About
This site is an attempt to provide a primary resource for interested parties, a kind of roadmap to enable them to share in our journey in Retail, and to offer an insight into what motivates us at Fifth Dimension.
As a unique team of highly motivated industry professionals, we are passionate about making a difference in all aspects of Retail. What we discuss here is intended to explore the background to what we do every day and also to fill in the gaps between today’s best practices and the ‘art of the possible’ in the future; for clients, friends and guest readers alike.
Given time, the site’s coverage will be extensive, illustrating all aspects of our work with Retailers and Manufacturers, both in Europe and in the United States. It has been a long journey since the mid eighties, but sometimes it feels like we’ve only just begun. Every day brings new challenges, new horizons – a new landscape of possibilities.
We can always do more!
Michael Letchford
Michael has a twenty year track record as an innovator and thought leader in retail space planning automation, category insights, performance optimization and virtual store based consumer research.
He is credited by industry experts as the designer and driving force behind the next generation of automated store planning, aisle management, automated merchandise display planning and assortment planning tools. Uniquely, this business solution is fully integrated with a revolutionary consumer insights suite built on the very latest developments in Interactive Virtual Store and Eye Tracking technologies.
His passion is providing powerful tools, for both Retailers and CPG Manufacturers, that focus on delivering highly profitable, shopper-centric solutions and which enable clients to successfully drive any initiative ‘from concept to in-store execution’ in record time.
Michael Letchford’s LinkedIn Profile
Fifth Dimension is a dynamic, innovative company, dedicated to delivering outstanding competitive edge for its ‘top echelon’ Retail and CPG Manufacturer clients in both Europe and the United States.
Working in close collaborative partnership with its clients, Fifth Dimension specializes in Automated Store Planning, Space Optimization, Aisle Management, Planogram Automation, Visual Merchandising, Assortment Planning, Shopper Insights, In-Store Marketing, Retail Communications, Store Auditing and Virtual Store based Consumer Research.
Fifth Dimension’s mission is to deliver exceptional space planning and performance optimization technologies, extensve actionable insights, and highly effective business process innovations to help its clients become higher performance businesses.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Dear Michael
Thanks for this site – it is of great interest to me because I worked in the same sector (using virtual and interactive technolgies for pack and store concept testing) in the mid 1990′s. However, my product went down a completley different route from using true VR environments because at the time it was impossible to render the graphics at a resolution we felt satisfactory for testing (to avoid agency complaints). Also, we avoided the complex VR interface intimdating for some of the respondents we needed to use. So we used pre-rendered high quality movies in a seemless multimedia app with an integrated questionnaire. Unfortunatley the hardware investment and the custom coding involved in creating these studies put off the company involved and they pulled the plug on the project. A great shame! However, we did some 30 or 40 studies for some blue-chip clients. And even today, some 14 years later visually I think some of these studies still stand scutiny. The research and methodology were also quite rigorous. If you are interested in this historical anomaly, please let me know.
Kindest regards
Paul Spencer
Greetings Michael –
Thanks for linking to the ISI Network and my personal blog, TensersTirades. I take this as a high compliment and return the same to you.
It seems we have interests in common and I’d like to make an effort to get to know more about you and your firm. ISI Network operates on a shoestring, but we plan to do some original benchmark research this year and also to publish some case studies that demonstrate real-world success in retail compliance, sensing, and performance. Perhaps Fifth Dimension would benefit from participating? Seems worth exploring to me and I invite your personal email, call or Skype.
James Tenser (address details removed to preserve privacy – MBL)