The document summarizes 7 rules for retailers to follow in order to recover from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted retail businesses worldwide. The rules are: 1) Accelerate digital transformation and prioritize omni-channel systems. 2) Focus on sustainability and frugal innovation to adjust to changing consumer behaviors. 3) Emphasize health, wellness and organic products that saw less impact. 4) Leverage livestreaming and social commerce to enable indoor shopping. 5) Adopt virtual reality, robotics and gamification. 6) Develop adaptive learning and agile organizational strategies. 7) Maintain a sense of the changing landscape and shifting consumer trends. Following these rules will help retailers beat the "

1. Companies must adopt a recovery position in
the Post-COVID black swan based on the jolt
effects felt by retailers around the world in order
to prepare new sets of contingency planning
measures and cope with the looming signs of
uncertainty. This entails, on one
hand, reexamining their survival
strategies, store network, existing
point of sales and pre-established
business models; and on the other
hand, to look for any dead angles,
emerging whitespace, be it during
the early recovery phase or after a
prolonged period of consumer
confinement and quarantine
shopping that spared no one
including online sales which have
also contracted 5 to 20 percent
across Europe, 30 to 40 percent in the US and
15 to 25 percent in China.
Based on various market studies and survey
results published by leading firms like The
McKinsey Global Institute’s insightful and
elaborate State of Fashion in 2020, we have
compiled and summarized the most critical
insights on what it takes to boost retail
business immunity systems and to hopefully
turn COVID 19 crisis into a game changer. One
thing seems to be certain; the one size fits all
type of cure for the retail world doesn’t exist.
Each country, each retail vertical will have to
abide by its own rules and socioeconomic
stimulus measures to boost, reignite consumer
confidence and help companies adapt to the
changing dynamics in the disruptive age.
This unprecedented humanitarian and
economic crisis have shattered all previous
growth forecast for 2020 and pre-established
paradigms, leaving retail business owners
traumatized and awed by the steep impact of
prolonged lockdowns, distancing measures and
shifting grounds. The growing dependence on
remote and wireless management, cloud
computing, ecommerce, virtual shopping,
robotics, video streaming and smart chain
supply logistics among so many disruptive
technologies and behaviors are the new normal
except for early adopters of smart digitization.
POST COVID-19 HUNGER GAME RULES
FOR RETAILERS & HOW TO BEAT THE
BLACK SWAN IN 7 ROUNDS.
By Jamal Boukouray, Ph.D.
Vice President Marketing at Multidev Technologies Inc.
According to McKinsey's latest report, revenues for the global
fashion industry (apparel and footwear sectors) will contract by
27 to 30 percent in 2020 year-on-year, although the industry
could regain positive growth of 2 to 4 percent in 2021. For the
personal luxury goods industry (luxury fashion, luxury
accessories, luxury watches, fine jewelry and high-end beauty),
we estimate a global revenue contraction of 35 to 39 percent in
2020 year-on-year, but positive growth of 1 to 4 percent in 2021.

2. While none of us could predict precisely how
long social distancing measures and lockdowns
will be re-extended or how recurrent the
pandemic is going to be within the next few
months, it seems obvious that the retail world is
just about to feel the post-traumatic side effects
triggered by the lack of readiness to change and
to digital first mindset.
Business owners and captains of industries
need to gather all their lieutenants to think about
fast-forward tactics to put in place before a new
COVID 20 upgrade pops up in the midst of the
recovery plan. Being agile is the mother of all
necessities. Therefore, it’s time to get ready for
a post-coronavirus market. This is a tipping
point, where survival of the fittest will most likely
favors mutant business warriors and
chameleon organizations.
Without a drastic paradigm shift and proper
reassessment or transformation of current
business models, processes, organizational
behaviours, experts are afraid that retailers in
the brick and mortar will most likely be the ones
to suffer most from the black swan effect due
to the stay home, stay of away from physical
shopping outlets, food courts and malls. Two to
three months of a lockdown combined to an
ongoing recession will mutatis mutandis lead to
massive foreclosures across the retail world.
Once the dust settles on
the current pandemic,
fashion apparel, footwear,
jewelry, beauty and
non-essential supplies will
have a window of
opportunity to step-up
their digital
transformation projects,
ramp up their existing
software solutions,
omni-channel systems
and digital platforms.
Investing in the right
ecommerce solution and
partner to expedite the
transformation processes
is the only option for
those who will get a
chance to be bailed out or
have enough stamina to
weather further havoc.
While coronavirus is a major disruptor, it’s also
an opportunity for retailers to revamp their
business models, to boost their immune system
and to step up their contingency planning
strategies. Companies surviving the immediate
crisis will have to make bold and rapid
interventions to improve their agile
architectures.
The road to recovery according to the market
studies mentioned above will entail among
many pre-emptive tactics and the following
step-up measures.
POST COVID-19 HUNGER GAME RULES FOR RETAILERS
& HOW TO BEAT THE BLACK SWAN IN 7 ROUNDS.

3. Rule No 1 - Digital Acceleration
Social distancing has heightened the
critical importance of digital
channels, smart stores, broadband
networks, social data, collaborative
shareware and collective intelligence
tools more than ever and lockdowns
have heightened the importance of
omni-channel systems as an urgent
priority across the entire value chain.
With no leeway or limited options to
recover lost sales, pure offline
players whose revenues depend on
brick-and-mortar footprints were hit
hardest. The good news is that retail
tech sector is one of the most
avant-garde ecosystems when it
comes to innovation for the world’s
largest employing sector.
Take for example, Multidev Technologies’ early
adopters. With turn-key systems like ChainDrive
and eComDrive, the company’s leading clients
and brands have not been hampered as much
by the shopping quarantine as they managed to
capture disposable screen-time traffic when
most of stay home households turned their
focus on indoor-shopping and social media
platforms to quell their thirst for binge
shopping.
Rule No 2 - Sense & Sustainability
As deep discounting will continue to plague the
retail industry for the remainder of 2020 due to
several ‘’depressionary’’ factors such as the
increasing proclivity towards bargain shopping.
This latter consumer behavior will most likely be
exacerbated by the rise of anti-consumerism, in
inventory gluts and a nosediving consumer
confidence. To reach increasingly frugal and
disillusioned consumers, brands must find
inventive and sustainable ways to regain value
and rethink their broader business mission and
how to adjust to the changing landscape.
Rule No 3 - Think Organic, Health and
Wellness
In the absence of an eminent cure or a vaccine,
consumers turned to health, wellness and
organic stores for supplements and ancestral
medicinal herbs and recipes to boost their
immune systems and wellbeing. Unlike other
discretionary purchases, organic stores with or
without online apps were less harmed by the
sanitary crash.
Here are 7 Hunger Game rules and step-up measures that
will make the difference between leaders, transformers
and laggards in the retailing world:
POST COVID-19 HUNGER GAME RULES FOR RETAILERS
& HOW TO BEAT THE BLACK SWAN IN 7 ROUNDS.

4. Rule No 4 - Frugal Innovation is the mother
of necessity
To cope with the new paradigm and emerging
consumer shifts, companies must introduce
new tools and strategies across the spectrum
to invest in frugal practices. Retail players must
harness innovations and scale up those that
work in order to make radical and enduring
changes to their organizations — and to the
wider industry — after the dust settles.
Recycling unsold inventories, upcycling previous
fashion collections, wardrobes, home
furnishings, shipping materials, packaging and
managing waste might well be the new normal
as most of consumers have learned to spend
more time fixing their households, gardens,
attics and basements…
In the absence for sufficient personal protective
equipment, many designers, entrepreneurs,
liquor distilleries converted their existing
facilities into makeshift works shops to turn
snorkeling gears into alternative ventilators and
stocks of alcohol into hand sanitizers, etc.
Rule No 5 - Live streaming: The Rise of
Social Commerce & Indoor-Based Shopping
Between January and February 2020 during the
peak of China’s outbreak. WeChat offered
features that allowed store assistants to
message directly consumers and complete
purchase orders, generating a much-needed
oxygen. Popular social media platforms like
Instagram, WeChat Groups and WeChat Work,
allowed companies to expand their reach, to
engage clients and beef-up their customer
relations let alone their brand equity.
Other digital solutions used by retail assistants
during the lockdown in China included
livestreaming sessions on WeChat or media
platforms such as Yizhibo, Joor, Hero and Slack
which turned empty retail/wholesale
showrooms into virtual boiler rooms hosted by
store assistants. Brand-to-shopper video chats
and broadcasted influencer-curated
assortments were well-received on chats like
Taobao as the number of Chinese brands
livestreaming skyrocketed by a whopping 700
percent. This paradigm shift forced traditional
brick-and-mortar retailers in China to re-train
their store personnel on how to become
livestream hosts and how to sway and convert
outdoor-based shoppers into a fan-based
indoor audience of active shoppers.
Rule No 6 - Virtual Reality, Robotics &
Gamification in The Cyberian Republic
Unable to invite the international media to its
Japanese headquarters during the lockdown,
ASICS’s publicists made their presentation in VR
and shipped Oculus Quest head gears to
journalists to watch the hologram.
From 3D printers to make alterative respiratory
ventilators to chatbots, the impact of robotics,
AI, real time social data and cloud computing
are reshaping entire building blocks of the new
economy.
Rule No 7 - Adaptive learning &
Organizational Agility
Once again, the Darwinian tenets will prevail as
resilience will be subject to how agile retailers
can be at the new starting block when
quarantine measures are lifted. The sooner, the
merrier as the time left to catch up on lost sales,
foot traffic and business opportunities will
mostly favor early adopters of agile bootcamps,
scrum, lean thinking organizations with enough
collaborative skillsets to fuel collective
intelligence and holistic change.
POST COVID-19 HUNGER GAME RULES FOR RETAILERS
& HOW TO BEAT THE BLACK SWAN IN 7 ROUNDS.
Revolutionizing the way retailers run their business.
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