Retail consultancy HighStreet Collective has chosen NEC as the title sponsor for the recently announced Living Retail Lab, a one-of-a-kind project inside of Ponce City Market in Atlanta.

The Living Retail Lab is HighStreet’s brainchild, their vision of the ideal trifecta for testing store innovation initiatives: a perfectly appointed store, busy excited shoppers in their natural habitat and compelling, in-store experiences measured by the best tools in the industry.

NEC Display Solutions of America, Inc., a leading provider of commercial-grade digital signage solutions, created NEC ALP to operate as a powerful business intelligence analytics platform for retailers. Delivering real-time content and data measurement, the Analytics Learning Platform (ALP) integrates advanced video analytics with its digital signage expertise to serve up big data, content matching, and relevant, impactful content capabilities to customers.

“Core to the Living Retail Lab is analytics,” says HighStreet Co-Founder and visionary of the Living Retail Lab, Laura Davis-Taylor. “We’ve been looking for a system that can make it easier to automate, and ALP is it—and so much more. We’re really excited to put it to work and share our findings!”

As innovation becomes table stakes, so has the requirement for irrefutable, data-based measurement reporting for every test-and-learn initiative.

“NEC’s ALP is a cure for a monumental industry challenge,” says Ed King, HighStreet’s other co-founding partner. “We’ve been preaching for years that we need to view stores as physical websites and use the same data-focused, measurement nomenclature to test and learn what works. It all comes together to create amazing shopping experiences, as well as aiding and abetting revenue. Let’s be real — in retail today, everything eventually comes down to increasing revenue.”

HighStreet secured a prominent property partner through Jamestown, an innovative real estate investment company with $10.4 billion of assets under its management, for this venture. Kristen Morris, vice president regional leasing director at Jamestown, hand-picked the Citizen Supply store for the Lab location based on its many unique attributes.

Self-identified as a “curated artisan marketplace,” it features over 150 hand-selected vendors of hand-made, select goods from sustainable businesses. The 20,000 square foot store is also a community destination, boasting maker workshops, events, gatherings and, recently added, a bar featuring libations and light bites from local chefs and mixologists.

Phil Sanders, proprietor of Citizen Supply, says, “I make no bones about how important experimentation is to me, but there’s only so much that I can learn by physical observation. I’m really excited to tap into this mind-blowing system to see what it can do to help me better understand what’s working for business, my vendors and my customers.”

HighStreet is currently vetting out additional supporting sponsors to join this exciting initiative here.