MCL at The Future of Retail Festival

MCL’s CEO Ryan McLaughlin and Mick McConnell of &McConnell kicked off PSFK’s Future of Retail Festival with their panel How Experiential Retail Can Thrive Tomorrow featuring:

• Katie Hunt, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Showfields

• Zak Normandin, Founder, Iris Nova (Dirty Lemon, The Drug Store)

• Alexander Marten, Chief Innovation Evangelist, Deutsche Telekom

• Irene Hwang, Author, Lecturer, Assistant Chair of Taubman College, University of Michigan

• Jon Levy, Behavioral Scientist, Consultant, Writer

If you’re worrying about retail? Don’t. 

Culture keeps inventing ways to shop: main street, department stores, malls, strip malls, ecommerce, messaging, Instagram, TikTok. Retail is not dead or dying. In fact, retail is living, thriving, growing, and morphing. Retail sales have climbed 23% since 2010. Retail is actually bigger than ever. Retail is disparate and divergent. The path to purchase is multichannel and multifaceted. 

Old retail struggles due to a lack of relevance and accessibility. An NPR article suggests one reason malls are struggling is that social media is now the “gathering place” of choice. The growth of new venues to shop will disadvantage those that came before, but our desire to experience, buy and enjoy will only grow.