The Future of Specialist Retail When I wrote in January about the potential of pop-up high streets, I was making a broader argument about retail. I believed then that pop-up retail was not just a short-term fix or a useful extra for independent businesses, but part...
What Shoes of Prey Teaches Retailers About Customisation “Shoes of Prey.” Anyone remember them?For a while, they were everywhere in retail and startup circles. A well funded, well loved brand that promised to change how women bought shoes, and then quietly disappeared. Shoes of Prey is...
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...