Two days, over 100 speakers, more than a 1,000 delegates – Retail Week Live was again the highlight in the retail calendar this year.

Bigger and better than ever, this was a landmark event in retail. Never before has the pace of change been so frenetic, never before has the future looked so uncertain.

In the words of retail bosses, the retail climate today is “challenging” and “threatening”. We heard about failing fast, daily release cycles, experimentation, personalisation, working with start-ups, click-and-collect; in short this felt like a conference of its time.

We heard many leading retailers describe how click-and-collect is driving their business, how they are introducing it, how it creates challenges for them (supply chain and in-store especially) and we heard how click-and-collect is not only driving double-digit sales growth, but that it is embedded within their business models.

Stepping stone

But surely click-and-collect is but a stepping stone? A stepping stone to something more convenient for the consumer.

After all, why would we want to order online and then have to collect from a store? Unless of course we have a reason to visit the store, click-and-collect appears to have been initially a consumer-led service which is now rapidly becoming a retail strategy to drive footfall in store and thus take advantage of upsell and cross sell.

What if we could have click-and-deliver? Order online (or in store for that matter) and have the goods delivered to our home. Nothing new in that you might say.

But at Retail Week Live this year there was a new addition; the Innovation Campus. Run along the Dragons’ Den principle, it showcased more than a dozen inspiring start-ups, all pitching their retail innovation products.

And tucked away in a corner of all this was, for me, the most important and significant aspect of the entire conference.

Game-changer

The secure plastic box known as a Pelipod sat there pretty anonymously, but the significance of having a secure box outside our homes, along with all our various recycling bins, should not be underestimated.

No more trips to the local depot or Post Office when we find the ubiquitous card on the doormat, no more deliveries tossed over the garden fence, or with the neighbours and especially, no more waiting in for that delivery that never happened.

With this we are liberated from being tied to a delivery and that is game-changing.

And with returns handled just as easily, for all those retailers building a business model around click-and-collect I would urge caution. The consumer drives the pace and type of change and this would seem to be an ideal candidate .

As the two keynotes from Dixons Carphone boss Seb James at the opening of the conference and Sainsbury’s chief Mike Coupe at the close both echoed: “adapt or die”.

  • Andrew Busby is retail business head at Zensar Technologies