When I covered retail for the FT in the early 1990s, industry bosses would often recite their three secrets of success: location, location, location. Back then, retail was largely a property game. Companies would make huge efforts to analyse local demographics, economics and infrastructure to estimate potential footfall and spend small fortunes to acquire the most promising sites. Stick your stores in the right place and customers would be ensnared in your web, just like spiders catching flies.
That retail model, which clearly favoured capital-rich incumbents, has had holes ripped in it by the explosion of the internet. For most digital transactions, store location became irrelevant. With no bricks-and-mortar outlets at the time, Amazon delivered goods directly to your door. The secret of retail success was increasingly redefined as logistics, logistics, logistics.
The next evolution came when consumer brand companies and smaller merchants chose to bypass traditional retail outlets and ecommerce platforms and go straight to consumers themselves. This led to the direct-to-consumer craze, which was boosted by Shopify, the innovative Canadian firm. Widely seen as an anti-Amazon, Shopify provides the back-office logistics, payments and delivery infrastructure services that smaller independent merchants cannot afford to build themselves.