We’re Not Fixing Retail with Flashy Tech, We’re Fixing What’s Broken: Cathy McCabe, CEO of Proximity

Cathy McCabe doesn’t talk like a tech founder. There’s no breathless pitch, no sweeping generalities about changing the future. What she offers instead is a certain kind of calm. Measured, deliberate, and steeped in experience.

As co-founder and CEO of Proximity, Cathy has spent the last several years working on something that sounds deceptively simple—bringing retail back to a more personal place, without throwing out the efficiencies that tech can offer.

“We called it Proximity for a reason,” Cathy begins, seated in a modest London office not far from where the business took shape. “Retail’s been drifting for years—away from the customer, away from common sense. We wanted to pull it back.”

Her path to Proximity wasn’t a straight line, but each step pointed in the same direction. Time at Burberry, then Jaeger, gave her an early grounding in what made stores tick. Later, as CIO at House of Fraser, she saw firsthand how legacy systems and clunky processes had begun to chip away at both staff morale and customer experience.

“I didn’t wake up one day wanting to start a company,” she says. “I just got tired of watching the same problems go unsolved. And I realized no one else was going to fix them.”

That was 2015. Since then, Cathy has built Proximity into one of those rare retail tech firms that retailers actually seem to trust. The company doesn’t promise the moon. What it does is deliver tangible improvements—tools that help store staff serve customers better, systems that don’t require a PhD to operate, and services that integrate without headaches.

The point, Cathy says, is to respect the store—not replace it.

“There’s been this wave of tools that try to turn stores into mini websites,” she says, almost shaking her head. “But the store is not a website. It’s a place. It’s people. It’s a human interaction. Why would you try to erase that?”

The Decision to Build

Cathy’s background reads like a highlight reel of traditional British retail. But even as she moved through senior digital and operational roles, there was a restlessness building. Strategy papers began to feel like exercises in delay.

“You’d go into meetings with a 50-slide deck, all the right numbers,” she says, “and yet nothing would change. Not because people didn’t care—but because they didn’t have the tools, or the time, or the confidence.”

Leaving corporate life wasn’t about rejecting it. It was about doing something more direct. Together with a small founding team, she began developing what would become Proximity’s early product—software that allowed store staff to access key customer information in real time, with minimal friction.

The first pilot was small—just a handful of stores in the Midlands. But the results were immediate.

“Customers remembered being remembered,” Cathy says. “It sounds obvious, but when someone greets you by name, remembers what you bought last time, checks stock without vanishing for ten minutes—it changes how you feel. That’s what we wanted to scale.”

Small Footprint, Big Impact

Today, Proximity works with a range of mid-sized and enterprise retailers across the UK and Europe. The company’s tools—clienteling apps, intelligent stock checks, smart appointment scheduling—are deliberately unflashy. But they work.

And that’s the whole point.

“We never wanted to be this all-singing, all-dancing solution that claims to fix everything,” Cathy says. “Retailers have had enough of those. What they want now are tools that are invisible in the right ways. Tools that just do the job.”

When asked how Proximity competes in a market full of louder, better-funded players, Cathy doesn’t flinch.

“We’re not loud,” she says. “We’re consistent. And we’ve never been interested in scale for its own sake. That’s not how trust is built.”

That trust shows in client relationships that often start modestly—one store, one team—but grow steadily over time. Cathy is quick to credit her team, many of whom have long backgrounds in retail themselves.

“They’ve stood on shop floors,” she says. “They know what it’s like to serve a customer during a holiday rush. So when we build something, it’s not theory. It’s real.”

No Appetite for Hype

Cathy has little patience for the kind of frothy marketing that tends to swirl around retail tech conferences.

“You see all these booths selling dreams—AI that knows your mood, mirrors that talk to you,” she says. “But ask a store manager what they actually need, and it’s probably something like fewer logins or a better returns process.”

This pragmatic streak runs through the company’s roadmap. Proximity isn’t racing to bolt on AI just because everyone else is. And it certainly isn’t replacing associates with screens.

“We’re not automating away the human,” Cathy says. “We’re making sure the human has the information they need, when they need it.”

In a post-COVID world, where retailers are still reckoning with shuttered locations and fickle customer behavior, Cathy sees clarity as a competitive edge.

“There’s a temptation to chase whatever’s trending,” she says. “But the retailers who are doing well now are the ones who stayed focused. They doubled down on basics. They listened to their teams.”

The Long Haul

Proximity hasn’t raised vast rounds of venture capital. It hasn’t opened a flashy HQ. Growth has been steady, customer-led, and largely self-funded. That’s not to say ambition is lacking—it just takes a different shape.

Cathy is clear about where she sees the company going.

“We’ll keep expanding,” she says. “But we’ll do it the way we’ve always done—one relationship at a time, one problem at a time.”

The next phase involves a stronger presence in continental Europe and further refinement of the analytics side of the product. But Cathy remains wary of feature creep.

“More isn’t always better,” she says. “What’s better is giving the right insight at the right moment. A dashboard doesn’t help if it takes five minutes to load or tells you what you already know.”

Culture Without Noise

Inside Proximity, Cathy has worked hard to build what she calls a “low-drama” culture. No heroics, no 80-hour weeks. Just people doing good work, consistently.

“We’re not trying to be the cool kids of retail tech,” she says. “We’re trying to be the reliable ones.”

That extends to the way they hire—slowly, carefully, and with an emphasis on listening over talking.

“There’s no room for ego,” she says. “Our clients don’t care about how smart we are. They care about whether we make their day easier.”

Staying Close

Cathy’s definition of proximity goes beyond product features. It’s about staying close to the customer, yes—but also to the store teams, the supply chain, the small details that make or break retail.

“You don’t build loyalty with gimmicks,” she says. “You build it by showing up, knowing who your customer is, and doing the basics really well.”

And while much of the tech world races ahead—chasing novelty, chasing scale—Cathy is sticking to her lane. Steady, thoughtful, human.

“Retail doesn’t need more noise,” she says, almost in a whisper. “It needs more clarity.”

She lets that thought hang in the air for a moment, then smiles.

“And that’s what we’re here to give.”

You don’t build loyalty with gimmicks. You build it by showing up, knowing who your customer is, and doing the basics really well.