W2W Conference Recap: Shoptalk 2019

Shoptalk is one of the largest and most progressive retail conferences available to retailers. The Remodista team had the pleasure of attending and hosting a slice of innovation for our community.  It was an exciting few days where we explored new retail ideas and connected with some new retail friends. Here are a few take-aways we came home with as well as a recap of some of the events we ran. Take a look!

On the hunt (again!) for Robotics + Artificial Intelligence

The big Shoptalk theme this year is all about creating the future of retail.  If you know us, then you know this is near and dear to our hearts. To that end, we wandered around the expo floor looking for robotics, and artificial intelligence and we weren’t disappointed.  During our wanderings, Commerce Tools partners with a robotic arm delivering energy drink to Kelly, our founder. We were visually inspired by a 15-foot wide screen showing us how robotic shopping carts triggered by online orders would deliver packages to customers.

Artificial intelligence helped deliver digital assets to retail teams to help streamline marketing efforts and the Startup Row gave us an insight into the next up-and-coming machine learning-powered tools for retailers looking to grow their tech stacks.

Retail Innovation Uncovered

One of the real highlights for us was working with retailer brand leaders and technology executives to extract their perspective on innovation during our Collective Think. If you’re not familiar with our Collective Think program, it’s a measurement tool that allows us to better understand how innovative or ahead of the trends a community or group of people is. Understanding the full scope of a community’s skills or perspectives can lead to critical differentiators for businesses.
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At Shoptalk, we were able to collect insights about topics that included cryptocurrency and blockchain, data privacy, artificial intelligence for marketing and sales, and finally robotics. A woman I was sitting next to from ASOS, an athletic shoe brand, mentioned how so often you’re expected to be receiving information from conferences, but rarely do you get to collaborate and contribute. And later today we were able to take those contributions and create word analysis that gave us a unique insight into these topics purely from how we communicate about them. Take a look at the results:

Women2Watch at Shoptalk

After the Collective Think, we were delighted to host our fourth Women2Watch Reception at SUSHISAMBA in the beautiful maze that is the Venetian hotel. Brand leaders connected with other brand leaders, ideas were shared, sushi was eaten and fabulous cocktails were consumed. 

Women2Watch Interviews

Several of the women on our annual Women2Watch list were in attendance and several of them were speaking. We decided to capture some of their knowledge on the fly with a new video series we launched this year.  Take a look and see what challenges retailers are facing and how someone might follow in the footsteps of these unbelievably accomplished women.

What's Next? 

Keep an eye out for the next piece of content we build from our Collective Think insights, our Visual Map. In the meantime, grab the latest version of our 2019 Look Book and check out the predictions we’ve compiled there.

Get the Look Book