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The panel discussions were great. The keynotes from retail professionals were great. The sales pitches interwoven within the day between panel discussions and presentations we not welcome and a waste of time. The only type of sales pitches that would be interesting would be by design agencies showing a particular project - how they worked with a brand to develop retail. Sales pitches by technology companies are not interesting even with case studies.

Some of the biggest disrupters and players are missing, such as Amazon, who has decided to incorporate physical stores, and Patagonia, to name only a few. Also, I feel that the vendors are driving the bus, which is somewhat helpful but offers a biased approach.

The organizers did well on the event management part, the 3 star rating is mainly for the content, for me personally it felt too basic and repetitive. i was expecting everything much higher level, lot more technology innovations like robots, drones and stuff. Rating could have been different if I was able to get a spot on the tours.

Great information and presentations, but a lot of the material just didn't pertain to our field of work, which this was our first time at Future Stores so we weren't sure what to expect, and that is OK. A lot of information revolved around the experience for the consumer and how associates and the stores can use more advanced technology to better their experiences. Being our stores are licensee owned rather than a franchise, as a businesses we do not control how the owners operate their stores. It was great to hear from the various amounts of businesses and their own experiences in growing, re-branding, and adopting to the changing market. I found there were some overlap with the different vendor booths, which would be nice if your "shopping around", but would have like to see even more and different companies brought in.

Overall I thought the show went well. We were able to connect with a diverse base of prospective customers and possible partners. Some things that I think would be improved was the time with the attendees of the show. The morning interactive break was by both days the most productive time, but each of the following breaks only had less and less people. And by the cocktail hour on the first day there were almost no attendees there it seemed. I personally reached out to 50 or so attendees via the Jubila App and got 0 responses. And since we were near the meeting tables it seemed that not many people even used the app to schedule time. We had talked about reaching out via regular email but since this was our first time at the show I assumed you would want us to keep it through the internal app. Along with that it seemed that besides those few breaks we were kept pretty separate. With lunch being off in different areas it felt really segmented from the booths. Overall, if there was more time to have the attendees in the innovation lab, as well as more interactive times I think we would have gained a ton more value.