News English — event review

The Monday is often considered the business day, when the larger budget buyers come out to play. Most exhibitors appeared sanguine about the level of visitor traffic versus quality as usual. It is not inconceivable that NRF 2022 has taken a hit in visit traffic, many thanks to the pandemic. One of the longest queues at NRF during all our visits have been to Starbucks. Many coffee connoisseurs criticize Starbucks for the apparent lack of coffee in the drinks they serve. However, as the queue is evidence of - these beverages are very popular in the US... but... Starbucks also sell gift...

Day 1 at NRF Big Show kicked off with a keynote featuring Target's CEO Brian Cornell and Matthew Shay, President & CEO National Retail Federation. After the usual smalltalk about how business was over the holiday period, the two men started talking about supply chain problems and how they could be overcome alongside any other headwinds the retail sector is bound to experience in the next few months and years.  The main focus for Brian Cornell was upstream improvements in visibility and improvement of ports in the US. It was a bit disappointing not to hear about onshoring of manufacturing or alternative sourcing strategies...

Recent news about the high prevalence of Covid in New York appears to have influenced a few companies to downsize their presence at NRF. However, the show has not started yet and we will see with our own eyes from tomorrow 10am. Look out for our coverage from the show. The typical last minute frenzy of setting up meetings with exhibitors have been a very civil affair in 2022 with nearly all companies also offering a hybrid approach with post-show Zoom (replace with your choice of video meeting software) meetings.  Interestingly, the 2022 version has attracted many warehouse automation vendors, from AutoStore to Geek+ and...

Finally, a real trade show with real people!  We visited PPMA at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham, UK on Sep 29th, 2021 and were pleasantly surprised by the many visitors.  Next to the bag checking people, there were now also a few people checking our vaccination status. This was expected and had been communicated by the show organisers. PPMA (Processing & Packaging Machinery) primarily targets the food sector with plenty of companies providing bulk food and pallet packaging machinery.  Note that STIQ's focus is on mobile robots and retail tech so plenty of the food packaging machinery is not covered here. Visit...

1 RWB remains the number one event for cross border trading on marketplaces despite the understandable cancellations from participating marketplaces from South Korea and China. Coupang would have been an exciting addition to the many exhibiting marketplaces at the conference, but we are looking forward to seeing them in 2021 instead! 5 The conference has now been running for five years and 2020 saw the extension of the conference from a one day event to a two day event, inculding some very exciting content including data analytics and augemented reality. 7 The number of years Gerald Ratner spent in bed...