We’re very excited about Retail Week Knowledge Bank, the latest addition to our subscription package.

It really has been the week of the canape diet. Last night I was at the opening of Jack Wills’ grown up brother brand Aubin & Wills’ ultra-trendy new store (complete with cinema and art gallery) in Shoreditch - more on that next week - followed by a dash across town to Waitrose’s Summer Party at the RIBA, where I arrived just as Richard Desmond was leaving, and had an interesting conversation with a farmer.

However I’ll focus today on the launch of Retail Week Knowledge Bank, which you can’t have failed to spot all over the website and magazine. The analyst Robert Clark, who will be familiar to many in the industry, has along with his colleague Wendy Massey, built what was formerly called Retail Knowledge Bank into a formidable reservoir of data and analysis of the top UK retailers over a period of many years.

Retail Week’s owner Emap bought the business last year and since then we’ve been putting it on a new platform to create a fully searchable database, enabling Retail Week subscribers to get comprehensive information on any of the top 175 UK retailers, or to compare or contrast a group of them which can be narrowed down using the screening tool.

That means it can serve a real variety of missions, whether its identifying those retailers with the highest margins, or trying to find the IT director of a particular company.

We hope that both our retailer and non-retailer readers will find it a really useful tool, whether for benchmarking against competitors, making investment decisions, or in the case of suppliers, identifying sales leads. Best of all, all readers who subscribe to Retail Week get it included in their subscription.