Commerce Voice caught up with Jamie Hancox, founder of Commerce Futures, ahead of the launch of his new event, Let’s Go Shopping – a event built entirely around physical retail, running twice in September in stores across London.
For years, Jamie Hancox has been one of the most familiar voices in ecommerce. Through Commerce Futures, he’s built a reputation for bringing retail and technology people together, interrogating what “good” looks like in digital commerce, and asking hard questions of an industry that liked to think of itself as the future of shopping.
So it’s a small irony that his next event is a deliberate step away from all of that. Let’s Go Shopping, launching this September, is built “in stores, for store people” – and Hancox makes no secret of why.
“We’ve all been told for years that ecommerce is the engine that’s going to save retail,” he says. “We’ve been hearing that for what, fifteen years? And yet ecommerce is getting really hard. Traffic is expensive, the platforms are taking their cut, and you can’t grow a brand being a pure ecommerce business anymore.”
A career built on bringing people together
Hancox has spent much of his career at the intersection of retail and technology, most recently running Commerce Futures, an agency and event platform that works with major retail and software brands to shape conversations around digital commerce. Along the way, he built a reputation for editorial judgement – knowing which speakers, which stories and which ideas were worth a room’s time.
That instinct for what makes a gathering genuinely useful, rather than just another conference, is what he’s carrying into his next chapter. Alongside his newsletter No Rocket Ships and a WhatsApp community of industry peers, Hancox has increasingly focused his energy on advisory work and event curation – the parts of the job, he says, he has always enjoyed most.
“It’s the editorial judgement – what’s good, what’s not good – that I really like doing,” he explains. “Content, podcasts, building a community around ideas people actually want to talk about. That’s the bit that doesn’t feel like work.”
Where the idea for Let’s Go Shopping came from
The idea, Hancox says, came from a physical retail event in Copenhagen he ran last autumn, and a conversation with a store manager who told him it was the first time in twenty years of working in shops that she hadn’t felt like “a second-class citizen” next to ecommerce.
“That stuck with me,” he says. “The idea that people working in stores have spent years being told that ecommerce is what’s going to save the business and meanwhile we’ve completely ignored them.”
At the same time, he was watching the brands doing well right now – names like Represent, Tala and Astrid & Miyu – expand aggressively into physical stores and wholesale, not because digital had failed them, but because stores had become one of the most efficient ways left to acquire customers.
“Despite ecommerce existing for as long as it has, it’s still only around 20% of the market,” Hancox says. “Eighty percent of people are still going to shops. We’ve ignored them because they don’t officially ‘buy tech’, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.”
Why “in stores, for store people”
Unlike most industry conferences, which Hancox says are pitched at buyers and technology decision-makers, Let’s Go Shopping is deliberately aimed at the people who actually run stores – store directors, area managers, merchandisers and heads of retail.
“I now know that the CTO doesn’t buy anything unless the store ops team wants it,” he says. “You can sell to the top of the business, but if the people on the floor don’t buy into the idea, it never actually gets used. So why has nobody built anything for them?”
That gap, he believes, is why the event has found an audience so quickly, with retailers offering up their own stores as venues at no cost. “The people running stores have never really had anything built specifically for them,” he says. “As soon as I started talking about it, people wanted to be involved.”
Workshops, safaris and a cinema
The day is built around three parts. It opens with a series of small, hour-long workshops hosted inside working stores before opening hours, with retailers including Lush, Paul Smith, Liberty and Jigsaw among those confirmed to take part. Each session is capped at around fifteen people to keep the conversation genuinely useful rather than a straightforward store tour.
“These aren’t ‘come and look at how nice my shop is’ sessions,” Hancox says. “At Lush, for example, it’s their head of retail explaining how they run stores with a completely flat structure – store managers with total autonomy – and then the store manager showing how that actually plays out day to day.”
From there, delegates regroup for a conference session and lunch, before splitting off in the afternoon for guided store tours across some of London’s key retail neighbourhoods, including Shoreditch, Mayfair, Covent Garden and Chelsea.
The event runs twice, on the 22nd and 24th September, partly to widen access for people who can’t get a day off retail floors easily, and partly so Hancox can match attendees to the sessions most relevant to them based on what they register interest in.
What he hopes people take away
For Hancox, success isn’t measured purely in ticket numbers. “I’d be genuinely delighted with a strong turnout across both days,” he says. “But more than that, I want people to leave actually rethinking how they talk about stores — not as the poor relation to ecommerce, but as the place where you build a proper relationship with a customer.”
He points to brands like Paul Smith, where the ambition for physical retail isn’t simply to close a sale, but to build a connection strong enough that a customer wants to come back. “That’s something you’re never going to replicate online, no matter what you do,” he says. “It’s utilitarian. In a shop, you can guide someone, get to know them, build loyalty in a completely different way.”
What comes next
Hancox is clear that Let’s Go Shopping isn’t designed to become another sprawling events business. Instead, he’s already talking to people within his own network about running versions of the format elsewhere, under the same banner, in other retail cities.
“If people want to go and run their own version somewhere else, they’re welcome to use the brand and the idea, as long as I trust what they’re doing with it,” he says. “This isn’t about me building something bigger. It’s about giving stores, and the people running them – the platform they should have had a long time ago.”
Let’s Go Shopping runs twice in September in stores across London, with registration open now.
