Retail insights at the intersection of now and next. Unfiltered. Unbiased
Join Shelley and Katie Thomas from the Kearney Consumer Institute as they challenge conventional wisdom about the economy that’s leading retailers to misclassify customers and fail on pricing, assortment, and messaging.
The uber luxury market is the only one poised for genuine, sustainable, profitable growth. It’s time to forget about the ‘aspirational’ consumer, lusting after high-end, name-checked logos and settling for an over-packaged bottle of a marquee brand’s fragrance. Forget too, the quaint notion of ‘masstige,’ because life changes at the macro-level while marketers change at the micro-level.
There is a disturbing disconnect between the classroom and performance on a retail sales floor. This is an industry-wide problem. If you ask any local retail manager, they’ll probably tell you they’re retraining new hires from scratch while eating the costs of avoidable returns. To be blunt, what retailers fail to realize is that the counter is only as good as the training behind it.
Melissa Gonzalez didn’t plan to revolutionize retail. The Principal and founder of MG2 and author of The Purpose Pivot, left her Wall Street career for a more creative path, leveraging her analytical talent, risk management ability and affinity with consumer passion. Her career has been defined by clarity in the midst of chaos, by understanding the bigger picture.
It doesn’t get any more experiential than Netflix’s store format, which takes participatory adventures, hospitality and the ubiquitous gift shop to levels unmatched by anything this side of Florida theme parks.
Take that Amazon and Google and all the rest of you entitled Magnificent Seven: You’ve got a new trillionaire member, and it’s not another tech bro AI and agentic wannabe.
Join Shelley and Liza Amlani, principal and founder of Retail Strategy Group and co-author of The Material Life, as they discuss why design innovation is typically mismatched with process innovation in the fashion supply chain, and what the consequences are.
Retailers that continue to compete primarily on product breadth risk becoming background noise. Availability doesn’t equate to value. Curation isn’t a niche strategy reserved for luxury brands or personal shoppers. It is becoming table stakes for relevance in a crowded, fatigued marketplace.
TikTok Shop harnesses the power of interest-driven impulse shopping through entertainment, rather than consumer necessity, like Amazon. Using “shoppertainment” to lock down Gen Z consumer loyalty is where TikTok Shop excels.
Sign up for emails from The Robin Report and get our Daily Report, the latest in retail insights and analysis, delivered to your inbox.
