tech methods to attract customers but maintain margin. !Coupons may be spread via iBeacon to draw only certain shoppers in at set times, mobile coupons will become the norm offering seamless ways to save money and avoid social stigma. !Social coupons will become huge, generating savings based on how many people saw them, as will social shopping concepts where more people who buy from your recommendation, the more money you will save. !The final chapter will be personalize dynamic pricing where certain times of day or combinations of items will see different prices being shown.

RememberThis document is focused on the intersection of technology & retail and the future that it creates. !There are many more interesting trends that go beyond this scope, especially how physical retailers fight back in the age where the role of the physical store needs to change. !That deck will follow shortly to include: !1) Experience retailing: how brands will look to turn store fronts into places to drive traffic &

build brands at the same time. In the omnichannel world, converting sales isn’t the only job of the retailer.

2) Narrative retailing: how brands will look to arrange physical stores to layer rich meaning into the products and their provenance. A movement towards stores as journeys of exploration

3) Hyperlocal retail: Apps now allow better matching of buyers and sellers, given scale the new retail may not only be in swapping and sharing, but in new products from super close by.

This document is the tip of the iceberg designed to inform, but it may give rise to more questions than answers. !For more information or for a full presentation including: 1) Examples. 2) More detail. 3) Suggestions on how to take advantage of new trends. 4) Implementable ideas based on technology and trends. !Please get in touch: !Tom Goodwin Tomorrow London | New York !tom@tomorrow-innovation.com

Thank you.