What's In Store In '24?

I decided to delay December's newsletter until January - primarily because I decided to take a break from the keyboard. Well, that was the intention however, best laid plans of mice and men.....

Spent a large part of the festive period continuing to edit my new book, The Covid Chronicles, which is due to come out before Easter. I've been publishing extracts on here over the last couple of months so if you've seen those you may wish to skip the next bit.

Because, during lockdown in England, from March 2020 to May 2021, I wrote a daily diary containing my thoughts on life in lockdown. And looking back at them over two years later is proving to be a fascinating experience.

Of course Covid and the Government's response features heavily as you might expect, but of course from December 31st 2020 we had the Brexit deal, clap for carers, then the there weas the non-essential retail pantomime, the vaccine, the three tiers (or was it four?) and the daily Downing Street briefings. And of course all this is interspersed with daily life trapped in my own home.

I've calculated that at around 500 to 600 words a day, it will be around 250,000 words in total which is going to be quite some book! Look out for more news coming soon.

And all of a sudden we're into January and that can only mean one thing: NRF.

I wrote a pre-Show round-up of some of the things I'm looking forward to whilst in New York which you can read here. It's shaping up nicely for me personally and for The Industrious so I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

It's at this time of year that retail predictions for the forthcoming twelve months appear and I do like to read them; although I think this must be one of the easiest to predict as in this excellent predictions piece from Ben Sillitoe. And interesting that another industry thought leader, Natalie Berg has some similar thoughts in her predictions.

Hard to argue with any of what they both say however, it prompted me, not to come up with any predictions, but more what I hope to see in 2024. I'll be interested in your thoughts:

I hope that in 2024:

1. AI actually gains some intelligence. ChatGPT is fairly dumb in reality but AI will prove to be useful to do the heavy lifting leaving humans to do the stuff that really matters.

2. Greenwashing is finally called out for what it is (but I'm not holding my breath).

3. Legislation is passed to limit the appalling rates of returns in the fashion sector because the industry is clearly turning a blind eye to it (for obvious reasons)

4. Personalisation finally becomes personal and not ambulance chasing in all but name and we begin to see things such as pro-active clienteling

5. Physical retail CX continues to demonstrate how and why it will always be better than online.

What are your retail hopes for 2024?