Sometime in the midnineteenth century, following its civil war, America went through severe recession as gold, silver and currencies had been hoarded, creating shortages of currency in the market. Grocery retail chains started minting their own copper, brass and tin coins to give their customers as change in return. Customers then had to come back
When the pandemic began in early 2020, the first casualty in the retail industry was supply chain. There was chaos, and consumers struggled to find ways to fulfill their daily needs – essential as well as non-essential – in the restricted environment they had access to outside their homes. Gradually, overall disruption in end-to-end supply
The first product to start retailing online, which introduced e-commerce to the world in the late 1990s, was books. Global customers steadily started using this as a reliable channel to fulfill their needs across categories. Fashion and lifestyle categories soon began to dominate, and may continue to rule in terms of consumer wallet share. However,
Food and grocery retail is the largest segment in the Indian retail sector with an annual spend of $570 billion, around two thirds of the overall retail spend in our country. This is growing at over 10% every year. Though a large number of organised brands have come up in the recent years, 80% of
Post pandemic everyone is talking about growth of online business and how brands are also exploring Direct-to-Consumer models to create new relationships. This is very much the flavor of the season for CPG sector, however I don’t see any action on this front in the automobile sector. Last month I wrote this piece on how
Couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues from KLISMA connected back after almost 7 years. Kunal Vora worked with me as an intern for 6 months in 2013 and he now works for Tesla in the US. Since Kunal was very keen to work on a supply chain project, I chose to deploy him
Apart from stock market, Retail is the only business looking visibly impacted by Corona globally. Malls and high streets are shutting down due to lock-downs whereas on the other hand supermarkets, pharmacy stores, food stores and online stores are experiencing a different surge. Panic buying, shortages and huge drop in fulfillment rate of online retailers
Modern consumers, especially millennials are now expecting an “Amazon like” experience when they shop in a retail store environment and that means retailers need to go miles ahead on engaging and creating convenient shopping experience.
Over the last 5 years variety of e-commerce platforms are trying to cater to each of these shopping needs but most of them are offering similar experiences. Instead of trying to offer category specific experience all of them are trying to catch consumer attention using deals and discounts and that too on big ticket items which actually deserve planned shopping experience.
I see this as the time when the role of physical stores has the best opportunity to evolve in different ways. Brand and retailers can start re-imagining the role of their stores in many ways and, in doing so, they will rebuild value make their stores more relevant to their consumers.