Does Your Technology Sell, Or Does It Distract?

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

Last week, Nadia Shouraboura gave me one of the most interesting interviews I’ve had in a long time. Shouraboura is the founder of Hointer, a boutique retailer-turned in-store technology company that’s hell-bent on turning the physical retail experience as we know it on its ear. Her story is inspiring and I don’t hesitate for a second to call her a pioneer, which is why I’ll be writing a profile of Shouraboura for an upcoming story in Innovative Retail Technologies. In the meantime, I thought I’d reflect on a particularly poignant comment she made while we spoke.

Shouraboura is a technologist, and a very good one. She spent many years working for Jeff Bezos. To be clear, I’m not simply saying she worked for Amazon. She worked on Amazon’s elite “S Team,” which means she worked for Jeff Bezos. Yet for all of her tech chops, she doesn’t want the customers in her stores interacting with technology—unless that technology is facilitating a sale.