As a Senior Manager on the Strategy and Insights for Retail and Consumer Goods team at Salesforce, Caila Schwartz’s goal is simple – help retailers gain a competitive edge via actionable data and insights.

Schwartz joined Retail Refined for a conversation with host Melissa Gonzalez on how that goal takes shape in practice, diving into the ways Schwartz and her colleagues attempt to get retailers up to speed with the ever-shifting retail landscape.

As is the case in many other industries, independent wine and spirit retailers in a post-COVID world are seeing a drop in sales and revenue. The reason? The shifting demands of online shoppers has reduced their desire to discover new brands.

Mike Provance, the CEO of 3×3, works to change that. 3×3 is a marketing technology company dedicated to helping independent liquor retailers engage with and market to consumers. He joins Melissa Gonzalez to discuss how 3×3 leverages data to develop hyper-targeted, hyper-local marketing strategies for these independent retailers.

On this episode of Retail Refined with host Melissa Gonzalez, Showfields CEO Tal Nathanel outlined how “the most interesting store in the world” is attempting to revolutionize retail.

Showfields’ mission is to “create a better way for customers to discover, engage and show emerging brands and artists of tomorrow.” In practice, that means offering a reimagined customer experience driven by the brand’s commitment to curation, content, commerce, convenience and connection.

Live selling has a new look, and retailers are finding new opportunities to connect with audiences. While live selling came to prominence through TVs with players like QVC, today’s shopper desires an experiential retail experience from their smartphone. eCommerce and live selling expert Brandon Kruse, CEO of CommentSold, shared his insights and predictions for this type of shopping.

Successful business leaders are always looking for the next way to cut costs, maximize profits, and run their company more efficiently.

Brick-and-mortar retailers with a significant amount of ecommerce sales experience a huge amount of inefficiencies in their fulfillment and shipping processes. How can they utilize their existing infrastructure — their people, product, and stores — more efficiently? Is there a way to improve both the company’s logistics and the customer’s shopping experience at the same time?

In a (bring your own device) retail world, the lines between the physical and digital worlds continue to merge thanks to the possibilities of computer vision. In this episode with guest Christian Floerkemeier, CTO and co-founder of Scandit, learn how Scandit is helping retailers automate end-to-end retail operations by moving routine processes and tasks onto mobile devices powered by high-performance barcode scanning software. From consumer self-scanning apps for self-checkout and Scan-and-Go shopping to augmented reality for access to real-time information, they are redefining retail one scan at a time via intelligent text and object recognition capturing customer imagination and reducing operational costs.

Christian Floerkemeier: CTO, VP Product, and co-founder of Scandit

As CTO and VP Product, Scandit co-founder Christian Floerkemeier is responsible for Scandit’s product strategy and roadmap and is the technical lead behind Scandit’s patented Barcode Scanner technology.

https://www.scandit.com/

Before founding Scandit, Christian was the Associate Director of the Auto-ID Lab at MIT and a member of the MIT research team that developed the RFID technology which is today in use in major supply chains. Christian also co-founded Fosstrak, the leading open-source RFID software platform that implements the EPC Network specification. He was the technical program chair of the Internet of Things Conference in 2008 and IEEE RFID 2009 and general chair of IEEE RFID 2011.

Christian received a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and a Bachelor and MEng degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

About Scandit

Scandit enables businesses and consumers to interact with everyday objects by blending the physical and digital worlds using computer vision. Scandit technology is a unique machine learning platform combining leading-edge barcode scanning, text recognition (OCR), object recognition and augmented reality (AR) for use on any camera-equipped smart device, from smartphones to drones, wearables and robots.

Many of the world’s most successful companies use Scandit as part of their digital transformation, including 7-Eleven, Alaska Airlines, Carrefour, Hermes, La Poste, Levi Strauss & Co, Sephora and Toyota.

• How does Scandit blend the physical and digital worlds using computer vision?
• Why did you start the company and how has your vision evolved since then?
• How do you see changing behaviors due to COVID accelerating adoption for in-store technology integration?
• How does Scandit take costs out of operational costs?
• How long does it take you to get a store up and running, and optimized?
• Are there a couple of retail use cases/success story examples you can share?

Computer vision and advanced algorithmic sensors have changed the possibilities of consumer facing technologies. From augmented reality to virtual reality, kinect technology to motion capture, host Melissa Gonzalez speaks with Adaora Udoji, Director of Corporate Innovation of RLab about the latest trends that are evolving and how COVID is accelerating adoption and testing, as well as some of the exciting start-ups moving the needle. We are no longer in a world that can wait for long tail pilot testing and roll outs that take years, the consumer is changing rapidly.

Adaora Udoji Bio

Director of Corporate Innovation of RLab

ADAORA  currently heads a corporate innovation and venture program team at RLab, a New York City initiative focused on emerging technology like spatial computing- virtual reality, augmented reality, gesture, voice, neural networks.

She is a media innovator; an award-winning storyteller with an expertise in emerging technology. She helps build new tech products, teams, and business model strategies. She’s also a media maker including creating new tech immersive formats like virtual reality and augmented reality, having written and directed experiences for the likes of Google Daydream VR, as well as the producer of documentaries and short films.

Questions:

1. Let's break down 3D scanning as a creative tool and storytelling medium.

2. How does 3D capture work? 

3. How is VR changing the way we build environments?

4. How have you seen adoption and use cases evolve in retail for AR? 

5. How is creation accelerated/opportunities widened via 

6. What are you most excited for in terms of innovations coming to fruition in 2021?

RLAB:

A partnership between New York City and its universities, RLab is the nation’s first city-funded center for research, education and entrepreneurship in virtual and augmented reality and related technologies.

https://www.rlab.nyc/

A look into capturing customer intent and how brands and retailers will be positioned better than before post COVID. In this discussion, host Melissa Gonzalez dives into the possibilities of contactless data capture with Amanda Latifi, Co-Founder and CEO of Hafta Have. Technology has traditionally been cumbersome and heavily reliant on hardware but now solutions are becoming "lighter" weight and the value proposition to the customer, not just the retailer, is becoming clearer. Listen to how Hafta Have is helping illuminate insights around exactly what shoppers are browsing in-store and unlocking opportunities to continue the offline conversation just as retailers would if a shopper were to abandon their cart online, and learn how its becoming an effective sales and marketing tool.

Amanda Latifi, Co-Founder of Hafta Have

Named one of “5 Women at the Cusp of Fashion + Technology Innovation”, Amanda Latifi is the co-founder and CEO of Hafta Have, a platform that empowers brick & mortar stores to perform more like online. Amanda brings 15 years of experience in retail strategy and brand marketing for Fortune 500 brands: McDonald’s, SC Johnson Brands, MarsWrigley (Skittles, Combos, Milky Way). A brand strategist assigned to McDonald’s during the recession, Amanda was an integral member of the company’s ‘value team’ studying price-sensitivity thresholds across the U.S.

Hafta Have helps retailers collect limited offline data on their customers browsing in-store with a personalized mobile messaging platform (patent-pending) leveraging data captured in-store to drive conversion, helping retailers recover in-store abandonment with the tactics of online. Contactless. No app, no hardware; all SMS. 

Discussion includes:

- What it means to capture customer intent

- What do you see as the biggest obstacle causing such a gap between being able to capture content online, but not in-store?

- How have you seen COVID opening up opportunities to better capture customer intent?

- When you can capture customer intent, what insights can a retailer or brand glean? 

- Share takeaways from Starbucks and Chili Beans case studies (what made each successful)?

- How does Hafta Have serve as a tool for sales and marketing teams?

With the evolution of the store, it has now become table stakes to invest in a modernized POS system- one that can be in service of contactless payments, omni-channel retail and clienteling. Having seen demand by brands and retailers to take the step to modernize skyrocket, CEO and Founder Nitin Mangtani speaks to Melissa about how to create a modular system that truly empowers store associates and allows them to flex across channels to better serve customers. Hear why he alludes to the Nordstrom meets Apple experience as he paints the picture of his long term vision of the shopping experience.

PredictSpring is a leading Modern POS platform connecting the online and in-store customer experience and enables sales associates to engage with customers by offering highly personalized interactions and fast and efficient transactions. PredictSpring Content Management System (CMS), is a no-coding mobile commerce platform enables retailers to create a full on brand customized experiences. Designed exclusively for brands and retailers, its innovative technology powers Modern POS, native consumer mobile apps and store associate apps including Clienteling, Endless Aisle, and mPOS.

Nitin Mangtani, CEO & Founder, PredictSpring

A visionary and pioneer in the mobile commerce sector, Nitin Mangtani is the Founder & CEO of PredictSpring, an innovative mobile commerce platform. Prior to founding PredictSpring, Nitin led the Google Shopping merchant and search infrastructure team, scaling Google Shopping product to hundreds of thousands of retailers. Most recently, Nitin founded Google Retail Promotions to optimize mobile conversions. Prior to joining Google, Nitin was a founding member of data infrastructure group at BEA from 2001-2006. BEA was leader in application platform market and was acquired by Oracle for $8.5 billion.

• Why stores need to invest in their technology in replacing legacy POS’s.
• The main value of the sales associate in the ‘new retail normal’, the role of the consumer-sales associate and how the relationship is changing.
• Many shopper-associate relationships are purely digital now. Why associates need to adapt their behavior to create those strong relationships, especially if they lose the in-person element.
• Why clienteling is important and what will comprise a strong clienteling strategy, post-pandemic?
• What will retail experience will look like in a post-COVID-19 world.
• How can retailers maintain the high quality shopping experience their consumers have come to expect while following social distancing protocols?
• How can retailers and brands safely create a personalized experience for their consumers from afar?

In this episode, Melissa speaks with founder Spencer Hewett on how the possibilities of RFID are involving with RADAR’s speed and accuracy around item-level analytics and autonomous checkout. With the goal of giving retailers insights to understand what is happening in their store locations at any given moment, they are helping their partners illuminate. what’s on the sales floor vs. in the stockroom in real-time, let alone find misplaced items in real-time. Here how they are taking insights another step deeper by layering on computer vision to their RFID platform and where the future lies. In Spencer purview, the future is where the world becomes a store and every object can become indexed and shoppable.

Spencer Hewitt is the founder/inventor of RADAR, a fully-integrated hardware and software solution that is powered by RFID and enhanced by computer vision. Spencer was named one of entrepreneur Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20", is a Y Combinator Alum, and has invented/prototyped various technologies (mostly at hackathons) including intelligent advertising displays, wireless hospital hand-hygiene compliance systems, computer vision software for detecting heart rate (implemented on Google Glass), and a device for the visually impaired. To date, Spencer has filed patents for over 20 inventions on behalf of RADAR.

Radar, a platform that combines radio frequency identification (RFID) with computer vision to help retailers automate inventory management and more, announced that it has raised $16 million in a round of funding from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures, Align Ventures, Beanstalk Ventures, Colle Capital, Founders Fund Pathfinder, and Novel TMT.

Questions Asked:

1) Why did you found the company in 2013, what was your vision then?

2) How has your vision evolved? How have you seen the market progress in making RFID more accessible and integrated?

3) You say that your RFID technology is different from traditional RFID, as you build everything from the ground up using “proprietary signal processing methods and location algorithms” that improve the ability to identify an RFID tag in three dimensions - can you explain that to us?

4) Radar layers on computer vision with RFID - how has that make your approach different/more powerful? What insights can you glean?

5) What have been the biggest challenges around integration and how are you solving for that?

6) Any key customers/case studies you can highlight? Best successful examples?

7) What are some use cases not yet made possible that you see pursuing in your future? You have mentioned autonomous check out in the past...