Speaking Engagements
CMA | SIMA 2025 Conference
Innovative Ideas for Omni-Store Excellence
In today's fast-evolving retail environment, businesses are constantly balancing the changing needs of the shopper, the pressures of the economic climate, and the relentless drive for innovation. The 2025 conference will explore how to manage this delicate retail balancing act.
How do you elevate the shopping experience and make it more compelling? Join Kevin Kelley as he shares everything he's learned in the field and the boardroom in his debut book, Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together.
Sign up here!
The NGA Show 2025
Shaping the Future of Grocery: Innovation, Disruption, and the Next Generation of Store Design
The NGA Show is the only show created exclusively for the grocery industry and brings together a community of independent grocers and the food retail industry to learn, engage, share, network, and innovate.
Join Kevin Kelley for two sessions: "Tech Innovation Summit" (Sunday) and "Shaping the Future of Grocery" (Monday). As a lifelong advocate of bringing people together in prosocial settings, Kevin's expertise is in studying how the environment of a place affects our behavior, perception, and decision-making.
Join us at this exciting event here!
Shoptalk Spring 2025
Track Speech
Shoptalk Spring 2025 will bring together a speaking faculty of over 200 luminaries and 10,000 attendees across retail, consumer brands, and retail tech. It is where the future of retail is defined.
Join Kevin Kelley (Thursday, March 27 at 10:15AM) for his insights working with executive leaders in their efforts to develop new kinds of immersive brand experiences that have the power to convene people in places.
Sign up here!
Past Speaking Engagements
CMA | SIMA Conference
The Bonfire Effect: How to Create Stores That Survive and Thrive in a Digitally Dominant Era
We live in a time of digital replacements, where everything we used to do physically in place—shopping for groceries, getting dinner at a restaurant, and going to the movies— can now be achieved virtually online.
So how can place-based entities survive, much less thrive, in an era of digital dominance? By creating irreplaceable places that have the power to convene people around a quality that Kevin Ervin Kelley calls the Bonfire Effect.
Through engaging storytelling, human behavior insights, and real-world case studies, Kevin Ervin Kelley—an attention architect and cofounder of Shook Kelley, a strategic design firm that pioneered the field of “convening”—unfolds why physical places are essential to business, community, and civil society.
Join fellow retail and consumer professionals by registering here!
NRF '25 Retail's Big Show
Making Your Stores Irreplaceable: How Retailers Can Survive and Thrive in the Replacement Economy
We live in an age where everything can be replaced through an app on a handheld device. So, how can physical stores compete with these easier, cheaper, and more convenient digital replacements? They can tap into other human desires, such as the need for sensory stimulation, belonging to a community, and participating in cultural celebrations. For the last three decades, Kevin Ervin Kelley—an experience designer and author of IRREPLACEABLE—has been helping retailers compete on dimensions other than price, variety, and convenience. During this provocative presentation, he will outline the key principles, tools, and techniques he and his team deploy to help retailers deliver store experiences that are irreplaceable.
Learn more and register here.
Columbus Region Economic Development 411
Keynote Speech
Economic development is constantly evolving. Keeping up with the latest challenges and opportunities is essential for staying relevant and effective. Join Kevin Kelley for his keynote speech and reshape your outlook on the Region's future and your role in it.
ED411 is where ideas flourish and partnerships grow. Learn more and join the conversation here!