The guy at the DJ stand is going to feel the wrath of Tom. He’s got a pretty high- energy soundtrack featuring some pretty hip mixes. But here’s the problem–it’s like a seven-minute loop. Madonna, I liked your new song before I got here and now I’m near violence. I can’t stand it anymore. If I knew where the DJ was plugged in, I’d rip the his power supply out of the wall. If you can’t keep it fresh, I’ll ignore you. Hmm, there’s a lesson there.

Day Three was all about mobile retail, shoppers armed with tools to make their shopping easier, more cost-effective and more exciting. And some retailers and suppliers are doing it.… read more.

Picking up where I left off yesterday with the whole ‘is it real’ theme, today the seventh grader who lives inside my head had me saying “Oh yeah? Well prove it.” practically the entire day. And I don’t mean that in a snarky, ‘I don’t believe you’ kind of way. There are just a lot of exciting things happening in the retail space and more than ever, we have ways to prove what we are doing is working. Or not.

Self-proclaimed retail nerd Jason Goldberg from CrossView ran my favorite… read more.

Much to my dismay, I discovered last night that my hotel room overlooks the volcano show at the Mirage Hotel. Every evening on the hour, my windows shake from the roar of the flames and spouting water. Which caused me to wonder: is “mirage” the name of the hotel or an explanation of everything Vegas? Perhaps the latter. That Italian marble? Fake. Those stone columns? Actually fiberglass. One thing you need to know about Las Vegas is that what you see is not necessarily what you get.

Inside the Sands Convention Center, GlobalShop is no exception. Across the myriad of vendor displays and supplier… read more.

Experience is the new location.
Visual Merchandising with Charles Luckenbill of OfficeMax

Possibly the most interesting discussion from day two of Global Shop was with Charles Luckenbill, Vice President of Visual Merchandising for OfficeMax.

In a retail world where shoppers and brands are managing experiences with brick- and-mortar, click-and-mortar and all social and mobile points in between, the mantra “location, location, location” has been replaced by “experience, experience, experience.” After… read more.

GlobalShop is the world’s largest annual tradeshow and conference dedicated to store design, visual merchandising, and shopper marketing. Showcasing the latest trends, technologies and practical solutions to enhance the retail experience and connect with the changing shopper.

For a conference called Global Shop, it was refreshing to learn about a brand whose focus is on local marketing and local experiences.

Gabrielle Rosi, Senior Design Coordinator of Whole Foods Market, utilizes three seemingly simple yet hard to pull-off values to design the Whole Foods Market stores to create shopper experiences unique to each location.

• The community is our friend
• Little is the new big
• Values are to be seen in action

According… read more.