My plan for this month’s Store Innovation Watch was to visit a whole list of stores in the London area, as I just spent a week there. However, while London is a very vibrant store innovation market, things move fast there – so fast, many of the concepts I wanted to see were already closed. […]
Editor’s Note: This month we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of Store Innovation Watch. Click here for a look back at the biggest trends in store innovation that were highlighted over the last 12 months. While there has been a lot of activity across many different types of store innovation, I’m going to take a deeper […]
This month, Store Innovation Watch takes a look at retailers who are still very much focused on “flagship” experiences. My colleague Dave Bruno and I debate this one all the time: can flagship experiences make it to Main Street? Or can they only survive in the rarified air of high-rent, high-traffic destinations? With three new […]
Last month I focused on characteristics that seem to define store innovation in 2019: stores that focus more on deepening the relationship, rather than selling stuff; an emphasis on in-store services; connecting fulfillment to the store, to the point of possibly not having inventory; gathering rich behavioral data in stores; and using the store to […]
Six Themes Expected from Store Innovation in 2019 Pop-ups are still wildly popular, and retailers are still investing a lot into testing new store concepts and even launching new – and sometimes enormous – flagship stores in a bid to remain relevant to consumers, and in some cases, to get ahead. Between December 2018 […]
I will preface this list by saying that while I wish I had the opportunity to visit each one of these to personally ensure that I am recommending something that is truly innovative, alas I have not had that chance. If you’ve been to any of these, and have a perspective to share, please let […]
It’s October, and while consumers may be turning their thoughts to Halloween, retailers are firmly focused on making sure they’re ready to execute on the big winter holidays. That means that while there may be new innovations “discovered” over the next few months, the reality is there are very few retailers who are going to […]
I will be honest. I have tracked cool stores to visit for years, though never as actively as I have in the last 9 months. And when I started this endeavor in June, to actually publish a curated list of store innovations, and make a commitment to doing so on a monthly basis, I was […]
This is the third publication of our Store Innovation Watch series, which, given retailers’ dedication to experimenting with store innovation, looks like it will continue to be a monthly update for the foreseeable future. This month, I already find myself reaching back to the June post, to pick up two store innovation trends identified there: […]
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere of our planet, it’s fair to say that it has been hot. Perhaps the summer heat has slowed the pace of store innovation announcements for the month of July. More likely, retailers are taking a collective breath before hitting stores hard in preparation for either back to school, […]