The Future of Retail: It’s More About Magic Than the Muscle of Massive Inventory

The future of retail is, well, kind of a mess.

Physical stores are desperate to compete with the convenience and choice available on the internet. Online retailers are opening brick-and-mortar locations to improve their browsing, fitting and return efforts. And shopping malls are busy trying to stay relevant and reinvent themselves as some sort of hybrid.

As much as consumers have never had more choice, creating an environment that sews it all together into a magical experience that makes shoppers want to return is the secret sauce of success for the retailer of the future.

“It’s all about the experience,” retail innovator and former Club Monaco CEO Francis Pierrel said in a conversation with Karen Webster. “It’s like if you put Chanel No. 5 in a plastic bottle, you’ve lost the magic. It’s about the bottle. It’s about the packaging. It’s about experience.”

He described retail’s future as both curative and collaborative.

On the curation front, retailers need to know their customer and the brands they want, and then curate a holistic shopping experience, Pierrel said. That may sound easy, but he pointed out that customers often know more about brands than store employees.

At the same time, the future will see less competition and more collaboration. Instead of pitting brands against each other, he said he envisions a future that pairs the nicest sweater with the best pants to the delight of customers. In short, an experience that transcends the brand DNA and delivers an experience that consumers could not get on their own.

“This is somehow the purpose of a department store,” he said. “Their job is to curate, it’s not to have the latest, shiny object. It’s not to get the whole collection from a brand, but to get a piece of the collection that makes sense in the assortments that they are curating.”

The Better Omnichannel Experience

Simply put, Pierrel said stores need to be as good as online, but also bring something else to the table that online cannot do. That thing, that “tangible expression,” he said, involves talking to customers in an interesting place and having a salesforce that can engage and collect information. A place where customers can shop slowly but purchase quickly.

“Serve coffee, serve drinks, talk about the weather, do whatever, let them browse,” he said. “Browsing is not just touching and sampling product; it’s that experience, that human experience that we’re all missing when we’re shopping online.”

He said as he sees it, customers should be encouraged to take as much time as they need until it comes to the purchase itself, which he said needs to be as efficient as it is online.

“Make the moment of the transaction as seamless and as quick as possible, at least in the eyes of the customer,” he said. “Everything else, let them take their time.”

Feeding the Impulse to Buy

Clearly there is a “buy now, get now” (BNGN) mentality that’s emerging within the connected economy, as physical stores undergo a series of transformations to remain relevant, a trend that will be even more of a factor for the retailer of the future.

PYMNTS latest How We Shop report, a Carat from Fiserv collaboration, concluded as much, stating: “Brick-and-mortar stores still are king when it comes to buy now, get now shopping. Eighty-nine percent of consumers report making BNGN purchases at Walmart stores, and 90% make them at physical locations of nationally known retailers.”

Get the study: Brick-and-Mortar’s Role in the Bring-It-to-Me Economy

And yet, Pierrel said he knows all too well that more is needed to break through the clutter and demand the attention of a would-be customer.

“The full availability of everything possible on earth doesn’t help me,” he said. “I’ve got the internet for that. Amazon is the internet. Everything is there. [But] what a piece of work to get through that. It’s very complicated, and nobody is there yet, but we’re getting closer.”

What to Do With Malls

As far as malls are concerned, Pierrel said they are dead, in need of reinvention and that there are simply too many of them. And yet, he said he still believes in them and the role that they can play in delivering a Disney-like experience that makes shoppers and families want to come back again and again.

“Malls still believe in curation, [as in] let’s put this brand next to this one, or this service next to these brands, and then it creates an experience that is a little bit like what the city center used to be,” he said. “But we don’t need as many malls as we have. That’s for sure.”

See also: Separation of Store, eCommerce Operations Draws Increasing Interest

Aside from fewer stores and malls, Pierrel said his view of what retail in 2025 will look like also involves more globalized selling, with a more concentrated approach for online shopping.

“International websites, one website for the world, not different websites,” he said. “With intelligence you can customize by markets, [but] I don’t believe in markets. I don’t believe in countries. I believe in 20, 30 key cities in the world.”

But perhaps most of all, Pierrel said for retailers to succeed in the hybrid, omnichannel, connected commerce future, they’ll need to pay close attention to the clues — both physical and digital — that their customers are giving.

“To understand your customer, you need to be observant,” he said. “It doesn’t take many, many visits to understand that. I see how you dress, what you wear on your wrist, your hair, the coat that you’re wearing, whether you came from work or from home, what kind of shopping bags you are carrying. There are a lot of clues.”

The same is true on the data side of modern retailing, he said.

“If you can share [those clues] across the board, [retailers] don’t have to build a full relationship to create that experience for you,” he said. “It’s just leveraging these two worlds from the data they give you.”

See also: Technology Front and Center in Proposed Amazon Department Stores