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RetailROI 'Super Saturday' highlights tech trends, good works

SuperSaturday 2025 (Photo by Jack McCoy)
Attendees at the 2025 RetailROI Super Saturday event. (Photo by Jack McCoy)

The annual RetailROI "Super Saturday" event educated attendees about what sets successful retailers apart and the importance of helping disadvantaged children.

Celebrating its 16th year, RetailROI once again brought together industry thinkers and experts for in-depth discussions on retail technology and assisting vulnerable children worldwide at the Super Saturday event hosted Saturday, Jan. 11, at Microsoft headquarters in New York.

Held the day before the official kickoff of NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show, the event included a review of findings from the IHL Group 2025 retail technology trends study of more than 1,300 North America-based retail banners (many with global presence).

The study compared the tech habits of sales winners (retailers that grew 2024 sales by more than 10x) and profit winners (retailers that grew 2024 profits by more than 10x) to those of sales and profit laggards (retailers with flat or negative growth in these areas). Results included:

  • Sales winners were 20x more likely and profit winners were 9x more likely than laggards to use digital twins (virtual replicas of their enterprises for testing and simulations) in 2024. Sales winners were 27x more likely and profit winners 13x more likely than laggards to be investing in them in 2025.
  • Sales winners were 22x more likely than laggards to be using “just walk out” cashierless store technology and 9x more likely to be investing in them in 2025.
  • Sales winners were 16x more likely to be using consumer mobile checkout and 38x more likely to be investing in the technology in 2025 than laggards.
  • Sales winners were 17x more likely to be using electronic shelf labels and investing in ESLs in 2025 at rate 8.5x higher than laggards.
  • Sales winners were 17x more likely to be using 5g networking in stores than laggards and those sales winners using 5g in stores had expectations for 25x higher sales growth 4x higher profit growth in 2025 than laggards.
  • Sales winners were 85x more likely than laggards to invest in a single data lake, 85x more likely to invest in advanced analytics and 37x more likely to invest in an order management system.

[READ MORE: 2025: The year RFID breaks through]

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Doing good

A major focus of Super Saturday is also to shine a spotlight on the many charitable activities RetailROI undertakes. One segment of disadvantaged children that RetailROI makes significant effort to assist is kids who are part of the foster care system.

Keynote speaker Alexis Russell, founder and CEO of Alexis Russell Jewelry, gave a heartfelt keynote address discussing how she entered the foster care system at age 2 because her mother was not fit to care for her and she then spent the rest of her childhood in a series of numerous foster homes.

Many of the homes Russell was placed in were neglectful, abusive and unsafe. Russell described how one foster mother who stood out by being kind and caring took her clothes shopping to a department store.

"It was my first time in a store that wasn’t a thrift shop or a donation center," she said. "I couldn’t get over seeing rows of the same product, all in different colors and sizes. I had never seen anything like it."

Russell persevered and launched what became a highly successful jewelry business by selling handmade pieces from the trunk of her car, with local retailers who believed in she and her product key to the growth of her company. Russell now dedicates herself to helping other children going through the same type of foster care situation she endured.

In addition, a "youth summit" of Gen Z young adults who had all taken part in RetailROI “vision trips” to assist underdeveloped communities in locations such as Honduras, South Africa and Jamaica in their teens spoke about how participating in the trips changed their lives and opened their eyes to the need for assistance in many parts of the world.

See a list of upcoming trips here.

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