Rebuilding retail with kindness - Autumn Fair announces fireside chat with mary portas

Autumn Fair, the UK’s industry leading marketplace for wholesale home, gift, fashion, and Design & Source at the NEC Birmingham from 4th – 7th September, has announced that retail expert, broadcaster, author, and businesswoman Mary Portas will take to the Inspiring Retail Stage for an insightful conversation with Forbes’ Retail Contributor Mark Faithfull at 1.30pm on Tuesday 6th September.

Visitors can expect a perceptive discussion with one of retail’s leading voices, as Mary Portas talks through her insights into how businesses must adopt kinder ways of behaving and how the secret to saving your store lies in the relationships you build with your customers to make shopping more brilliant. Infamous as the ‘Queen of Shops’, Portas’s latest book Rebuild draws on Mary’s decades of business experience and outlines how to thrive in the new ‘Kindness Economy.’

Mary states that how we live, buy, and sell is changing, and argues that over the past thirty years the business of what we buy has been dominated by the biggest, fastest, and cheapest. But those values no longer resonate and it’s time to put people and planet before profit. The 'Kindness Economy' is a new value system where, in order to thrive, businesses must understand the fundamental role they play in the fabric of people’s lives.

Rebuild is about resetting the dial. It gives businesspeople pause for thought about how to make money, as well as the practical tools to build back post-pandemic. And it speaks to anyone who votes with the pound in their pocket - all of us who, with social progress in mind, want to spend our money differently and better.

Victoria Pope, Head of Content at Autumn Fair, says: “Mary Portas is a retail powerhouse and her new guiding principles of the Kindness Economy offer a common sense and practical approach to moving forward and rebuilding for a new era of doing business. Her talks are always fascinating, and our visitors come away inspired with invaluable insights and advice.”