Group Chairman Stuart Rough gave a talk at the India Retail Forum (IRF) 2017, associated with MAPIC, the world’s biggest retail conference, which was followed by an interactive session and a panel discussion.

Aimed at groups of approximately 40 delegates, the ‘masterclass’ sessions covered a diverse range of topics in more detail than the main conference sessions, offering people the chance to interact with experts in a workshop style environment.

Stuart led one of these sessions with Ernesto Zabarte from the practice’s Singapore studio and Neha Momoya and Ritesh Bafna, both from the Mumbai studio, focusing on retail refurbishment and repositioning.

He said: “A successful repositioning can significantly improve the performance of your retail centre across all key metrics including customer spend, footfall and dwell time.

“Repositioning can involve looking at anything from the brand and tenant mix, through to large scale extensions and refurbishments, to smaller, focused improvements in targeted areas.

“In the session we focused on the latest trends in retail and how these are impacting on mall designs. This ranged from an increasing diversification of offer in F&B as well as changes caused by technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and robotics how retailers are offering more personalisation driven by big data.”

This story featured in: APAC Dispatches - Review of 2017