NearSt: the Google-backed startup helping high street stores compete with Amazon

The strapline of Kibworth Books, a bookshop in the village of Kibworth in Leicestershire, is “something for everyone”. But it’s only recently that everyone has been able to see what the store has in stock for them.

Kibworth Books is among hundreds of independent UK booksellers who have started using NearSt technology, which allows small retailers to compete with Amazon by making their inventory visible in online searches. As well as listing stock online for potential customers to browse, NearSt has an add-on feature that makes the store appear in searches when people in the area Google the specific title they want.

“Now we have 8,000 titles findable by people who are walking past the shop, or in the pub three minutes down the road,” says Debbie James, who started Kibworth Books when she left the music industry 10 years ago. “They can Google a book from the pub and our shop will come up before Amazon, Waterstones and WHSmith.”

NearSt was founded by Max Kreijn and Nick Brackenbury in 2015 with one mission: to get more people into high street shops. The startup comes at a time of rapid change for UK high streets. More than 30 major retailers have shut since Woolworths closed in 2008, according to the ONS. Job losses from the retail sector are expected to rise nearly 20 per cent in 2019, putting 164,000 people out of work and leading to the closure of a further 22,000 stores, according to the Centre for Retail Research.

It’s an interesting time in retail,” Brackenbury says. “I think the high street has a ton of value but it needs to be unlocked.”

Brackenbury and Kreijn met 10 years ago when they were working together at Ogilvy, the advertising agency. Brackenbury was a graduate trainee and Kreijn was a strategist in a small team of three or four people doing early social analytics.

Not long after, Kreijn left the firm to start his own company, an innovation consultancy helping big companies behave more like startups. He was spending a lot of time working out how big companies could take old assets and come up with something new, when he had a “literal lightbulb moment” – a lightbulb in his living room blew, and when he Googled for a replacement, the search threw up online shops, rather than stores near him.

The next time Kreijn saw Brackenbury, he pitched him the lightbulb problem: how could they unlock the retail industry’s massive stock inventory, and make it available in the place where most people were starting to shop – online?

“I told him I was sure someone had figured out his problem already,” Brackenbury says. “But when I looked at it I thought, ‘My god, why hasn’t anyone done this?’ And it turns out no one has done this because it is quite hard.”

The technology developed by NearSt echoes work by Alibaba, the biggest e-commerce company in China, which has been converting 100,000 retail stores into Alibaba-linked smart stores. Customers in these smart stores are able to source products missing in some stores from others nearby, so they know where to look next – or where to order the product for home delivery.

NearSt has had early success with booksellers as many of them use the same book supplier, Gardners Books, which makes it easy for NearSt to digitise the inventory used by multiple independent stores. But it is much more of a challenge to digitise and extract the data from hundreds of thousands of small shops.

“The inventory is locked away in these archaic inventory systems that weren’t built for the modern world,” Brackenbury says. “So if you search for a product on your phone, it shows you hundreds of products in warehouses up the M1 corridor, even though you could be stood outside a shop that sells that very same product and you just don’t know about it. That seems bonkers.”

NearSt has developed software to extract and understand rudimentary stock data and feed it into the internet, so that Google doesn’t just show online results, but also local availability.

If an online inventory is the best way for retailers to take back the bite of their profit stolen by Amazon, why haven’t more done it? “The data challenge is hard for a retailer to do,” Brackenbury says. Many companies that do have digital inventories are using mainframe technology that was built in 1988. Even after the store has established a barcode, a stock level and a price, they must also have pictures, product descriptions and titles before it can be listed as a product online.

“It’s a huge ask, and they’re busy so they don’t do it,” Brackenbury says. “We connect into old systems, extract information, understand what it is and enrich it so the retailer doesn’t have to do anything. They keep managing the inventory in the same way, but we make it visible on the web.”

Last year, NearSt was approached by a Google employee who explained that the search company wanted to list local inventory. “It’s an incredible way for us to make a huge impact,” Brackenbury says of the partnership. “We looked at who we wanted to feed data into, and then Google came to us and said they could feed it into the world’s biggest search engine – that’s the way to achieve that mission.”

The company has raised £1.5m to date and is in the middle of another funding round. Brackenbury knows that as the company’s mission grows, it must do what it can to safeguard the privacy of stores. He imagines opening inventory data to other technology companies, like Facebook and Uber, so that users can get instant delivery of branded spirits from local stores by nearby couriers, for instance. But he says this would have to be done with the consent of the retailers, so their inventory only appears when they want it to.

At Kibworth Books, James say the decision to sign up to NearSt was a “no brainer”. She recently paid an extra £2 a day for the store to appear in local Google searches for titles around World Book Day. “I did it for two weeks to get my shop out there when families who weren’t aware of us were searching where to get the books from,” she says. “Looking at the statistics it was worth it, you can safely say footfall increased.”

Brackenbury meanwhile says that in a few years, live inventory technology will be so commonplace we will wonder how we ever did without it: “Within three or four years, this real time local inventory will seem completely normal to us in the same way that now if you look up on your phone what time Boots shuts, Google tells you the closing time for the nearest store. Four years ago that didn’t exist,” he says. Whether it can save the high street remains to be seen.