Hello and welcome to our fantastic first edition of five
things Friday UK. And I'm privileged enough to
have a wonderful Co host special guest Co host Simone Olleman,
who I have seen talk on stage at 2 conferences and was also
privileged enough to share the stage with their E tail.
But when I saw when I saw Simone learn about need it for tonight,
got that passion, the the the depth, the the intelligence, the
intellectualism, I thought, Oh my God, what a fantastic and
ideal Co host. And and I think we'll have a
completely different angle. This is going to be a little bit
different from the normal, you know, looking just at tech.
So Simone, why don't actually, why don't we do this?
Why don't you just give us a one minute headline on who you are?
Obviously the Co founder running this wonderful new start up, but
just give us give us an overview.
Yeah, One minute pitch. Hello.
Super excited to be here. I'm Simone.
I'm the founder and CEO of Need It.
It's Night, also known as NIFT. I always say the easiest way to
describe NIFT is kind of like delivery, but for quality
fashion. So we've built a marketplace
that partners with some incredible brands and boutiques
in London to facilitate 90 minute delivery.
On the side of that, we do also have AB2B product that plugs
into retailers checkouts, enabling them to have 90 minutes
and same day delivery as well. That's my 32nd pitch.
I think you're the future Jeff Bezos, right?
He started in books, ended up with this whole software.
So I can see where you're going. Future Jeff Bezos.
Would you? Would you get married in in
Venice? No, no, no.
That wedding was a little bit too big scale for me, not mine.
Anyway, OK. Alex.
So on that bombshell, tell me something.
What are the five things? Sorry, what are the two things
that are top and five? 01, which I was reading about
today and it's actually been a topic this week within our team
and just other retailers I'm speaking about was the topic of
loyalties. Air source have just launched a
new loyalty scheme. This has come after banning
quite a lot of UK shoppers after having too many returns.
I think their loyalty scheme is free to join, but it's clearly
designed to encourage progression like a status
ladder, you know like things like the air and the obvious
points that's. What I was thinking is I think
it's really interesting how schemes really evolving, you
know, it's less about points and basic discounts and vouchers.
I think now it really is a lot more about belonging and
recognition and, and really about experience and community.
Yeah, I think there's been a bit of an evolution of, of loyalty
to almost lifestyle, you know, before it would be vouchers or
it might even just be 10% off or it might be refer a friend and
you get, I don't know, £5 off. Where now it's more like it
feels more like a membership. It's like excuse perks.
It's early access. It invites to events that not
everybody has access to. Yeah, I think it's really
interesting seeing the shift. I know Selfridges do it quite
well, especially for that kind of younger millennial Gen Z
audience, which is very much their audience.
If they are angling it like this community and tiered access.
I do think they will do very well at it.
You know, it doesn't seem like it's just money off.
I I think they'll do well from it.
I do. And I think the retailers that
have done it that way, like Selfridges, I know it is a
slightly different audience, but they create this like formal
effect whereby you want to spend more because you earn access to
these special things. And they're very good at
creating the formal. I think it is really, it's the
the psychology of being a part of something.
Yeah, that is really key. I got you.
OK. What's your?
What's the second one? The second is a scary topic.
I find this a very scary topic is agentic AIA lot of people
talking more and more about the rise of agentic AI.
And you know, if you like the, the LVMH group, for example,
piloting these AI agents. So it's obviously it's AI
systems that can make decisions, take actions without needing
human instructions, unlike things like ChatGPT, which is
obviously prompted by a human. But yeah, there are a lot of
retailers that are exploring this.
I know the LVMH group piloting these AI agents.
And yeah, we're starting to see this shift from, I guess,
passive AI to identic AI, which is really interesting.
What are your thoughts on it? Yeah.
I'm curious, do you look at it as identic AI as in like the
business creating agents for workers within LVMH or for
customers of LVMH? Which one do you think it is?
I think it's. For what?
Right because Because so Jetty PT It does have AI.
Forget what it's called now articles.
Is it articles where it goes off and it can do things like
imagine if I wanted to buy some flowers, it will go off and buy
the flowers for me. So the agent exists and chatty
PT can do that. I think like just look at
Microsoft. They've announced another 10,000
redundancies today in the in in their global tech workforce.
And it's no doubt that they can see that so many of these roles
in the past where you had humans, you'll be able to have
agents, you know, whether it's call centres, that's that's one
of the major ones where you're seeing a lot of AI in there.
Merchandising. I've seen less because I think
humans are still deciding what to buy and whatnot.
Although you'll look at the data, right?
Or you'll look at the dashboard or you'll look at whatever is
telling you, whatever the colours are.
Yeah, it's like Uber. I guess in the early days people
were like, oh, I can just raise my hand and and call a taxi.
Why would I open my phone, get an app, then call Uber and then
all of a sudden it's like Uber becomes the word, right?
Let's just get an Uber home, right?
It's no longer let's go to the street and hunt down a taxi.
And I think agentic AI is in that phase where it's sort of
finding those use cases. Will I buy more flowers through
AI agents? Customer service 100% people are
now used to IT or customer inquiries.
I mean, I can definitely see from for a business like mine
and for retail in general, you know, even things like deciding
the order, the reordering of products before trends started
or launching micro campaigns based upon the weather changing
really instantly think when it comes things like that blows my
mind slightly, I'll have to admit, but I think it could I
think that's where it could get really interesting is just how
responsive and personal that it could get.
But it does still feel risky to me, but maybe that's because it
is still it still feels very early and but I guess it's also
a big dependence on data as well.
And if you know you're you've got poor data, then you're going
to get poor. Absolutely.
I mean, there's so many retailers out there with so much
data. But again, that's where agents
will be able to. If you have data sets on your,
on your sales force, on your SAP systems, on your Shopify back
end or whatever front end, the agent can go off and do so much.
I actually interviewed the Shopify Chief Revenue Officer
yesterday and he was saying, because I said to him, what's
the one thing that people don't get about Shopify?
And he said that AI that we've embedded into our back end will
just keep growing and growing and growing and people are not,
they don't get it. They're not understanding that
this. I think it's off on Anthropic
clawed as as that model improves the Shopify I that's I think he
may have just used that as an example.
But anyway, that Shopify AI agent is just going to continue
to become more and more powerful to empower business owners and
merchandisers and category owners.
And you know, I can only imagine how much data they have access
to. So yeah, it's pretty incredible.
He was a he was a really nice guy, really interesting.
So listen, yeah, I don't know when we'll get it out there.
We'll it'll be out there next week or so.
But anyway, I'll be I'm conscious of time.
So I'm going to talk super fast. So just quickly moving on to my
ones. Go here, right?
So I've I've talked about this on other shows.
Luxury needs to stand out. The only way that they can stand
that specifically in places like London, Paris, Milan is through
pop ups. So yes, they're curating and
beautiful, creating new beautiful stores.
This is Mew Mews flagship store in central London, but they are
still going after unique pop up experiences because they
understand that this new generation doesn't just want to
transact culturally. It's a movement to feel.
And so that feel comes from engagement at pop ups and one of
the people that I love. And you know, I was following
this girl when she was, I don't know, underneath 1000 followers
because I was looking for some things to, to actually talk
about on the show. And she came up in Sani and on
TikTok she I think she's on Insta as well.
See you Sani. She's now got how many?
Where's the number of followers? I'm sure it's about 60,000.
It's almost 100,000 followers. But basically what she does, and
I'm not going to play it, but you can, you can.
As I go through, you can see these are all the pop up events
in London today and the number of beauty fashion music
collaborations that are just coming up time and time again is
incredible. And I think this is we're just
going to see more specifically in the UK.
So you know my thing to retailers, if you're not
curating community, if you're not curating community, if
you're not creating these moments, then your competitors
potentially may, you know, you talked about FOMO, it may move
from FOMO to just they're not interacting with you, right,
Because they're busy interacting with, with someone else.
And again, in, you know, places like Shanghai where they have 22
million customers, yeah, they know that it's not going to be
tech that wins. It's going to be experience and
connection and, and that sort of community that's going to drive
that change. So I, I really love what Sani
does as a, as a creator, but it also highlights this point of
how many pop ups, retail pop ups are now appearing in London and,
and what retailers can do to to do that.
The second element that I'm going to talk about is this sort
of battle in the athleisure world between bigger is better.
Footlocker, I think last week opened their largest store in
the Birmingham Bullring Shopping Centre.
And obviously earlier in the month JD opened EU KS largest,
not only, I'm sorry, the world's largest, JD Sports, which is
42,000 square feet, which in in my mind I envisage like a
department store, right? Yeah, but it's a department
store for athleisure. And part of me says, hey, look,
I I understand this. Bigger is better because you
feel that you can stock more, stock more products, have more
categories, bring more people in.
But how are you going to maintain relevance because you
know, you're relying on Nike, Adidas and on for JD's in JD's
case and foot lockers are how that has a massive partnership
with Nike Footlocker. Sort of had a little jibe at JD
saying, hey, look, we're not about big, we're about
impactful. We believe we're going to, you
know, do more activations in store that community led and
getting those sort of hype beast type shoppers to come in.
But I don't know if this signals maybe the top of the market and
we're going to see athleisure as a category struggle going
forward. I could be completely wrong, but
I'm not saying so I do believe sports, yoga, cycling, any type
of sports that's just going to keep growing, right?
Yeah, but that's technical sports, not athletic, generic,
you know, loungewear, sportswear.
And I think this and and I and I see it on Instagram or TikTok
about aesthetics, right. You've got old money, new money.
Who wants to Sorry, old. Yeah, who wants to look like
old, old money? Yeah, Old money is when they
look vintage and classic, and new money is like when they're
in track suits and expensive sneakers.
And I think people have sort of got to the to the peak of that.
And yeah, and that's it. So they're my two things.
And the final thing, because it's five things Friday is if
people are interested in what's going on in Asia, what's going
on in the Middle East, what's going on in Europe or France,
they're coming out as different 5 Things Fridays.
So we're going to have like a, a Friday radio station full of
little news, news articles. But this is the one for all of
those wonderful, beautiful people in the UK and we're going
to have some special guests. So I look forward to sharing
that with you. Simone, any closing thoughts
before we shut down for the weekend?
Oh God. Well, first of all, thank you
for having me. Can't wait.
It's OK. Yeah, like what am I signed up
for? After I've met, I've got a bit
of Friday brain. He's getting to me.
I'm not used to to such weather in the UK.
Super exciting. There was lots of very exciting
things going on in retail, lots of exciting technology and I'm
excited to dive in further next time.
I mean, I'd love to unpacked need it for tonight, right?
Your whole journey, what are you doing?
How are you standing out because that whole sort of super
convenience or hyper convenience, you know, getting
it to customers? I'd love to sort of just
understand the psychology why you went for it.
I I know it's a personal story because it's something you
shared on stage, but I'd love to share that with the audience as
well. Yeah, I know, absolutely.
And it's just an area that's really, really growing as well,
that convenience and ultra fast delivery.
Quick commerce, that was it. OK Simone, thank you so much.
Have a lovely weekend and I look forward to speaking to you next
week. Wonderful.
Thank you, Alex. Have a great one.