Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to What's in the Box, brought to you by Boxtech, powering retail with purpose. Boxtech delivers innovative and market leading customer engagement solutions that turn business ideas into performing reality. From design and integration to ongoing support and maintenance, we're with you every step of the way. Now, my guest today has been a passionate supporter, advocate, and champion of UK retail across his entire career. I feel privileged to have known him for a good number of years and seen the work that he does in the industry. Prior to joining Retail Trust in May 2020, he was the managing director and senior vice president of Retail Week, the most influential media brand in UK retail, and also the World Retail Congress, the single biggest gathering of global retail's leadership each year. Before he joined Retail Week, he was a pioneer in the age of digital information, launching his first online news service in 1999 for the FMCG sector. He has edited and led a number of intelligence and information media brands in industries as diverse as agriculture and automotive, but has specialized in media brands and served consumer-facing industries all his professional life. He is a passionate campaigner for the positive impact of retail on the UK economy, as well as a leader in the fight for diversity and business, having been recognized by both the Women's Business Council and Management Today as an agent of change by fighting for gender equality in business leadership. It is a great pleasure to welcome to what's in the box the CEO of the Retail Trust, Chris Brook Carter. Welcome, Chris.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Hi Andrew, thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:44

Thank you. As I said in the intro there, we've known each other for a good number of years since your days at uh the retail week. I think it's really perhaps we'll we'll we'll uh we can talk about that for perhaps a a little bit, but but I really want to focus on the work that you and the Retail Trust do, because it really is amazing work that uh you do supporting people. And I'm sure that a lot of the the audience of this will be aware, certainly of you and of the retail trust, but it'd be always good to uh just remind people what you're up to uh these days and so forth. So maybe perhaps just yeah, just a little bit about um your days at uh retail week. Everybody knows that, of course. And then we'll we'll talk about the retail trust.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah. Brilliant. Yeah, so I love it's it's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks so much. Uh yes, as uh well, as your very kind, generous intro suggested, I've been in and around the retail industry and and and and significantly, I suppose, its leadership for the best part of well, just over 30 years, I suppose, first as a journalist, then as a editor, and then more recently since 2020, um, as part of the the team leading the work at the retail trust. So it's been a a real privilege to watch the sector change and I suppose get you know probably the best seats in the house in both organisations as I've you know seen it adapt and evolve to the extraordinary changes that we've seen over the last 20 years in particular, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Yeah. And I've actually I just published uh earlier today. I thought I'd I I did a I kind of did a written version of a keynote that I

Retail’s Fast-Forward Era Of Change

SPEAKER_00 3:21

did a few weeks ago in Stockholm. And it was it was about part of it was about what I thought were the the major milestones and changes in retail. And it went back to the days of Piggly Wiggly, because that was a versatile service, and then brought it up to date. And yeah, it was kind of like the internet, the world wide web, smartphone, and now AI, and it just seems to be accelerating.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Yeah, absolutely. I suppose uh you know you speak to some of the older leaders and they will tell you that the only thing that's constant in retail is change, whether it's you know the move from the high uh high street to retail parts and big box retailing into into the internet. So I think it's always been a pretty key part of how these businesses have operated. But I undoubtedly it's I think it has accelerated a little over the last few years and the the pace with which new technologies now have the potential to change the sector again, is is quite extraordinary. Obviously, we'll we'll wait and see whether it's for good or bad, but certainly uh I feel now the sector needs to be more agile than it's it's ever needed been before in the past.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Yeah, and it and it seems I was looking at some figures earlier again. It was a LinkedIn post from um uh Steve Dennis,

Big Platforms Versus Brand Loyalty

SPEAKER_00 4:36

who I think you know, American XC is exec and so on. And he was he published some figures about the the depth of the penetration that Amazon, Shein, Timu, I think JD might have been in the Costco, Walmart. And it was something like I don't know, 60-70% in the US of uh all sales are from the top ten or eight retailers. And his point was, well, what room does that leave for other retailers?

SPEAKER_01 5:12

Yes, but although I would uh you know I would say that we've been talking about the sort of homogenization of the sector for so many years now, whether it was Tesco previously or you know Amazon, I suppose, in the UK more more recently, and and yet I'm still excited and passionate and inspired by how many fabulous new brands uh we we in interact with, get to meet all the time. And I remember having an argument with a a former leader of mine when I was at Retail Week about the fact that I c you know I felt retail would still continue to be fragmented, that there would still be huge opportunity for great brands with a clear proposition that we weren't all suddenly going to be trading solely on two or three huge platforms because consumers don't want choice. They want the brands that they they shop with, whether it's general merchandise, food, drink, fashion brands, they want them to reflect themselves. And as wonderful as Amazon is and abstractly transformational it has been in terms of convenience, I'm not sure that anyone necessarily feels as passionate about the Amazon brand as they do, maybe to their favourite wine retailer or their favourite clothing retailer, their favourite food retailer. Those things are still incredibly emotional purchases. And so I'd look I I I I remain pretty optimistic about the sector and its ability to evolve and all the all all the brands that are coming onto the market now. I'm not saying it's it's easy, they face some huge challenges, but I I don't think we're all going to be shopping in one place.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

No, I'm not I agree. I I I um yeah, we don't, as you say, we don't have that emotional attachment with with an Amazon or uh uh in the same way that we do our favourite brands. And yeah, that and I can see that the I do like the fact that it seems that physical

Why Stores Still Matter

SPEAKER_00 7:16

retail and reasons to go and shop, whether it be for the experience, you know, we talk an awful lot about experiential, and I always hate the words, but we know what we mean by it. And I think that's exciting. I think that the standard of physical retail is improving all the time. And that's I I think Oxford Street is a classic example. I think when it gets pedestrianised, it'll be an amazing. I think it it could well be an amazing place to uh to uh to spend time.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Yeah, yeah, look absolutely. And I suppose yeah, you you've you've service is has become more and more important. I suppose that that is one of the upsides of of all the pressure that we've seen come onto the high street. In order to survive now, you really, really need to s to serve your customers brilliantly. You need to understand what they want, and you need a brand and a proposition that's gonna resonate. And we, you know, when I look back over the years of the brands that we wrote about and covered that that have fallen by the wayside, and there've been some amazing ones, there is a very strong thread of a loss of relevance, you know, you you to to to their to their shoppers. Some some it's been debt. I think debt and resonance have probably been the two big drivers of of businesses going under since since I've been writing and and and watching. But yeah, you look you lose your relevance at your peril these days because it is so hyper competitive, the sector, and everybody's fighting for market share because there's essentially no growth in the market. It hasn't been for a number of years.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Yeah, yeah. Now let's um let's talk about retail trust because uh yeah, it does some amazing work. Kind of been

What The Retail Trust Does

SPEAKER_00 8:57

involved a little bit on the periphery if if you like, but uh for for the benefit of people. Talk us tell us about the retail trust. Uh you joined, as I said in the intro, I think it was um what is it six years ago? Six years ago, yeah. Yeah. And and and also tell us about you know you mentioned challenges there and and so forth. The challenges that you see that are I guess is in the main frontline retail workers are are facing these days.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

Yeah, it's it uh Andrew's an absolutely extraordinary organization. I feel incredibly privileged to be part of it. And I I've loved every minute of the last six years. It's one of the oldest industry-funded charities in in the country. We're 194 years old. And I'm I'm always slightly wary of talking about the history because I think it the danger is that uh the brand gets sort of put in a box of not being progressive and forward-thinking it, but actually we couldn't be further from the truth there. I say because actually you can trace back the origins of our purpose right back to the very first meeting in the 3rd of January 1832. We have a full-page article in the Times uh the next day that sort of paints the picture of who we are. And those founding trustees talked about wanting to do thr three things really. And the first was to campaign and champion the notion that happy, healthy people created thriving in and a thriving industry, and that a thriving industry was at the heart of a thriving British society. The second was that in they recognized in order to create social change around that concept, they wanted scale. And so they at the time they talked of building out a confederacy of good feeling across the industry. We talk about coalition and an ecosystem and lev and sort of um cultural leverage these days. And then finally, everything that they were putting in to look after people is about empowering people to take better decisions around their health. So if you fast forward almost two centuries, those three tenants still guide everything that we do. We're out there proving the link between health and productivity, low rates of germ, low rates of absence, or idea we want to see this sector thrive through its people. We still see the need for to create leverage so that we are setting standards that everyone buys into, and that that that that needs an ecosystem around it in order to create change. So we regularly get the sector and encourage the industry to coalesce around us around us on issues of people. And then everything that we're providing is trying to empower people. Now that's a whole range of health services, financial advice, financial support, all the way through to supported living retirement uh services that we provide for former retail workers, the idea that we want people to have agency over their own lives, but that agency also translates into how we support leaders within the sector as well, through a whole set of data services that gives them the information they need to make better decisions around their people in order to create better outcomes for the business as well. So, as I say, there's a very strong line across those almost 200 years, right back from that first meeting. And I think what inspired me about this industry more than this organisation more than anything else is that when you go back through the history of it, there are moments in time where its influence not only changes things for the retail industry, but given the importance of the retail industry to UK society, you can see its influence on British society at large. Now, as I say, one of the first benevolent societies in the country, the idea that industry looked after the people that was creating value was that was quite alien before you know we came along with that with a handful of other organizations at the time. There's some extraordinary evidence to suggest that there were people running our organization that were right at the heart of creating the working week and the and the weekend in sort of 1860s, 1870s. Our move into supporting people in retirement was was pretty revolutionary at the time as well. During the late 40s, the the organization was heavily involved in built rebuilding high streets uh up and down the country after the Blitz. But I think actually, despite all of that, despite all of those sort of progressive instincts of the lead leaders of this organization in the past, for me, we've probably been never been more relevant than we are now to this industry. The very, very clear link between health, happiness, and lower levels of churn, high levels of productivity, we are at the cusp of being able to prove exactly what works in that space through through our data. And then obviously we've seen this huge rise in abuse and aggression to retail workers up and down the country. And, you know, really, really encouraged by what we're hearing from the government around its support for the high streets. It's fabulous to have a plan for buildings and rates and all these things, but actually, currently, what's missing is a plan for the people. And you know, high streets cannot thrive unless the people in them do. And we believe that we are the plan to do that. So we feel right at the forefront of the of the debate about actually how our societies and communities coalesce around high street stores and the retail sector, and think we have a big role to play in the huge good that all that can do.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

That's interesting you're talking about the data that you have. And because I I don't know why uh clearly wrongly, I I I've always associated the retail trust with supporting primarily frontline workers in in stores, but clearly it's not limited to that. And that that yeah, that's fascinating that you also are supporting retail leaders by providing insights because of the data that you have.

SPEAKER_01 14:46

Yeah, so we I mean our services now we work with just under 210 of the top 230 retailers in the country, and our services cover about 700,000 of the whatever 2.5, 3 million people working in the sector. So it is a you know very broad reach. And as a consequence of that, we realized a few years ago that we were sitting on enormous amounts of of health data. Look, what what were the trends driving

Turning Wellbeing Data Into Action

SPEAKER_01 15:13

people to reach out to support? What were the trends that were potentially driving absence and churn and presenteism, you know, which demographics were struggling more than than than most, or which where were their pockets of happiness that we could take inspiration from to roll stuff out? And we began to build a generative AI platform about three years ago that would interpret that data at a business-by-business level, score each retailer that we're working with against a national aggregate so that they could get a sense of where they sat in the grand scheme of things, and then give insight back into those organizations actually about what initiatives do we together need to launch in order to bring bring churn absence and the risk of the risk to productivity down. Again, going back to why we started, is we're here to see the sector thrive through its people and you know the the extraordinary advances in AI and data capabilities, we've been able to leverage that and um now sit on an extremely powerful data set that, as I say, is available at a at a company level, but actually also once a quarter we publish a retail people index, which you know not it took inspiration from the work the BRC do on footfall to give insight into what is actually going on with people because we go back to what we were talking about earlier, leaders are leading through extraordinary amounts of change, and then it's almost impossible to do that unless you understand how your people are feeling and what their potential, you know, how that how they're how they're getting getting on with that. So we found it important to leverage that asset um for the for the best of the sector. And there are some really interesting insights, you know, not one size doesn't fit all in this industry. We see very, very different levels of well-being and happiness in at a generational level, uh, very different from seniority, and very different depending on job role as well. And each of those cohorts needs a different level of care and a different approach and a different way of dealing with the issues they're facing.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Yeah, yeah. And I'd imagine that with retailers providing those sorts of insights, you must almost be pushing against

Proving People Investment Pays Off

SPEAKER_00 17:19

an open door because, as we know, with all the cost pressures coming on retail at the moment, well, they want to become more productive, more efficient, and therefore, and because I've always I mean I've for years and years and years I've felt that generally retail businesses have treated their workforce, and I'm kind of referring to the uh the uh the frontline workforce as a cost and not an asset. But I sense that that is now changing. Are you are you seeing that?

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Uh yeah, I think I think that's fair. I think uh look that that some of it's uh complex picture and there's a lot of play. I mean the first thing is I think we saw a big pivot in COVID to understanding the role that industry can play in public health and how how important a role people could play. And we're A, there is a lot more so societal pressure on uh industry and business to show that they're running organisations that that look after the mental well-being of their people. Secondly, I think that we're we've got leaders in the sector now who take this thing seriously because they know it's the right thing to do. And then thirdly, clearly there is more and more evidence to show the financial link. Now we know, again, through our data, that if every colleague that is currently at risk of of churning churns in the next 12 months, it will cost UK retail £7 billion in replacing them. So, as you say, when you are scrabbling around for one or two percentage point margin points on your operating model, reducing your churn and absence rate becomes a lever that actually I don't think the sector has really lent into in the past, but actually, thanks to the data that we're sitting on, is one that can be pulled effectively now.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Yeah, yeah. Now, before we before we finish, we've got uh maybe a minute or two. I I did want to ask you about what possibly your your primary campaign

Respect Retail And Safer Workplaces

SPEAKER_00 19:17

at the moment. It started well certainly a year ago, probably longer, and that's the let's respect retail campaign. You you touched on abuse of retail workers earlier, and I think that's one of the main topics that certainly the media picked up on and um and so forth. Tell us uh if we can just end on that, tell us a bit about that campaign.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

So I I think this is certainly our most important work at the moment. 70% of all frontline colleagues say they are facing abuse in the workplace. Four over 40% that it's say it's got so bad that they are frightened and anxious about going into work, and about a quarter suggest that it uh involves some uh physical assault as well as verbal. So this is a really important topic. A couple of years ago, well, about three years ago, we launched a campaign. Last year we we pivoted quite significantly to try and leverage the message that the retail industry plays an enormous role in the health of British society, uh both from its ability to create a social glue through in the in communities in High Street, but clearly as a as an employer as well, particularly of young people, and therefore there is a sort of economic and moral prerogative for us as a society to lean into this issue. I think also that it's um no retail's a real window into us as a nation as well. It's you know, it's a singular place. There are I I would more trap more meetings of of strangers in a retail setting every single day than any other place in the country. And therefore, the importance of us reminding people of the power of kindness, the the need for respect, the need for patience, I think goes beyond just what's going on within the retail industry, and that this is a national, a national challenge and a national problem as well. So delighted with how the campaign's gone. Last year we had about 300 brands get behind it, the national media got behind it, we raised significant funds to carry on doing the work this year with it. Really, the goal, I suppose, is threefold last year and this year. The first was to start educating and reminding the public of that kindness ought to be a non-negotiable on our high streets, that we all benefit if we've got happier, healthier high streets. That has a knock-on effect also of really throwing an arm around three million people working in this industry and saying, we're not leaving you on your own in this. Actually, this is an industry and a society that will work hard for you to start changing, uh turning the tide on this problem. Secondly, that actually we have a whole host of brilliant free training modules that are available on our website, and we want to get those into the hands of as many frontline colleagues as possible so they've got the confidence and the skills to deal better with these challenging situations. And we know when colleagues are uh feel supported, they feel seen, and they feel heard, their resilience goes up considerably compared to those that feel like they're dealing with this stuff in a vacuum. And then finally, we recognise we're probably uniquely placed to then offer a pathway of support to colleagues post-incident. So whether they need to speak to someone, whether they need to go back into the micro learnings to just give themselves a boost of confidence, whether they need to do CBT around sleep or anxiety to help with some of the stress of this, actually, that there's a whole pathway of support available as well. So, really for me, whilst we had brilliant momentum last year, it is kicking on significantly now, Andrew. We've got we've got the police involved, we've got local councils involved, the home office are interested. And as I say, there's this great plan coming down the road, I think, to help regenerate high streets from a building and an infrastructure point of view. We cannot forget about the people in this plan. This campaign is the industry's chance, I think, to address that en masse for an industry to have a single platform, a single language to say to customers, please uh remember kindness matters, and to say to colleagues, look, we care and we've got your back on this.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And wish you all the best with uh with that uh campaign. Chris, that's been brilliant. Thank you so much. Pleasure. So that's all we've got time for for what's in the box for now. New episodes will be dropping every two weeks, so please stay tuned. And if you want to find out more about Boxtech,

Final Thoughts And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 23:32

please follow the link in the description. Thanks for watching. Watching, even listening.