2023 RTIH Innovation Awards: Omnichannel Retail Initiative of the Year shortlist announced

We’re pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2023 RTIH Innovation Awards Omnichannel Retail Initiative of the Year category.

We received a record number of submissions this year and many fantastic examples of the continued resilience and dynamism of the retail space during hugely challenging times.

Our winners will be revealed at the 2023 RTIH Innovation Awards ceremony, which will take place at the Barbican Centre in central London.

The event will be held on Wednesday, 29th November, maintaining its popular evening format, with a drinks reception in the stunning Conservatory, followed by a Christmas themed three course meal, and awards presentations in the Garden Room.

Congratulations to all those who made the shortlist.

To book your place at the 2023 RTIH Innovation Awards ceremony on Wednesday, 29th November, click here.

Omnichannel Retail Initiative of the Year shortlist as follows:

This award will go to a tech centric approach to retail that provides customers with a fully integrated shopping experience across bricks and mortar stores, online, mobile, and everything in between.

Confer With and Dunelm

Dunelm seamlessly integrated its extensive physical presence with an innovative digital strategy, capitalising on Confer With's live video shopping platform.

This blending of in-store expertise and remote, working from home virtual consultants with online convenience delivered personalised virtual consultations, transforming customer engagement and elevating shopping experiences.

The use of the Confer With 1-2-1 live shopping platform led to significant enhancements in customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and revenue, showcasing a forward thinking and flexible approach to omnichannel experience in an increasingly digital landscape.

Ibotta

The Ibotta Performance Network (IPN) is a performance marketing platform built by Ibotta to offer solutions for delivering Rewards as a Service to retailers, CPG brands, and publishers.

Drawing on nearly a decade’s worth of insights into consumer shopping behaviour, Ibotta launched the IPN in April 2022 to further pursue its mission to make every purchase rewarding.

The IPN aims to offer a superior shopping experience that not only elevates consumer engagement with rewards at scale, but also delivers efficiency and incremental sales for retailers and brands.

Jisp

Unifying a traditionally fragmented convenience sector, Jisp offers independent retailers an omnichannel solution to unify their in-store offering with online platforms, rewarding shoppers with discounts, loyalty rewards and brand promotions via in-app and push notifications, in-store PoS and social media marketing.

With Jisp, retailers enjoy boosted sales, enhanced margins on key products, increased footfall, and a loyalty programme that competes with larger grocers’ offerings.

Brands reap the benefits too, with real-time unique data insights into convenience retail behaviour, a notoriously challenging sector to penetrate. That’s not to mention over £1.35 million in savings back in shoppers’ pockets.

Lakrids By Bülow and Sitoo

Lakrids By Bülow, renowned for its liquorice creations, has partnered with Sitoo to revolutionise its retail omnichannel experience.

The brand, founded by Johan Bülow in 2007, initially focused on perfecting liquorice in his mother's kitchen.

Since then, it has expanded globally with stores across Europe, US and Dubai.

Notably, e-commerce sales have surged, constituting 40% of total sales, up from 6% in 2018, with a compound growth rate of 90%. Lakrids By Bülow sought technology partners to match its ambition, and Sitoo's cloud native Unified Commerce Platform and PoS offered the ideal solution.

NewStore and Footasylum

Footasylum, a UK fashion streetwear and sportswear retailer, collaborated with NewStore and Talon.One to deliver cutting-edge omnichannel shopping experiences across its 60 stores in a mere 85 days.

The project, which was led by Absolute Labs, an SI partner, leveraged NewStore's modular, mobile first platform, to integrate Footasylum’s physical and digital channels, providing customers with a seamless online and in-store shopping experience.

This roll-out, coupled with Talon.One's promotion engine, also facilitated omnichannel purchasing journeys that significantly enhanced brand engagement.

By embracing a MACH approach, and tapping Absolute Labs to oversee the integration, Footasylum utilised the flexible platforms of NewStore and Talon.One to swiftly drive innovation across its retail channels.

PriceSpider

PriceSpider is reinventing the way brands conduct commerce, with data solutions that help them deliver the shopping experiences today’s shoppers demand.

For more than 20 years, its platform has helped the world’s most loved brands streamline the path to purchase and collect actionable insights about their products – and their customers.

With more retailer relationships in more countries than anyone else, PriceSpider helps brands build seamless omnichannel experiences, with commerce solutions that empower their customers to easily find the products they’re looking for, get the best possible price and make every moment shoppable.

Retail247

Retail247 has deployed both of its core retail solutions to Crew Clothing.

Origin now delivers a single view of all things product, including commercial channel integration, and Archean delivers the backbone of all stock transactional activity as well as providing real time visibility of stock positions across the business.

The combination of these two solutions underpins omnichannel enablement at Crew Clothing.

Transactional visibility, improved stock accuracy, quicker stock processing as well as product and pricing data that is managed, enriched and distributed from a single point has all been delivered by teams from Retail27 and Crew Clothing.

Rovertown

American convenience stores have come a long way since the days of selling “smokes and Cokes” next to fuel canopies. Today’s retailers have become much more, often with strong brand identities, private label products, and foodservice offers that compete with quick service restaurants.

Unfortunately, the legacy of this industry’s mobile app challenges has been a barrier to effectively leveraging and deploying new omnichannel capabilities. In particular, a longstanding reliance on rigid, white label apps has complicated things.

Rovertown’s app platform - and its new Integration Store - are helping retailers overcome this barrier, instantly scale up their capabilities, and meet the expectations of today’s consumers.

SML

Stadium, a Swedish sports fashion retailer, faced inventory accuracy challenges impacting staff and customers across its 180+ stores. With an average of 35,000 products in each store, Stadium needed a clearer view of its stock.

Before implementing RFID, it took manual stock counts once a year due to the time-consuming process. As a result, the retailer maintained a low inventory accuracy of 70%.

Using SML’s RFID technology, Stadium can now take inventory once a week - with an inventory accuracy of 93-99% - enabling it to increase sales and successfully serve customers more efficiently.

XY Retail

Fender, the renowned luxury guitar manufacturer, needed a retail platform to support its first ever direct-to-consumer flagship store, located in Tokyo.

Fender partnered with XY Retail to create an omnichannel retail experience that could serve its new offline customers as well as its online customers. It chose XY Retail due to its versatility, ease of integration, and comprehensive feature set, including mobile reporting, clienteling services, and seamless payment integrations.

Fender was able to create a flagship store that is truly an immersive and interactive space, reflecting the brand's commitment to providing a world class retail experience for musicians and enthusiasts.