Nick Brackenbury
Most high street retailers are losing customers not because they lack stock, but because their stock is invisible. A shopper searching for a product on Google sees Amazon, eBay, and warehouses three days away, not the shelf five minutes from home. Closing that visibility gap is now the central commercial question for physical retail.
Nick Brackenbury is co-founder and CEO of NearSt, the retail technology company that puts live high street inventory inside Google Search and Maps so local shoppers can see what is in stock nearby in real time.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Nick Brackenbury
- A working answer to the visibility problem in physical retail. NearSt connects to point-of-sale systems and surfaces live in-store stock inside the platforms where shoppers already search, including Google and Facebook.
- Operating scale to back the argument. NearSt’s technology integrates with over 130 stock management systems and reaches over 800,000 retail locations globally, with Google as a named platform partner.
- Investor and partner credibility from inside retail and tech. Backers include Grosvenor Group, YYX Capital, Will Hobhouse of Heal’s and Jack Wills, and senior engineers from DeepMind and Google Research.
- A concrete view on where the high street competes and where it loses. Useful for retailers, landlords, and brands deciding how much to spend on stores versus marketplaces.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and CEO of NearSt, founded 2015, headquartered in London.
- Named platform partnership with Google connecting in-store inventory into Search and Maps.
- Total funding of approximately five million pounds across two rounds, led by YYX Capital and joined by Grosvenor Group, True Global, and Moscar Capital.
- Former Account Director at Ogilvy, working on Jaguar Land Rover, Nestle, and BP’s London 2012 Olympic sponsorship.
- Speaking platforms include RetailWeek Live, Wired Retail, eCommerce Expo, the British Retail Consortium, and Accenture events.
- Awards include RetailEXPO Innovation Award 2019, Get in the Ring Western Europe, RetailWeek Startup of the Week, and a London Book Fair Innovation Award.
Biography
A shopper looking for a specific product in 2026 starts in the same place: a search bar. The shop five minutes away has the item on the shelf. The shopper does not know that, so the order goes to a warehouse. NearSt was built to close that gap, by piping live in-store inventory directly into Google Search, Google Maps, and other consumer platforms.
The company was co-founded in 2015 by Nick Brackenbury and Max Kreijn, both former Ogilvy account leads. Brackenbury was one of the agency’s youngest account directors, working across digital programmes for Jaguar Land Rover, Nestle, and BP’s London 2012 Olympic Games sponsorship. NearSt began as a same-hour delivery platform for London high street shops and pivoted into the infrastructure layer beneath the search engines themselves.
That pivot is the substance of the speaking material. NearSt’s technology now plugs into more than 130 stock management systems and reaches over 800,000 retail locations globally. Investors include Grosvenor Group, YYX Capital, True Global, and Moscar Capital, alongside angels from Heal’s, Jack Wills, DeepMind, and Google Research. Awards from RetailEXPO, RetailWeek, Get in the Ring, and the London Book Fair sit on top of that operating record.
For senior retail and brand audiences, the value is a working commercial argument. Physical stores hold inventory that online retailers cannot match for speed of fulfilment or sustainability of footprint. The constraint has been discoverability, not stock. Brackenbury talks about that constraint from inside the system that is removing it.
Key speaking topics
- The future of high street retail
- Local commerce and in-store inventory visibility
- Customer experience in physical retail
- Retail technology and platform partnerships
- Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership
- Pivoting a business model under pressure
Ideal for
- Retail leadership audiences: CEOs, CMOs, and heads of stores at multi-site retailers and brands.
- Property and landlord audiences with high street and shopping centre exposure.
- Marketing and customer experience leaders weighing physical store investment against marketplace spend.
- Entrepreneurship and scale-up audiences interested in pivoting from B2C to platform infrastructure.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of why local stock is the most under-used competitive asset in physical retail.
- Specific examples of how integrating store inventory with Google and Facebook changes footfall and conversion.
- A founder’s account of pivoting from a consumer-facing app to an infrastructure business, with the commercial reasoning.
- A working framework for evaluating retail technology investments against measurable in-store outcomes.