| | NOVEMBER 20218CIOReviewBy Sean MacCarthy, Executive Director Global Analytics and Store Segmentation, Claire's IncOver the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has had an immense impact across the global economy; no industry sector has been untouched for better or worse. In Retail, it has accelerated the need not only to be digitally available to our customers but also to detect changes in customer behavior more quickly than many in the industry were used to. The underlying technology, data, and organizational and people skillsets necessary to "tune" our companies to the rapidly evolving consumer behaviors that are a result of the pandemic, are actually the same as we ought to have been pursuing anyway. As our customers' lives have become further centered around their digital devices and assets, they have become much more purposeful in where they spend their time and attention, and the brands that are not quick to pick up and ultimately predict where this is will only meet their customers like a broken clock meets the correct time twice a day.Across the technology, data, and skillsets, I will stick to more general platitudes as the underlying tools, languages, and platforms are constantly evolving.For technology, the most important piece is to have a platform that is flexible and robust enough to handle all of your important 1st and 3rd party data in a way that will allow your tools and data scientists to take advantage of the innumerable relationships between all of the features these data sets may have. It must be flexible in that it can scale with your companies needs from a pure storage and ingestion THE RETAIL AND CONSUMER LANDSCAPE MAY CHANGE, BUT OUR PURPOSE AS RETAILERS DOES NOTSean MacCarthyIN MY OPINION
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