The Future Laboratory: How eco-venient is your business?
The events of the past two years have provoked retail Darwinism at its most impactful, yet brands have evolved at speed, adjusting to changing expectations of access and more conscious mindsets.
Many retailers are demonstrating their ability to transform under pressure, becoming not only smarter but more robust as a result of pandemic-induced restrictions. According to IBM, the crisis has accelerated the shift from physical stores to digital shopping by five years.
‘In 2022 and beyond, companies must ensure they have the foresight and capabilities to adapt their systems, processes and products,’ says Kathryn Bishop, foresight editor at strategic foresight consultancy The Future Laboratory.
The Future Laboratory’s new Eco-venience Retail report offers a new framework that puts eco-conscious practices at the centre of brands’ retail operations. ‘End-to-end, the retail experience must now be relevant, sustainable, cost-effective and beneficial not only for the consumer but for the retailer, too,’ explains Bishop. Discover three key foresight trends from the report below.
• Low-impact E-commerce
In the 2030s, retailers will use design to turn the starting point for most customers on their acquisition journey—their digital platforms—into spaces that provide carbon-conscious convenience.
To do this, they will strip back their virtual presence to simpler formats that drastically reduce their digital carbon footprint and pass this onto shoppers. Pointing to this future are brands such as Organic Basics, whose low-energy website minimises the amount of data transfer by up to 70%. It runs on green energy from wind turbines and has limited numbers of product images and no videos. Design will be a central feature of Low-impact E-commerce.
‘Retailers are thinking about how they can communicate their sustainable credentials in the virtual or digital environment,’ explains Tyler Chaffo of Avery Dennison.
• Automated Retailtainment
As we look to the future of Eco-venience Retail, micro-fulfilment formats could soon double as a form of in-store novelty for shoppers, even becoming a convenient and personal community asset.
In the US, Albertsons Companies’ automated kiosks indicate a future in which micro-fulfilment will become consumer-facing. Dubbed ‘ATMs for groceries’, each kiosk can hold up to 120 crates and can be located close to homes or workspaces, allowing shoppers to place orders for collection within a two-hour window. When customers arrive at the machine, they scan a code to receive their items, with the process taking an average of 50 seconds. Elsewhere, start-up Fabric proposes a future in which grocery retailers will swap dark stores for integrated automatic product picking in an existing retail space. This will give shoppers a choice to place an order in person or order ahead for a faster, convenient collection.
By the 2030s, artificial intelligence (AI) integration could allow brands to hyper-personalise such automated retail experiences, whether by creating bespoke products on-demand or by using facial recognition to pick and present a customer’s favourite items instantly. For some retailers and their customers, these systems could even become a means of new product discovery.
• Totality Traceability
By the 2030s, retailers will be on a path to make every manufactured product traceable.
QR and barcodes will transform into information-rich touchpoints for retailers and customers alike, with unique digital product IDs given to everything from sneakers and luxury shirts to perishable goods. Spearheading such a future is Evrythng, a company that uses such product IDs to amplify trust and chains of custody for retailers and create long-term benefits for shoppers. Already, the company is working with Ralph Lauren and Puma to add unique digital IDs to products. ‘Once an item is digitised and is carrying a visible identity, that means that multiple parties can authenticate it at any point in the lifecycle,’ explains Niall Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Evrythng.
Totality Traceability will also mean each product has a real story, which is crucial for a future of more sustainable retail practices. A digital product ID scan will reveal an item’s materials, sourcing and manufacturing dates; it could unlock styling advice or even the product’s resale value for customers.
To harness the trends and strategic implications that will ensure your brand is part of this future, you can buy the Eco-venient Retail report here.