Serious and Sometimes Comic Musings on the Future of Retail
The Omni Talk team catches up with LISNR Founder and Head of Innovation Chris Ostoich, live from their show booth at NRF. They talk about everything from the future of drive-thru and QSR experiences to order pickup at retail, all without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket or car ever again.
As part of Omni Talk’s live podcast coverage from NRF, sponsored by LISNR, Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga sit down with Canada Goose omnichannel expert, Justin Ing, to discuss omnichannel theory, the sights, sounds, and smells of retail, and his company’s new experiential store in Toronto.
To kick off our live NRF coverage, sponsored by LISNR, Chris Walton sits down with Market Beyond CEO Yuval Yifrach to discuss his company’s full holiday season report of how Walmart stacked up against Amazon from an e-commerce market share perspective. We also even throw Target into the mix, as a special thank you to our loyal followers.
In this week’s episode, sponsored by Trigo, Chris geeks out over Alexa and Gift Cards to the chagrin Anne and Carter, plus other top headlines like JioMart, ‘Public Venmo’ and more!
Abbe’s career in retail has been nothing short of inspiring – from her determination to be the best bagger at Big Bear all the way up to her current role as Chief Human Resources Officer of Ahold-Delhaize. With the grocery industry changing quickly, so is the future of grocery work. For Abbe, that means having a finger on the pulse of everything from emerging technology to evolving customer expectations and building a workforce who is ready to support it all.
What started as a HauteLook experiment with Nordstrom Rack, turned into a completely new business idea for some of the biggest D2C brands to handle returns. Customers of online brands like Rothy’s and Evereve now leverage 700 Happy Returns return bars throughout the country to give customers their money back on the spot and make the entire return process more accessible and hassle free. By bringing joy to returns, David and Happy Returns plan to unlock even more value for e-commerce.
Anne and Chris sit down with Tim Rowland, CEO of Badger Technologies, a product division of Jabil, to discuss all things related to the future of in-store robotics on everything from monitoring floor spills to inventory stock positioning. Tim shares the early lessons from his company’s large scale implementation with Ahold Delhaize, gets real about all the noise out there on the topic, and shows why robots are likely the answer for completing the tasks retailers just don’t have the time or resources to do now, even if they want to!
In today’s special edition of the Fast Five, sponsored by Trigo, the full Omni Talk crew hands out the hardware for 2019. Retailer of the Year, Executive of the Year, Worst Idea of the Year — Chris, Anne, Carter, Emma the Intern, and even Margo the dog debate them all!
Anne and Chris sit down with Trigo Co-Founder and CTO Daniel Gabay at the Trigo headquarters in Tel Aviv to learn all they can about the history of computer vision, where it is going in the future, and why retail may be the first place it impacts people’s lives on a consistent basis.
On this episode of the Women’s Retail Collective Podcast, Anne interviews Karen Stuckey. Karen has had an unbelievable career in retail, starting in Chicago as a store manager at the Limited on Michigan Avenue to her current role at Walmart as SVP of Private Brands. Karen’s years of experience working on brands from Sara Lee to Target to Montgomery Ward have shaped how she and her team at Walmart are developing private brands for one of the largest retailers in the world.
In this week’s Fast Five, sponsored by trigo, the gang talks driverless cars, Kroger and Walgreens, Google commerce, Hudson News, and Amazon’s latest pop-up store.
In their inaugural podcast contribution for Omni Talk, Carlos Castelan and Toopan Bagchi of the Navio Group put their consulting hats on and provide listeners a deep dive into key retail topics for the month and give their advice, for what it’s worth, of course. This episode also features special segments, like “Buy or Sell” and “CEO Chalk Talk,” where CEOs write into Toopan and Carlos for advice. You won’t want to miss their debut!
The Co-Founders of VR startup Roomera, Thong Nguyen and Brad Von Bank, stop by the Omni Talk podcast studio to discuss the evolution of VR and its immediate and useful applicability within the physical retail store design process.
Carter’s out on assignment so Chris, Anne, and Emma the Intern in this week’s Fast Five, sponsored by Trigo, talk Kroger’s new Delivery Kitchen, more coolness (literally) from the new Canada Goose store, Casper’s stacking the deck with its recent executive hires, Glossier’s dip into Nordstrom’s waters, and the impact Returnly’s Instant Gift Exchange will have on post-holiday returns.
Chris Walton sits down one-on-one with b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby to discuss the history and business model of b8ta, “Retail-as-a-Service” theory and practice, and his company’s new partnership involving Toys R Us.
The conversation is frank, spirited, and left the Omni Talk team with even more unanswered questions about the long-term value of what we have seen so far from b8ta’s first footnotes on the chart of retail history.