Letter from America – CEO Sean Welch writes about his recent trip to the USA

Having flown back just a few days ago and feeling (almost) back to normal after getting over the dreaded jet lag, now seemed the perfect time to share my thoughts following a great visit to our US distributor of the Concept Tag.

I visited BSI (Best Security Industries) at their headquarters in Delray Beach, Florida, where temperatures were in the low 30s, which made quite a pleasant change from the cold and rain of a typical English November.

 

 

BSI have themselves had some exciting news recently, having been acquired by global security provider Prosegur. This means our US provider of the Concept Tag is now part of a group with sales of almost €4billion.

 

 

It was also very interesting to hear about the major growth BSI are expecting within the US and indeed globally, which is all great news for both Agon and the Concept Tag!

They now have a number of large-scale trials in place across the US and Canada, with many more due to start in 2020, and the expectation is that 2020 will be a break-through year for the Concept Tag.

Whilst I was with BSI, we also discussed our plans to provide greater support to our global customer JD Sports, who themselves have major growth plans for the US market since acquiring Finish Line in March last year.

 

 

During my travels around Florida, I also had the opportunity to carry out follow-up surveys on the impact of Concept Tag trials that have been carried out at several All Saints stores. This followed the recent completion of successful trials in a number of its UK stores, where each store saw reductions in losses of over 60%!

As a result of these impressive figures, All Saints are now looking at potential installations of Concept Tag in further stores across the UK and US.

The last meeting of my five-day trip was with Troels Falkenberg, CEO of Alert Systems, who happened to be in Florida at the same time, attending the Sensormatic global conference in Boca Raton.

 

 

It was good to discuss with him how both the Hyperguard and Apparelguard product lines continue to provide great solutions to the issue of professional thieves. Troels joked that Agon was currently only his 3rd largest client globally; I promised Agon would try harder in 2020!

Although it was undoubtedly a full-on week, I found my trip to the States really interesting and enlightening, and one which enabled me to learn a lot more about the US retail market.

And a bit of warmth and sunshine didn’t go amiss either 🙂