Retail Think Tank Members - Profiles

Nick Bubb, Retail Analyst, Arden Partners

Nick Bubb is the senior Retail Analyst at the stockbroker Arden Partners and has been a leading retailing analyst in the City for over 30 years, spanning a number of different stockbrokers and investment banks (including Morgan Stanley and Societe Generale). Nick was rated No 1 in the ‘Institutional Investor’ magazine 1988 poll of Stores Sector analysts. He recently left the boutique broker Pali International and started at Arden Partners at the end of January 2010.

He is a well-known commentator on UK retailing in the press and is also very knowledgeable about shopping centres. Nick is ranked in Retail Week’s “Top 100” list of the most influential people in Retailing.

Arden is an established stockbroker, providing a range of financial services to corporate and institutional clients. Based in the UK (with offices in London, Birmingham and Bristol) and with strong Indian business links, Arden Partners is quoted on London's AIM market.

Prof. John Dawson, Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling

John Dawson holds chairs at The Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling, Scotland. He is a visiting Professor at ESADE in Barcelona where he has research projects and participates on regular retail management programmes. John is also Distinguished Professor at University of Marketing and Distribution Sciences in Japan where he has a number of research projects funded by Japanese Government. His degrees are in Geography, Town Planning, and Retailing. Academic research interests are across retailing where he has been actively studying retail activity since the mid 1960s. Over this extended period he has worked on projects with a number of large and small companies and with UK, Scottish government and European Commission in addition to more traditional academic research. He is a Board Member of the company that operates the shops in the Museum of Scotland. John has written widely in books, major reports and papers in journals. He is a frequent contributor to management seminars and conferences. Current research is on retailer internationalisation, marketing strategies in retailing, retailer-supplier relationships, and the measurement of the retail sector. Most of this current research is in Europe and East Asia. He has also held visiting positions elsewhere in Europe, South Africa, USA, Australia and Japan.

Dr. Tim Denison, Synovate Retail Performance

Dr Tim Denison BSc MSc PhD MCIM is Director of Knowledge Management at Synovate Retail Performance the UK's market leader in performance improvement systems for retailers. He is also a regular commentator, broadcaster and conference speaker on retail matters, particularly those related to behavioural issues. Trained formally as a social scientist and a marketer, Tim has worked for Synovate Retail Performance for 10 years. Before that he managed the Centre for Advanced Research in Marketing at Cranfield School of Management, where he specialised in retail and consumer branding issues, working on key research and policy initiatives on behalf of organisations such as the European Commission, BP, BT Cellnet and Ford.

Helen Dickinson, KPMG

Helen Dickinson is a Partner & UK Head of Retail at KPMG. She is regularly quoted in the trade and national media on retail sales trends and other sector issues and also comments on industry topics in her weekly column in Marketing magazine.

KPMG is an associate member of the British Retail Consortium and Helen works closely with the BRC in a number of areas including the sponsorship and administration of the BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor. She has focused on retail since 1995 and been a Partner since 2002. She works with many retailers across all sectors including food, clothing, furniture and department stores.

As Head of Retail for KPMG since December 2004, Helen has overall responsibility for leading and developing KPMG's retail practice in the UK including development of multidisciplinary value propositions focused on the sector.

Helen is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales and is based in London.

Richard Lowe, Barclays Retail & Wholesale Sectors

Richard has more than 25 years of experience in providing specialist banking services to the Retail & Wholesale Sectors. He now leads the London based Retail & Wholesale Team which is made up of 9 specialist Relationship Directors. The team has over 300 customers from boutique fashion houses, to high street stationers and booksellers to department stores.

Richard has had a range of roles in Barclays including a number of relationship manager roles in London and has worked within the Retail and Wholesale Sector for over 10 years.

Richard is an avid reader and believes you never stop learning something new from a good book. His recent favourite titles include Blink by Malcolm Gladwell who also wrote The Tipping Point.

Outside of work Richard enjoys motor racing, when time allows.

He is married with 2 children, Annabel and Elliott, and lives in Hertfordshire.

Vicky Redwood, Capital Economics

Vicky Redwood is a UK economist at Capital Economics, specialising in the consumer and retail sectors. Vicky examines the forces acting on consumer finances and spending and assesses how likely economic developments will affect the various sub-sectors of spending. She is frequently quoted in the press and appears regularly on television and radio.

Vicky joined Capital Economics in 2003 from the Bank of England, where she was a UK economist specialising in the UK corporate and household sectors. She contributed to Bank of England publications including the Financial Stability Review, as well as writing working papers on household balance sheets and business failures. Before working at the Bank, Vicky studied Economics at Oxford and Warwick.

Mark Teale, CB Richard Ellis

Mark Teale joined CB Richard Ellis (Hillier Parker) in 1986. Initially setting up a retail project consultancy team, Mark was appointed Head of Research in 1989. Mark's research team specialises in retail property related consumer market research and forecasting but covers all aspects of retail research including information development for market analysis systems, shopping development viability studies, store location analysis and benchmarking.

Mark was responsible, in the early 1990s, on behalf of the Property Manager's Association, for establishing the industry's first shopping centre trading audits for rent review purposes. Mark also pioneered The National Survey of Local Shopping Patterns (NSLSP) survey, the largest continuous household survey programme of shopping destination preferences undertaken in the retail industry. The NSLSP survey is widely used by leading store groups for locational analysis purposes and by property/planning organisations for impact forecasting.

Mark is now primarily concerned with the development of local forecasting and benchmarking applications and related retail property market measurement applications.

Prior to joining CB Richard Ellis, Mark was employed as a journalist at Morgan Grampian Construction Press, writing on commercial property matters. He won RICS, ISVA and BBC awards for journalism in 1985 and 1986.