Loyalty 2.0, Autonomous AI Agents, Luxury Pop‑Ups, Mega Athleisure Stores

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.