Companies looking for a way forward to expedite their recovery strategies in the Post-COVID black swan must take some bold decisions to prepare for the new normal. This would entail conducting a due diligence of their existing retail strategies and business models as they must look for those ignored blind spots, emerging white space, be it during the early stages after curfews are lifted or during the re-extended periods of mandatory confinements in heavily impacted states, areas and countries. But the time is ticking faster and faster. Unless, we find a cure, another season or episode might be wipe out all mitigation, sacrifice efforts made by millions of store owners, retailers, wholesalers and distributors around the world.
Based on various market studies and survey results run recently by leading firms like The McKinsey Global Institute’s elaborate State of Fashion in 2020, we have summed up the most critical recommendations on what it takes to reinvigorate business immunity system and organizations. One thing seems to be obvious; the one dose panacea for the retail sector is neither possible or viable; as each market segment will necessitate its own set of stimulating vaccines to boost, reignite consumer trust and help companies adapt to the shifting grounds.
According to McKinsey’s latest report, revenues for the global fashion industry (apparel and footwear sectors) will contract by 27 to 30 percent in 2020 year-on-year, although the industry could regain positive growth of 2 to 4 percent in 2021. For the personal luxury goods industry (luxury fashion, luxury accessories, luxury watches, fine jewelry and high-end beauty), we estimate a global revenue contraction of 35 to 39 percent in 2020 year-on-year, but positive growth of 1 to 4 percent in 2021.
This sudden and unexpected health crash have ripped apart all forecast agendas and preexisting business models, leaving retail owners in a state of shock. The increasing thirst for remote and cloud-centric apps, online marketplaces, indoor-based shopping, video streaming and social media platforms among so many disruptive behaviors are the new normal.
While no one could predict how long social distancing measures and lockdowns will continue or how recurrent the pandemic is going to come back, it looks obvious that retailing as we knew it in the past is about to feel the tremor effects triggered by the lack of lean and agile behaviors in many 1.0 and 2.0 businesses.
Retail owners and captains of industries alike need to mobilize their lieutenants as soon as possible to rethink their preexisting tactics before the next season of COVID 19 becomes 20 more times more deadly. Being agile-centric is the mother of all necessities. Thus, time has come to prepare for post-coronavirus season. This is a tipping point, where survival of the fittest will most likely favors chameleon organizations who are not afraid to change and adapt.
Without a radical paradigm shift and metamorphosis of current business models, processes, organizational behaviours, retail management experts are afraid that retailers with physical stores only will most likely be the ones to pay a heavy price due to the stay home, stay of away from shopping malls, outlets and crowd-centric areas. Two to three months of a lockdown combined to an ongoing recession will mutatis mutandis lead to massive foreclosures and layoffs worldwide.
Here are some Tips on How to Beat the Black Swan
Once the dust settles down, fashion apparel, footwear, jewelry, beauty and non-essential supplies will have a narrow window of opportunity to ramp up their digital transformation projects, step up their retail plumbing solutions, ERP systems and digital platforms. Investing in adequate ecommerce solutions and partnering with the right vendor or POS champions to expedite the transformation processes is the one way of leveraging smart omni-channels.
That’s why companies like Multidev Technologies, put together a retail squad and committee to develop a full array of retail recovery tools and guides to help retailers cope with uncertainty. Many surveys were developed in join effort with leading business magazines in Canada and USA to share the company’s extensive expertise in digital transformation, frugal innovation and sustainability.
While coronavirus will be remembered as a painful chapter, it could be seen as a wake-up call and opportunity for retailers to reexamine their retailing fundamentals, to boost their immune system and hopefully act fast enough to step up their contingency strategies. Companies who will manage to rise from the slump will have to make bold and eminent maneuvers.
The road to recovery will entail among many pre-emptive tactics and step-up measures in many core sensitive areas:
Digital Acceleration as a Pre-emptive Measure Against the Next Sanitary Crisis Episode
Social distancing has heightened the critical importance of digital channels, smart stores, broadband networks, social data, collaborative shareware and collective intelligence tools more than ever and lockdowns have heightened the importance of omni-channel systems as an urgent priority across the entire value chain.
With no leeway or limited options to recover lost sales, pure offline players whose revenues depend on brick-and-mortar footprints were hit hardest. The good news is that you still have time to expedite your transformation as most retail management software and omni-channels are fit for today’s changing landscape.
Take for example, Multidev Technologies. The company has been offering entire point of sales systems that are full proofed, fully-integrated and digital ready to help its customers in the footwear, jewelry, sporting goods, beauty and pet shop stores advanced ERP systems to handle seamlessly online and offline operations all over the world for decades. With turn-key systems like ChainDrive and eComDrive, the company’s many early adopters of smart omni-channels have not been hampered as much by the shopping quarantine as they managed to capture disposable screen-time traffic when most of stay-at-home households turned their focus on indoor-based shopping to compensate the shortage of foot traffic.
Investing in software upgrades, turn-key deployments, smart ERPs is one way of expediting your resilience and post-recovery planning.
The increasing dependence on online shopping, remote management, smart chain supply, collaborative working, social data and messaging will no doubt continue to favor those who have relied on customer-centric systems like eComDrive to step-up their digital go-first game plans.
Here are few reasons why, many leading retailers and brands trust Multidev Technologies for digital transformation projects and contingency planning ahead of time:
eComDrive for instance comes with all the preventive tools to help users, store managers and decision makers manage all retail operations and ecosystem under one unified platform.
ChainDrive’s Ecommerce Gateway acts as a bridge across all sales channels, pulling meaningful information from the same single source. It’s flexibility and seamless connectivity to a centralized database offers real-time data on inventory, catalog / product publishing, product and price maintenance, automated order fulfillment and customer analytics.
In addition to being customizable, there are plenty of features and key performance tools to help its community of customers fuel and empower the organization across the spectrum:
- Manage product creation centrally within the gateway
- Initiate Price Changes within ChainDrive’s centralized database
- Monitor in real-time inventory fluctuations and flows
- Track location and status of merchandise
- Monitor web order fraud rules
- Capture valuable customer information for analysis and marketing
- Seamless flow for order fulfillment and shipping
- Price management analytics and reporting
- Cross-channel sales analytics and predictive dashboards
While each solution is custom-tailored to fit the needs of modern retailers, the entire new generation of omni-channel solutions 4.0 are intuitive in their way of making collaborative working, sharing and communicating natural. The ease of use and friendliness is second to none in the retail Tech. Its cutting-edge technologies offer many real-time and seamless features:
- Intuitive messaging to communicate within the organization
- CRMs are custom-designed to offer better profiling and better understanding of consumer behaviors, patterns for better optimization and engagement.
- OTB is endowed with predictive capabilities at dazzling speeds
- Smart Search Engines for SKUs
- Smart IQ Cards for multidimensional tasks
- And the list goes on, and on…
In addition to being one of the most digital-first minded systems, Multidev Technologies is well-known for being a leading powerhouse to offer its community network of retailers, wholesalers, distributors, brand carriers entire training tools, programs, workshops and advisory services to help its customer community foster open innovation, fuel collaborative intelligence, retraining and adaptation.
Thus, Coronavirus should be seen also as a chance to reset, to innovate and to revamp the entire value-chain — let alone being an opportunity to become more sustainably-correct.
To cope with the new paradigm and emerging consumer shifts, companies must introduce new tools and strategies across the spectrum to invest in resilience-centric s. Retail players must harness these innovations and scale up those that work in order to make radical and enduring changes to their organizations — and to the wider industry — after the dust settles.
So, don’t be afraid to innovate, because this could be a great window of opportunity to kickstart your open inclusive innovation projects. In opposite to other POS providers and developers, Multidev Technologies is one of the very rare companies in its category to have developed win-win relationships with leading incubators, accelerators, innovations clusters and universities to help retailers at large scale up and create new products, solutions, business models, etc. Live and virtual bootcamps, hackathons and design thinking workshops will be launched shortly to help retailers from all walks of life learn about frugal innovation strategies and how to step-up their game plans before the rebound.
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