The recently held Women’s Wear Daily Apparel & Retail CEO Summit witnessed few of the brightest minds in the industry discuss a wide range of insightful topics like IPOs and M&A, in-store experience, and even the future of the Chinese market. A few common themes that came out in most of the topics discussed were, the need to connect and appeal to a larger audience, balance between the art and science of retail, and technology and its impact on retail growth.
Read about other recently held summits– World Textile Summit to explore business logic of textile sustainability
Marvin Ellison, CEO of JCPenney discussed the struggle to balance art and science in retail, which has been going on since decades, along with talking about some of his company’s new data initiatives around consumer analytics and pricing. Many speakers including Jeff Yurcisin, Vice President, Clothing, Amazon Fashion emphasized the need to appeal to a greater audience in order to positively influence growth along with balancing art and science.
Representatives from Ideo and RetailNext at the WWD’s Apparel & Retail CEO Summit had a detailed discussion on the need to improve the in-store experience by exploring the various avenues through technology. MasterCard claimed that smaller retailers represent a strong growth segment and are realizing a more full-price sales than larger retailers, according to its data analysis.
According to Sarah Quinlan, Group Head of Market Insights for MasterCard, the challenge is how to use technology to ensure that the retailer has merchandise that not only stands out, but is what the customer wants and is priced correctly.
