As Director of Retail Strategy at
ThoughtWorks Europe, RUTH
HARRISON is a leading luxury
brand specialist with over 25 years’
international market and multichannel experience. Possessing
a strong background in UK blue
chip organisations, she has held
senior executive operational
and commercial roles within the
consumer goods and services sector
at John Lewis Partnership and
House of Fraser, and most recently
Selfridge Group and within the
highly competitive Health & Beauty
sector at Elizabeth Arden, Body
Shop and Estee Lauder Companies.
Ruth is also a European Advisory
Board Member of Chief Marketing
Officer Council Europe, regularly
contributing to research, informing
market leading industry publications
on marketing trends, analysis and
implementation strategies.
8 LITRS OCTOBER 2015
DigitalRetail
Sustainable
Ruth
Harrison
What does it mean to be green
in this day and age? We have
moved a far cry from lentil eating,
hemp wearing eco-warriors of the
late 80’s into a digitalised push
button fulfilment economy – by
2020 the conventional retail store
will be unrecognisable from the
homogenised high street of the
last decade, with same bland
pile it high sell it cheap model –
now stores are entertainment,
experimentation and education
emporiums, the digital revolution
has borne a series of cybereconomies – with fewer physical
stores being built – this has to be
a good move for sustainability,
less waste will be generated,
less pollution, less traffic and
congestion as a result of the
reduced need to visit bricks and
mortar store locations.
However with this digital
transformation we must caution:
instead our purchases will be selected
and packed for despatch in dark
stores, couriered to us at a chosen
time, to which ever location we prefer,
all whilst generated and facilitated via
smart devices; phones and tablets.
Now this is indeed quite amazing, yet
with new release versions of smart
device numbers increasing to several
per year – what do we do with the
mounting volumes of obsolete devices
in our midst? Hardly surprising the
millennial generation has already
considered this wasteful behaviour
and is now pioneering development
of eco-smart smart devices – a
collaboration between the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and