s changing, however, according to a number of industry leaders, is what customers expect from the physical retail experience. Know your customer According to Aje Athletica’s chief executive Nadia Lotter, it’s no longer enough to strive for retail excellence. Now, businesses must focus on reaching “retail extraordinary”.  “What can you do that is different? That’s the main thing that we should be obsessing about,” Lotter said.  “Retail is not easy. It’s hard. I can only say that if you’re going to be successful, you’re going to have to get physical, connect with the customer, and really understand what you can do differently.” In fact, connecting with customers is the number one thing that retailers can do to improve their physical stores, Lotter said. In an age where businesses are increasingly relying on impersonal data to determine buying and merchandising decisions, knowing who your customers are is actually a rare and valuable point of difference.  To Lotter, brands need to know more than their customers’ name, age, sex, and location in order to properly serve them. “You shouldn’t assume you know who your customers are. I went into an MJ Bale store recently – a menswear retailer – and there were five women in there buying for their boyfriends,” Lotter said. “They don’t make women’s suits, [and] I’ve never seen them advertise to women.” Another example Lotter shared was related to Aje Athletica’s store in Melbourne’s Highpoint Shopping Centre, which serves a large Muslim community.  Upon visiting the store and getting to know its customer base, Lotter ensured the offering was curated to include more long-sleeve options to better cater to its customers. “I think we assume we know our customer, because we’ve got the data, but we really don’t,” Lotter said.  “That’s the biggest challenge we face as retailers. We can sit there and say, why do I need to go into my stores to understand them — I’ve got data that tells me who they are and where they live – but that’s really not enough.” International innovation It can be difficult for brands to gain a foothold in a new market, where customers don’t already have knowledge of the business.  That is why Global Retail Brands’ (GRB) chief innovation and disruption officer Jeremy Krause believes it’s critical for brands to challenge the status quo in their store design and approach to physical retail when expanding overseas.  “If you’re not challenging the status quo, the world is going to eat you right up. You need to keep innovating,” Krause said.  For example, when the group launched its personalised knife brand Custom Chef in the UK, it knew that physical retail would be an important aspect of the business. However, the traditional stores that the company opened in the UK didn’t succeed.  So, when Custom Chef was looking at entering the United States market, GRB decided to try a bespoke retail concession model. Rather than launch its own stores, Custom Chef is opening smaller, dedicated pop-up stores in Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue locations across the US.  Krause has learned that this is a more cost effective way of entering new markets.  “Building a brand overseas is friggin’ expensive,” Krause said.  “We looked at how we could stay true to the brand, but build it in a global market, and we decided to work with different groups and leverage their knowledge of the region.” In order to make an impression on customers, GRB knew that its pop-up concessions needed to be more than just “knives on a stand” — they needed to be an experience.  To Krause, this is what sets good retailers apart from the rest, and is increasingly important as more and more big, established names struggle to remain relevant.  “The retail apocalypse is real, and it’s pretty sad. As an industry we all have to work together on what [the future] looks like,” Krause said.