Kris Hamer

Director of Insight, BRC

Kris Hamer leads the BRC Insight team and the delivery of all insight publications and events. He has spent his career working for UK retailers including Tesco, Waitrose, ASDA and SSP Group both instore and in central operations, leading teams that delivered analytical insights and operational change.

Kris has a PhD in applied statistical modelling of retail performance data and is a fellow of Henley Business School.

Sophie Birshan

Industry Head Retail, Google

Sophie is the Industry Head of Retail at Google, leading Google’s relationships with many of the UK’s largest retailers. Before joining Google, Sophie was Head of Insight at John Lewis & Partners, where she built the data science and analytics function. Previously she has held roles as Director of Loyalty Marketing at Mothercare; a consultant at McKinsey & Company in their London, San Francisco, and Mumbai offices; and a Policy Advisor in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Sophie holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and has two boys: during the past year she has been learning a lot from them about SB737, Binging with Babish and Nick DiGiovanni.

Carla Puttini

Strategic Insights Manager, Google

Carla Puttini is the Strategic Insights Manager for Retail at Google UK. She has over 10 years of experience in consumer and market insights, and is a strong believer in the power of data to inform decision making.

In her five years at Google, she has helped clients grow their businesses by helping them understand changes in consumer behaviour.

Carla is passionate about unraveling how people think and act, and how this knowledge can help businesses make better decisions.

Paul Winsor

Industry Principal, Retail & CPG, Snowflake

Paul has worked within the Retail industry for over 30 years. In his early career, Paul spent nearly 20 years at Sainsburys - the 2nd largest UK retailer - in which he was responsible for the data sharing strategy with 2,000 CPG companies. In the past 17 years, Paul has led the Retail GTM industry practice for many global leading data & analytics companies, helping retailers apply intelligence into their data. He joined Snowflake in late 2021, to help retailers mobilise and enrich their data with the Snowflake Retail Data Cloud.

Jeff Howarth

Director of Data Engineering, Dunelm