The Nick Molnar-backed start-up transforming bricks-and-mortar stores

afr.com:

For Simon Molnar, rumours of the death of the retail store have been greatly exaggerated.

The founder of retail technology platform Flagship, Mr Molnar is on a mission to make visual merchandising – the art of curating store windows and in-store displays to attract shoppers and maximise profit – faster, more efficient and more data-driven.

With venture capital fund Tidal Ventures, he has just secured $2 million in seed-round funding to take his start-up to the US and beyond.

Tidal Ventures’ Georgie Turner and Flagship founder Simon Molnar. 

“There is a consistent challenge around merchandising,” said Mr Molnar, who previously worked with his brother Nick at Afterpay.

“It’s slow, it relies on people, there is no innovation. The bigger a retailer gets, the more likely the pain is to be solved by more people. That’s not efficient.”

His solution uses a simple web-based platform that creates a digital floor plan of each store, including merchandising components that can be altered when necessary. Changes are sent to the stores’ network and then implemented by staff, who confirm compliance with the plan via photographs.

It is a far speedier process than traditional visual merchandising (VM), where teams input changes to InDesign plans and send out specialised teams to enact the changes weekly. “Everyone does it manually,” Mr Molnar said.

Flagship launched its beta version in February, working with local brands such as Aje Athletica, Venroy and Sir the Label on the rollout. Mr Molnar is now in talks with major US retailers about implementing the technology there.

He conceived the idea while working at Afterpay.

“With e-commerce you have every single data point related to what a customer does,” Mr Molnar said. “So how do we