Sponsors and solution providers get a straight-talking guide to maximising their 1:1 meetings. Expect insider advice on framing conversations, understanding retailer priorities, and standing out as a trusted partner.

Most retailers treat social media as a marketing channel. Brooke Bellamy built a business on it.

In just three years, Brooki Bakehouse grew from a 41 square metre Brisbane bakery into six Australian locations and secured a $25 million UAE investment, driven almost entirely by Instagram and TikTok content. No traditional advertising budget. Just authentic storytelling that turned 4 million followers into queues around the block and investor confidence.

But viral moments don't scale themselves.

In this session, Brooke unpacks what actually works in social commerce versus what just looks good online. She shares the operational decisions behind rapid expansion, how attention translated into revenue and capital, and the capability gaps she wished she'd addressed earlier.

For New Zealand retailers operating in a smaller, resource-constrained market, this session reframes social not as a brand play, but as a growth engine when executed with clarity.

Because social doesn’t drive revenue, decisions do.

Hailed as one of the most rewarding parts of the summit, business connect involves 5 x 10 minute meetings designed to float topline objectives and explore synergies. Delegates are required to request and confirm these meetings prior to the summit.

The official Welcome Dinner & networking reception held on the first night is the perfect avenue to build relationships with key conference delegates, speakers, and sponsors in a more relaxed atmosphere. 

Dinner Keynote | Leading When It’s Hard - Building Trust When Pressure Doesn’t Lift

Pressure affects more than strategy. It affects people. Confidence dips, energy thins, and teams look for clarity when the path forward isn't obvious. This session reflects on leading through sustained challenge: how trust is built when conditions stay tough, how to keep teams moving without burning them out, and why consistency, presence, and honesty matter more than big gestures. A grounded conversation about the small leadership behaviors that hold teams together when the pressure doesn't lift.

Day 2 begins with breakfast and barista coffee!

Hailed as one of the most rewarding parts of the summit, business connect involves 5 x 10 minute meetings designed to float topline objectives and explore synergies. Delegates are required to request and confirm these meetings prior to the summit.

Most retailers know where their biggest costs sit. Rent, wages, marketing, freight. What they don't see is where margin quietly disappears through operational complexity, silent inefficiencies, and invisible trade-offs that compound over time.

This session exposes the hidden P&L: the 2-5% of revenue that leaks through payment failures, returns fraud, inventory write-offs, promotional errors, delivery subsidies that don't drive incremental sales, and tech sprawl that adds cost without adding capability. These aren't dramatic failures. They're structural blindspots that worsen under pressure.

Rather than generic efficiency advice, this examines where to look, what to measure, and how to build visibility into costs that don't trigger alarms until they've already eroded margin. A practical reset for leaders who suspect they're leaving money on the table but can't pinpoint where.

Join us for lunch before you head out on your afternoon activities. Please also use this time to go back to your room and get changed for your activity if required.

Day 3 begins with breakfast and barista coffee!

New Zealand retailers are not going to win by spending more. We don't have the scale of Amazon. We don't have the capital of global marketplaces. And we can't afford margin-free growth.

So the real advantage isn't budget. It's judgment.

As costs rise, promotional noise intensifies, and every tech vendor promises transformation, the pressure to do more is constant. But most of what's being sold as growth is quietly diluting margin, adding complexity, and locking retailers into expensive decisions that are hard to unwind.

Drawing on his experience as CTO of Fujitsu Australia and Partner at PwC, Anthony Mittelmark cuts through the noise — challenging leaders to get honest about where capital is actually creating return, which investments genuinely move the needle, and when AI improves decisions versus when it simply speeds up bad ones.

In a market the size of New Zealand, every major decision has outsized impact. There is less room for waste. Less room for ego. Less room for bets that don't pay back.

The retailers who win next won't be the ones with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones making fewer, smarter, braver decisions.

And that starts here.

Take a break and refuel with morning tea.

Alignment creates momentum. Momentum creates pressure. Pressure creates activity. Over time, retail organizations confuse progress with motion, layering initiatives without questioning what they're replacing. The result isn't confusion. It's dilution. Focus thins, ownership blurs, and outcomes soften even as effort increases. This session explores how leaders recognize when action reinforces strategy vs quietly erodes it, and why restraint has become one of the most undervalued capabilities in modern retail execution.

Strong retail teams move with confidence, but confidence isn't always proven. Early indicators, promising pilots, and anecdotal wins can quickly turn into conviction, especially under pressure. Over time, belief sets direction, investment follows, and assumptions stop being questioned. This session examines how confident decisions quietly outpace evidence, and why some of the most costly retail commitments are made not in moments of doubt, but in moments of certainty.

Designer Wardrobe began as a simple Facebook group in 2014. A decade later, it has grown into one of New Zealand's most recognised fashion marketplaces - with roughly one in ten New Zealand women on the platform.

In this fireside conversation, founder Aidan Bartlett shares the journey behind building Designer Wardrobe, including the moments that forced the business to rethink its model. From launching and later shutting down a rental venture during COVID to doubling down on the marketplace engine that worked, the story reflects the realities of building and evolving a platform over time.

Today, AI is embedded across the platform - from listing and content moderation to search, pricing guidance and product discovery. Aidan explores how these tools are reshaping the marketplace experience and what the next phase of platform retail could look like.

Part founder story and part technology roadmap, this conversation offers a candid look at the decisions that shaped Designer Wardrobe and where the platform goes next.