The retail industry has been rocked by the worldwide market disruption created by COVID-19. Despite the unprecedented challenges retailers are facing, consumers are still heavily shopping. In fact, Cyber Monday 2020 saw the highest spending for the holiday to date. According to Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday wrapped up 2020 with $10.8 billion in sales, representing…
Shawn Harris
Shawn currently leads go-to-market efforts for Zebra’s SmartSight, as Director of North American Sales. Leveraging Zebra’s over 50 years of experience building purpose-built solutions for retail, SmartSight is Zebra’s inaugural intelligent automation service offering for retail. In this role, Mr. Harris helps Zebra’s retail customers navigate the ever-changing retail landscape and truly digitize their store floors. He provides thought leadership, pragmatic insights and innovative solutions on issues pertaining to the implications of Intelligent Automation and Artificial Intelligence for business strategy, customer experience, inventory visibility and staff productivity.
Mr. Harris’ passion rests in brick-and-mortar and digital retail technology, operations and customer experiences. That has spilled over into supply chain management; he has a strong understanding of the complexity of the timebound matching of supply to demand.
He has been involved with store systems, ecommerce, and order management technologies for over 15 years and has served in various management and consulting roles with tier-one retailers, including TJX Cos, Staples, BJ’s, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and Uniqlo (Fast Retailing). Mr. Harris also founded a luxury menswear brand, which most was known for designing and manufacturing clothing for some of New England’s most regarded corporate executives and professional athletes across the country.
Mr. Harris keeps a keen eye on what’s potentially next, by staying closely involved in the Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley startup communities. He recently served as the program lead for the Startup Leadership Program and has participated in startup programs through XRC Labs, Techstars, MassChallenge and New York Fashion Tech Lab.
Before his career in retail, Mr. Harris helped to start e4eNet as the vice president of global operations. e4eNet was a cloud-based enterprise platform that handled the design for manufacturing process for printed circuit boards (PCBs), e4eNet was ultimately sold to IBM. Prior to e4Enet, Mr. Harris worked for IBM in a number of technical capacities and honorably served in the Army National Guard as an infantryman and armored personnel carrier (APC) driver for eight years. He has a deep curiosity for culture and language. He speaks conversational Japanese, and he has traveled to numerous countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia for business. Mr. Harris earned his MBA from Babson College and a bachelor’s degree in management information systems from the University of Massachusetts.