Bernd Albl, Umdasch - The Store Makers

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Austrian firm Umdasch refers to itself as The Store Makers - designing, building and kitting out retail stores at scale both in Europe and globally. About seven or eight years ago, the company looked at the shifting state of retail and realized that staying relevant meant adding digital to its toolset - a decision that's played out nicely for the business unit, which is part of a much bigger holding company that is a global leader in construction - from office towers to single family homes. I first met Bernd Albl earlier this year at ISE, knowing almost nothing about Umdasch and not a whole lot more about what the company refers to as shop-fitting. But after this podcast chat, I now know a whole lot more about the company and more broadly about the expectations, challenges and demands of properly designing and equipping retail in 2023. We get into a lot of things, including defining experience in retail. We also have an interesting discussion about sustainability in retail - particularly a shift from doing store refreshes every five to seven years, to 10 years and longer. That's driven mainly by demands to stop tossing out perfectly good wood, plastic and metal finishings to make way for new designs. One of the beauties of applying digital is its ability to refresh a store's look and feel by changing files, not hard materials. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Bernd, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Umdasch does and what it means by store makers?  Bernd Albl: Okay, Dave. First of all, thanks for having me. Umdasch actually is a family-owned company within the History of Wealth brand for about 150 years. We are a shopfitting company, basically focused on the European market, and we are building stores in different areas, from fruit areas to grocery stores, the fashion industry, banks, automotive industry, all places. We say we are businesses done, and we are around 2000 employees in our organization, and since around seven years, we established the business of digital retail because we saw that the business is completely shifting from the traditional millwork and handcraftmanship towards digital business and this is what Umdasch stands for, and our headquarters is in Austria, in Amstetten. For people who don't know Austria like me, where would you locate it? Is it by Vienna or somewhere else?  Bernd Albl: Probably most of you might know of Munich, Salzburg, or Vienna, and Amstetten is in the middle between Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna, around one and a half hours away from Vienna towards Germany, in that direction.  Umdasch is quite a big company. I think I saw the turnover is 1.5 billion Euros. Bernd Albl: So, this is when you're talking about the whole company. Umdasch is basically three company pillars. The biggest one is called Doka, which is a forworking company, and it is also established in the North American market.  So, we always say that about every building is higher than 200 meters in the world is by 80% built by Umdasch Technology, and the second one is ours one, it's the Umdasch store makes its shopfitting business, and the youngest group is Ventures, where we invest venture capital for disruptive technologies in the field of construction and in the field of retail technology. And in total, yes, we are doing around 1.5 billion euros turnover.  So you're pretty substantially backed in terms of your initiative. You're anything but a startup..  Bernd Albl: Yes, that's definitely right.  When you say you are doing the build of stores, is that the build, including the whole actual physical building or when you're talking about store makers or shop fitters, you're talking about the interior? Bernd Albl: It's a very good question. The value chain in projects in the past, we usually were focused on the interior design, on the production of interior installation of interior shop fitting. But as I m