September 2022 update from our Executive Director

The RIA is constantly evolving to better serve our members, and this fall we're heavily engaged in two areas: 

• Improving on what we already offer
• Adding a powerful new benefit that we think will substantially improve the concept of 'ease of doing business.’

As we move forward into the last quarter of the year, our goal is to provide the information our members need to make informed decisions and run more effective businesses. To help you with this, a few of our exclusive member benefits include:

• RIA Weekly Snapshots from Cadence, giving stores and brands insights into current sales trends,
• Mastermind Groups, our peer-sharing platforms that utilize RIA Weekly Snapshots,
• Sports Marketing Surveys, providing brands and retailers with accurate predictions of future brand trends

The RIA’s big initiative that we hope to reveal at our membership meeting at TRE is what we're currently referring to as our “Universal Product Catalog.” The idea is to create a standardized platform that our brand and retailers can use to manage brand product data each season. The user interface would make it simple and easy for brand members to upload both soft and hard data, and would include everything that retailers need to make product cards in a variety of POS systems and e-commerce platforms.

This platform would have multiple advantages, including dramatically reducing the massive resource drain caused by manual formatting and uploading of data. It would also reduce data duplication and data entry errors, and eliminate waiting on store management to create products in the POS system while boxes sit in the back room NOT ready for sale.  

We're currently in the testing phase for the user interface, and we're looking forward to sharing key elements of the platform with key brand and retail testers. Stay tuned for more.

Bottom line: We're working hard to bring you, our members, benefits that will enhance your business and make membership in the RIA a no-brainer. Thanks for your support as we grow!

Terry Schalow

Executive Director

Running Industry Association

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