Co-founder and chief marketing officer at JUXTA, Steve Liguori, said that he and his co-founders Om Shankar, Matt Clayton, Abby Smeaton, and Barak Meiri, realised there was a market gap for retailers and consumers on how to expand the reach of convenience retail better while addressing the industry’s substantial labour, cost of capital, and location constraints.
Liguori, alongside his co-founders, created JUXTA in 2022 with the aspiration of helping retailers everywhere get closer to the modern consumer than ever before.
With the growing global drive to decarbonise modern transportation, Liguori said that a supporting infrastructure needs to grow parallel to this, with a higher volume of locations available for EV drivers to stop for charging, convenience, and comfort.
“In addition to the EV space, the modern consumer is less and less tied to fueling as their primary convenience shop opportunity. Countless third places now exist with consistent foot traffic underserved by retailers where we think C-store retailers are best equipped to serve.”
However, there were limitations imposed through constraints of the current retail infrastructure of the industry. Liguori identified three key challenges that impede expansion: affordability and availability of labour, the rising cost of capital and overall costs to build the modern C-store, and the rising costs and decreased availability of real estate.
They then theorised if it would be plausible to build a solution for retail expansion that minimised upfront costs, with reduced real estate required and operated without the need for labour to staff the store, with a key goal centred on maximising revenue and profit. These ideologies and challenges inspired the inception of the JUXTA Nomad.
“That’s the driving mission for JUXTA and the inspiration for the Nomad, a portable, fully unstaffed or autonomous, micro-convenience solution that can profitably go everywhere the traditional brick and mortar store cannot.”
Liguori said that JUXTA learned from retailers that integrations, costs, and a consumer-centric design were significant barriers to adopting fully unstaffed or autonomous solutions in the C-store space.
While there are other players in the autonomous retail ecosphere, JUXTA’s offer is unique, as it is the only turnkey store on the market that does not require complex integrations.
Its fruition within the convenience industry meant that Liguori and Shankar knew that a seamless integration into the existing C-store infrastructure was essential. Based on the Nomad design, stores are plug-and-play with Gilbarco-equipped locations, a supplier of fuel dispensers, point of sales systems, payment systems, forecourt merchandising and support services, substantially integrated with back-office and loyalty systems throughout the industry
“A retailer sets up JUXTA just like any of their other C-stores, and there’s nothing as broadly applicable as a Nomad store.”
Cost is another area where JUXTA has set itself apart with its standardised micro-format. The Nomad has an optimised use of cameras and sensors in its AI sensor fusion design, maximising the number of products a store can sell while minimising the number of cameras and sensors.
“Our solution doesn’t require hundreds of cameras or sensors, which allows us to put a Nomad into a retailer’s hands for less than 1/10th the cost of the typical American C-store.”
Its consumer-centric design is based on how best to mimic the soul and feel of the C-store in an unstaffed environment. Consumers access the store using standard card-based payments they already have in their wallets, and checkout is optional. Consumers can review their basket in real-time at the kiosk or leave if they’re in a hurry. That step of being able to validate your purchase before leaving is crucial to many consumers, with roughly 70 percent of shoppers choosing to validate their purchase and interact with the store.
JUXTA’s initial markets for launch over the next year are the USA, Northern and Central Europe. They have had tremendous interest in other markets and anticipate its repeatable and appealing design will mean it will become an international solution.
The Nomad can be deployed with various safety options, from the types of locks used to the security systems the retailer chooses to deploy. The large storefront windows also ensure maximum visibility so potential customers can see and be seen at all times. It adheres to the strictest data privacy standards, and every shopper's data remains anonymous.
“The technology has been rigorously tested in thousands of simulated and in-field transactional scenarios, and we are confident in its robustness.”
Liguori explained that the Nomad was just the beginning for JUXTA, as the company firmly believe the unstaffed micro market will grow and become the best application for autonomous retail technology now and in the coming years.
Despite this, many of the same challenges that prevent C-store retail expansion are faced by retailers pursuing other consumer segments, which has motivated retailers to bring Nomads into unique markets, such as an autonomous retail station at festivals, going beyond what it was initially designed for.
“At JUXTA, we see a complex future for retail, EV charging, and convenience. Autonomous and unstaffed solutions have a major role to play. We’ve experienced incredible demand for the Nomad and look forward to all the places it will go.”
