Savills OPEN Magazine Launch

We were delighted to be invited by Savills and OPEN to the recent launch event for OPEN Magazine.

OPEN is where insights and trends shaping the world of global retail come together, and it was an honour for our Co-Founder, Simon Mitchell, to present the keynote on The Future of Department Stores, alongside such a distinguished group of panellists and speakers. We’re excited to contribute to the vision of a smarter, more experience-led retail future.

Our key takeaways from the keynote presentations and panel discussions were:

Samantha Conti, WWD
• The importance of influencers opening physical stores
• The importance of physical retail in winning new customers
• What is giving rise to innovative formats, namely, athleisure brands as elegant lifestyle interiors

Simon Mitchell, Sybarite
• The importance of the original premise of retail and how we need to look back to look forward in creating truly visionary department stores of the future
• Looking at retail holistically to deliver groundbreaking new blueprints
• Why experience and the experiential have such a pivotal role to play in the investment of retail design

Touker Suleyman, Dragon’s Den
• Fashion retail entrepreneurship
• Riding the waves of retail’s up and downs
• Building fashion retail brands since the age of 18, and most recently Hawes & Curtis

Jyo Sethi of JKS Group, Duncan Stirling of Inception Group and Jack De Wet of Time Out Market
• The importance of differentiation and expansion of F&B brands
• How the landscape of F&B has changed post pandemic
• Looking at how to scale restaurant brands globally in a highly competitive marketplace with spiralling costs