S2E12c #ShoptalkLive – SPECIAL – Digital Twins with Site Bionics

How can retailers perform A/B testing of merchandise layouts in their stores without cost and without burdening store teams? By using Digital Twins, that’s how! So how does a retailer build a digital twin of their stores? Meet startup Site Bionics and founder and CEO, Adam Blair. It’s Part 3 of our #ShoptalkLive podcast cross-over series with This Week in Innovation and special guest host Jeff Roster, recorded live and in-person at Shoptalk!

In this episode, Jeff and regular host Ricardo Belmar sit down with Site Bionics CEO, Adam Blair, to learn how they are helping retailers solve merchandising and operational challenges via digital twins, dramatically reducing the cost of testing new store layouts. Plus, we learn how Site Bionics can even help validate coverage maps of loss prevention camera systems! Yes, Jeff and Ricardo have uncovered another trend at Shoptalk – using loss prevention camera infrastructure in multiple ways that will positively impact your revenue streams and lower your costs. It’s all in this episode!

We’re now standing at number 19 on the Feedspot Top 60 Best Retail podcasts list – if you enjoy our show, please consider giving us a 5-star review in Apple Podcasts! With your help, we’ll move our way up the Top 20! https://blog.feedspot.com/retail_podcasts/

Meet your regular hosts, helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2023, 2022 & 2021, RIS News Top Movers and Shakers in Retail for 2021, advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation, and director partner marketing advisor for retail & consumer goods at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, CEO of Luxlock, and RETHINK Retail Top Retail Influencer for 2023. Obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, now slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech!

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring E-Motive, and Overclocked, from the album Beat Hype, written by Hestron Mimms, published by Imuno. 

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TRANSCRIPT

S2E12c Digital Twins with Site Bionics

[00:00:00] Show Intro 

[00:00:20] Casey Golden: Hello Retail Razor Show listeners and viewers, and welcome to retail's favorite podcast for product junkies, commerce technologists, and everyone else in retail and retail tech alike. I'm your host, Casey Golden.

[00:00:33] Ricardo Belmar: And I'm your host, Ricardo Belmar. Welcome to part three in our Shop Top Live crossover event with Jeff Roster, and This Week In Innovation podcast.

[00:00:42] Casey Golden: You guys really make me feel like I missed out on some great conversations. I think I'm getting more FOMO than our listeners here.

[00:00:51] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:00:52] Casey Golden: You are killing it with these amazing interviews. I have to come and join you guys next time, even though like I have no business [00:01:00] purpose to be there.

[00:01:02] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would be amazing if you could make it, Casey, we definitely missed you on this. It was lots of fun to, to capture these sessions. So on today's show, we are talking about none other than digital twins. One of my favorite probably my, the favorite metaverse topic that isn't necessarily a metaverse topic.

[00:01:22] Casey Golden: Right. Well, I'm already hooked, so just tell me more. Spill it. Who did you guys chat with?

[00:01:30] Ricardo Belmar: So this time Jeff and I spoke with Adam Blair, c e o, and founder of Startup Site Bionics. And in this discussion we learned just how popular it is to use those loss prevention cameras in your store for so much more than loss prevention. I mean, this was the second startup we talked to that were tapping into those cameras as a resource for analytics.

[00:01:50] This time using them to help build a multi-layered digital twin of your store.

[00:01:54] Casey Golden: Interesting. And you guys uncovered a trend trend there. Wow. Like [00:02:00] not many people would've said those loss prevention cameras are so popular not too long ago.

[00:02:06] Ricardo Belmar: yeah. Right. Exactly. So you, you'll also want to keep track throughout this discussion with Adam of just how many different use cases and questions you can answer about your store environment using this digital twin that you build with, with their solution and, and all the loss prevention cameras plus a few extra little add-ons that that I think are pretty clever that they do.

[00:02:25] Casey Golden: Well, let's not spend any more precious time talking about it. Let's get right into the discussion with you, Jeff and Adam Blair, c e o of Site Bionics, recorded live and in person at Shoptalk 2023.

[00:02:40] Site Bionics Interview

[00:02:40] Ricardo Belmar: ​hey everyone we are back at Shop Talk 2023, continuing our crossover event with This Week In Innovation. I'm Ricardo Belmar. I'm host of the Retail Razor Show and I am here with none other than the myth, the legend, Mr. Jeff Roster,

[00:02:59] Jeff Roster: [00:03:00] how you, how you doing today? I don't know about you, but I am dragging. I'm possibly, I went a little hard on the, on the evening research opportunities last night.

[00:03:08] Ricardo Belmar: Just a little, just a Yeah, yeah.

[00:03:10] Jeff Roster: little bit hard, but it was

[00:03:11] Ricardo Belmar: It's, it was, yeah. It's, it's what are we day three? Are we day three, day

[00:03:14] Jeff Roster: five. I tried to, I really was planning on being done by eight, but there was an event at the What Skyfall lounge, which was started at nine 30.

[00:03:24] Phenomenal. But boy, that got a little bit late Little 

[00:03:30] Ricardo Belmar: I hear you. I hear you. One, one more day to go. One more day. One more day to go. All right. All right. So the good news is we've got another great guest with us today. Jeff. We are here with Adam Blair and the CEO of Site Bionics, who's gonna tell us all about the cool things that he's working on over there.

[00:03:47] So Adam, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself here and dive in and give us your background and what Site Bionics is all about and what you know, what challenges are you solving for retailers and, and give us the scoop.

[00:03:58] Adam Blair: Sounds good. [00:04:00] Thanks for the intro. Yeah. At Site Bionics we're helping retailers make sense of their physical world.

[00:04:04] And what that means particularly is we're building digital twins for retail stores. And we, we view that as, just to be clear, cuz we, we you know, one of the things that you get into with digital twins is there's a lot of different uses of it.

[00:04:16] The different, it's an kind of an overloaded term. Right, right, right. We view the digital twin as a data, fundamentally a data model of the store. And it's a means of getting, taking the messy, unstructured, unstructured data that you get in a store when you have humans moving around doing what humans do.

[00:04:32] And and, and you try to make sense of it all. So yeah, for us, it, it actually getting into a little bit of how we do that, we start a little, we start by getting a, a sense of the site. So we have the means of going around and getting a physical rendering. So, to be clear, it's not sort of a metaverse play in that direct sense, right?

[00:04:50] Where we're just, you're not necessarily going into it. But we do have, for what it's worth, we do have a rendering that's like video game quality rendering of the space. But that's a tool it's a [00:05:00] tool that allows us to we, we can start there. We can help retailer to understand how the store is laid out whether or not their merchandising and their layout is matching what they expect from corporate and, and be able to feed that data back.

[00:05:11] And that's sort of our layer. Right. Then we have the ability to layer on to use existing cameras in the store as available and be able to add sort of our video analytics piece on top of that where you can track movement through the space. Right. And then we have an iot portion that can go beyond that too, where we can leverage on my, my pack background in, in R F I D particularly and, and other iot technologies and, and be able to.

[00:05:36] That and, and, and build really. So it's sort of these layers and we want to bring value to retailer to each of these layers, right? And but it's the full data source. That's really the thing. And, and, and then once you add that, you get that full system you get the learning that goes on top of it.

[00:05:51] And then you have the ability to move into higher levels of analytics where you're able to get a model and understand how things are behaving, why they're, why things are happening and, [00:06:00] and then help retailers better understand how to use their space and make the most of it.

[00:06:04] Building a Digital Twin

[00:06:04] Jeff Roster: So a couple questions right off the bat. How do you get the, the first rendering in, in layer one?

[00:06:10] Adam Blair: Yeah, we do that with it's, it's, it is using just a cell phone standard imagery. We have the ability and we, we've actually this is the piece we've built so far. We're, we're obviously very, we're very new startup.

[00:06:19] We've only been around for a couple months but this is a piece that we have, we developed the capability to go into a store and develop that rendering in about 15 minutes for like a mall size store. So yes. Yes,

[00:06:31] Jeff Roster: So who would actually do that? Would store associate level? I mean, just literally somebody just taking their phone and just videoing the the aisles and 

[00:06:37] Adam Blair: that's right. 

[00:06:38] Jeff Roster: Oh, wow. Okay.

[00:06:39] Adam Blair: Yeah. It's, it's, we don't want it to be specialized. We don't want to have to send our people in. We want to make that available to, you know, the, the people that are there for, for ease,

[00:06:46] Jeff Roster: Then I think in layer two, you said something about tying into existing cameras, is that the LP cameras or

[00:06:52] Adam Blair: we have the ability to do that. Yes. Or that, that's what we're working to build, I should say the, the, the DVR that's existing on the camera, right? I mean, we're, we're, we're very [00:07:00] sensitive about privacy. Right? That's a big, big deal for us. We mean that genuinely. So we don't, you know, we don't want to be storing any date, any, any image data.

[00:07:09] We wanna leverage the existing systems that, that are there.

[00:07:11] And so we would, yeah, we would be able to essentially connect in with the existing security system and, and be able to derive analytics from that.

[00:07:20] How Retailers Use Digital Twins

[00:07:20] Ricardo Belmar: Hmm, interesting. So tell us then a little bit about what kind of analytics you would expect a retailer to, to benefit from here, how would they use, so once you have the digital twin of the store, right. How are you expecting a, a retailer to use this?

[00:07:33] Adam Blair: Yeah, we're expecting I mean, it's, it's, look, we, we think that this if we can get to the full digital twin or when we get there, I should say that it, it can be used in, in all sorts of aspects of how they run the store. So and how they engage with their customers as well. Right? So it starts with making the most, the, the best use of the space that they have, right?

[00:07:50] Understanding how they wanna lay out a store, right? We would expect them to, in, in the long run, to be able to sort of model how they think it should work. Test it out, you might be able to [00:08:00] run AB testing in multiple stores, right. And, and, and really get to the next level of EF efficiency in sort of, in terms of the layout and, and merchandising.

[00:08:10] We expect to be able to understand that the full con, the, the full shopper path to purchase. We do believe we have the ability to tie that back to individuals as if they were to opt-in.

[00:08:19] They can opt in at any point in their journey, and the entire journey could be connected in. So you could start to actually conceive of a digital twin of the individual as they opt in and, and, and make better use of that.

[00:08:30] And then and then, and then operationally in, in terms of operational efficiency, right? Understanding how their staff are moving around, how they're, who they're interacting, when and why. And, and try to improve operations as well.

[00:08:41] So it's kind of, it can be kind of all things for all people. Right? I'm, I'm obviously sharing a vision here.

[00:08:46] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah.

[00:08:47] Okay. Okay.

[00:08:48] What a Deployment Looks Like

[00:08:48] Jeff Roster: So what would a deployment look like?

[00:08:51] Adam Blair: That's a great question. Yeah. So the, the, the, the early deployment is you go in and you scan the store using our app which we, we are in the, we [00:09:00] we plan to productize, right? So you would go in and you would do that, that sort of first deployment, you'd connect into the back the, the security system just a computer in the back office kind of thing.

[00:09:09] And and that's, that's actually all you need, right? Because you have the, the imagery and the, the, the data. We have the ability to understand what's a fixture, what's what different product. And infer your merchandising plan and how it, how it's the store is laid out. And, and so that's, that's kind of all that's necessary to g to get going.

[00:09:27] We would be, you know, we would expect to be delivering dashboards and things like that. So your, your people in corporate, your merchandisers could actually interact with the store, right? You could actually lay it out in our tool set and drag and drop fixtures around and move them around in that way.

[00:09:40] And then, and then push that down to your in-store.

[00:09:44] You can get the, the feedback confirmation that the store has been laid out appropriately, and see how the behaviors adapt and how performance the store adapts.

[00:09:52] Jeff Roster: So you're getting live feed constantly out of the the LP cameras. right. Any issue with LP?

[00:09:59] Adam Blair: With, with [00:10:00] LP directly? It depends. I mean, it's gonna depend, it's gonna depend a lot on, on, on who, right?

[00:10:04] Jeff Roster: so easy to work with. I'm sure.

[00:10:06] Adam Blair: Very flexible. There is. Look, there's, there's absolutely a, a, a path in there with any, anytime. Look, anytime you put any computer system inside anybody's network, you have to be there's a process you have to go through. With lp it'll be more rigorous for sure.

[00:10:20] Like I said, we we're, we're totally open from a privacy perspective having, having the code, getting vetted right is, is totally, you know, among our expectations, right?

[00:10:31] Jeff Roster: Well, you know, Ricardo, that's interesting cuz that's the second, second startup we've talked

[00:10:34] Ricardo Belmar: That's right.

[00:10:35] Jeff Roster: tying in. So there's,

[00:10:36] there seems

[00:10:36] to be a trend

[00:10:37] Ricardo Belmar: trend here in leveraging that LP video

[00:10:39] Jeff Roster: 36 hours ago, if you would've said, You're gonna run stuff through the LP camera. I've said you're crazy, but, but I mean, obviously two, you know the last two folks we talked to, so Yeah.

[00:10:49] And it does make sense to sweat those assets. So

[00:10:51] Ricardo Belmar: right. No, I mean, it, it does because you, you've already got a lot of useful information there. You're already covering exactly what you want to see in the store, so [00:11:00] this is a great way of, of using that information to derive new data insights from it. 

[00:11:05] Adam Blair: In fact, one of, one of the, one of the potential early, early benefits you can have from this approach is you can actually get an, an immediate assessment of how good are your, is your security camera layout, right? Because we could show you exactly where in that 3D rendering you have coverage and where you do not. Right. 

[00:11:20] Ricardo Belmar: that's interesting.

[00:11:21] Interesting. 

[00:11:21] That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:11:23] Jeff Roster: Any sense right now what percentage of the store is covered? I would think in theory they would say a hundred percent, but obviously it can't be a hundred 

[00:11:30] Adam Blair: Yeah. Talk to the employees and see what they say. Right.

[00:11:33] where they take those hidden breaks. I, I don't actually have a sense for that. I mean, it, it's it's, and, and, and it's also the sort of thing again, we, we have the ability to go in and say where those holes are, how to fill them.

[00:11:44] The Digital Twin Vision

[00:11:44] Ricardo Belmar: So do you envision a retailer using this, so, you know, once you have that digital twin, they have the model that they're gonna do a lot of kind of what if and ab scenarios on, product placements on shelves, and rearranging things and doing some modeling with that before they push that down to stores.[00:12:00]

[00:12:00] Adam Blair: Absolutely. I mean, I, I think that that's that, that's absolutely one of the expectations. The other way that I actually like to look about, look at it is you know, most retailers when they provide direction down to the stores, they're providing guidance. And there's different, retailers are different in terms of how much local control that they give, but I love the idea of giving a bit more local control. Right. You know, one, one of the retailers we spoke with about this, they had, they said that the reason they don't give more local control is that they found they don't trust the control at the retail at, at the, at the retailer, at the, at the local site.

[00:12:28] Right. They, they you know, the, the person that has best of intentions and, and the example that they gave us directly was then you end up with a beer next to the back to school section. Right.

[00:12:38] Jeff Roster: It might

[00:12:38] work. I don't know.

[00:12:39] Ricardo Belmar: I don't, I don't know if that's unintentional, that

[00:12:41] Jeff Roster: it would've worked at.

[00:12:42] Ricardo Belmar: exclusively as a parent. I don't know if that's unintentional.

[00:12:44] Jeff Roster: definitely would've worked at Chico State. Dropping a daughter off at San Diego State, it absolutely would've worked there.

[00:12:49] Adam Blair: Maybe a little off brand for the retailer though.

[00:12:51] Ricardo Belmar: Maybe just a bit. Yeah, maybe a little.

[00:12:53] Adam Blair: But, but, but, but you give that sort of control down and now you actually introduce some randomness into the larger system. And that's actually a good thing in this [00:13:00]case, because as long as you're able to measure and then close that feedback loop, when somebody goes and does something that's silly, you can, you'll see the behavioral changes of that.

[00:13:10] When somebody does something that's, that's surprisingly effective, you'll see those re results too and be able to understand why. And so then you can pull that data up to the corporate level and feed it down to all of your stores, and so you can, you know, create more of a, learn a much tighter, more effective learning cycle as a result.

[00:13:27] Ricardo Belmar: interesting. So I, I guess I have to ask, how did you come to this idea and what, what motivated you to create this solution. 

[00:13:35] Adam Blair: Yeah, so it's, it's I guess it, it came through through a, a, a path, a journey, I suppose. It actually started couple startups I've had now this is my third, my third startup. The previous two have been in overhead, R F I D.

[00:13:47] Ricardo Belmar: Okay. 

[00:13:47] Adam Blair: And and, and one in particular, the first one was we were partnered with Intel in, in their responsive retail platform from 

[00:13:54] Oh, okay.

[00:13:54] Years back.

[00:13:55] Ricardo Belmar: I remember that.

[00:13:55] Adam Blair: Yeah. And so one of the things that we found early on when we did some, some of our [00:14:00] early R F I D deployments, we were getting like 85% of the, the total I inventory that we could actually like read within about an hour of.

[00:14:09] we

[00:14:09] found if we just left it on running continuously for long periods of time though, and we added just a, a strong probabilistic algorithm on top of it, that we could actually infer the inventory you needed for the purposes of restocking to a 99% plus accuracy by just at any given moment, just running over an extended period of time.

[00:14:27] Because you could see the dynamics of the store. You could see how

[00:14:31] so I haven't read something for a day. It doesn't, is it more likely that it's outta stock or it's still here and it's just not readable? Or is it, is it gone? And so by applying that sort of that that sort of algorithm and that model on top of the store, we are able to make much better, much more effective use of the really messy data that we had.

[00:14:49] Right? So it, it started with that. As I got into talking to people in the computer vision space as well.

[00:14:54] They have similar problems, right? Where you have, it's very messy, very uncontrolled data. And so you [00:15:00] start applying these higher level algorithms to it, and you start to get to the better insights, right?

[00:15:04] You get, you start to answer the questions, you start to put yourself in a place where you can answer the questions that the retailers actually have, right? And, and to step back a little bit to the inventory question, ? Retailers don't really like, they think they want to know what, what is in their inventory list, right?

[00:15:21] But in reality they want to know, should I restock right now? Right? And, and what items should I be restocking when they want to know, can I ship this? Can I have somebody that's looking at this item online right now? Should I send them to the store to pick it up? Right? Those are two very simple, very, very different questions that are, you know, it's, it's somewhat arbitrary to ask them of the same list. Right? And so by building the more comprehensive model, you can get to something that can answer those real questions that are being asked of the store, right? And so that's how we think about it. We think about it as queering the digital twin for whatever information. And the, the digital twin will give you the best answer for that [00:16:00] question, given the full context of the store, right?

[00:16:04] If you're down to one umbrella, one umbrella, and you haven't sold them in a week, any, any in a week, right? You might be inclined to say, well, go ahead and send somebody that's 15 minutes away if I told you that it hadn't been raining in a week and it's raining now. Right? That answer's very different, So that's how we're looking at it, is the full context response.

[00:16:21] Jeff Roster: So who do you sell into in that regard? Is that, is that BI? Is that what is that?

[00:16:26] Adam Blair: Yeah, we think it's it, it, it's, it's most likely the cio ct CTO type level, right? Because we, we think about it in terms of the full data for the, for the, for the store. right? You think, we think about it in terms of you know, the, that the, the data source, because it, it, it is, it's a little bit tricky, right?

[00:16:42] Because it is a lot of potential users for any of this data within the, within the retail store, and, and we're thinking about it being the CEO or the CTO being the conduit into the rest of the retailer.

[00:16:52] Jeff Roster: Well, they'd be the one that buying it. But I mean, it it, where would I put that in my, in my tech stack? I mean, is that, is that business intelligence, is that I don't know, [00:17:00]video analytics, I guess. I mean that we've had that conversation too, it seems, seems pretty video in a lot of analytics. So are you comfortable with that sort of a classification. 

[00:17:08] Adam Blair: I mean, I think I'd prefer being more business in business intelligence than, than, I mean, I, I, I don't like it being the source of the data. I like it being the, the context of the data. But I, I, you know I think that's something we're gonna have to work through with the, the different retailers and how they're organizationally structured too.

[00:17:23] Right? Because sometimes the, the titles don't completely match the function.

[00:17:26] Jeff Roster: That makes sense

[00:17:27] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, that's, that does happen. That's true. Okay. . Well wow. I mean this is, I'm always fascinated by digital twin technology right now, as I think this is we're still sort of in early days on, on how retailers can leverage this kind of technology. What kind of questions can they answer by using it?

[00:17:43] Kind of your, your last example there, Adam, about, you know, how, how you can have just slight variation, right? Very different questions to answer. And by leveraging that digital twin, you can come up with an answer where the absence of that, you know, how, how many different systems do you have? To be able to figure out what the answer is that that's being [00:18:00] facilitated here.

[00:18:00] So I think this is really, really a fascinating space to watch. And Jeff, to your point, you know, now this is the second kind of conversation we, we've kind of come across where we're plugging into LP as a data source but using it in a pretty different, more creative way necessarily than, than we might otherwise think of.

[00:18:16] Jeff Roster: I w I am writing the email to my, our, our mutual friend Tony, to say,

[00:18:21] Ricardo Belmar: say are you thinking about this?

[00:18:22] Jeff Roster: just curious what, just so what the LP sense is on that. But

[00:18:25] Ricardo Belmar: Yep. So Adam, if somebody wants to reach out to you and, and find out more about what you're doing in Site Bionic, what's, how should they reach out to you?

[00:18:32] Adam Blair: Yeah. Honestly, best way is just reach out directly adam@sitebionics.com. Also on LinkedIn is always a good way to get in touch with me. And happy to have conversations. Right? We're early. The conversations are, are, are the greatest value. The building, the relationships is, is is the most important thing for us right now.

[00:18:47] Ricardo Belmar: Great. Fantastic. Well, Adam, thanks so much for joining us and we appreciate you taking the time out to meet with us, and we'll be, we'll be watching out to see how things progress for you.

[00:18:56] Adam Blair: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:18:57] Jeff Roster: Outstanding. Thanks. Bye.

[00:18:59] Ricardo Belmar: [00:19:00] bye everyone. 

[00:19:00] Show Recap

[00:19:00] Casey Golden: Well, welcome back everyone. And wasn't that an interesting take on digital twins? Did you catch the ever important reference to computer vision? 

[00:19:15] Ricardo Belmar: Yep, I did too. I did too. And this was a short but sweet session that we had with Adam. I mean, they are really leaning into helping retailers answer tough questions about their store, ranging from merchandise layouts to just general operations. I mean, having that digital twin opens a door to so many possibilities and AB tests that you can run without having to spend the time and effort to physically change it in the store and know what kind of results you're going to get. And this is just why I've been a big proponent of digital twins, is that one super important and practical use case for metaverse applications today.

[00:19:50] Casey Golden: I agree. I don't think a lot of people know how much we have been doing physical twins in the [00:20:00] industry, like building the whole entire area of your Macy's shop and shop somewhere else to flo, do floor sets and and, and not just one, but you know, 30 retailers where their floors going, how that set's gonna look.

[00:20:14] Stack heights. I think that I mean, we'd have whole teams that flew in to go ahead and, and play with that before the merchandise plans went out. Having these spaces from your stores into like throughout the whole entire process. It's just, it's, there's so, there's such a money savings here that if you can turn those cameras from a cost center to generating revenue,

[00:20:40] Ricardo Belmar: Exactly.

[00:20:41] Casey Golden: How awesome is that?

[00:20:43] Ricardo Belmar: Exactly.

[00:20:43] Casey Golden: most times when we think of like a digital twin, everybody thinks that it's avatar clothing,

[00:20:48] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah. Right,

[00:20:48] Casey Golden: right? Which I love. But I think that there's, there's so many different applications that where we spend millions of dollars every season [00:21:00] that could be recaptured and spent elsewhere by using these different types of digital twins in different ways of like visualizing Even just traffic pattern.

[00:21:11] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, E. Exactly, exactly. I mean, just think of all the what if scenarios you can do, like you were saying, right? Where before you could have a team of people take days, right. To experiment and try different options, different layouts. And now you just put 'em in that, in the digital twin you can see exactly, you can do a fly through, and and kind of walk through that virtual space, see what it, what it's gonna look like to you and decide maybe that's not the option you want. I mean, it it, and it really does turn that whole cost center of having to absorb the cost of making those changes. Now it's something that helps you get to revenue faster, right?

[00:21:41] Because now you, you can implement the changes. You'll know what the outcome is gonna be. You've predicted it. And now when you're asking the store teams to go and do these things, it's not an experiment anymore. Now, you know that you're doing something that's gonna have a positive impact right to your, your revenue stream. So it just makes so much sense. I really believe people should be [00:22:00] adopting this more and more. So I think that Adam is on to a good, a really good solid application here with Site Bionics, and we hope to see more of them in the future.

[00:22:08] Casey Golden: Yeah, I mean, cutting lead time is, is a really big

[00:22:12] Ricardo Belmar: Huge. 

[00:22:13] Casey Golden: So what's coming up next in this series? We've got one more to go, right?

[00:22:17] Ricardo Belmar: that's right. We've just got one more in the series and sure enough, this is probably my favorite of the set. You know, at the start of the series I teased that it was a follow up to that popular discussion we recorded at N R F. We did run into a few difficulties, however.

[00:22:32] Casey Golden: Difficulties. Okay. I didn't realize there was gonna be a mystery attached.

[00:22:37] Ricardo Belmar: Well, remember the TRI chat that Jeff and I had with Vicki Cantrell and Ron Thurston at nrf, the one that was supposed to be a a 10 to 15 minute discussion that turned into an almost an hour.

[00:22:48] Well, yep. Well, we all agreed to do that same chat again at Shop Talk. But we did run into some scheduling challenges.

[00:22:56] Sure enough, we were all so busy there was only one time slot that we could [00:23:00]manage to, to get together and, and RETHINK Retail was kind enough to let us use their booth space at Shop Talk to do this recording. So we planned it for the end of, I think it was day two at the show. But sure enough, that was also the time that Shop Talk had their happy hours scheduled on the expo floor.

[00:23:16] And I mean, literally as soon as Jeff and I got to the Rethink booth and we were about to start setting up the recording equipment, suddenly we. All kinds of loud music starts blasting over the speakers because, you know, it's happy hour time, so it's time to put some music on the, on the show floor. I guess that was part of the entertainment.

[00:23:33] So as you might guess, there was just no way we could record any audio under those conditions with all that background music playing. So we ended up deciding, okay, let's regroup. The week after the show, we'd all have some time to digest what we saw. Think about it. And we just do it a normal remote recording.

[00:23:50] And so this last episode was not exactly recorded in person, but as a bonus it does mean that there's gonna be full video for everybody to watch this time.

[00:23:58] Casey Golden: Well, that's [00:24:00] a fantastic way to close out the series and I'm sure it'll definitely be worth it. Now there's expectations that everybody's done their homework. So,

[00:24:09] Ricardo Belmar: Yeah, maybe I set that up a little too strongly. I hope, I hope we meet everyone's expectations now that I said that. But, but for now I, I'm just gonna thank Adam Blair for joining Jeff and me for this recording that we just went through at Shop Talk. Thank you, Adam. We will definitely be watching for Site Bionics' progress over the rest of the year.

[00:24:27] Casey Golden: and on that note, Ricardo, this can only mean one thing. It's a wrap.

[00:24:33] Show Close

[00:24:33] Casey Golden: If you enjoyed this season's shows, especially our podcast crossover miniseries, please consider giving us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Remember to smash that subscribe button in your favorite podcast player so you don't miss a minute. Plus, remember, you can watch us, not just listen on our YouTube channel and like, and comment there.[00:25:00]

[00:25:00] If you wanna know more about what we talked about today, including a full transcript of the episode, take a look at the show notes for handy links and more deets. I'm your co-host, Casey Golden.

[00:25:10] Ricardo Belmar: If you'd like to connect with us and share your thoughts on this season and the crossover series, follow us on Twitter at Casey C Golden and Ricardo underscore Belmar, or find us on LinkedIn. Be sure and follow the show on Twitter and LinkedIn at Retail Razor for the latest updates. I'm your host, Ricardo Belmar.

[00:25:27] Casey Golden: Thanks for joining us.

[00:25:32] Ricardo Belmar: And remember, there's never been a better time to be in retail if you cut through the clutter. Until next time. This is the retail Razor Show.