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Antonis Argyros

liateR: The shopping experience of the future!

At the age of 18, Antonis Argyros, created from scratch his own retail business by the name “Sportmania”. 16 years later he has 7 sport stores in Athens, Greece. He built his first online sport store in Greece in 2006 and since then he has been experimenting a lot around new technologies, augmented reality and gesture control.

And in mid-2004 liateR was born, an interactive sales solution for retailers and brands in the apparel and accessories market. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqHTwpwUz_4

In his spare time when he is not creating the shopping experience of the future, he is spending quality time with his 3 sons and as he calls: “His amazing wife”.

Why do you do what you do and how did you come about it…

Everything started when we realized that the experience somebody has visiting a store today is almost the same as it was one century ago. The biggest collateral damage retail faced while moving from small retail stores to big retail chains is the lack of a shopping experience that is personal for the consumer and scalable for the retailer. From one side consumers don’t receive the services they are looking for and from the other side we have retailers who witness their overall conversion rates to drop on a daily basis.

Consumers still visit physical stores for more than just transactions, but they now expect more out of any place they shop. They want informed, customized experiences. Retailers know these figures very well but they don’t have an easy and scalable way to serve their consumers.

For retailers to stay relevant they need to create new shopping experiences. With liateR we help them bridge the gap between offline and online retail by enabling millennials to select, try and buy the products they love, anywhere, anytime.

liateR started as an experiment in my retail sport stores chain. As soon as I realized the amazing results this solution has in our consumers engagement I decided to focus. With liateR we have 3x times more product seen in our shopping windows, timewise our consumers spend 5x times more in front of the shopping window and we have an astonishing of 25x times more connections with our online presence (online store, facebook page etc)

What are your strengths and why should a company invest in you?

Fortunately we have proofs on why we are different from any other solution. Intel is launching their new 3d sensor (goo.gl/ZPV0gs) and they have chosen liateR to be the only solution worldwide around retail that will be pre installed in all their devices.

What convinced them is our unique technology, our business approach (we create a tool for retailers and not some kind of gimmick as most of the others are doing), our omni-channel approach that maximize the benefits of this unique opportunity and of course our team that combines retail know how with HCI tech.

The basic reason why we have created liateR is because there isn’t any solution that uses the revolutionary technologies around HCI in its full potential, aiming to solve serious problems for the offline retail.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpIkqyzpxe4

Why should an investor consider in investing in liateR?

We already have raised an early stage investment round from Greek and Dutch investors. Fundraising is always easier when you have a working product and a significant traction.

In our case 1) the fact that we have worldwide partnerships with Intel and Microsoft, 2) the technical partnership we have with FORTH-ICS that secures us a pool of 12 developers that are working for us, 3) the first paying customers we have in Greece, Netherlands and U.S. and 4) the amazing team we have where we combine more than 32 years of retail experience with strong technical superiority where the key points.

How hard has your journey been till today as an entrepreneur?

The life on an entrepreneur is like a roller coaster and solving problems is what we do every day. I must say that the bigger the growth is inside a company the bigger is the size of the problems.

What is your Motto and what gets you up when you are down?

My motto is “Never give in and never give up.”

My 3 sons and my amazing wife is what motivates me the most.

 

http://www.liater.co