An early read on what the OX3 room has asked for, five weeks out from Stockholm.
Ask a hundred operators what they want to fix and you would expect the answers to sort themselves by job. Merchandising asks for one thing. Finance asks for something unrelated. That is not what has come back.
Just over four in ten of the operators registered so far picked data moving accurately between systems. More than a third picked automating work that crosses teams. A third picked being able to analyse performance and get something usable out of the other end.
Those three have one thing in common. Not one of them belongs to a department. They live in the handover, between the person who creates something and the four people downstream who inherit it. Nobody’s objectives mention them, which is how they survive year after year while every problem with a name on it gets fixed.
Which is why the tables are built around problems, not job titles
The afternoon runs as two sessions at the same time. One works on getting a product decided, costed and live. The other works on what happens to it once it is there.
Nobody chooses on the form. We read the registration answers against what people actually do and place them, because those tables only work if both ends of the handover are sitting at them. With a third of the room booked, the balance between the two moves every week and we rerun it on every batch of approvals.
The same goes for the session list. It is built from the answers, it is not finished, and it will not be finished until closer to the day. If you registered and gave the challenge question a one-line answer, go back and give it more, because the free text is what decides the running order.
The partners were not asked for a slot
Dema are headline sponsor. What we have asked them for is not a presentation.
The firms in the room see more brands in a year than any one operator sees in a career. The question put to them is what brands will need to be doing in two years to still be performing, and what they are building now to make that less painful. They open the sessions with that, then work the tables.
After that it is about who is useful on what.
Emfas on product data at the point somebody types it in.
Resourced on what a range really costs and how long it takes before anyone commits to it.
Centra on running wholesale, B2B and D2C off one system, which is a range question long before it is a trading one.
Dema on forecasting at one end and turning a performance read into an actual decision at the other.
HighCohesion on the handover itself, and the job of producing one set of numbers that survives contact with a trade meeting.
Vervaunt on performance and launch.
Loop on returns, and the impact on them across the whole business. Torque and Pro Carrier on the part where the physical thing has to turn up, and come back again if it is returned.
We are Whānau chair one of the two rooms and bring the number the rest of it eventually runs into, which is gross margin and what lands in the P&L. A finance-literate voice at a table of trading and merchandising people changes the conversation about ten minutes in.
Commerce Thinking chair the other room and take the handover session with HighCohesion, and we are across both rooms all afternoon. Because this is where we play.
The particulars
Thursday 22 October, Blique by Nobis, Stockholm. Midday, through the afternoon, drinks after
Brand side only, senior operators, capped at around 70. Roughly a third booked
Confirmed so far includes H&M, Damson Madder, Klättermusen, Ellis Brigham, Nudie Jeans, Björn Borg, NN.07, Nordic Knots, & Other Stories, Ro&Zo, Drake’s and more
Discounted rooms held at the venue for the 21st and 22nd, code goes to everyone approved
No UK member is expected to travel for this one. If you want to be there anyway, tell us and we will see what can be done
If you know operators worth knowing in Stockholm, introduce us
Every registration gets read by a person, and you hear back either way. operatorexperience.ai.