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Over 750 retailers have chosen Dutch chain Rituals to be their Retailer of the year 2018 at this year’s RetailDetail Night. Other highlights included professor Gino Van Ossel’s review of the retail year.
Rituals beats Lidl and Juttu
Three completely different chains from three different countries (German Lidl, Dutch Rituals and Belgian but Finnish sounding Juttu) were the three candidates for the first RetailDetail Award for retailer of the year 2018. The 763 people present in San Marco Village voted for the remarkable growth of Rituals, which features a different kind of shopping experience in their ever expanding physical store network – including its brand new flagship store in Wijnegem that even features a meditation room.
Other awards went to Media Markt (best flyer of 2018), Lidl, Colruyt en Torfs. Still, the party atmosphere was ruined when Van Ossel made a remarkable start to his speech and Dutch trendwatcher Richard van Hooijdonk was quite clear that there still is a lot of work to be done for retailers, both this year and the next.
Boards of directores halved?
“Look to your left, then to your right: at least one of you will not be here any more next year”, was the prelude to retail professor Gino Van Ossel’s terrific (in both senses of the word) look back on 2018 in retail. A bit harsh, but most likely very true… While Van Ossel thinks companies have to think further ahead and face structural problems, Van Hooijdonk went a lot further and said every board of directors should be halved in size and replaced by 25-year-olds, as a kind of ‘reverse monitoring’.
Hibernation will not be on the cards for retailers, and those who went to one of the morning’s programmes will have soaked up even more good advice for the future. Fortunately afterwards all of the good and bad news was softened and made more palatable with a delicious supper and at the end, our knowledge centre retailhub announced its ‘new and improved’ restyling!
