Full disclosure: I did not set foot in a store this season. In normal times, my in-store holiday shopping mood toggles between energized and irritated. Wandering through a crowded, slightly overheated store, dragging a coat with a bulky scarf-stuffed sleeve […]
Virtual Stores: Are They Here to Stay? Read More »
The flagship store has been a staple of retailing since…well, practically since retailing started. No self-respecting operation wouldn\’t dare to have a showpiece store, often downtown, but more recently in the dominant regional mall in its marketplace. The concept pretty
Home Retailers Go Large Even as Fashion Flagships Recede Read More »
Gen Z is in dire straits. They’re facing the second major economic recession of their lifetimes. They’re spending a year of their formative teens trapped at home. They’re staring down the barrel at climate change, so their future isn’t looking
2021 Forecast: Next Gens in a Brand-New World Read More »
The average age of a CMO is 52 for the consumer industry segment — and the CMO position has the shortest tenure of all C-suite executives at 3.5 years. One could argue that struggling to master the dramatic shift in
The New Chief Marketing Officer Read More »
Remember when everyone was talking about the great retail “bifurcation?” The gap between discount and luxury retail was the trending topic up until a year ago, when Covid-19 threw all of the old rules out the window. Then consumers started
The Great Retail Simplification Read More »
Long in a state of decline, 2020 provided the final nail in the coffin to kill off Black Friday as we have known it. While consumer shopping trends have changed in recent years, 2020 provided a catalyst for accelerated change
Black Friday is Dead Read More »
Ever since they put that pea under the princess\’s mattress a long, long time ago the bedding business has been pretty sleepy… and yes, the pun was too obvious to pass up. For decades it was dominated by three big
The Mattress Business Gets Woke Read More »
Tons have been written about DTC native brands, the startups, viral unicorns still trying to make a buck, and those new brands who are making lots of bucks. Most of them were created by young tech geeks, business school grads
Warby and the Natives Read More »
The Robin Report Innovators Network introduces you to startups with novel solutions that improve the performance and profitability of retail and brand operations. Our first four Innovators have engineered actionable systems to streamline retail in everything from contract management and
Four Startups Reinventing Retail Read More »
PrePan…Pan…Not-Yet-PostPan. What does the world of retail look like now? What did we learn? What did we let go of …and what changed us? Here\’s a retrospective look forward. 1. Shopping Safely You\’d have to living in a cave not
An Evolutionary Reinvention of Retail Read More »
