The next edition of EuroShop – the world’s most important and largest trade fair for the retail industry – is behind us. Once again, we had the opportunity to look at key trends in the retail industry. Below, we write about what particularly caught our attention.
Between 26 February and 3 March 2023, 1,830 exhibitors from 55 countries placed their stands in the halls of Messe Düsseldorf. In total, 81,000 participants from 141 countries visited the fair. The number of exhibitors was slightly lower than three years ago, but it can still be impressive given the difficult times for the industry, caused first by a pandemic and then by the collapse of global supply chains and worldwide inflation.
The exhibition space, which covered 17 halls this year, was divided according to exhibitor specialisations (technology, marketing, lighting, shopfitting, design, visual merchandising etc.). In addition, on seven stages we could watch expert speeches. Special thematic zones such as the Start-up Hub and Designers’ Village were also prepared.
The trade fair three years ago already showed how much technology is influencing today’s retail. The 2023 edition proved that traditional trade is now intersecting with online reality and that technology is taking the retail industry to another level.
Among many technological innovations, one that caught our attention was the intelligent shopping trolley by the Polish company Mago, with which there is no need to queue and the customer can carry out the entire shopping process by himself – from selecting products, scanning them and making payment on the app of the retail chain.
The digital mannequins presented at the fair, on the other hand, make it possible to select a figure of different shapes, then check how it will look in the clothes we are interested in, and finally purchase the product directly using the phone.
We were hugely impressed by the stand of HYPERVSN with its solutions of digitally generated 3D objects that can be an integral part of the shop fittings.
It is difficult to talk about modern retail in isolation from the issue of sustainability. “Customers are increasingly attentive to the environmental and human impacts of production and trade. Companies must therefore comply with sustainability requirements if they want to maintain their reputation and position in the market” – points out Izabella Węgrzyn, vice-president of the management board of Ergo Store. Today, sustainability applies to virtually all aspects of modern retailing – shop design, lighting, visual merchandising or marketing. Energy-saving and carbon-reducing glass display cabinets for Low-e foods from Yorglass and recycling machines from Tomra are examples of sustainable solutions presented at the fair. However, we were a little disappointed with the ecological proposals at EuroShop, considering how much environmental issues are shaping the modern world today. What we saw was not setting new standards, but rather following a trend.
The EuroShop fair was an opportunity for us to have many valuable meetings, expand our network of contacts, have conversations and find inspirations. This is already the next edition of the event, which we were attending. This is a ‘heavyweight’ trade fair, which sets the directions of the industry and outlines business prospects for at least the next three years (next Euroshop will take place in 2026).
02.05.2024
The project in the capital of Austria is a monobrand store located in the Auhof shopping center.
