Past Events
Unlocking Retail Innovation with Composable Commerce
In a world where change is the only constant, composable commerce promises exciting opportunities for retailers to improve operations, create exceptional customer experiences, and drive business growth fast. On Thursday 28th September we gathered leading retailers at the iconic Emirates Stadium, home of the Arsenal Football Club, to discuss the challenges and opportunities composable commerce brings. As well as an exciting range of talks from retail leaders at Primark and Arsenal F.C., guests were treated to a guided tour of the iconic Emirates Stadium, and a showcase of the solution that enables Arsenal's kit shirts to be personalised.
Stadium tour
A highlight for many of the retailers in attendance was the guided tour of the Emirates Stadium. Attendees toured the Diamond Club, sat in the VIP stands, viewed the home and away changing rooms, and got to walk through the player’s entrance onto the main pitch.
Retailing the Arsenal way
Our first speaker of the day was Matt Iles-Hunt, Business Applications Specialist from Arsenal Football Club. His presentation ‘Retailing the Arsenal Way’ provided behind-the-scenes insight into experiential retailing at the football club, and the extreme peaks and troughs you face as a retailer when your sales revolve around a limited number of match days each year! As echoed in Arsenal’s key motto ‘Always forward’, Matt shared some of the key innovations they have introduced in the last year, including rolling out mobile retailing solutions across the stadium and in one-off pop-up stores.
Inviting a challenge mindset from your technology partner
Our second speaker of the day was PMC’s CEO Rich Lowe. He took to the floor to discuss the concept of ‘Inviting a challenge mindset from your technology partners’. Rich started off citing change as the obvious and well-known constant, and how serverless technologies enable resilience when it comes to enabling change. However, the flipside challenge is that truly composable commerce often means you end up with both a multi-platform and multi-vendor solution. He finished off by showcasing the PMC Graphene solution and the reason behind why PMC bought their own custom solution to the market – to meet the platform and tooling needs of modern customer-centric retailing.
How Primark are using composable commerce to drive retail footfall
Peter Robinson, Primark’s Head of Channels Transformation shared the digital journey Primark has taken since moving into the online selling space and launching click & collect. He shared the motivations behind their digital strategy including their desire to better engage with their customers, rather than reinvent themselves as an e-commerce brand, and the impact this has had on enabling data capture and enhancing the product offering for smaller stores.
Architecting for performance and scale
Chris Bridgland, Senior Director Solutions Engineering and Customer Success for Europe led a talk on the topic of ‘Architecting for Performance and Scale’, sharing the benefits of composable commerce and how they can be realised through Couchbase’s cloud database platform. His talk touched on key opportunities composable commerce offers retailers, including agility, plug-and-play options, flexibility, scalability and faster time to market.
Panel discussion
The panel discussion, led by Couchbase’s Chris Bridgland, was around the theme of ‘How Composable Commerce technology is revolutionising the retail industry’. The panelists included Richard Surman, Head of IT at Crew Clothing, Paul Worthington, an ex retail CIO and independent retail business and technology advisor, and Martin Schofield, CEO of Retail 247.
Questions they explored included:
- How do you align composable commerce promises to the values and business objectives of your company?
- Are traditional ERPs dead?
- How do you secure buy-in to composable commerce from the wider business?
- What are the best strategies for innovation whilst managing technical debt?
- What are the biggest blockers to adopting new composable commerce strategies?
Personalised Football shirts
Arsenal’s kit shirts are one of the most popular items their on-site store stocks, and fans have the option of personalising the shirt with custom names and numbers. As part of the event, we showcased the solution that sits behind this personalisation technology and offered all attendees the opportunity to create their own personalised shirt as a take home gift! Find out more about the event, or request a copy of the event slides by emailing hello@pmcretail.com
You may also be interested in:
