The Case for Pop-Up High Streets Why an Airbnb-Style Model Could Be the Future of Specialist Retail For the past few years, I have been running regular pop-up shops in Woodstock in Oxfordshire with Mish. What started as a practical way to reach customers outside Cornwall has...
My predictions for retail in 2026: why AI adoption becomes unavoidable, not optional I don’t believe AI will replace good retail.I do believe that 2026 will be the year when retailers who don't adopt AI meaningfully find themselves running a more expensive, more pressured version of...
December 2025: the Christmas trading season that exposed the fault lines in UK retail December 2025 was not a “boom or bust” Christmas. It was more uncomfortable than that.The data shows a trading period where retail spending broadly held up in value terms, but demand appeared...
Giving Customers What They Really Want: The Black Bra Problem, and What We Can Learn From It In my last blog, The Rise of the New Retailer, I talked about how people are no longer using high street shops for their purely transactional purchases. They want something...
The Rise of the New Retailer: Why the High Street Isn’t Dying, It’s Evolving Every few months, another headline appears declaring the death of the British high street. Yet every time I walk into Wadebridge, where my own business lives and breathes, I see something entirely...
How HMRC’s Delays Are Undermining Maternity Rights and Small Firms In July 2024, I went on maternity leave.It should have been a straightforward transition, a business owner stepping back for a few months to focus on family. Instead, it exposed a serious flaw in the UK's...