Digital showroom, disaster response and provocative look into the future

With a once again thematically wide-ranging farewell session, the 7th Global DIY Summit in Dublin came to an end last Friday, 7 June 2019.
Neil Munz-Jones from mdj2 brought participants up to date on the status of the DIY store industry in Great Britain where the former "nice little world" is being radically changed by factors including online trade and discount formats.
A completely new retail space format was introduced by Igor Kolynin from Petrovich, the new number two in Russia: the digital room as only 26 m² fully digitalised showroom in a shopping centre.
A thoughtful note was struck by Osamu Watanabe of Lixil Viva in Japan. He reported on how the company is involved, for example, in disaster response after the Tsunami catastrophe of 2011 and is also offering corresponding products.
The store designer and retail specialist Ibrahim Ibrahim from Portland Design gave an - intentionally provocative - outlook into the future of the trade in times in which retail space is disappearing and for the new generation of customers, access to (hired) products is "the new purchase".
The 8th Global DIY Summit will take place from 10 to 12 June 2020 in Amsterdam.