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Clare Bailey (Previously Rayner)
The Retail Champion

Clare Bailey, The Retail Champion, is one of the most well-known and respected retail consultants in the UK. A child born into a family of retailers and entrepreneurs, she is passionate about retail and business: it is in her blood.

Clare started out as a fast-track graduate store management trainee for McDonalds and went on to work with leading retailers such as M&S, Dixons and Argos. She moved swiftly into management roles before being headhunted into senior consulting roles with global software giant SAP, and international management consulting brand, Accenture.

Known as The Retail Champion, Clare is engaged by clients as a retail consultant, professional speaker and business mentor. She is regularly called upon by BBC News (TV and Radio) and trade press to comment as a retail expert. Her retail business book, The Retail Champion: 10 Steps to Retail Success is specifically written to enable independent retailers to become scalable, saleable businesses.

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Clare Rayner The Retail Champion

The UK's Leading Retail Expert

The Retail Champion's expertise comes from decades working in retail and hospitality for national and independent High Street businesses. Working with a trusted team of experts we can support businesses looking for growth through business strategy, new sales channels, marketing, e-commerce solutions, supply chain management and much more.

Clare Bailey Keynote Speaker
Keynote Speaker

Clare Bailey speaks at many conferences and events, delivering keynote presentations on a variety of topics including retail, high streets, supply chains, consumer engagement and customer services. Her expertise and ongoing experience working with High Street businesses allow her to speak in a thought-provoking, personable and professional manner. 

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How to Sell to Retail
How to Sell to Retail

Buy a copy of Clare's second book, 'How to Sell to Retail: The Secrets of Getting Your Product to Market', ideal for any business looking to supply products or services to the retail industry. Every reader gets exclusive access to a whole range of free, downloadable resources, including tools that our consulting team use in our 1-2-1 coaching services. Buy a copy of How to Sell to Retail now!

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Retail Consulting for Suppliers
Retail Consulting for Suppliers

For those who prefer to have support as and when they need it, rather than as part of a structured programme, business consulting for suppliers to retail may be more suitable for your requirements. Book Clare's time, to benefit from her extensive expertise, and she can help you with any aspect - from preparing your business to go to market to delivering the perfect pitch. Find our more about business consulting services.

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Marketing Support
Marketing Support

Marketing helps build brand awareness, brand engagement and sales conversion. Our marketing specialists can support businesses in developing their brand positioning and messaging, identifying target customers and creating offline and digital marketing strategies based on your key business objectives.

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Media Commentator

Clare Bailey is a regular media commentator, covering topics such as the high street, the retail industry, and consumer topics, often featured on UK and international TV and radio channels, including BBC, Sky, Channel 5, Bloomberg, ITV and various other outlets. 

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Media Training and Presentation Skills
Media Training and Presentation Skills

Media Training and Presentation Skills enhance your ability to communicate and present yourself effectively in both the media and in public speaking situations. We can help teach techniques that convey your business’ message clearly, whilst giving you the confidence to handle media interviews.

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Change Management
Change Management

Change is crucial for growth and survival, especially for High Street businesses wanting to develop a competitive edge or looking to scale up. The Retail Champion supports businesses with how to deal with various types of change.

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1-2-1 Retail Coaching
1-2-1 Retail Coaching

Retail Champion’s Coaching Programme keeps you on track, focusing your time on value-adding activities that will guide you towards achieving your business objectives. The programme helps you to develop strategies to your customer base, revenue streams and channels to market, ultimately growing your profit.

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Finance and Accounting
Finance and Accounting

Finance and accounting business support is a valuable resource for businesses to efficiently manage their finances. We offer a wide range of financial support from what to include in sales and financial reports and how to interpret the data through to financial planning, budgeting and cash flow management, providing businesses with insights for informed decision-making.

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Business Engagement
Business Engagement

The Retail Champion's experienced business engagement team can help involve local businesses in place audits and stakeholder consultation. Our work helps local councils, Business Improvement Districts and trade associations understand the challenges and opportunities for their place, ensuring place making strategies are tailored to the needs of their local community.

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Place marketing
Place Marketing

Our team of experienced marketing professionals have created marketing strategies and campaigns for a range of places including towns and shopping centres, growing the digital presence of a place, increasing engagement with local businesses and with the community . Our campaigns increase a places brand profile, invite footfall and ultimately contribute to the overall vitality and prosperity of that place.

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After Dinner Speaker Clare Bailey
After Dinner Speaker

Clare Bailey offers her light-hearted insights into her experiences of life growing up in a family of entrepreneurs, working for major corporate brands, creating and running a successful business, and juggling the responsibilities of being a busy, working mum and business owner. Audiences can relate her warm and personable stories told in an entertaining and professional way.

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Outsourced Business Development

Smaller businesses typically have neither budget or need for a full-time, dedicated, professional resource to manage their PR, Marketing and Business Development. This service gives you the flexibility of a dedicated professional, on a retained basis, to maximise your business growth based on the needs of your business. Find our more about outsourced business development services.

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Place audits
Place audits

Place audits help local place makers understand the current challenges and opportunities relevant to their place to help inform place making strategies. Our team can complete audits to assess and understand a location's assets, challenges and opportunities and can engage with stakeholders to understand their aspirations for their place, what their current challenges are, and where they see the priorities for developing the economic, social and financial prosperity of where they work.

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How the Retail Champion Can Help You!

The Retail Champion mentoring programmes are tailored to provide you with exactly what you need to take your business forward; be that mentoring, advice, support, consultancy, project management or training.

Retail Success Programme
Retail Success

The aim of Retail Success is to help all business develop processes and systems that are both robust and repeatable, with an end goal to create scale-able - and sellable - enterprises. There are several ways to get involved with the Retail Success Programme; each designed to work around you, your business and your preferred way of learning from participating in the ten steps programme, mentoring, consultancy services to outsourcing marketing to the Retail Champion.

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Selling to Retailers
Selling to Retailers

Whichever level of engagement you choose, you can rest assured that when we work with you on your business, you can look forward to developing robust, repeatable processes and systems that will enable you to develop a scalable, saleable and profitable enterprise. Let us help you to develop a go-to-market strategy that will make retail buyers sit up and take notice!

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Business Support for SMEs
Business Support for SMEs

Our panel of experts at the Retail Champion offer comprehensive business support for SMEs to drive growth and success. Our experience supporting retail and hospitality businesses can be applied to any businesses selling to consumers. Our insights in consumer selling can also help you build an effective business-to-business strategy. Support available encompasses the key areas to help you launch or scale up your business from strategy development to delivering implementation.

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Clare Bailey Retail Expert Speaker
Retail speaker

As one of the UK's leading business speakers, Clare Bailey has experience of a wide variety of public and professional speaking engagements. She is a knowledgeable and engaging media contributor and regularly features as a commentator on BBC and commercial TV and radio channels, providing insights and analysis for topical news and consumer shows.

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Meet Our Team

Rob Colbert

Finance and Business Improvement Consultant

Donna Callander

Marketing Consultant

Catherine Smith

Bookkeeping and accounts specialist

Oliver Rayner

Video Creator Consultant

Get in touch to find out how we can help

Since 2010, Clare has helped thousands of retailers through her books, retail training, and mentoring programmes.

© 2023 Retail Champion. All Rights Reserved - by Clare Bailey