Retail insights at the intersection of now and next. Unfiltered. Unbiased
The first thing you learn, especially in the military, is if you make an investment and it’s not working, then you have to make tough decisions quickly and iterate. In business, as difficult as it is to make certain decisions, if it’s right for the business, it’s right for your stakeholders, and it’s right for you as a leader.
You’ve got to admit: Ryan Cohen, the CEO of GameStop, always thinks big and lives large. His attempt to take over eBay—a company at least four times bigger than his—was pretty outrageous.
Listen in as Shelley and Eliot reveal how the Orton family has resisted the temptation compromise their values in a screen-driven, digital marketplace. Their conversation gives a voice to deeply held values, classic, wearable clothes, and a retail ethos (including a customer bill of rights) that survives the test of time.
It is mind-boggling that a vertically integrated direct-to-consumer industry disruptor, generating 70 percent margins on a brilliantly conceived offering, ended up selling it for pennies on the dollar. But honestly, how many people want to buy a $15,000 bed?
A lot of companies think that loud and messy and customizable and, honestly, an unserious aesthetic proves a human actually made it. Packaging with the low-fi, Nickelodeon slime-esque aesthetic of hyper goo maximalism is the perfect in-group signifier to make next gen impulse purchases move.
Three companies built and sold with more than $200 million in sales. Refreshingly honest, T says part of her career trajectory is that she’s simply “not particularly employable.” She’s been disruptive her whole life, approaching everything with curiosity and imagination, never bound by how “something is supposed to be done.”
The boom and bust of Korea’s AI-fuelled financial markets could be foreshadowing a wider global meltdown. The way its digital natives are dealing with their reversed fortunes could also be a leading indicator of how the rest of the world’s consumers will cope.
We get that companies want to protect their valuable brand names, but Buc-ee’s, really? Over the past few months, they’ve sued at least half a dozen retailers—maybe more—for names and/or logos that they say are too similar to their iconic beaver character.
Join Shelley and Alice Pope, author of The Trust Algorithm: How Leaders Build Trust with Generative AI to get up to speed on a current trust recession. Alice says that we are facing more customer data than ever yet have a deeper skepticism about AI than ever.
Sign up for emails from The Robin Report and get our Daily Report, the latest in retail insights and analysis, delivered to your inbox.
