Who scheduled Retail Solutions against Wimbledon? Despite all the tennis excitement, I did manage to pop in to the new look Retail Solutions at Excel.
To pick a couple of highlights:
Profimetrics Price Optimisation system recently acquired by Itim looked interesting. It has been designed by the team behind Arthur Planning and has some impressive quantified benefits based on a case study from the US. It is being marketed as the first, second generation price optimisation system. Improvements on generation one (systems like Demandtec and ProfitLogic) include visibility of the formulae and rules behind the results.
The Magic Mirror from RetailCam is at the opposite end of retail technology – right at the customer facing end. Just speaking from personal experience, excellent customer service in the changing room can make the difference between buying a pile of clothes and withdrawing from battle exhausted and empty handed. A lot of incremental sales can be made in the dressing room just by having a reliable method to ask staff to fetch a different size – not quite so glamorous as the Magic Mirror, but makes a huge difference to customers.
The magic mirror can email pictures and videos of the customer wearing the clothes to friends for a second opinion. You would need to be very sure that this is only going to happen when you request it – malfunctions could be embarrassing! See this Retail Solutions press release for more details.
Overall though, the show was smaller and it was hard to spend all day there due to the lack of free seminars. The conference running alongside could have worked well but the conference programme was a full day allowing little time to go round the show in one day. Perhaps half day conferences are the answer?
I wonder what the plans for next year are?
August 3, 2008 at 3:28 pm |
I agreed with you