On April 19th, 2018 SCI hosted its 3rd Omni-Channel Retail Leadership Summit in Toronto featuring speakers and attendees from influential organizations in the Canadian retail environment. The speakers discussed the state of retail in Canada, e-commerce and wholesale success in Canada, the influence of Amazon, shipping models, cyber security, and other pressing topics. Get some vital answers by downloading the Summit materials.
See below some key messages presented by the retail and e-commerce industry experts at the Summit:
Andrew Nichols, BioSteel:“Our success story began with our founder generating consumers’ support and awareness first, and big marketing activations coming later.” “BioSteel customers demand an authentic connection with our brand.” “We need the ability to scale when customer forecasts are inaccurate or non-existent.” “Ecommerce is the fastest growing part of our business, and it’s breaking stuff everywhere!” “The supply chain pressures we experienced came from managing manufacturing capacity, trying to accurately forecast demand, develop our distribution partnership, getting product delivered to consumers – all while growing fast. In our case, when combined with the hyper growth these factors become even more of a challenge.” “The four strategic pillars of our strategy for sustained growth were Right product, right price, right merchandising, and staff awareness.” | Dave Mack, SCI:“If your Amazon strategy is “wait and see” it might as well be “wait and suffer”. “Five Amazon Strategies that I’m seeing right now are:
If you’d like to learn more about what these strategies could look like, reach out and I’ll send you illustrations of each.” “If Amazon has not yet impacted your product category, they will.” “When I surveyed the group of over 50 Omni-Channel Retail leaders and asked them to describe their Amazon strategy, here’s what they said:
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Kyle Pretsch, Lucky Brand:“Culture change happens when you light a company on FIRE!” “For omni-channel launch to be successful, review the tactics and adapt to the changing business on a bi-weekly basis, not quarterly. Quarterly is just too slow!” “When launching omni-channel, to achieve the full effects and learning it is important to do 3 things: make all inventory available, at all stores possible, and do both quickly. More availability means more sales for the same cost.”
| Jeremiah Tonn, Marsh and McLennan:“The average data breach costs is $255 per record compromised. The average cost for an organization to deal with a Data Breach is $5.8M.” “For card-not-present (CNP) types of transactions, e.g. payments made over internet, phone orders, mail orders, the fraud growth is currently overpassing the growth of sales.” “Wherever your data is, it’s your responsibility. Employee misuse of data, lost data, cyber extortion, inadvertent disclosure of private information, business use of private information are some examples of the breaches that lead to class action lawsuits.” |
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Michael Leblanc, M.E.LeBlanc & Company:“Retail is changing… as it always has and will continue to do forever.” “Conversational Commerce” or voice activated shopping through devices such as Google Home or Amazon Echo – it is going to be the next big thing, and you heard it here first!” “The eco fees that we see in the Electronics space will likely soon be something the Apparel space will be facing as well.” “Canadian retail performance is curiously strong. Latest Canadian numbers tell the story.” | Brian Beck, Guidance:“65% of consumers would buy from a brand or seller they never heard of before!” “Ignoring online marketplaces is not a strategy.” “Amazon is the new Google for product searches.”
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