About Martec's Managing Director

Brian founded Martec 35 years ago. His goal was to develop a retail consulting business providing services to retailers and technology vendors in the UK.

 

 

Brian Hume
Managing Director



Background

Prior to forming Martec, Brian held executive positions in the Debenhams department store group in the UK. His department store career qualified Brian as a hybrid manager, with various appointments in the MIS division ranging from Systems Manager to Divisional Director and a second career as General Manager of warehousing and distribution and lead executive in supply chain management.

Brian graduated in Mathematics, Operational Research and Statistics and moved into retailing following two years in logistics planning for a major brewer and ten years with a leading consulting company and systems integrator.

Martec

Martec was born on 1st July 1987.  Luck always plays a part in life and Brian's first two clients were Harrods and American Express. With brand names such as these, other prospective clients made decisions to use our services faster. We moved into training just 5 months later after client number 4 asked us to help train their sales force to understand the retail industry. 

International Growth

Brian had originally intended Martec to be a UK business, but within two years clients had asked us to provide services in Europe and then the US.  We have worked in 38 countries and have a deep knowledge of retailing around the world. Our US business grew so well that Brian and his wife moved to Atlanta in 1998 to set up a US subsidiary. They returned to England in 2008. In the meantime, the development of the European community made it easier to sell services in Europe and we now have a long list of European customers as far afield as Portugal, Finland, Lithuania and Denmark. More recently, Martec has been increasing its activities in the Middle East and over a number of years has completed projects in Australia, China, Japan and India.

Clients

Brian has consulted to some of the world's leading retailers and suppliers in areas such as business strategy, development of strategic partnerships, all aspects of merchandise management, supply chain, CRM, store operations and the use of IT to improve business performance. His personal clients include supermarket retailers, convenience stores, fashion and department stores, mail order and online retailers, discounters, hypermarkets and various types of speciality retail. In addition to the retail community, Brian has worked with consumer goods manufacturers, fibre and textile manufacturers, banks, credit card issuers, wholesalers, telecommunications suppliers, computer manufacturers, software houses and others who need to understand and market to the retail industry.

Expertise

As a dynamic and knowledgeable speaker, Brian has been invited to lecture to retail audiences all over the world. His work has been translated into a number of different languages. He has taught merchandise management theory and practice to US retailers on behalf of the National Retail Federation. He presents training classes in a wide variety of countries.

Re-focus

In July 2019 Brian took the decision to focus Martec on the training business and to make it 100% of our activity. Since then he has launched a complete new online curriculum for consumer goods manufacturers, be they CPG/FMCG companies or consumer durables companies. This is being followed in 2022 with a complete new training suite in Selling Space Productivity Management and Visual Merchandising.  In Spring 2023 our Security and Loss Prevention suite will be launched.  More will follow in 2023.