Retail in Asia had the pleasure to attend the Weave 360 Conference “Unlocking Your Retail Value Chain” on 22 August 2019.
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The 2019 Weave 360 Conference – Unlocking Your Retail Value Chain, was attended by 150+ participants from the apparel, footwear & accessories industry. 24 speakers and panelists shared insights across the value chain from consumers to manufacturers, with check ins on the state of play in sustainability and the latest technology affecting the supply chain today.
Attendees learned the latest trends in retail, networked with their peers, and gained actionable intelligence to take back to their businesses.
The conference was divided into different sections following the value chain.
Consumer
Millennials, one of the largest generations in history, are entering their prime spending years and engagement, differentiation, measurement, unified commerce, next-gen hiring, and discipline is how brands can win them over.
Influencer marketing can be a powerful tool to engage with consumers, but is only part
of the marketing mix.
Retail
Weave kicked off the session with a discussion around what is winning in the retail war today and what role do physical stores have against e-commerce channels. The panelists, through their unique expertise lenses shed light on how the physical store still remains a critical part of the retail ecosystem but emphasizing that brands need to be laser sharp on what this store means for their consumer.
Weave also had Weave’s Vietnamese team give us an insightful “what’s on the top of the list” for the booming Vietnamese retail market. The speed of customer adoption to innovation and new commerce offerings makes Vietnam market an attractive environment for retail right now.
Distribution
The session discussed challenges in the last mile delivery and how new age technology can be used to generate insights for quick decision-making, reducing operations cost and increasing collaboration.
In the blockchain panel discussion, the key message was how to critically evaluate blockchain deployment instead of simplyadopting it and look for opportunities to join an existing Distributed Ledger Tecnology initiative instead of deploying a private blockchain ecosystem.
Sustainability
In the sustainability section, there was a diverse panel that covered how new technologies that are coming into the play are empowering and enabling companies to find creative means and business models to unlock opportunities that benefit People, Planet, and Profit than ever before.
However, companies still face two major hurdles: the inability of lone players to achieve economies of scale; and the cost-benefit disparity between different roles within the value chain. Therefore, companies need to partner with each other (with competitors even) to work out how to split the load and share the gains.
Manufacturing
This session explored how PLM’s can be used to gain an advantage in speed to market for new designs. A panel of experts dug deep in the reasons – above and beyond price – as to why companies should consider India and Vietnam as alternatives to China.
Leveraging the panelists’ experience, Weave 360 conference discussed that despite the availability of IOT, many manufacturers are not exploiting IOT due to teams’ inability to action the data.
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Finally, the conference took a look at the future and how AI is starting to be used by companies to understand performance in real time and how this is being used by companies to increase their efficiency.