Following the announcement of the transformation of Paris Retail Week into NRF Retail’s Big Show Europe next year, Paris Retail Week Daily spoke with Matthew Shay, President and CEO of National Retail Federation, in an exclusive interview about the partnership

Matthew Shay outlined the goals for the partnership, and what the NRF hopes to bring to the table to make the show bigger and better than ever.

Can you first of all present NRF and its goals?
National Retail Federation is the industry group in the United States that represents retailers and their partners. NRF was founded more than 100 years ago, and over those many years has grown, evolved, and changed to reflect the contemporary view of the retail industry. Today, NRF represents retailers in every possible version of retail, whether that’s general merchandise, discount, luxury, department stores, online, home goods, specialty retail, digital retail…really the entire continuum of retail. One of our primary responsibilities is to convene and gather retail leaders and conduct educational programmes and conferences. We do that in the U.S. in a variety of our own events like NRF Big Show in New York each January, which is a global event that attracts nearly 50,000 attendees and more than 1,000 exhibitors.

For a number of years, we’ve considered whether there might be opportunities to conduct similar gatherings in markets around the world in other regions, but we knew that we didn’t possess the expertise to do that on our own independently. We needed a partner.

After a period of exploration and due diligence, we built very strong relationships with Comexposium, which is the organiser of Paris Retail Week, as well as many other shows from the consumer and business to business side. And earlier this year with Comexposium, we launched NRF Retail’s Big Show Asia Pacific, which was a huge success with 7,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors. Building on that, we thought we should look at another market. Paris Retail Week is already a very successful event, so we concluded that by working together in partnership, we could continue to grow and expand. Yesterday we announced that beginning next September, Paris Retail Week will become the NRF Retail’s Big Show Europe and will be focused on convening retailers and their partners and solution providers, not only from France but also across Europe and maybe partners from around the world.

We’re very excited. We have a great partner and this is a new programme that is very consistent with NRF’s responsibilities to serve members.

What are your ambitions for the new show?
I think that what will change going forward is that we will try to bring NRF’s expertise, especially on content and education, the speakers and the topics and the themes that we discuss and align those with the attendees and with the most popular topics that are taking place in the industry. It will hopefully attract leaders and executives who want to be part of that programme to participate.
The goal is not to completely change all of the great things that Paris Retail Week already delivers, that Comexposium has created, but to bring our expertise and build on that, and together emphasise our own respective strengths.
Comexposium is fabulous at the execution, marketing and bringing together exhibitors in France. NRF has a global relationship with retailers and partners around the world so we’ll be able to bring some of them to this event who are not currently participating and some of our own brand expertise in terms of promoting and advertising the show. We think this will increase our opportunities both for new exhibitors and improved content as well as for attendees from beyond Paris and France, hopefully from across the continent and the entire region.

Regarding the size of the show, what do you expect?
Well, we certainly believe there’s growth opportunity. We have various targets and ambitions in mind based on what we accomplished in Singapore, where we started with nothing and sold out the floor with a need to expand next year. There’s more competition in Europe, but we still think it’s reasonable to assume there will be significant opportunity for growth in the next few years. We’re still discussing how ambitious we should be.