NYU Grad Student Blogs from Retail’s Big Show–Day Three Recap

After spending two days at NRF’s Big Show, I was starting to get feel for the place. Here’s a recap of my Day Three (Tuesday, January 13).

Retailers Doing Well by Doing Right: 11:00AM-12:00PM
The first lecture I went to today was down in Hall E, where I heard Morley Ivers of RecycleBank and Tom Szaky of TerraCycle. The theme: there’s gold in them there landfills! It hasn’t hit in my Brooklyn neighborhood yet, but RecycleBank has essentially created one of the world’s first recycling-for-dollars loyalty promotional campaigns. The more you recycle, the more redeemable points you get. They take almost everything-plastic, paper, aluminum cans, glass. Sadly, they don’t take recycled jokes, dashing my hopes for an early retirement.

Hitting the trade show floor:
After a $4.25 pretzel for a snack (lest I forget that I am in New York), I hit the trade show floor again and saw many more cool exhibits. Scentair had a brightly colored VW minibus at their booth specially equipped to emit all sorts of fragrances, including “chocolate,” “pumpkin pie,” and “baby powder,” so that you can give your store an appealing scent. It smelled like a winner to me. Ironically, though, they did not offer a VW minibus smell, much to the disappointment of the nostalgic baby boomers in the crowd.

There was plenty of other high-tech stuff as well. They had some of those cool tabletop computer screens at the Microsoft booth, and another vendor had Provision 3D holograms, although I thought it would have been even better if they built an R2-D2 droid to display them.

Reinventing the Retail Store Window: How Technology and Visual Merchandising Merge to Unleash the Customer Experience: 1:00-1:45PM
I popped up to the NRF Design Studio for a bit, where a lot of the store architects had displays of their work. They were very chic, although slightly beyond my student-budget price range. Alex Richardson awarded chocolate prizes to the audience if they could identify retailers by their store windows, which was a fun quiz except for the curve wrecker in the front right of the audience who kept getting most of them and nearly cornered the chocolate market. She clearly had studied.

Richardson went on to show us some really engaging windows like the touch-screen window at Ralph Lauren’s store in Manhattan. It’s highly interactive, and was inspired by technology used by Tom Cruise in the Minority Report, so I’ll have to take a field trip next week. I really liked the technology, although the rest of presentation seemed like a lot of window dressing to me. (Wait for it, wait for it…Insert rim shot here.)

CIO Innovator’s Forum: 1:45-3:00PM
This was a moderated panel from with the CIOs of several companies, including Urban Outfitters and Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, and they offered a variety of interesting perspectives. However, they all were looking for the same thing in their software vendors: rather than buying software off-the-shelf, they wanted ongoing partnerships. High service costs and not enough support were the biggest driving factors in pushing them towards open-source solutions.

There were other interesting points as well, but I was highly distracted because Doug Rutledge, Fresh & Easy’s CIO, bore an uncanny resemblance to my brother and I could not stop staring at him from way in the back of the room. I left before he could attempt to put me into a headlock.

Mobile as the Next Channel-Hype or Reality? 3:00-3:30PM
Instead of the moderated debate that I expected, with each candidate getting two minutes plus one minute for a rebuttal, reality hogged all of the air time. According to Cisco, the recent advances in cell phones will create tremendous opportunities, and the successful stores will be the ones who figure out how to use it to their advantage. In many ways, mobile technology is a lot like me on the basketball court – you can’t really stop it, you can only hope to contain it. At least that’s the message that I took away.