Small local businesses can improve their ability to compete with large chain stores, thanks to a new platform called GettinLocal. Retailers can inexpensively create their own mobile app and use it to attract new customers and increase the frequency of visits from regular customers.

Brookstone, long known for offering unique products like kinetic sand, percussion massagers and watch winders, is upending its business model. The new Brookstone Plus Innovation and Retail Platform provides a network between Brookstone, maker communities, product incubators, global brands and manufacturing companies who have joined forces to accelerate innovation and bring new products to markets worldwide.

Described by its co-founders as “the fastest-growing convenience delivery service in the country,” goPuff has grown over the last four years from selling about 100 convenience foods from a small warehouse in Philadelphia to more than 30 5,000-square-foot warehouses in major cities across the United States with more than 2,000 products and almost 400 employees.

Neiman Marcus has a long tradition of innovation and meeting its customers where they are — be that online, offline or both simultaneously. Last holiday season, the 111-year-old luxury retailer launched a pilot program in a Dallas store with digital display platform provider Perch Interactive to drive sales of shoes, denim and gifts.

NRF is proud to provide our members with the online Retail Buying Guide to search for trusted vendors, products and services in the retail industry. Our guide is a user-friendly forum designed to bring suppliers and purchasers together. You can search by keyword, location, company name or category. Available whenever you need it, the Retail Buying Guide makes it easy to locate products and professional services geared to the retail industry. Click here to visit the online Retail Buying Guide! To advertise, please contact Sarah Allen for more information.

U.K. insurance company Hiscox used an interactive billboard to show hacking attacks in real time. The billboard pulsed with cyberattack attempts — 23,000 per day on average.

What is it about the German grocery sector that is so innovative? From the country that gave the world Lidl and Aldi comes another great idea: A supermarket for companies that have just begun their journey into the food/beverage industry. 

The digital edition of STORES includes must-read pieces, including the articles featured here. Read the current issue and browse the archives for issues you may have missed.

NRF members now have access to theBoardlist, a program designed to expand the network of board-ready women to help achieve more balanced corporate governance. A recently announced partnership gives female executives the opportunity to be discovered in board searches from private and public companies across the country. Learn more and apply.

While the time-honored tradition of picking out new backpacks, lunch boxes and planning first-day outfits may be the same, the way consumers approach shopping for the back-to-school season has changed. NRF’s head of consumer research Katherine Cullen explains how events like Prime Day have influenced U.S. shopping habits.

Walmart has chosen Microsoft as its preferred and strategic cloud provider. In the five-year agreement, Walmart will use the full range of Microsoft cloud solutions, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, to help standardize across the company’s family of brands. The partnership further accelerates Walmart’s digital transformation in retail, empowering its associates worldwide and make shopping faster and easier for millions of customers around the world.

MyWebGrocer, the leading software and digital media company to the grocery and consumer packaged goods industries, announced the launch of a new Sponsored Listings digital merchandising capability with Wakefern Food Corp., a retail cooperative and owner of the ShopRite trademark. Sponsored Listings enable CPGs to invest with the ShopRite and the Fresh Grocer brands to increase native product placement and drive sales.

Uber and Venmo are partnering to deliver a seamless new payment experience available with Uber and Uber Eats. More than six million payments on Venmo mentioned “Uber” in their description over the past year, making a seamless connection between the two apps a natural fit.

PowerReviews, a global technology leader in reviews and user-generated social content to more than 1,000 brands and retailers, has acquired BzzAgent from dunnhumby. BzzAgent is a leading product sampling and influencer marketing company with more than 15 years of experience working with the world’s largest brands.

Chick-fil-A partnered with Kallpod across three Houston restaurants, including the second highest in the system in terms of both revenue and foot traffic, to enhance service and facilitate tableside ordering. Since the partnership, the busiest location has already seen a 500 percent increase in revenues from additional ordering at the table.

Diebold Nixdorf, a world leader in driving connected commerce, is partnering with Mastercard to deliver an industry-defining, managed solution for the banking and retail sectors. The solution combines Diebold Nixdorf's expertise in omnichannel innovation and consumer transactions on the front-end, with Mastercard's state-of-the-art processing services and extensive global network capability on the backend.

ReposiTrak Inc., an industry leader in compliance, food safety and risk management for the retail supply chain, announced that “I and love and you” an independent, employee-owned pet food company that creates healthy food with real meat and real ingredients for dogs and cats, is joining the rapidly growing ReposiTrak MarketPlace community. The pet food company is also deploying the ReposiTrak Enterprise Demand Planning solution to better manage its supply chain, helping turn demand signals or point-of-sale data into actionable information for its marketers and merchandisers.

Capango, a new jobs marketplace that is specific to the retail industry, has launched. Capango is designed for both people seeking jobs in retail and employers in the retail industry who are trying to fill nearly 725,000 vacancies each month with qualified retail talent.

Prosper and Acxiom, the data foundation for the world's best marketers, announced a joint solution for marketers and their supporting agencies that enables brands to increase the accuracy and predictive power of their omnichannel marketing efforts, resulting in consumers receiving more relevant offers when they are most interested in considering a purchase. Prosper Predictive Audiences powered by Acxiom is an end-to-end, privacy-conscious solution that unites the power of Prosper’s unique, award-winning consumer survey insights and analytics with Acxiom’s InfoBase^® data, one of the world’s richest, most accurate and most ethically sourced third-party data sets available.

Global British lifestyle brand Ted Baker has signed an exclusive new licensing agreement with Israel’s Delta Galil Industries Ltd., the global manufacturer and marketer of branded and private label apparel products for men, women and children.