The Eight-Minute Delay

Emulating others is a reflex that is almost always short-sighted. The retailers posting the best numbers in early 2026 are not necessarily winning because of recent decisions. They are paying off decisions often made years ago; decisions that may have cost them profit, share price, or applause at the time, in exchange for the position they hold now. Chances are, no one was lining up to imitate them at that point. Think of it like the sunlight that reaches Earth that seems instantaneous;  it actually left the sun over eight minutes prior to delivering your sun-drenched experience. The same with quarterly results; they arrive based on past planning.

Planning Ahead

In October 2015, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon stood in front of his investors and told them, in effect, that the company was going to make less money on purpose. It would pour billions into wages, ecommerce, and the unglamorous plumbing of supply chain and technology; earnings would fall while it did this infrastructure work. The market’s response was not admiration. Walmart’s stock had its worst single day in years, shedding roughly $20 billion in value, because analysts had been expecting earnings to climb, not drop by double digits. When the company later paid $3.3 billion for Jet.com, a startup that made no money, the criticism only got louder.

What the strategists at Walmart had seen, and what most of the rest of the market had not yet noticed, was where the customer was going. The value shopper was moving online and beginning to expect to be met everywhere all at once: in the store, on the phone, and at the curb. Price alone would no longer hold them. It sounds obvious today, but McMillon and his team had foresight 11 years ago. Walmart bet on being everywhere the customer was heading before she even started her shopping journey. McMillon was willing to appear financially imprudent in the short term while he built the capacity to anticipate the future, not catch up to it.

A decade later, that bet is validated by the numbers. Although Jet.com and Mark Lore are gone, their impact endures. Walmart’s digital business is still growing fast. A membership and marketplace flywheel is finally turning, and the tell that matters most: Walmart’s strongest share gains are now coming from households earning more than $100,000. The discount giant is winning the customers it was supposedly too down-market to attract. To my point, that outcome wasn’t authored this past quarter. It was presented in 2015 to a room full of people who didn’t like or understand what they were hearing.

Shifting Positions

Ralph Lauren made a different kind of bet on the future, and a harder one to stomach because it meant deliberately selling less. By 2016, the brand had a problem common to many heritage names (Cartier comes to mind): it was everywhere, and being ubiquitous was quietly killing it. Relentless discounting through department stores and off-price channels had trained customers to refuse to pay full price. The brand’s meaning was eroding each off-price and markdown sale at a time, and its market value had already been cut roughly in half.

The orthodox move for a struggling retailer is to chase volume: more doors, promotions, and units. Ralph Lauren did the opposite. It pulled out of a large share of its wholesale distribution, cut inventory, throttled discounting, and shrank the top line on purpose to restore the brand’s worth. This was not the elimination of value retail—outlets remained part of the fleet—but a deliberate withdrawal from the channels that were eroding the brand, including the department-store markdowns and off-price clearance that had trained the core customer to wait for discounting. Revenue fell. Analysts accepted the logic but doubted it would inflect anytime soon, and the immediate results gave them every reason to worry.

The read underneath the pain, though, was a true read about the customer: People would pay full price for something that they felt was worth it, plus scarcity and integrity were assets the brand had been quietly compromising for years. Subtraction was the strategy, and discipline was the execution. The easy move, especially when you’re hurting, is to discount your way back to growth. Ralph Lauren refused that pathway. The proof is now clear: Maintaining a systematic run of full-price sales combined with a more affluent customer delivered healthy margins. They sold less at full price and were perceived as more valuable by their loyal customers. 

Bucking a Trend

It would be easy to file these case studies under a “giants making dramatic moves” rubric, but the pattern holds true for smaller brands. Urban Outfitters built a rental subscription, Nuuly, at a moment when many in the industry had written rental off as a money pit. Urban proceeded to lose money on Nuuly for years, exactly as the skeptics predicted. But the underlying bet was a prediction for a customer who wanted access more than ownership, newness without accumulation, and a rotating closet instead of a crowded one. That customer turned out to be real. Nuuly is now profitable, continuing to grow quickly, and has been carrying the parent company through financial reporting quarters when its namesake stores have stalled.

Levi Strauss made the longest bet of all. It opened its first U.S. store in Columbus, Ohio, in 1991, but for decades, the business still ran through other people’s sales floors. The real bet came later: a patient, expensive reweighting toward direct-to-consumer that meant cannibalizing its own wholesale business and absorbing the cost of running stores. What set Levi apart wasn’t defiance—direct-to-consumer was already proven by the time it leaned in— but conviction held over years rather than months, and the willingness to keep funding the transition long after the initial enthusiasm wore off. Today, direct-selling comprises more than half the business, and the brand owns the customer relationship which it used to rent from other brands’ sales floors.

Lessons Learned

Compare these four retail stories and three things become clear: none of them “copied the winners.” What does it take to shift the accepted status quo? The first is timing. Each of these retailers made a long-term decision years before positive results surfaced in the numbers. The reporting quarter is a lagging indicator of conviction and prescient planning, not a leading one. Whatever these companies are being congratulated for now was set in motion when no one was applauding, and in some cases, plenty of people were jeering.

The second is cost. To varying degrees, each of these bets was placed against the prevailing view. In Walmart’s case, the guidance triggered a historic sell-off, deliberately. In Ralph Lauren’s case, shrinking on purpose defied everything orthodoxy preaches about retail growth. But here is the distinction that keeps all of this from being a sermon about bravery: Running counter to the room is not the same as being right. Plenty of conviction is led by stubbornness and ego. What separates these retailers wasn’t that they defied accepted best practices; it was that they defied the consensus of their peers while reading the customer correctly. Each was an industry contrarian and an accurate customer advocate. Walmart anticipated the omnichannel value shopper. Ralph Lauren understood the customer’s fatigue with cheap ubiquity. Nuuly foresaw the appetite for access over ownership. Levi leveraged its customers’ desire for a direct relationship with the brand. These leaders were early to understand a customer’s truth, not on a mission to change groupthink. That’s the line between a bet that ages well into a win versus one that ages out as a cautionary tale.

The third lesson is the one the industry is most likely to miss: You cannot copy your way into this. By the time a contrarian bet is visible as a win, the window has closed. The prescient move is now obvious, fully priced and de-risked. It is no longer a bet that creates an industry-changing advantage. What’s worse is that imitating these strategies is the very herd behavior these companies refused to follow. Following the leader is not leadership.

The Cost of Conviction

It would be dishonest to pretend the conviction of foresight is easy. Walmart could absorb years of appearing to be wrong because it had the financial scale to absorb the investment and a board mandate. Ralph Lauren had deep pockets and an internal consensus. What they all share is a long-term perspective and the resistance to judging success (or failure) by the latest financial report. When you accept that a decision made years ago by people willing to take a risk for long-term success, it is no model that can be imitated and it’s worth pausing and reviewing your playbook with that in mind. It takes confidence and conviction to be willing to look wrong for several years.  But if you’ve read your customer well enough to make that bet, appearances can be deceiving.