Speakers
David Donde
Truth Coffee Roasting
Founder
Topic: Kamiwaza - The Hidden Art behind good business in retail
Biography
David Donde is the founder of Truth Coffee Roasting, multiply accoladed as the World’s best Coffee Shop. He is a pioneer in Speciality Coffee, regularly judging internationally. He speaks locally and internationally on Coffee, Marketing, Branding, Entrepreneurship, Innovation and his true love, Useful Disruption
Doug Stephens
Retail Futurist
Topic: Reengineering Retail
Biography
Doug Stephens is one of the world’s foremost retail industry futurists. His intellectual work and thinking have influenced many of the world’s best-known retailers, agencies and brands including Walmart, Google, Home Depot, Disney, BMW, Citibank, and Intel. Doug is also listed as one of retail’s top global influencers by Vend.com. Prior to founding Retail Prophet, Doug spent over 20 years in the retail industry, holding senior international roles including the leadership of one of New York City’s most historic retail chains. Doug is the author of two groundbreaking books - The Retail Revival: Re-Imagining Business for the New Age of Consumerism (2013) and Reengineering Retail: The Future of Selling in a PostDigital World (2017) Doug is also the nationally syndicated retail columnist for CBC Radio and sits on the advisory boards of the Dx3 Digital Conference and the David Sobey Centre for Innovation in Retail & Services at St. Mary’s University. His unique perspectives on retailing, business and consumer behavior have been featured in many of the world’s leading publications and media outlets.
GG Alcock
Minanawe Marketing
Founder
Topic: Kasinomic Evolution
Biography
GG Alcock, founder of Minanawe Marketing, Author KasiNomics, Kasinomic Revolition & Third World Child. Born white in apartheid South Africa but raised & bred as a Zulu man , GG was raised in a mud hut in one of the most poverty stricken and violent parts of Kwazulu Natal, Msinga. GG’s activist parents raised their two sons in a hut with no running water, electricity or modern conveniences, instead growing up like young Zulu’ boys herding and hunting. GG has been at times a shebeen owner, political activist, community worker, African adventurer and entrepreneur. GG’s passion and current focus is on Kasinomics, the invisible matrix at the heart of South Africa’s informal economies and the people who live in them. Living and doing business in African marketplaces requires an ethos uniquely suited to the informal, to the invisible, to the intangible, GG shares some of the secrets to doing business & entrepreneurship in these informal spaces.
Gugulethu Mfuphi
CNBC Africa
Senior Anchor
Topic: Master of Ceremonies
Biography
Gugulethu Mfuphi, an award-winning broadcaster, is a well-versed orator, with experience in front of the camera, behind the microphone and addressing an audience. This skill, together with her sound grasp of financial markets, economic data and current affairs issues and the impact that this has on the business community, makes her the perfect candidate to speak to industry analysts, political leaders and C-suite executives from across the globe.
This forms the basis of her tasks and responsibilities as a Presenter on Kaya FM’s prime time, award winning business show - Kaya Bizz, and her experience as a Senior Anchor on CNBC Africa.
Jasper Eales
Sealand Gear
Creative Director / Co-founder
Topic: Authentic Responsible Business
Biography
Jasper Eales, Co-founder of Sealand Gear is the imaginative mind behind the brand, he drives the brands’ focus to achieve refined, practical solutions, which are designed to last. Born in Cape Town where mountains and ocean vividly connect, Sealand creates environmentally smart high-end Bags, Accessories and Apparel. We reuse the structural properties and textures of waste material in a new context while mitigating the generation of waste and promoting sustainability. We try to play our part for the environment and by supporting us you do too.
Jeremy Gardiner
Investec Asset Management
Topic: Déjà vu?
Biography
Jeremy is a regular voice in the media, at conferences and to the investment-related world at large, responsible for commenting on current affairs, economics and investment markets.
In his position, Jeremy is inundated with information from the world’s top analysts, on everything from politics to petrol. Jeremy’s challenge is consolidating all this information and bringing it to you in an understandable format that you will find interesting and informative.
With the company since 1992, Jeremy has been with the firm for 25 years, during which the business grew from a small Cape Town Asset Management firm to a significant global business managing clients assets in excess of R1.6 trillion.
John Ryan
Retail Week
Stores Editor
Topic: What's New and What Matters?
Biography
John Ryan is a journalist and analyst covering retail design, strategy and marketing for a wide variety of magazines and journals.
As Stores Editor of Retail Week, online editor of retail design magazine www.MInd-mag.com and European editor of VMSD, he has written about the sector for almost two decades. As well as occasional appearances on the TV and radio, he is a frequent speaker on conference platforms around the world.
He is also a consultant on store interiors, retail strategies and shopper profiling with clients ranging from Screwfix to Marks & Spencer, John Lewis to Tottenham Hotspur and L’Oreal, as well as Swedish store equipment manufacturer Itab.
In a previous life he was a retail buyer for C&A, a role he fulfilled for 13 years, working in London and Dusseldorf and then head of buying for department store group Bentalls.
Jonas Kjellberg
Author and Investor
Topic: Keynote - New Business Models for a New Generation
Biography
Jonas Kjellberg is an engaging digital transformation speaker, co-creator of Skype, author, and investor. As co-creator of Skype, Kjellberg worked as Managing Director (equivalent to a CEO in the U.S.), helping generate 90 percent of their revenue stream.
Currently, Kjellberg runs Gear Up Ventures, a company that focuses on implementing the innovation and entrepreneurship model set out in his book Gear Up. Kjellberg also lectures on the subjects of entrepreneurship and “How to Create a Winning Sales Culture” in his keynote talks and at Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics
Ludwick Marishane
Headboy Industries Inc.
Innovation Business Scientist & Thought Leader
Topic: Thriving in the Technological Future
Biography
Ludwick Marishane is the founder & MD of Headboy Industries Inc and is SA’s youngest patent-filer after having invented DryBath® at the age of 17. In 2011, he was rated as the best student entrepreneur in the world, and that same year, Google named him as one of the 12 brightest young minds in the world.
He holds a Bachelor of Business Science, majoring in Finance & Accounting, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In December 2013, the global TIME Magazine named him as one of the 30 people, under 30, who are changing the world…one of only 2 Africans on the list.
Forbes Africa named him as one of the Top 30 under 30 Young African Entrepreneurs in 2013 & 2015, and in 2015 he was chosen as one of South Africa’s 21 ICONS for the curator’s youth-focused 3rd edition.
Magnus Lindkvist
Trendspotter and Futurologist
Topic: (W)evolve - How Togetherness Shapes the Future...of Retail and Beyond
Biography
Magnus Lindkvist is a trendspotting futurologist and author who weaves together important current trends to forecast what life, society and business might look like in the future.
It is the fantastic timing, storytelling and politically incorrect humour that keep the audience laughing and talking well after his talk ends. He has given in excess of a thousand keynote speeches over the past decade to everyone from Fortune 500 CEOs and civil servants in the Middle East to anyone looking to be inspired and enlightened by trendspotting and future-thinking.
As a writer, Magnus Lindkvist is driven by a relentless curiosity about our mental space where the outside world collides with the human brain. His recent book Minifesto (2016) tells us why small ideas matter in the world of grand narratives. By sharing a vision of the future we can strive to surround ourselves with as many strange, conflicting ideas that we can in order to immerse ourselves in future possibilities and possible futures.
With a Master of Science in Business and Economics from Stockholm School of Economics and a degree in film production from UCLA, Lindkvist weaves together the worlds of quantitative insights with the imaginative storytelling of Hollywood. His talks are often described as ‘shows’ or ‘performances’; he calls it ‘intellectual acupuncture’ with the expressed intention of changing our minds with needles of insight, examples and observations.
Michael Hinshaw
McorpCX
President
Topic: Keys to Winning at the Intersection of Digital Transformation and Customer Experience
Biography
President of McorpCX, Michael Hinshaw is recognized by leading analysts as a digital transformation and customer experience thought leader, and has been named to over a half-dozen “Global CX Thought Leaders” lists. Co-author of the best-selling book Smart Customers, Stupid Companies: Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them, he has been published and quoted in dozens of publications ranging from Harvard Business Review and Fast Company to American Executive, Forbes and Time. A Teaching Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at The Haas School of Business, he has consulted for and advised executives at companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Best Buy, Danone, lululemon and Staples.
Mike Vincent
Deloitte Africa
Consulting Leader: Strategy & Operations
Topic: “Smart” Building and Connected Store 2.0
Biography
Mike currently leads the Consumer Industry focus across Africa and sits on the Deloitte Africa Clients & Industries Leadership Committee and the Consulting Industry Executive. Mike is a strategy consultant and has led both the strategy and innovation businesses in South Africa. He is a senior partner in Monitor Deloitte in which he helps clients to solve complex business and industry challenges. Under Mike’s guidance, Deloitte established Mzansi & Green, a connected retail store in its Greenhouse™ in Cape Town. The store is intended to demonstrate the impact that digital will have on the industry. Mike holds MBA, BA and Higher Diploma in Education degrees. Previously he was an entrepreneur invested in TMT and IT ventures and an investment banker.
Thebe Ikalafeng
Brand Leadership Group
Founder and CEO
Topic: Building Great Brands
Biography
Thebe Ikalafeng is arguably the foremost global African branding authority. In a distinguished corporate career which started at Colgate Palmolive in New York and concluded as chief marketing officer for NIKE for Africa, he won over 75 awards in branding and marketing communication globally.
He is the founder of the award-winning Brand Leadership Group and has worked on over 100 corporate, nation and political brands across Africa. Brand Leadership has been recognized by Fin Week Magazine as “Marketing Services Agency of the Year” in 2008 and was inducted into the Rebrand “Hall of Fame” for Excellence in Branding in 2015. A fellow of the Institute of Directors, Ikalafeng is a non-executive director at South African Tourism, Mercantile Bank Group, Cartrack and WWF South Africa. He has been recognized by New African Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans.
He founded Brand Africa, an inter-generational movement to create a positive image of Africa, celebrate its diversity and drive its competitiveness and Brand Africa 100: Africa’s Best Brands, the only pan-African research and ranking of brands in Africa, to promote excellence in building brands in Africa. He has judged awards on design, branding and leadership globally, including the Red Dot Design awards in Germany and St. Gallen Symposium ‘Wings of Excellence’ in Switzerland. He has served as the inaugural vice-chairman of the Brand Council of Southern Africa and as the first indigenous African chairman of the Loeries.