About Howard Saunders

Howard has worked in retail design for over twenty five years. As a former Creative Director of Fitch, based in London, he was responsible for retail design and branding and for creating multi-disciplinary teams of architects, graphic designers, product designers and copywriters and making them work together! As an independent consultant Howard has worked closely with Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Westfield, for over a decade, helping them develop new store designs and keeping them informed of the latest retail innovations and shifts in customer expectations. His work with Westfield, for example, culminated in the creation of the artisan Great Eastern Market at Westfield Stratford, Europe’s largest shopping centre, which opened in 2011 on London’s Olympic Park. Now based in New York, Howard’s current clients include CBRE, Claire’s Accessories, Consumer Goods Forum, Ebay, Johnson & Johnson, L’Occitane, Magento, Mothercare, Permira and Westfield World Trade Center. As an international speaker Howard’s talks are big, visual journeys across the world of retail. Provocative, challenging, brutally honest, evidence based and thoroughly entertaining.

WE MUST GRAB CHRISTMAS BY THE BAUBLES

Being an Englishman at Christmas gives us a wonderfully warm glow. The Scots have their Hogmanay and haggis throwing, Australians will be busy at the barbie, the Americans have Thanksgiving, but Christmas, a proper chestnut roasting Christmas, is an English affair. At the end of every year we slump onto our Christmas laurels, flatulent with pride that this peculiar hybrid of Victorian invention and Dickensian romance is bloody well ours. And apart from when they replaced baby Jesus with the cheerier Morcecambe & Wise in 1970, an English Christmas remains remarkably unchanged.

But perhaps that’s the problem. England’s Christmas capital has become a party pooper. At the turn of the millennium things perked up a little along the ole charcoal Thames with the launch of the Dome, London Eye, IMAX and the Somerset House ice rink, but since then all we’re left with is a sprinkling of market stalls, the crucifix of illuminations at Oxford Circus, and that boring free pine tree in Trafalgar Square.

So, what’s dampened our festive spirit? Was it the big fiscal fish of sobriety that slapped us across the faces in 2008, or have we simply grown too cool for Christmas?

Some of the blame must surely be laid at the shopfronts of those retailers who stretched the celebrations, like a giant stocking elastic, from the end of August to Boxing Day. Psychologists have proven that listening to Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want’ for five months causes early onset dementia, so perhaps it’s a US conspiracy. The Americans themselves cleverly fixed a fat, turkey-sized valve, known as Thanksgiving, at the end of November, which holds back the real festivities until just a month before the big day.

The truth is, the rest of the world has raced past us. The wonderfully crisp and tacky German markets have multiplied like mice across Europe and even into the US: Dresden, Cologne, Vienna, Lille and Helsinki, each put on a far more fabulous display of Yuletide optimism than Londoners could ever dream of, with glowing squares festooned in lights and brimful of markets and fun-fairs. Montreal has a ‘Fire on Ice’ fireworks extravaganza, Brisbane has a series of amazing shows and parades on its south bank; Copenhagen’s Tivoli Garden becomes a winter wonderland with dozens of rides and a cheeky Santa to ho ho ho amongst the revellers and a few miles away in Freetown Christiana the Christmas market is more like an oriental bazaar. In its bid for visitors, Zagreb puts on a magnificent show where inhibitions are kicked into touch to encourage dancing and singing with local beer. Metz has an ice sculpture parade, Christkindlmarkt in Chicago holds a kids’ scavenger hunt and in Philadelphia, their month long Christmas village features a German grill for bratwurst and fries. The list of inspiration is endless.

Meanwhile, back in lacklustre London, even red-pilled Ebeneezer would go back to bed.

So, London, it’s time to bring Christmas home. This isn’t some rose-tinted plea for the good old days. Q4 is how retail pays its rent, so we must step up and unleash all that untapped spirit that currently has nowhere to go.

Please, New West End Company, let’s make sure the (hopefully) newly pedestrianised Oxford Street is the catalyst for bustling street markets, local craft fairs, winter fashion shows, carol karaoke, lantern walks, firework displays and sing-alongs. Yes, Westfield, (Unibail) you must retaliate with street food fairs, celebrity cook-offs, midnight suppers, sleigh rides, light shows, concerts, ice sculptures and treasure hunts.

Sure, retail is going through a tough patch, but it won’t help sobbing into your egg nog. Let’s all pull up our Christmas stockings, shake off our Scrooge and grab Christmas 2018 by the baubles.

If you liked this, please join me on Twitter @SaundersHoward and read more of my blogs here:  andcom.uk9.fcomet.com/blog/

  Howard Saunders   Dec 18, 2017   Food, Future, Uncategorized   1 Comment   Read More

THE DARK SIDE OF THE ME AGE

The heavenly choirs were at full pitch as the fallout from the global financial crisis became apparent. Suddenly, the sky parted and we were handed a slim, black, slab of glass and told we were now in charge, we were in control. No longer would we need to wait to see what the mainstream media had prepared for us at six o’clock every evening. No longer would we need to press our ears to the radio to discover which twenty tunes they’d lined up for us. The dawning of the ME Age really was this biblical. At precisely the time we lost our faith in governments, banks and authorities of all kinds, the smart-phone arrived to grant us uncharted access to anything and everything the planet has to offer. Little wonder it’s had such seismic impact on our high streets.

But there’s a dark and murky side to all this democracy. ME Agers have evolved into an army of super-entitled consumers, brimful with great expectations. Any semi-literate teen is a potential vlogging evangelist now, preaching how we should live, how we must better our lives. It’s not the porn you need to worry about. It’s the feeding frenzy of entitlement your children are locked into that will distort their view of life on earth. Remember, they are all beautiful now, no matter what, and all deserving of our undying respect, as well as a flawless complexion, of course.

The entitled generation is already percolating into our shopping centres, and you can expect them to become ever more demanding as they grow in number. Every mundane thing you take for granted, or haven’t thought much about, they will have an opinion on, passed to them, no doubt, by one of their teenage life coaches. Toothpaste, toilet paper, washing-up liquid, fruit juice, shampoo, aspirin…they’ll be keen to enlighten you as to how deadly these seemingly innocent products are to the health of you and the planet. Clearly, we must prepare for a mighty surge in demand for products and services that are specifically tailored to their highly individual tastes. And delivered within the hour, preferably. The ‘twas ever thus’ brigade won’t know what’s hit it.

It’s worth noting that ME culture is more bubble-up than trickle-down. The contemporary signals that scream desperately ‘I’M AN INDIVIDUAL!’ are sought much harder by those further down the socio-economic scale, perhaps for obvious reasons.

The rise in the number of obscure intolerances is also a by-product of the ME Age. What better way to signal our specialness than to decline an unsuspecting food type while eating amongst friends or colleagues? To date, brands have adapted pretty quickly to our mushrooming pickiness, but they will have to keep on their toes, as it’s unlikely the esteem, with which we now hold ourselves, will dampen anytime soon.

The current ‘pestminster’ scandal can be put down, in part, to our new-found self worth. Victimology, the science of actively seeking out victim status, is clearly on the rise as more of us feel special enough to demand retribution for every awkward, inappropriate sexual advance, or ham-fisted flirtation, dating back decades. Once upon a time, crude or tacky behavior would have been shrugged off as merely that. But today, our egos demand vengeance. No need for expensive lawyers or painful post-mortems. One tiny tweet can be quickly fashioned into an ugly-man destroying missile, and launched with the lightest index finger.

We are in the midst of a cultural upheaval. Back on the high street we are watching the demise of mass market generalists, mid market supermarkets and department stores, largely because they sell the same stuff as everyone else, to absolutely anyone. But very soon, we’ll arrive in a retail wonderland where artificial intelligence will tailor anything our little hearts desire (as well as plenty they had never even considered). In the meantime, we are fast approaching a clash of cultures that could destroy the traditional retail contract: great expectations vs commercial pragmatism. Whether it’s tinned soup or handmade shoes, retail’s unspoken trick is to sell us mass produced merchandise as if it were specially designed for us. As the ME Age gathers momentum, this may well be our biggest challenge yet.

Join me on Twitter for daily retail rants @retailfuturist and read more of my blogs here:  andcom.uk9.fcomet.com/blog/

  Howard Saunders   Nov 14, 2017   big data, Brand, me, me age, Retail, smartphone, Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

MASTER-PLAN: MOSCOW

Moscow is a giant experiment: keep a city under a thick, dark blanket for seventy years, and then whip it away suddenly to see how it reacts to the daylight. That was almost thirty years ago, and the green shoots from the West have certainly found the Muscovite soil fertile. The whole gang is here, from H&M and McDonald’s through to Gucci, Prada and Chanel. The restaurants are appropriately dark and contemporary, with low-slung Tom Dixon lights or exposed Edison lamps. Furniture is on trend too, with plenty of jaunty 70s shapes, as if they watched MASH and Columbo like the rest of us. Except, of course, they didn’t. 1970s Moscow was a cold, grey silhouette of a city, illuminated by little more than a few fluorescent pharmacies and the erratic red trails of Lada tail lights.

Today, it’s a very different picture. Glass towers have snuggled next to the concrete ones. Citibank, BMW, Ford, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo and many of their contemporaries now have tall, black glass HQs here. Clustered around the feet of these giants, the swish restaurants congregate in anticipation of clocking off time. Each one is of such immaculate international style, you could pick it up and drop it into London, Los Angeles or Sydney without anyone noticing. Perhaps only the background rattle of Robbie Williams and George Michael hints at their slightly ‘wannabe’ status.

One aspect of urban life that’s unusual here, is that it is clearly a furiously female-first culture. Ambitious millennials, who grew up never knowing the iron curtain, hold down high-powered jobs, speak a handful of languages, and fill the fancy restaurants most evenings. I did my own, anecdotal, survey across the week, and I would say women make up 60-70% of the customers.

Yet there’s something missing, and its absence is a lesson for us in the entitled West. It’s hospitality. It’s here alright, but if you want it you’ll have to dig for it yourself. The default face for all taxi drivers, receptionists, concierges, greeters and shop assistants is deadpan zero. In the UK and US, we’re used to the eye-averter, the sulker and the utterly disengaged, but ours are born of discontent and cynicism. There are enough smilers in our day for us to surf across the lows and avoid getting dragged down. In Moscow, the blank expressions are born from innocence. They simply haven’t realised how vital hospitality is to city life.

Moscow has rushed headfirst into the 21st century, equipped with a master-plan, and the money, to double in size. Already a city of 11 million people, everywhere you look work is underway to improve, expand and refurbish: Renzo Piano is converting a power station into a cultural centre and art gallery, Rem Koolhaas has finished his polycarbonate clad art gallery in Gorky Park, and there are shiny new trams, a pedestrianised waterfront, ribbons of cycle lanes and a handful of new Metro stations. The early signs of hipsterdom have already introduced craft ale, which is doing a decent job of denting vodka sales for the first time in history. Everything is in place now for Moscow the Megacity, and mightily impressive it will surely be.

In this city, as in many others, ‘starchitects’ and designers are creating jaw-slackening spaces to lift our spirits and open our eyes to the glories humanity can achieve. Every tiny detail, every curve and juxtaposition will be prototyped, tested, argued over and redesigned, so that the spatial acoustics and sense of touch live in harmony with the overall vision. And then, at the front desk, at the very first point of customer contact, they place a young girl, vacuous and indifferent. All the uplifting design and intellectual intent comes crashing down in an instant.

For cities to function smoothly they need the lubricant of hospitality. The eye contact, the affirmation, empathy and human connection that turns the functional into the pleasurable. A happy city sees guests, visitors and customers as its lifeblood. Moscow has yet to notice the invisible mesh that binds everything together is missing from its master-plan, but it will.

There is an almighty untapped resource rumbling beneath Moscow, and it isn’t oil. For the time being, the milk of human kindness just lies in wait.

Join me on Twitter @SaundersHoward and read more of my blogs here:  andcom.uk9.fcomet.com/blog/

  Howard Saunders   Oct 04, 2017   Future, Retail, shopping, Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

THE DEATH OF NUANCE

The good, the bad, and the nothing in between

Futurists and soothsayers of all varieties predict so many deaths of cultures, eras and fashions that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Death makes a much more striking headline than to warn of demise, so I make no apology here for announcing the death of subtlety and adding another corpse to our ever expanding cultural obituary.

I blame politics. Nuance has been looking sickly for a number of years but rigor mortis really set in some time mid 2016, just before the dreaded elections. Over the course of the summer and pushing into late Autumn the western world turned fully binary. You were either in or out, either on the left or the right, there was no in between. Politics has always been adversarial, with its two party bias whipped up by the media, but something was different this time. Each of us set up camp firmly in one territory or the other and hunkered down, right through into the new year…and there’s no sign of things easing yet.

I blame the media. The BBC and CNN, in fact all of them, talk to us like Blue Peter presenters. In gently lilting tones they simplify things for us to digest, like Mummy cutting up our food. The relentless drip, drip, drip of reassuring reasonableness has taken its toll. We have become infantilized. Everyone is either a goodie or a baddie.

If you are good you vote left. That’s the caring, sharing thing to do. You distrust big business, love the European Union and relish every dystopian warning on climate change you read. If you are bad you vote right. You love big business (since it probably made you rich) hate foreigners and believe climate change is a conspiracy. Surely, even the oikiest of oiks amongst us knows these polar positions could not bear the gentlest scrutiny, and yet this is precisely where we increasingly feel most comfortable.

I blame Facebook. It’s the most powerful forum ever invented but it’s no place for nuance. Our silly social avatars must only be seen faking the thrill of being alive, clinking glasses, peace-signing and mugging to camera. Every tiny, insignificant event in our friends’ lives is offered up as something we must like, heart or cry over. If we fail to decorate our page with the flag of the nation of the latest victim of terrorism, we may ourselves slip into the bad category, amongst the ‘friends’ best avoided. And when they poke fun at a ‘bad’ politician or celebrity we have a thumbprint’s chance to join them and show the world that we are good, not bad like the bad man. This isn’t debate, it’s whack-a-mole politics. We’ve become babies.

I blame Twitter. How can an argument be constructed in 140 little letters? It’s a terrific tool for missile shaped comment and observation but these staccato sound bites can hardly be expected to encourage fluid debate. They merely offer themselves up for us to love or ignore. You’re either with me or against me. Snap decisions force us to go binary and sucker us into joining the consensus. After all, it saves so much time.

But we’ve recently entered a much more dangerous binary phase. In the rush to be outraged and signal our universal goodness we are picking on dull, bird shit spattered statues and demanding they be removed for representing bad deeds. Even lonely old Nelson high above Trafalgar Square, who hasn’t been bothered for 180 years (unless you include John Noakes in 1977) has suddenly become a target.

This binary frenzy threatens our biggest brands too: Secretive Apple, censorious Google and tax dodging Amazon must learn to live on a cliff’s edge, knowing that at any minute the tide may turn against them. These three money making monsters are not just big business, they supply us with the tools for modern life and yet, as crucial as they are, they are more vulnerable than perhaps any of us realize. If, say, we turn against Google for being too manipulative, it might just find itself in the bad column. If it does, it will surely crash to earth as swiftly and as heavily as General Robert E Lee bit the Virginia dust.

Even lower profile brands cannot hide from the Outrage Hunters. Let’s scan a few high street names: Tesco, Sports Direct, John Lewis, Rapha, Walmart. Lululemon, JC Penney, Burger King, T Mobile….don’t be shy. You know which camps they fall into.

I am not normally one to fret over the domination of social media. I believe the planet has just opened up for all of us and the benefits of the digital age are only just becoming clear. I do hope, however, that the fashion for binary opinion on everything and anything is just that, a fashion.

Join me on Twitter for daily retail rants @retailfuturist and read more of my blogs here:  andcom.uk9.fcomet.com/blog/

  Howard Saunders   Sep 04, 2017   Apple, Brand, Future, Retail, shopping, Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

BOTS CAN’T DANCE

It’s official. 2017 is the year we went mad. All of us here in the UK, anyway. On the one hand we are resigned to the fact it will probably take twenty years to unravel a few trade agreements with the EU, and yet, on the other hand, we fully expect a driverless car to be whisking us off to work within a few months. We mutter endlessly about the naivety of our political leaders, but will happily recount the news that Elon Musk and Matt Damon will shortly be starting a colony on Mars. And in the pub on a Friday night we can be heard thanking god for the robots that will replace us at work, so that finally we’ll have the time to make home-brew, do the gardening and enjoy life on the UBI (Universal Basic Income).

We’re told that shopping will radically change too, when the supermarket shelf stackers are replaced by little Star Wars droids that work through the night, at considerably less than the minimum wage. During the day, of course, those shelves will sing with Minority Report style promotions, designed especially for us.

Dinner party conversation is of home-robot chefs, exactly as predicted by the Jetsons in the sixties. Sillier still, we grin like schoolchildren at talk of sex bots with hyper-realistic latex skin and randomly blinking eyes, that will keep us company and a lot more besides.

The future has never looked so puffed up and swaggeringly arrogant as it does right now. Drone deliveries, telepathically controlled computers, flying cars, homes that talk back to us, 3D printed organs, lab grown meat and brands that know what we want before we do. It’s all very scary.

Oh come on. The future may be racing towards us faster than ever but it’s probably not a bad idea to hang on to some sense of reality a tad longer. It’s as if the mundanity of ordinary life has become so mind-numbing that we reserve our optimism exclusively for fantastical visions of the future, the ones that will probably never happen. Call me Mr D. Squib if you must, but a little injection of practical, down to earth common sense may help put things into some sort of context, so that we’re not so desperately disappointed when the future finally arrives. Which, of course, it never does.

Firstly, we will not be washing our driverless cars on a Sunday morning. A vehicle that can take us to work as we read our tablets already exists. It’s called a train. Or a bus, for that matter. Our roads are clogged already thanks, and they’re unlikely to free up when we each own an autonomous vehicle. And what does it do once it’s deposited us at work? There won’t be room for it to park up and wait for us to finish. No, what our techno-boffins are promising here is a sophisticated new mode of public transport, charged by the mile no doubt.

Drones are more than ready and able to deliver to your door, but reality will kick in when drone delivery goes mass market. There is no way governments will allow swarms of electronic bats to hover above our homes all hours of the day and night, awaiting a thumbprint signature. Not least because they’ll get in the way of their own surveillance drones. Oh yes, that’s sure to happen.

Connected home technology has already become mainstream, if not mass market, but the benefits are limited, simply because our homes are old, often very old, stock. Besides, the opportunity to control the heating remotely was solved decades ago by a simple timer.

The exhilarating vision of talking shelves and shelf-stacking bots can be crushed in one fell swoop, I’m afraid. Supermarkets are already being replaced by local, smaller, more artisan producers. We won’t be wheeling our trolleys past holographic shelf ads because we won’t be wheeling trolleys, full stop. Not because the technology isn’t ready.

Home robots that do the cooking and cleaning are still a very long way off, simply because comprehensive, sensory dexterity is bloody difficult, as well as ridiculously expensive. Rest assured that by the time they’re available you certainly won’t be able to afford one. Not on your UBI anyway! And for the record, Universal Basic Income will be a disaster: another debilitating measure to make us even more state dependent…and utterly useless for the economy.

And saving the juiciest until last, I mean, really? You think a sex bot will ever replace human intimacy? Maybe for a few psychopaths it will, but it’s worth remembering that bots can’t dance yet. And when they do, it just won’t be sexy.

Join me on Twitter for daily retail rants @retailfuturist and read more of my blogs here:  andcom.uk9.fcomet.com/blog/

  Howard Saunders   Jul 19, 2017   Brand, face recognition, Future, Retail, shopping, technology   1 Comment   Read More