Monthly Archives: March 2013

Showrooming vs. Retail Warehousing

Showrooming vs. Retail WarehousingOld School vs. Old School

As the saying goes, ‘what’s old is new again’. Only this time robots and hand-held computers (aka smartphones) are involved.

I was having a conversation recently with a colleague about the retail industry and I made the point that all retail stores are warehouses, only some are prettier than others.

Walk into the average Macy’s or other department store and you’ll see piles of inventory out on display in the store, of every size (from small to XXXL) and variety (white, black, brown, etc.) with even more in the back. Retail WarehousingAll of this inventory has been tagged for individual sale and is there every day, just in case the person who wants that size, color, style, whatever, walks into the store ready to take it home today.

Contrast this with Argos in the UK or the now-defunct Best and Service Merchandise in the United States whose business model was to have only certain items out on display in the retail store, with the rest of the inventory in the back ready to be picked (much like an eCommerce environment) once the product(s) were ordered.

Showrooming and Retail Warehousing HybridApple Stores are a hybrid between the two. Accessories are out on the floor boxed for individual sale, while iMac and iBook computers, iPad tablets, and iPod mp3 players are all out of the box and display in droves for customers to try out and hopefully purchase. Then if they do, the box appears from the warehouse in the back.

But there is a new wave of entrepreneurs trying to bring back the catalog retailing business model into the modern age. Version 1 was standard eCommerce where the catalog was available online instead of in the store and no physical retail stores had to be maintained, leading to a financial advantage for online retailers like Amazon. But eCommerce has a weakness, and that is in product categories need to know how something fits or feels or otherwise fits their style or life.

ShowroomingThis has led to the rise of what physical retailers rail against, the concept of showrooming. If you’re not familiar with what showrooming is, it is the pattern of behavior where potential customers come into a physical retail store, explore the product, try it on if necessary, and then leave the store and buy the product online from a competitor like Amazon.

Some entrepreneurs are beginning to recognize the collision of some of the mobile technologies that underlie the showrooming trend together with automated robotic picking technologies and the recognition of inefficiencies in the traditional retail warehousing model.

Hointer Founder

One example is a Seattle area entrepreneur who left Amazon to launch a business called Hointer that while they are talking about how they are revolutionizing the premium jean shopping experience for men, their real strategy is to use their store as a rapid prototyping and testing environment to develop a technology platform supporting the browsing, trying, and checkout process that they hope to sell to a number of different retailers all around the world. Their modernization of the catalog showroom business model is predicated on reducing the square footage and personnel required to operate a store, thus increasing (hopefully) the dollars per square foot ratio that most retailers use as their success metric. One side benefit of the approach is that salespeople will be able to spend less time folding clothes and more time helping customers. Imagine that.

Will this robotic retailing concept catch on with more than utilitarian shoppers?

Image Credits: Daily UW, Hointer


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How healthy are your innovation efforts?

How healthy are your innovation efforts?As organizations become more mature in their process excellence efforts, an increasing number of organizations are turning their attention to try and achieve innovation excellence.

So where should your journey of a thousand innovation steps begin?

As your organization begins its innovation journey it is helpful to know where you are starting from in terms of your innovation maturity level and where the strengths and weaknesses of your innovation culture lie.

In my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, that many organizations are buying in bulk and using to help establish their organization’s common language of innovation, I promised to share my 50 question innovation audit on this web site, and so here it is.

The audit is designed to examine many different areas of your innovation culture and help you identify both what your level of innovation maturity is, but also the areas where you have a strong base to build from and where you need to invest more effort.

Innovation Maturity Model

To properly use my innovation audit, you should have large sections of your employee population fill out the survey (both in management and operational roles) across several different business specialties and office locations. The data can then be looked at by department, business specialty, office location and other groupings that make sense to identify both commonalities and differences.

If you would like assistance interpreting the results, please contact me to see the different options for engaging my services. Many companies combine this with an innovation speaker engagement or some innovation training for their employees.

I hope you find this innovation audit of use, and I thank you for buying the book (or considering doing it now)!

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Build a common language of innovation on your team

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