Getting Engaged in the Era of Experiential Retail

In April, I had a very busy week at the ProMat tradeshow in Chicago.  The show, which originally billed itself as a materials handling equipment event, now has something for everyone involved in supply chain, manufacturing, and distribution.  It offered a whole world of ideas on what’s happening in our industry.

It was an interesting mix of offerings. About a third of the show involved robotics including associated components, control systems, gear mechanisms, motor actuators, and software systems. I saw an arm of a robot with fingers exactly like human fingers, which reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arm in Terminator 2.

My real reason for being at the show was to meet with prospects and customers. I wanted to share some of the conversations I had at the event. It pointed to some important industry trends, particularly around something called experiential retail. It’s something that we’ve suspected in high-tech electronics for a. while now—and it’s going to change our supply chain in a variety of ways.

I spoke with a vice president of a toy company that had both retail stores and a distribution center that carry educational toys for schools and other companies.  They are planning to try an experiential retail store as well—so they are developing a model where kids can play in the place and experience some of the toys right in the store. They represent a journey that every retailer, including electronics retailers, will need to figure out and perfect.

In the clothing retail space, I’ve seen signs of this trend for ages but success has been hard to capture. In 2014, Norstrom bought the Trunk Club for $350 million, but two years later it had lost $150 million.  The department store sector has been hard hit by the changing market and big retailers are looking for alternative to the ineffective anchor store model that has been used traditionally. I thought it would be interesting, now that more time has passed if the Trunk Club is delivering value to customers and learning how it fits into Norstrom strategy.

The Trunk Club assigns a stylist who offers a virtual trunk show of potential purchase options based on your preference and profile. Approved clothing will be shipped to your home and you can try them and keep the ones you like. The trunk comes with a return UPS shipping label to make it simple.

While I was in Chicago, I decided to visit the original Trunk Club Clubhouse. When I entered, I was greeted by a receptionist and offered a drink at the bar.(I had to decline because I was driving but I could see that it might relax potential customers and help them be open to a style change. I browsed until my assigned stylist found me.  Beth, a senior stylist, told me that she had a philosophy of it being better to overdress than under-dress, since it shows you care and respect people. In the Indian culture, that might be seen as showing off—so I shared my dilemma. Finding a happy medium became a collaborative task. Although the clothes seemed expensive, I settled on two pairs of pants to give it a real try.  They seemed to meet all my requirements—and I felt like Beth tried to give me what I wanted.

I asked Beth about her job. She told me she was paid a base salary and paid on commission. She has 475 customers all over the US who buy regularly.  She also told me that Trunk Club maintains the same pricing as Nordstrom. She can also help customers who want a bespoke suit or blazer and are willing ot pay more. (That fits the Nordstrom brand for sure.) This seemed like a model that many retailers could replicate to adapt to the sweeping retail transformation.

In retail, getting customers to buy is going to get increasingly harder. How do you think organizations can offer a fulfilling experience that includes expertise that only a human provide? It’s going to take the right recipe that creates lots of questions:

  • What is that fulfilling experience?
  • How can a retailer provide that at a reasonable cost, in a way that translates into value for the customers?
  • Is there any way to leverage technology in the effort?

Perhaps robots will be a critical part of the supply chain and manufacturing effort while humans take the special retail roles. Consider companies like SoftWear, which use sew bots (sewing robots) to make clothes. Maybe in future you can walk into a store and a sew bot will spit out a perfect suit (today it’s more about basic T-shirts). Maybe the toy store will use 3D printing or robots to create cool as you wait high-tech toys. Who knows?

Originally published at Smartgladiator.com on May 14, 2019.

30
Jun 2019
By Puga SankaraComments Off on Getting Engaged in the Era of Experiential Retail
Author:
Puga Sankara
About:
Puga Sankara is the Founder, CEO of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator LoadProof has been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. SG LoadProof is a patent pending Centralized Enterprise Photo/Video Document System on Cloud for Supply Chain. SG LP is built on the fact that photos & videos are vital docs as important as POs/SOs/Legal Contracts/Fulfillment Orders that reside in ERP/WMS/TMS systems, that serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal proof of crucial, critical, vital operations executed in Supply Chain within/across orgs when fulfilling customer orders as well as meeting contractual obligations between orgs as merchandise is transferred between different parties that partake in Supply Chain functions & operations. And these photos/videos data should not be stored in someone’s Smartphone or Email Inbox or in their personal/work Computer, but should be stored in a Centralized Enterprise system, where such data can be pushed into super-fast, stored securely, accessible to all stake holders (CFO/Sales Reps/Customer Support/AR/AP) in an org, as well as facilitates super-fast retrieval/sharing. LP is an Enterprise System of record for Photo/Video docs & is as important as an ERP which is an enterprise system of record for POs, SOs, Legal Contracts between parties etc. that have huge legal ramifications, also as important as a WMS (Warehouse Management System) that hold indispensable shipment & fulfillment data on orders. Like how Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat etc. have evolved into social media platforms/systems that enable individuals to showcase their beauty/pretty clothes/lovely cosmetics/hep coolness etc., LoadProof is an Enterprise system that holds similar photos/videos, but for a different reason, not for show off, but to serve as compelling, conclusive, unequivocal & indisputable system of record and proof that can be presented even in the court of law, when there is a dispute between parties while they execute many facets of the Supply Chain functions & operations. SG LoadProof is also an Enterprise System of Record for Photos, videos and any other digital documents for your Supply Chain Network. A system of record (SOR) or source system of record (SSoR) is a data management term for an information storage system (commonly implemented on a computer system running a database management system) that is the authoritative data source for a given data element or piece of information. The need to identify systems of record can become acute in organizations where management information systems have been built by taking output data from multiple source systems, re-processing this data, and then re-presenting the result for new business use. In these cases, multiple information systems may disagree about the same piece of information. These disagreements may stem from semantic differences, differences in opinion, use of different sources, and differences in the timing of the extract, transform, and load processes that create the data they report against, or may simply be the result of bugs. The integrity and validity of any data set is open to question when there is no traceable connection to a good source, such as a known System of Record. Where the integrity of the data is vital, if there is an agreed system of record, the data element must either be linked to, or extracted directly from it. In other cases, the provenance and estimated data quality should be documented. The “system of record” approach is a good fit for environments where both: 1. there is a single authority over all data consumers, and 2. all consumers have similar needs Here, LoadProof is the System of Record for pictures and videos for all the entities in Supply chain who uses pictures and videos to track using any Supply Chain System infrastructure. 1. LoadProof provides accurate, thorough, complete, and latest information in pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply chain that is tracked. 2. LoadProof is the single authority on pictures and videos related to any entity in the Supply Chain that is tracked 3. LoadProof doesn’t let any external system to copy the records being stored in it, which eliminates the data being duplicated in multiple places to preserve the data integrity and credibility. 4. LoadProof has a secured login procedure which lets only users with select level access to view the data and modify the records which helps in maintaining LoadProof is becoming the Industry Standard System for Photo & Video Docs for Supply Chain Smart Gladiator is located in ATDC - Advanced Tech Dev Center (tech Incubator) in Georgia Institute of Tech. Click for a demo - https://loadproof.com/apply Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 25 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com. [Read More]
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