It’s been a tough quarter for regional retailers based here in the Pacific Northwest. They’ve all suffered from the same soft sales that the economy has imposed on national retailers, and we had a sever winter storm that knocked out a lot of the traditional holiday shopping days this season. Now we’re starting to see [...]

Miller Zell is one of the top firms in the retail marketing and design industry.  In the first half of the 90′s they were a terrific vendor of mine at Blockbuster.  Among the clever things they do is conduct their own research.  It both gives them a competitive advantage versus firms that either don’t base [...]

In a recent post about Microsoft’s new retail initiative, I suggested that that there are aspects of Apples customer experience that could be improved.  Several readers responded, asked for more specifics thoughts. Let me start by saying that Apple has the best dollars per square foot metrics in all of retail.  They don’t need to [...]

Last week Microsoft announced plans to open its own retail stores to “transform the PC and Microsoft buying experience,” the company said Wednesday as it hired David Porter as corporate vice president of Retail Stores. Although Microsoft hasn’t publicized the scope or mission of this new retail initiative.  Many reporters and bloggers responded by immediately [...]

MediaPost’s Marketing Daily has an article about how some advertisers are setting up digital signage networks in the windows of out-of-business vacant retail stores. I have no problem believing digital signage can be an effective tool in a window display (see my recent Harrods post).  But most successful windows displays are designed to draw you [...]

Adrain Cotterill who writes the excellent Daily Digital out of Home blog, sent me a heads-up this morning about a new window display being unveiled at Harrods. For US centric readers, Harrods is based in the UK, and is one of the premiere department stores in Europe along with the likes of KaDeWe from Germany [...]

The PR folks at Microsoft have to be feeling pretty good. On March 26th Fortune Magazine and others reported that Microsoft’s often hyped multi-touch user interface product, Surface, would not be ready for consumers until 2011. Less than a week later, AT&T Wireless stores and Microsoft announced that Surface would be going live in select [...]

I’m happy to report that traffic picked up at the show on Wednesday. I still think overall attendance will end up down for the show, but day 2 was much better than day 1. Thursday is a half day and typically has pretty light attendance.

Global Shop has long been one of my favorite shows. I love to hang out with lots of smart people who spend their days thinking about great retail experiences. This year’s show got off to a slow start. After getting swamped in our booth the last two years, I was surprised to the trickle of [...]

So far this quarter I’ve visited: CES, Las Vegas NRF, New York EuropShop, Dusseldorf DSE, Las Vegas The next stop on the tour is Chicago for Global Shop. My company MTI has an exhibit here, and the team has been working long hours to get the booth constructed while complying with the all the quirkly [...]