High-end business is not just about superior quality and selling expensive goods and services. It’s also about making a personal connection with the customers and offering them an exclusive, tailor-made shopping experience. The ultimate goal of every brand is, after all, to have a community of lifelong loyal customers. Although technology plays a role in this, the high-end luxury market has tradition been based essentially on the highly-personalized in-store experience of the purchase. With this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, this practice, so precious to both brands and luxury shoppers, had to be put on hold and at great expense. Social distancing...

Our brain loves visuals. Since the dawn of time, visual stimuli have served as an essential source of information for our survival. Scientists say that more than half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to processing visual information. Human eyes are capable of registering 36,000 visual messages per hour, and over 80% of all information that is taken in and processed by our brain is visuals. Text-based content, on the other hand, humans have learned to analyze and utilize only a few thousand years ago. As a result, our brain process visual information more naturally and more...

In the rapidly changing global marketplace, particularly due to COVID-19, retailers are having to shift and adapt their business models in order to remain in business. For many, this means selling online, for others it is rethinking physical stores to meet the needs and demands of their customer base. So what can we learn from IKEA?