Sandy Miller

Sandy Miller, founder and President of Miller/Zell, Inc., was born in Tacoma, Washington and moved to Atlanta when he was five. Mr. Miller holds a B.A. in Economics from Emory University is married to the former Harriet Higgins and has two sons, one of who is in the business.

After service in the Army, he bought a silk-screen printing business. By 1974, the company began specializing in providing services and products to all types of retail chains. The company has evolved into handling national new store and renovation programs for many of the world's largest retail and franchisee companies. Today, the 600,000-foot home office campus includes the Design Center, a unique retail lab, Logistics Center, and a highly sophisticated printing and distribution operation. The company has offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Bentonville, and Toronto.

His focus today is building a great management team and working with clients in developing innovative, practical and cost effective strategies, which the company calls Integrated Store Development®. He believes the critical requirements in this hyper-competitive climate are Branding for results, planned continuous concept renewal and focusing the stores on meeting the needs and opportunities in increasingly varied marketplace. And he believes that one of the areas of greatest opportunity for financial institutions is viewing their branch development like the best retailers: Increasing traffic, selling more of your services and products and creating long-term client relationships.

Miller Zell believes the store development process must be a completely holistic process, integrating focused strategy, great design with concurrent value engineering, fast-track prototyping (with measured results) highly cost effective rollout, tailoring stores to the marketplace and planned, ongoing new idea development (continuous concept renewal).

We believe strategy and design must be developed by determining what effect it will have on targeted customers, what it will help cause them to think and do. It must highlight and reinforce promoting the services, products and relationship the various Brands feature. When we meet, we will present our strategic observations on retail trends and how they affect the financial services section.