Uber Eats is expanding, and its newest partner uses more tool belts than takeout containers.

Ace Hardware is joining the growing roster of non-food companies that offer delivery through the ride-sharing-app-turned-logistics company. Other partners include retailers such as Sephora, Dollar General, and Spirit Halloween, and grocery stores such as Save A Lot.

The partnership with the hardware chain “demonstrates Uber Eats’s continued commitment to expanding selection beyond food delivery into everyday retail categories,” according to the company.

In 2025, Uber Eats added more than a thousand new retailers to create a network of 50,000 locations, and with Ace Hardware comes more than 3,700 stores across 50 states.

“Whether they’re tackling a last-minute project or planning ahead, our customers now have greater access to fast, flexible solutions for getting the products they need delivered right to their doorstep,” Bill Kiss, head of digital at Ace Hardware, said in a statement.

“Consumers are increasingly turning to Uber Eats for more than just meals,” Hashim Amin, head of grocery and retail for Uber in North America, said in a statement. “They rely on us for a variety of essentials, from paint supplies, to mulch for the garden, to the tools needed to kick off a weekend yard cleanup.”

The evolution is five years in the making. Non-takeout items such as flowers and convenience store items started showing up on Uber Eats in 2021 following partnerships with GoPuff and ProFlowers, respectively. Since then, it’s become an increasingly important facet of its business.

Uber told Bloomberg last September that its non-takeout delivery business would hit an annual run rate of $12.5 billion in gross bookings by the end of 2025, and that growth in its delivery business was outpacing its ride-hailing business.

• The company reported in February that revenue from delivery grew 26% in 2025, compared to 20% from its ride-hailing business.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told shareholders that what it calls “selection,” or the number of companies available for delivery in a given market, is key to growth. “Our selection still in many countries is 30–40% of the addressable market,” he said. “Our selection in the US—especially in less dense markets in small and medium businesses—is not where we want to be.”

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One argument for getting marketing localization right is the crises that can erupt when brands get it disastrously wrong.

Just ask Dolce & Gabbana. In 2018, the Italian fashion house produced a video campaign featuring a Chinese model struggling to eat Italian fare including pizza and cannoli with chopsticks. Following accusations that the ads were racist, major Chinese retailers removed the brand’s products from their websites, the brand canceled a Shanghai fashion show, and its eponymous owners issued a video apology.

Or ask Ikea, which in 2012 airbrushed women out of photos in a Saudi Arabia catalog, presumably to appease government censors, and which also ended up apologizing.

Whether it’s adapting messaging from one country to another, or one city to another, marketing localization is where brands connect with consumers by demonstrating their cultural literacy. And it’s about much more than hiring a translator.

Lost in translation? Not these brands

The Strategy Institute lauds what it calls Starbucks’s “multidomestic approach” to international markets, where the brand “meticulously analyzes local coffee drinking habits, social norms, and economic conditions to understand nuanced preferences.” Such an approach, it continues, includes “customized food items—China sees xiaolongbao dumplings while India indulges in masala chai lattes.”

Originally produced in Britain in the 1935, Kit Kats marketed in Japan are so immersed in Japanese culture and tastes that a New York Times Magazine article noted many consumers there think it’s a brand native to Japan.

Along with having such regional flavors as sake, wasabi, and Tokyo Banana, the way Kit Kats are sold in Japan also is unique.

“The Kit Kat has range” in Japan, the magazine stated. “It’s found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores…stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse.”

So instructive is the example that the Harvard Business Impact even published a business case study about the Kit Kat execution in Japan to teach marketing students about how Nestlé Japan began rolling it out in 2008.

Listen first, then launch

Staying within the US, Whole Foods launched its Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP) in 2022 to get more products from local markets on shelves. Whole Foods’s website features such brands on a section of its website that encourages shoppers to explore products made in their region that are available at their local stores.

Lokalise, which makes a localization platform for businesses, wrote in a blog post that brands entering new markets should use social listening tools to get the lay of the land before developing an approach. The company also suggests going to Yelp (or one of its local equivalents) and reading reviews of similar offerings there to gain “a good perspective of their pain point and where current solutions fall short.”

While major brands have no shortage of in-house marketing muscle, Lokalise encourages those entering new markets to engage local marketers and influencers “to get faster entry to popular channels” and “build credibility quickly and penetrate the market.”

Lokalise stressed that localization is about much more than getting the language right.

“In short,” it wrote, “authentic localization goes far beyond translation.”

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Marketplaces are still a big growth engine for e-commerce.

However, as the pace of retail media growth slows, a consolidation among marketplace agencies that offer professional services to optimize seller listings and manage ads is underway.

The latest acquisition comes from Podean, which services brands that sell on Amazon. Podean has acquired Amerge, an international firm that manages Amazon advertising for brands across the EU, Ryan Craver, co-founder and chief strategy and AI officer at Podean, told Retail Brew.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Private equity firm Mountaingate Capital poured money to finance the deal. Amerge, headquartered in London, is Podean’s third acquisition after it acquired rival Commerce Canal and Ad Advance, another marketplace agency which specializes in advertising. Amerge will bring some additional technology to Podean’s current platform.

“It’s all about strength in numbers,” Craver said. “There’s a consolidation of agencies, and the larger agencies generally will have better placement, better opportunities for better programs, better pricing, and better overall tech.”

Amerge is Podean’s third acquisition in the past year, “but it won’t be our last,” Travis Johnson, global CEO of Podean, said in a statement. “Our strategy is driven by the services and geographies our clients need to drive growth. As an integrated leadership team, we fundamentally believe in the importance of independence and a clear focus on marketplace and retail media networks.”

The deal adds strength to Podean’s client stack with tech, electronics, and consumer goods verticals. Plus, the technology used by Amerge “reinforces the speed [Podean brings] to clients,” Amerge Co-Founder and the new International CEO of Podean John Doyle said in a statement.

“We’re taking the best of their tech and including it within our tech,” Craver added.

The timing of the deal is not surprising because retail media has been under some pressure, thanks in large part to AI. Agent-assisted shopping is expected to push regular digital advertising on retail sites out of the spotlight. Therefore, companies like Podean need to insulate themselves from future uncertainty.

“We are seeing more consolidation among both the smaller and larger agencies in this market,” Sky Canaves, eMarketer analyst for retail and e-commerce, told Retail Brew. “It’s just more efficient for brands to work with agencies that can provide more services and can really support them across geographies.”

The combined entity will represent more than 450 global brands on Amazon including e.l.f. Cosmetics, Mattel, Adobe, and Danone. Plus, it will have more than $500 million in marketplace and retail media billables. Podean and Amerge together generated more than $4 billion in Amazon sales in 2025.

“This just helps to provide more of the services that brands are looking for, because a lot of the brands that they serve are not necessarily just US-focused,” Canaves said, “but they want to be able to sell globally and plug into Amazon wherever it operates.”

The AI shift: As ad buying becomes more automated, a critical part of the marketplace ecosystem is understanding how to maximize existing tools while deploying AI.

“Certainly, they’re larger agencies that have larger scale can have more to invest in AI, and can then translate that to their clients,” Canaves added.

Meanwhile, Craver admitted that if agentic purchases bypass ad clicks, Amazon’s advertising revenue will take a hit.

“I do think that there’s an impact,” Craver said. “But I also would highlight the fact that agentic buying is a very small percentage of overall business today—and how large it becomes over time is difficult to say—but I wouldn’t anticipate it being a massive percentage of the overall business.”

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One foolproof way to avoid high gas prices? Shop from your couch.

According to a new report by e-commerce marketing company Omnisend, online spending surged 20% month-over-month in March as consumers avoid the $4+ price at the pump amid the Middle East conflict. Online spending typically shifts about 1%–5% on a monthly basis outside holiday periods, per Omnisend.

Consumers shopped more often and placed larger orders in March: Online orders jumped 12%, and average order value was up 8%. A consumer survey Ominsend conducted also found that 83% of consumers cite gas prices as their largest cost concern, with 30% saying they’d shift their shopping online to steer clear of driving.

Even if the higher gas prices could be ultimately baked into product or shipping costs, consumers still see online shopping as a workaround to spending on gas, Marty Bauer, e-commerce expert at Omnisend, said in a statement.

“When gas crosses a psychological price threshold, the math changes,” he said. “A round trip to the store starts competing with ‘free’ shipping.”

When consumers are shopping in person, they’re making the most of the gas they’re using by taking fewer but larger trips, Omnisend found. That’s especially true for purchasing non-discretionary items like groceries and other household staples, with average order value up 22% YoY in Q1. A Coresight report last month similarly noted shoppers would save gas by cutting back on shopping trips for non-essential items. Bauer called this “defensive buying” and noted that “brands that treat this like a sign of strong demand and keep pushing prices up risk speeding up the pullback.”

A consumer survey last week by brand loyalty and promotions company Snipp Interactive yielded similar results. Half of consumers said gas prices are impacting their shopping behaviors, with 29.8% consolidating their trips and 21.5% taking fewer trips. According to Snipp, 26.1% of consumers are opting to shop at retailers that are “closer to home” due to high gas prices, and 13.1% have moved to buying more online.

The Commerce Department’s monthly retail sales data, which includes e-commerce sales, continues to be delayed due to last year’s government shutdown, with March data set to be reported on April 21.

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After a tense contract standoff, Amazon has struck a deal to cut 20% of its business with the US Postal Service, though USPS is still expected to handle more than 1 billion Amazon packages annually.

Amazon ran into problems with USPS after the government organization said in December that it planned to introduce a new bidding system for deliveries. The auction would have meant Amazon had to rely on a system wherein it competes with other vendors for USPS business.

To avoid the USPS auction process, Amazon made plans to run its own delivery service. However, USPS reportedly resumed talks with Amazon after bids from other vendors did not meet expectations.

“We’re pleased to have ​reached a new agreement with USPS that furthers our longstanding partnership and will ​let us continue supporting our customers and communities together," Amazon said in a statement to Reuters.

The new deal comes as higher fuel prices pressure carriers like USPS to raise prices on packages. Amazon has also raised its shipping fee temporarily to offset higher logistics expenses.

The deal with USPS will also support Amazon in its ambition to serve people in rural America, where it has been ramping up faster delivery speeds. Numbers show that rural Prime customers spend around $950 on Amazon per year on average, per data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partner (CIRP). And 16% of rural customers have reported same-day or one-day delivery of their most recent Amazon order, CIRP data showed.

In March, FedEx also introduced FedEx SameDay delivery services in partnership with last-mile delivery network and logistics platform OneRail.

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Thinking of ordering in tonight, or getting your groceries delivered via an app? Maybe even a last-minute dress or pair of shoes? Well, apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats, both of which have partnered with several fashion brands over the past year, are hoping they can serve all of those needs within minutes.

DoorDash, which has joined forces with the likes of Steve Madden, Rally House, and Urban Outfitters, among many other fashion retailers in the last several months, said it’s part of the company’s founding vision to connect “everything in the neighborhood to the consumer.”

“Those principles are really around speed, affordability, convenience,” Mike Goldblatt, VP of enterprise sales and business development at DoorDash, told Retail Brew.

The platform now offers more than 500,000 retail items nationwide, as it continues building out its apparel and fashion categories. Still, the obvious question remains: Who really needs a last-minute pair of pants?

“The use cases are pretty wide-ranging, and so sometimes it’s an urgent need, like a new pair of pants; sometimes it’s a more planned purchase for a party,” Goldblatt said.

The need for speed: Speed is part of the appeal. Deliveries that arrive within 30–45 minutes can serve urgent needs, while the delivery network can also handle more considered orders placed ahead of events.

John Harmon, CFA and managing director of technology research at Coresight Research, told Retail Brew it is all part of a broader “flywheel effect” already present across e-commerce platforms.

“You already could do retail shopping on DoorDash and Uber anyway,” he said. “The more volume they do, the more efficient they become, the lower their shipping costs become, the quicker they’re able to ship items.”

And efficiency simply drives customers to buy more volume. “It’s a virtuous circle,” Harmon said, adding that it also helps consumers view such platforms as not just a delivery service but a “shopping portal.”

As for the brands, adding a last-mile delivery partner along with their own e-commerce business means more sales.

DoorDash says partnerships with retailers have helped bring new customers to the platform.

“We’re the largest platform in North America [with] 56 million monthly active customers at this point,” Goldblatt said, noting that 30% of its customers shop for items outside of restaurant delivery.

“We just firmly believe that any retailer that joins the marketplace is going to benefit from meaningful incremental sales that they otherwise wouldn’t get,” he said.

Ultimately, the arrangement could prove a win-win for both retailers and delivery platforms, especially if apparel purchases start boosting average basket sizes.

“Consumers shop in a variety of channels: Some go to the store, some use the app, some use the website and some go to social media,” Harmon said. “This is just another place to have a presence where consumers might be.”

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Farming isn’t typically associated with speed—most tractors can only go about 25 miles per hour—but “speedy” may be the word that best describes Tractor Supply’s growth trajectory in recent years. The farming supplies and equipment outlet opened 90 new locations in 2025 and plans to open 100 more in 2026, as the purveyor of chicken coops, horse feed, and outdoor workwear capitalizes on what Placer.ai has called a significant “unmet demand” in rural markets across the country.

But the market opportunity is only part of the story. Tractor Supply has also invested heavily in AI-powered technology to drive growth. In January, CEO Harry Lawton said the company had extended the use of AI across its entire enterprise and expanded its partnership with OpenAI. He also hinted at how Tractor Supply gauges the success of its AI investments: “The capabilities are improving forecasting, inventory flow, and team member productivity.”

With 90% of retail and CPG companies planning to increase their AI budgets in 2026, according to a survey by Nvidia, how these companies plan to measure their ROI is one of the biggest questions facing the industry—and the example of early adopters such as Tractor Supply could prove instructive.

Sales and speed: So what does success look like for an AI-forward firm? Glenn Allison, VP of AI platforms at Tractor Supply, told Retail Brew that there are a number of key metrics for measuring when an AI-powered technology is working.

Sometimes this is as simple as taking a successful transaction and looking back at whether AI tools were used during the sales process. Tractor Supply is able to track when, for example, an employee used its generative AI application Hey GURA prior to making a sale, Allison said. The application, which is available to all in-store associates through handheld devices, can provide information about products, generate recommendations based on a customer’s needs, and locate products within the store.

There is a similar process for its Tractor Vision system, which uses computer vision to alert employees when help is needed around the store, whether that’s a long line forming at checkout or a customer looking for assistance with a purchase decision. If one of these alerts preceded a sale, that’s a positive indicator.

Speed of service is another metric for determining ROI. The speed at which propane tanks are refilled is one such success story, Allison said. In the past, customers had to come into the store to notify an employee when they needed assistance. Now they can signal through the app when they are ready for a refill, and an employee will respond, completing the entire transaction process on a handheld device.

“It’s all centered around the team member,” Allison said. “We’re using AI to save time and reinvest that time back into the customer experience.”

Better availability: These measures are mostly focused on the customer experience and sales processes, but inventory planning is also a target for AI-powered improvements. Through its partnership with Relex, a supply chain service provider, Tractor Supply is using AI to help maximize product availability.

A case in point: By tracking the sales velocity of SKUs, the company can tell when sales suddenly drop off for a given product. It then uses AI to generate an employee task to investigate what might be going on and correct the issue, whether it’s a merchandising or shelving problem, or a wrong price. This ultimately gets more inventory in the right place at the right time, which helps keep inventory levels in check.

For its part as a vendor of this type of technology, Relex tracks the revenue gains that come with better presentation and minimized out-of-stocks, Relex CEO Mikko Kärkkäinen told Retail Brew. He noted that lowering inventory levels has an “immediate cash flow impact” and then a longer-term impact on the P&L statement, including reduced capital costs and less need for costly warehouse space.

“That can be super meaningful in many cases,” he said.

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From nationwide parcel carriers to individual delivery drivers, the US-Israeli war with Iran is raising costs up and down the retail supply chain.

In response to higher energy prices and other geopolitical disruptions, Kearney revised its 2026 inflation forecast for global supply costs to increase between 5% and 7% rather than 2.3%–4%, noting that companies will “feel this immediately.”

In addition, “unlike tariffs,” the consulting firm wrote, there will be “direct and immediate pass-through of energy costs to commercial contracts.”

FedEx and UPS have significantly raised their fuel surcharges since the conflict started, per a Wall Street Journal report. Both companies index their rates to the weekly price report published by the US Department of Energy, which showed diesel prices rising above $5 per gallon for the last two weeks. 

Both diesel and regular gas prices are up more than 30% from a year ago, marking one of the fastest increases in recent memory. “It’s one of largest month over month increases we’ve seen, even outpacing what we saw in 2022,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told Retail Brew.

He said his view of the downstream effects of the uptick is limited, but that anecdotally “airfares are going up, surcharges from logistics companies are going up, and I know that the price trucking companies pay is absolutely going up.”

Meanwhile, app delivery drivers are paying more at the pump as well, and DoorDash is paying out a stipend and cashback benefit to help recoup the cost. The program gives 10% cash back for users of the DoorDash Crimson card, and weekly “relief payments” for drivers who travel 125 miles or more in a week. Combined, the two benefits could total between $1.40 and $1.90 per gallon in savings.

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On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Michael Carle is CEO of Nate’s Honey maker Sweet Harvest Foods.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? As CEO of Sweet Harvest Foods, I lead the largest US honey producer which provides the highest quality ingredients for some of the most iconic brands and beloved products. I also lead two US brands: Nate’s Honey, the No. 1 honey brand, and Nate’s Hives, the largest beekeeper. My role is to enable my leadership team to function at the highest level, drive creativity and innovation across their departments, and make strides toward our vision of being the trusted honey company that nourishes every home and every occasion.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? Honey isn’t just a job; it has an important connection at home. My wife was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease 13 years ago and has been on a long-term journey to adjust her diet in ways that can help her manage it. She was eventually led to honey to support her in controlling the inflammation in her body. It’s become an important part of her diet, to the point where she takes a teaspoon of it every day! And it’s a bit of a treat to her as well.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Honestly, there has been no better professional experience for me than leading Sweet Harvest Foods to transform honey from a sleepy commodity into a $1.4 billion industry that delivers trusted, all-natural honey at scale across the US. In the midst of honey industry and market challenges, we’ve been able to accomplish our vision of becoming the leader in honey. We’ve done that by investing in world-class operations, scaling up our beekeeping business to become the largest US apiary, continuing to build Nate’s Honey as the No. 1 honey brand, and pioneering the innovation and quality that is driving the honey category. And we’re looking forward to accelerating business growth of our health and wellness product categories in 2026.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? The most exciting trend I’m seeing is the growth of shopper interest in functional foods. It aligns perfectly for Sweet Harvest Foods and our Nate’s Honey brand since there is no need to engineer the kinds of wellness and functionality that is naturally found in pure honey. So, we’re just meeting people where they are and focusing on formats that fit their lifestyles like Nate’s Honey Minis for a pre-workout boost or Nate’s Manuka Honey for daily wellness.

What’s your go-to coffee order? My go-to morning drink is tea. Sometimes it’s hot, sometimes iced, but always with a drizzle of Nate’s Honey.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? “You can’t differentiate or brand a commodity. Don’t try.” I’ve heard that several times over my career, yet there are so many clear examples of that not being true: water, eggs, coffee, and yes, honey. The most important thing is to understand the consumer. What’s important to them? Then create a product that speaks to those needs. If you can’t uniquely meet a need, it’s difficult to differentiate.

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? In high school, I was an athlete and constantly on the go. I couldn’t drink enough Dr. Pepper and would eat Hot Pockets at school for lunch almost every day. When you burn 4,000 calories a day, you can do that. My daughter is an athlete now and fortunately cares more about nutrition. She’s found our Nate’s Manuka Honey to be a great part of her fitness routine and thankfully isn’t following in my footsteps!

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In the age of social media, traditional advertising and marketing have completely transformed, especially in the past decade.

Consumers need more than impressive billboards or advertisements to put their trust in a brand. Many now look to influencers, content creators, or other consumers before purchasing a product or service.

Per a recent PYMNTS intelligence report, 56% of shoppers in the US make at least one annual purchase based on influencer recommendations, while 12% make more than six.

Authentic authority

A key driver behind this creator-led retail marketing growth is a longing on the part of consumers for authenticity and transparency.

“Customers want to reduce the gap between their experience and also the information created by the sellers or the brands,” Minkyung Kim, assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, told Retail Brew. “That’s why there are a lot of things like social commerce or online reviews that actually lead brand marketing in retail, because that kind of authenticity, the closer distance, and bridging the gap between their experience and the information really matters to the customers.”

This has specifically been true for categories such as beauty and fashion where influencers are able to capture significant audiences.

“For apparel or beauty, the fit between the customer and the product is more important,” Kim said. “That’s where customers seek more information for authenticity and credibility.”

User case

And this “authenticity” also drives real results. Kim explained that a major metric for measuring whether creator-led marketing or user generated content impacts profits or sales is product returns.

“Online reviews help reduce product returns, because that gives more detailed and authentic information to the customers that they could not really see from the seller- or brand-generated information,” she said. “So it’s not only the sales, but reducing the product returns is becoming more important because of shipping, customer service, and all kinds of unnecessary [logistics] costs that the brands have to incur.”

The PYMNTS study found similar results. In the survey, 44% of consumers said they returned influencer-recommended products “less often than other items,” compared with the 24% who said they return those products more often.

And while metrics for conversions and sales directly tied to influencer marketing are not as simple to determine as some other channels, brands increasingly see a lot of value in it.

According to a 2022 Harvard Business Review report, the influencer marketing industry hit $16.4 billion with more than 75% of retailers dedicating budgets to it.

Catching a shift

In fact, the format has become so intrinsic to retail marketing today that many lifestyle and fashion brands are now posting their own influencer-style social media videos to maximize their margins instead of relying on well-established creators or celebrities, according to a New York Times report.

“In the last sort of 10 years, there’s been a massive shift in terms of the way that customers want to be marketed to,” Emma Shepherd, head of marketing at fashion brand Damson Madder, told the publication. “Peer-to-peer marketing has become such a huge part of how customers interact with brands and how customers want to be sold to. Gone are the days where customers want brands to kind of be really autocratic and tell you: ‘This is what you should wear. This is what’s on trend.’”

The industry is likely to continue to grow with companies becoming ever more adept at targeting a range of consumers with influencer- and creator-led content.

“I think many brands are actually running a lot of experiments to test if the specific component of the promotion really works or not,” Kim said. “So for example, they turn on and turn off some kinds of specific messages to some target customers, and that’s becoming more and more feasible due to the digital aspects of this kind of marketing. Most of this [type of] marketing is online and really targeted to a specific set of customers…That’s why they are improving in terms of the attribution and measurement.”

In short, marketing has shifted from brands talking at consumers to creators and customers talking about them. And as retailers refine the tools that track conversions and returns, storytelling may become one of the industry’s most measurable growth strategies yet.

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It’s no secret that Victoria’s Secret’s once-booming bra business lost some lift over the last decade.

As shoppers increasingly chose comfort over sex appeal, and the ideal of its Angels fell back down to Earth, its sales and market share eroded. But one year into CEO Hillary Super’s turnaround plan, Victoria’s Secret’s bra sales have achieved annual growth for the first time in four years.

Last year, Super, who took the helm in 2024, introduced the company’s four-pillar Path to Potential turnaround plan, which included shifting the retailer’s leadership structure to three brand presidents for the Victoria’s Secret brand, PINK, and beauty. Chief Merchandising Officer Anne Stephenson was tapped to lead Victoria’s Secret, tasked specifically with Super’s strategy of “supercharging bras” and regaining its “authority” in the category, Super said on an earnings call.

The effort has spawned successful innovations, and its latest launch, Invisible by Victoria’s Secret Strapless Collection, debuting tomorrow with a “Season of Strapless” campaign starring WNBA player Angel Reese, aims to further push up the business.

“We’ve rebuilt an innovation engine that was something that we weren’t as invested in,” Stephenson told Retail Brew. “When everybody is focused on the same thing with the same level of ambition and excitement and enthusiasm—and we’re delivering market-leading products again—magic happens.”

Down to the wire: While Victoria’s Secret previously varied its focus across categories like swim and sport, it now has an “always on” approach to bras, positioning them at the front of the store and making them the centerpiece of innovation and marketing, Stephenson said.

“There’s no moment that we’re not talking about a core bra franchise or a new innovation now,” she said. “There might have been moments where we weren’t as forceful about it, and so it’s really an amplification of something that we do well.”

Its FlexFactor Lightly Lined bra launch in July was the first to emerge from this playbook. Made with titanium alloy underwire to improve movement and comfort, the bra drove double-digit new customer growth and also lifted sales across all Victoria’s Secret bras for “the first time in years,” Super said in August.

Now, its new strapless launch seeks to “reinvent” a bra category consumers are most often “disappointed” with, Stephenson said. The new bra has upgraded fabric, a number of lining levels—and most importantly for wary bra-wearers—a grippy (not sticky) technology to hold it up.

Consumers have come to view Victoria’s Secret “a bit one dimensionally,” Stephenson said, so it’s been “mission critical” for the retailer to market its wide range—from its signature sexy lingerie to more daily-wear T-shirt bras.

“Our goal is to basically have a bra for every woman,” she said.

Voice of an angel: The company’s remodeled marketing has kickstarted that return to growth.

The brand is increasingly turning to influencer marketing and new faces, like Reese, to market the brand. Reese, the first pro athlete to walk its fashion show in October, serves as “a great example of part of who we see as our future,” Stephenson said.

It’s switching up its voice, too. The brand got “a little serious,” Super said last year. Now, it’s having a bit more fun. While “it’s hard to sell a sexy story and combine it with tech,” Stephenson noted, it’s employing a more “modern, relevant” voice to market its products’ benefits. The company touted last July’s FlexFactor as “better than being braless,” while a February campaign for its T-shirt bra dubbed the product “your favorite T-shirt’s favorite bra.”

Stephenson said the refreshed brand voice stems from a “critical” partnership between Chief Creative Officer Adam Selman, formerly of Savage X Fenty, and Chief Marketing and Customer Officer Elizabeth Preis, an Anthropologie and J.Crew vet, both appointed last spring.

Lift off: Victoria’s Secret has enacted a lot of change over the past year, but the retailer’s recent success demonstrates that “focus is powerful,” Stephenson said. Its bra business grew mid-single-digits in Q4, with new launches attracting more young customers, she said.

“Transitioning teams to focus on brand and pillars of product has been very powerful for people in their learning and in their development,” she said. “The speed at which we’re trying to execute change and growth is probably the biggest challenge. But it doesn’t feel like a challenge. We’re loving it.”

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Two specialty retailers with a recent history of bankruptcy are teaming up.

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. is acquiring The Container Store, along with its owned brands Elfa and Closet Works, for $150 million. In a letter to shareholders, Bed Bath & Beyond CEO Marcus Lemonis called the purchase “a critical step for our company” that will fill “critical gaps in both our retail and home services strategy.”

The household goods store, now primarily online, has been eyeing The Container Store since 2024, when it passed on an opportunity to invest due to concerns around “leadership, strategic direction of the brand, and the health of the company’s balance sheet.” Lemonis wrote.

Sure enough, The Container Store entered into bankruptcy at the end of that year and, during a brief restructuring process, shed $88 million in debt. It’s been just over a year since the company exited bankruptcy, and Lemonis clearly still likes what he sees.

“What I saw over time was a business with strong brand equity, a desirable physical footprint, and, most importantly, a group of teammates who care deeply about the customer,” he wrote.

The acquisition comes on the heels of another home brands acquisition, as Bed Bath & Beyond works to reestablish a base of brick-and-mortar stores. The company bought Kirkland’s Home for $10 million last September, and now that brand is set to operate more than 230 locations across the country. These stores will provide a “flexible store base that can be integrated into our broader platform,” according to the letter.

The Container Store purchase brings another 100 physical locations, which Lemonis plans to improve with an expanded assortment, additional brands, and a “more comprehensive experience for the homeowner,” supplementing modular and custom closets with flooring, lighting, kitchen, laundry, and bathroom cabinetry.

The stores will be co-branded The Container Store / Bed Bath & Beyond.

“The strategy is set,” Lemonis wrote. “Now it is about execution: integrating these businesses, unlocking their full potential, and delivering measurable results.”

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Amazon will add a new 3.5% “fuel and logistics-related surcharge” for sellers who use its shipping services due to rising oil prices.

The temporary fee hike kicks in on April 17 for sellers in the US and Canada who use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which merchants have come to rely on to handle storage and shipping.

From May 2, the new surcharge will also apply to items Amazon ships for merchants who sell through their own websites or other retailers. Essentially, merchants enrolled in Amazon’s Buy With Prime and Multi Channel Fulfillment programs will also have to pay the higher fee.

“Elevated costs in fuel and logistics have increased the cost of operating across the industry,” Amazon said in a statement to sellers. “We have absorbed these increased costs so far.”

However, like other carriers, Amazon said it adds temporary surcharges when costs rise to offset increases. To be sure, UPS last week raised its prices by 8% for some packages until early next year due to rising fuel prices.

Amazon maintained its surcharge is “meaningfully lower” than rivals. On average, this equates to 17 cents per unit for US FBA, though this will vary based on the item’s size and dimensions, the company said.

Still, Amazon’s elevated shipping fee puts more pressure on merchants already dealing with heavy tariffs, Sky Canaves, eMarketer analyst for retail and e-commerce, told Retail Brew in an email.

“Amazon’s new surcharges are just the latest blow to sellers who have been struggling to maintain profitability in the wake of the past year’s unprecedented tariff burdens, and comes on top of Amazon fee increases that took effect earlier this year,” Canaves wrote.

In January 2026, Amazon raised shipping fees at FBA by 8 cents on average after keeping costs unchanged in 2025.

“While Amazon’s surcharge is lower than, say, the 8% added by the US Postal Service, the lack of an end date signals an expectation that fuel prices will remain elevated for months,” Canaves added.

Amazon had previously instituted a 5% surcharge in 2022 as a response to rising fuel costs and inflation.

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The European Central Bank just sent a warning across to US consumers: Right now, retailers are absorbing the lion’s share of tariff-induced cost increases, but eventually, the burden will shift to consumers.

New analysis from the bank’s Economic Bulletin found that in the long-term, as retailers lose their ability to take a financial hit in order to hold down prices, shoppers could bear over half of total cost increases, up from around a third currently.

• Meanwhile, foreign firms are bearing just 5% of the cost of tariffs, with the rest falling on US firms and consumers.

The latest round of retail earnings showed that retailers are still keen to avoid price increases regardless of what happens with tariffs.

“Price is the very last lever we want to pull because we know price matters to consumers on a budget,” Target CEO Michael Fiddelke told shareholders. “That’s the mindset we'll have for however the variables unfold this year.”

The ECB isn’t the only organization predicting that consumers will eventually have to pay the price for the Trump administration’s tariff policies. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation said tariffs amounted to an average tax increase of $1,000 per household in 2025, and predicted a $600 increase in 2026.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York also found that 94% of tariff costs were borne by US importers in the first eight months of 2025, concluding that US firms and consumers continued to “bear the bulk of the economic burden.”

The reason for this distribution of costs, the bank explained, is that exporters are able to raise their prices in tandem with the tariff rate, in which case “there is 100% pass-through from tariffs to import prices, and therefore on US consumers and firms.”

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If last fall was CPG breakup season, the first quarter of 2026 was cuffing season. From Unilever and McCormick’s deal to Kraft Heinz’s conscious recoupling, plus a few potential mergers still in the works, we’re breaking down the tie-ups to know from Q1.

McCormick and Unilever unite their sauces and spices

Making it official on the last day of Q1, Unilever announced it’s spinning off its food business to combine with spice maker McCormick in a deal valuing Unilever at $44.8 billion and McCormick at $21 billion.

The combined company, led by McCormick President and CEO Brendan Foley, will unite Unilever’s Hellmann’s and Knorr with McCormick’s spices and brands like Cholula hot sauce and Maille French mustard. The new business boosts the global reach, retail and distribution scale, and innovation resources across the two companies.

It also allows Unilever to become a “pureplay’ household and personal care player, Unilever CEO Fernando Fernández noted in a statement—with brands like Dove and Vaseline operating in more “high-growth” categories—after spinning off its ice cream business last year. Unilever’s move continues the trend of CPGs streamlining operations, like the recent Kellogg Company and Keurig Dr Pepper splits, and rival P&G’s sale of its beauty brands to Coty a decade ago.

Kraft Heinz stays together

After sharing its plans to split in two in September, Kraft Heinz said in February it’s staying together after all. The company had said the split would allow it to “more effectively deploy resources” among high- and low-growth categories, but new CEO Steve Cahillane, former president and CEO of Kellanova who led its own split, said that since joining the company, he’d “seen that the opportunity is larger than expected and that many of our challenges are fixable and within our control.” Instead, Cahillane said the company would be spending $600 million to improve its marketing, sales, and R&D, and, like many CPGs, is seeking to drive “volume-led” growth this year.

Henkel makes hair care moves

Henkel—owner of consumer brands including Dial, DevaCurl, and Got2B—went on an acquisition spree in March to put more roots in hair care.

In early March, the company shared plans to buy Not Your Mother’s—the mass brand known for its TikTok-viral, curly hair-friendly products—which amassed nearly $220 million in sales in fiscal 2025.

A few weeks later, Henkel shared its intention to acquire Olaplex, the prestige hair care brand that’s two years into a turnaround effort, for $1.4 billion. Olaplex produced around $425 million in sales in fiscal 2025, and will help expand Henkel’s presence in premium hair care, the company said. Hair care has proven to be one of the fastest growing categories within prestige beauty, with 8% sales growth YoY in 2025, according to NielsenIQ.

Maybe: Estée Lauder and Puig mull merger

French beauty giant Estée Lauder is in talks to buy Barcelona-based beauty and fashion conglomerate Puig, owner of brands like Charlotte Tilbury, Dr. Barbara Sturm, and Carolina Herrera. Estée Lauder is also in the midst of a turnaround under new President and CEO Stéphane de La Faverie, aiming to reignite the Clinique and MAC owner through his “Beauty Reimagined” strategy.

The potential merger comes after Estée Lauder’s French beauty giant rival L’Oréal announced a deal to purchase Kering’s beauty business for $4.7 billion, giving it the rights to develop fragrances and beauty products under brands like Gucci and Balenciaga. The Estée Lauder-Puig tie-up could help Estée Lauder compete with the growing L’Oréal, though the two companies’ combined $20 billion in revenue last year is still quite shy of the more than $50 billion L’Oréal brought in.

Maybe: Pernod Ricard and Brown-Forman see spirits synergy

Jack Daniel’s owner Brown-Forman and Pernod Ricard, the world’s second-largest spirits seller with brands like Malibu and Absolut Vodka, confirmed last month the two are in talks to combine, a move that would create “enhanced scale, a powerful brand portfolio, and a balanced geographic footprint,” the companies said. The combination would work to combat slumping sales across the alcohol industry, which has been hampered by tariffs and changing consumer preferences.

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Easter was yesterday, and if NRF estimates were on point, there were a record $24.9 billion in retail sales fueled by candy, gifts, decorations, and clothing. Passover, which started last Wednesday, concludes this Thursday, and after that, the big spring holidays will be behind us, ushering in that unpredictable sales period between major holidays and big summer deal days and back-to-school season that give retailers and consumers a sense of direction.

Here’s what else is going on in retail this week:

In remodels: Walmart this month is starting remodeling projects at several Walmart Neighborhood Markets, mainly across the US South, with the goal of delivering “quicker results and less consumer disruption.” The retailer says it is experimenting with a quicker turnaround than the typical month remodeling process, shutting down their main sales floors for just four weeks while keeping pharmacies and fuel stations open. “This is an opportunity to test, learn, and refine our remodel process to identify best practices for the future,” the company wrote in a blog post.

In data releases: The consumer price index for March is coming out this Friday, with expectations of a sizable jump in inflation due to rising energy costs. The last report for February showed prices rising 0.3% month over month (up from 0.2% in January) and 2.4% year over year, with shelter costs being the biggest contributor to the increase and food and food at home prices also pushing up the benchmark. Meanwhile, at an event hosted at Harvard University, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank is carefully monitoring inflation expectations, and hinted that the plan is to hold interest rates steady in the short-term.

In conferences: The biggest names in AI are gathering in San Francisco this week for the HumanX conference. The event is the “brainchild” of entrepreneurs Stefan Weitz and Jonathan Weiner and is billed as a place to discuss future possibilities, while “anchoring the conference in the practical and real-world applications” for AI. The speaker list is a who’s who of high-profile tech executives, from OpenAI and Anthropic to Google and Perplexity, but there is at least one interesting inclusion from the world of retail: Daniel Danker, executive VP of AI acceleration, product and design at Walmart, who prior to joining the retail giant worked as chief product officer at Instacart. Danker will be discussing how Walmart is scaling its AI applications and putting them at the core of global operations.

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It’s still early days for tech giant Meta’s push into physical retail, but a top executive from the company recently said it thinks of stores as a candid way to get quick feedback from people.

“Our stores exist to do what physical does best: let people try a new category and tell us immediately what clicks and what doesn’t,” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of global business group at Meta, said during her session on “AI and Human Creativity Shaping Tomorrow's Shopping Experiences” at Shoptalk last week. “That feedback helps us improve everything from hardware design to software experience and then scale what we learn across our partner and retail footprint.”

Meta has five retail stores in the US dubbed “Meta Labs.” The social media giant opened its most recent store on Fifth Avenue, one of New York City’s most important retail corners, in March. The space lets visitors experience Meta’s AI-powered glasses and virtual-reality headsets firsthand.

Person-to-person feedback “also grounds us in the day-to-day realities retailers face,” Mendelsohn said, “reinforcing why tools like omnichannel ads matter to turn digital demand into in-store purchases.” To be sure, omnichannel ads are tools to not only drive online sales for merchants, but also drive people to stores.

The company said it thinks of retailers like “co-pilots” in this new AI reset as the future of shopping becomes deeply personal.

Meta’s retail chapter began in 2022 when it opened its first flagship near San Francisco in Burlingame, California. The company also has stores in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and New York.

Meta has sharpened its focus on the full shopping journey by giving more power to creators to tag products, and is testing an affiliate program for creators on Instagram and Facebook. According to Meta, 45% of shoppers say influencers affect what they buy. Plus, the company introduced a one-tap checkout experience with Stripe and PayPal in a direct counter to TikTok Shop, as one expert previously told Retail Brew.

Ultimately, Mendelsohn said, “physical scales belief, digital scales reach, AI personalizes, and winning brands use all three.”

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In recent years, luxury has begun to lean into the idea of creating holistic spaces versus simply polished showrooms to sell products.

For many retailers, such as Tiffany’s and Louis Vuitton, that has meant opening up cafes or restaurants, while others have added more immersive elements to the shopping experience.

In the case of Rolex-owned Bucherer (formerly Tourneau-Bucherer)—the Swiss watch and jewelry brand founded in 1888—that has meant collaborating with artists.

In March, the brand partnered with American contemporary artist Christopher Florentino, who creates under the name Flore, for an exhibition at its New York flagship, part of what Bucherer USA CMO Carina Ertl calls its broader “art program.”

“The store is literally designed like a gallery space, and we have a professional art hanging system,” she told Retail Brew, adding that the brand has had shows featuring everyone from Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso to solo shows of Terry O’Neill.

“Even though we’re a multibrand retailer, we are also a brand in its own right, so we really try to showcase more than just the creation of fine watches and luxury jewelry pieces,” she said.

Beyond art, Bucherer’s New York flagship, called “TimeMachine,” features multiple bars serving drinks, part of a broader push to create a full-scale experience with the ultimate goal of engaging everyone from ultra-high-net-worth clients to younger, aspirational consumers who increasingly value experience alongside product.

In chatting with Retail Brew, Ertl opened up about why art matters for the brand, the evolution of its identity, and reimagining itself as a hospitality space.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why is art so integral to your brand?

Usually there is a very strong relationship between our clients and clients who like to collect art or cars or fine wines. So it’s just interesting creating a community and bringing in a new audience to the store.

[These artists’ collaborations] are really part of being within luxury retail today. It all connects at the end of the day. Your audience really wants to be part of something, right? That’s human nature.

Also, when we look into studies, that audience has shifted a little bit from luxury being more of a status symbol, to luxury as being part of something bigger. Purchases today are more intentional. What we are trying to do is not just make sure that you have a beautiful experience when you buy a luxury product, like a luxury watch, but connect it with art, design, [and] with the space.

What role does hospitality play in your retail strategy today?

With the rebranding from Tourneau to Bucherer, a big part of that was to really recreate and redesign the store network. We have these two beautiful flagships right now, the one [in New York] and then another one in Las Vegas. Those were really also designed with the mindset of hospitality.

We call it Swiss hospitality within the store. At TimeMachine in New York, on every level, there’s a bar, and this is not about like, “Oh, we want you to drink.” No. It’s more like, “We want you to feel comfortable to hang out, to not just be in a chair in front of a watch case, but have a more organic way of shopping, and exploration.” That’s kind of how we think about the design of the retail environment in general.

How has the brand evolved over time?

Obviously with the rebrand, the first step was making sure that people start to understand what Bucherer is and making sure Bucherer gets known. The last two years, and also when I think about the programming for this year, it’s really about bringing the brand even more to life, really honing in on the client and the custom experience, and also making sure we are building a community and we are culturally relevant.

Part of being culturally relevant is coming back again to the art from the customer perspective…We have a lot of these studies where we, as I said at the beginning, where there is the next generation of clients that is more intentional, that wants to be more immersed in not just the actual product, but immersed in community. That’s something that we are definitely trying to provide with our marketing strategy in the United States. But it’s also so important because we talk a lot, especially in the field of marketing, about AI and AI optimization. When we look at marketing strategies, so much about how AI will change how we actually also operate within the field of marketing, it’s so important to point out that it’s actually the analog experience that’s absolutely crucial, and gets even more important through that AI push within the field of luxury.

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Retail sales got a higher-than-expected increase in February, rising 0.6% to $738.4 billion and 3.7% YoY, the Commerce Department said this week.

The boost marks a notable uptick after declines over the last few months, including a lackluster December. Sales dipped 0.1% in January, revised from the 0.2% reported last month.

Most categories saw sales bumps in February. Department stores saw the biggest sales increase (3%), though sales were down 5.4% YoY. Sales also rose month-over-month for health and personal care stores (2.3%), clothing and clothing accessories stores (2%), sporting goods stores (1.3%, and the greatest YoY sales jump at 11.3%), and at miscellaneous store retailers (1.1%). Nonstore sales, made up largely of e-commerce transactions, rose 0.7%, and electronics stores were up 0.5%.

Furniture stores had the biggest monthly and annual sales drop, down 1% and 5.6%, respectively, while grocery store sales dipped 1% month over month and 0.2% YoY.

The Commerce Department’s monthly retail sales reporting continues to be several weeks behind due to last year’s government shutdown. As such, the latest retail sales numbers don’t reflect any potential impacts from the US and Israel’s war with Iran—particularly consumers’ pullback on spending due to higher gas prices.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in emailed comments that February’s retail sales indicate the economy “was healthy” before the war.

“Four-dollar gas has changed the story,” she said. “It’s shaping up to be a slow-speed spring as the economy faces this massive shock.”

Consumer sentiment hit its lowest level since December 2025 in March 2026, driven in part by higher gas prices, the University of Michigan reported last week. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set to release the Consumer Price Index for March, the first report to reflect the war’s impact on consumer prices, on April 10.

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Perhaps nothing is more inviting to a younger consumer raised on social media these days than access paired with value.

And what better way to exemplify the union of the two than Zara’s new partnership with John Galliano?

Before the famed—and once exiled—former Maison Margiela designer cemented his two-year marriage with the fast fashion retailer, speculation was rife that he might actually be headed back home to LVMH, or perhaps for a stint at the Costume Institute.

Fitting…but not exactly promising in a world of luxury where budgets are tight but aspirations for high-end products remain intact.

A higher calling: “We’re going through a macro softness period in luxury,” Michael Prendergast, managing director in the consumer and retail group of Alvarez & Marsal, told Retail Brew. “Everybody wants and has the aspiration to have a little bit more luxury in their life…[but] what’s happened is the middle offering has gotten squeezed.”

As such, there has been a “merging” of value-oriented items in luxury, he added.

Rita McGrath, academic director in executive education and professor of management at Columbia Business School, believes although Galliano remains a “super exclusive” and “really beloved”—albeit controversial—designer, this type of partnership gives him reach and leverage that’s unparalleled.

“Increasingly, the age of value creation is devolving to small teams and even individuals,” she told Retail Brew. “You can have his impact by so-called ‘editing’ Zara’s past collections, and then use their leverage to have just this enormous impact and presumably enormous value creation for himself without being tied to these boutique houses that he’s been previously associated with.”

Haute connections: Meanwhile, for Zara, the partnership represents a formidable foot forward in the current race of mass market retailers contracting with luxury designers with impressive portfolios—Claire Waight Keller at Uniqlo, for example, or Zac Posen at Gap—as they compete against ultra-fast fashion giants such as Shein and Temu.

According to some estimates, partnering with high-profile designers can drive up revenues for fast fashion brands up to 30% annually. As for Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing, profits will reportedly cross over 610 billion yen (~$3.84 billion) this year as it continues to foster collaborations with the likes of Keller, JW Anderson, and Lemaire.

Prendergast called it a “no-lose” situation for Zara. Along with capitalizing on a sort of cultural cachet by having an iconic name, the merger also helps the brand draw in curious customers, even if they don’t initially plan on buying the product.

“It’s a win from publicity, a win from inspiring customers to come in the door. It’s a win from an inspiration of the product that [Galliano’s] going to be creating,” he said, adding that it will also help “elevate” its store environments.

It’s also why we’re likely to see more such partnerships in the future. In McGrath’s view, this is “classic disruption”—taking something once exclusive and inaccessible, like Galliano’s couture, and making it “easy and accessible,” and more affordable.

“It has all the earmarks of the classic disruptive strategy,” she said. “And what we know about those is that they do tend to drive growth.”

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As the resale industry has boomed in recent years, resale companies, including Treet and Archive, have assured brands that resale does not “cannibalize” sales of new products. But there are no such assurances in ThredUp’s 14th annual Resale Report, which paints a picture of resale enjoying new merchandise’s liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

The secondhand clothing market in the US is “taking a measurable share from new retail,” the report states. Resale grew to $30 billion in 2025, a 13% YoY increase and nearly four times faster than the new apparel market, which grew 3.6%, per ThredUp.

Today, 34% of consumers’ clothing budget goes toward secondhand purchases. Before buying new, 46% of consumers browse resale; among Gen Z, it’s 58% and among millennials, it’s 55%.

“We’re learning from the data that it does appear to demonstrate cannibalization is happening,” Alon Rotem, chief strategy officer at ThredUp, told Retail Brew.

But Rotem said this should not strike fear in brands, but rather encourage them to launch their own resale programs, resale’s version of “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” though Rotem didn’t put it so starkly.

“This is happening with you or without you,” is what Rotem said is his message to brands on the fence about resale. “Brands have an opportunity to participate in resale,” he added, and launching resale programs is “a great hedge for them against the trend of cannibalization that we’re seeing.”

In addition to being a resale marketplace, ThredUp, like Archive and Treet, partners with retail brands to launch and administer their resale programs through its Resale-as-a-Service (RaaS) service.

ThredUp’s 2026 report relies on research and data from research analytics firm Global Data, including a survey of 3,268 US adults fielded in January and February.

Agentslick commerce: The report is decidedly bullish about AI, with 81% of respondents who use AI saying it has improved their resale shopping experience, 69% saying they’d willingly use AI to monitor resale platforms for hard-to-find items, 59% saying they’d use it to haggle on prices, and 39% saying it would bolster their trust in the authenticity of the products they purchase from peer-to-peer resale platforms.

ThredUp’s marketplace includes an AI image search feature that lets shoppers upload a photo they’ve either snapped themselves or found online of someone wearing items they covet, with search results yielding listings for similar looking items.

One evolving use of AI in the resale realm that Rotem finds promising is automating the process of selling products on peer-to-peer platforms. Traditionally, selling garments has meant taking photographs, researching value, determining sizes on labels and actual measurements, and writing snappy listings.

But the day is coming when AI will reduce all that to just taking a photo of the item, he said.

“Take a photo of the item in your closet, and the magic of technology extracts all of the metadata layers of the item so that it can be quickly listed online, and even listed across multiple platforms,” Rotem said.

Among those who’ve never resold clothing, 33% said an AI-automated listing process would convince them to finally do so, the report found.

Dressed to invest: The growing popularity of resale has new clothing shoppers increasingly considering how much they’ll be able to get for items when they want to sell them down the line. Today, 60% of customers say resale value is a “key factor” they consider when buying new clothing, a 13% YoY increase, per the report.

Asked if that means brands selling new clothing should highlight resale value the way that automakers do, Rotem didn’t think the idea was far-fetched.

“For the most part, yes,” he responded. “We would expect to see [a] conversion rate increase if a customer…had some confidence about what the resale price of it would be because that changes the value proposition for the consumer.”

While that might not be happening explicitly now, Rotem noted that Patagonia effectively is doing it when, on its main e-commerce sites, it shows used items in the same listings as new ones.

It shows “the heritage value of the brand” that “they’re comfortable showing a customer new and used at the same time,” he said.

“We’re moving from a linear apparel economy toward a resale fly wheel, where consumers increasingly buy with future value in mind,” James Reinhart, ThredUp’s CEO and co-founder, noted in the report.

ThredUp’s survey found that the closets of Gen Z and millennials are such flywheels, with 52% saying they attempt to sell more than half of their wardrobes.

“They’re very comfortable looking at things coming in and things going out, like a circular closet,” Rotem said.

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If one theme rang true on Shopify in March, it was that of a spring reset, as people bought products ranging from lawn prep items to backyard essentials and new wardrobe staples, according to data shared first with Retail Brew.

Orders for items used in garden maintenance like outdoor misting systems went up by a crazy 302%. Shopify shoppers also shelled out money to buy sprinklers (up 273%), rain barrels (up 262%), weed trimmers (up 222%) and hedge trimmers (up 188%) just in time for spring.

Meanwhile, Easter spending is projected to hit $24.9 billion this year, per the latest NRF survey. “While economic uncertainty remains on the minds of many, consumers are still focused on holiday celebrations like Easter,” NRF Chief Economist and Executive Director of Research Mark Mathews wrote in a blog post.

Hangout season: As the weather gets warmer, the days get longer, and people feel more energetic and social, backyard gatherings will make a bold comeback. Shoppers bought items to spruce up their patio vibes, with sunshades (up 156%), gazebos (up 146%), swing chairs (up 130%), and outdoor sofas (up 113%) all spiking. Orders for hammocks and fire pits both jumped 110%. Plus, plant lovers invested in trellises and pergolas, with orders jumping 92% and 78%, respectively.

Spring’s longer days also mean a return to outdoor routines, prompting families to refresh their biking gear and seasonal sports equipment. People ordered bicycle child seats (up 151%) and training wheels (up 111%) to prioritize safety. Plus, orders for lawn games like paddle ball sets (up 92%) and tennis ball machines (up 91%) and rebounders (up 90%) also surged.

Closet reset: It’s also time to ditch those heavy winter layers for lighter fabrics and brighter styles to make the most out of the spring season. People shelled out money to buy denim shorts (up 143%) and bermudas (up 123%) for brunch outings and other weekend getaways. Orders for sun hats (up 99%), everyday cargo shorts (up 99%) and visors (up 61%) all went up.

Swing season: The golf course is another great place to be in spring. Orders for golf club sets jumped 75%, while golf tees and bags came in at 51% and 48%, respectively, and orders for golf carts went up 43% last month.

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Who ever said that younger generations were impulsive spenders?

RTB House’s 2026 US consumer study “Before They Buy” reveals that 50% of Gen Z customers dwell on what’s in their cart for two or more days before committing to a purchase. Meanwhile, only 24% of boomers reported mulling over their purchasers for that long.

Overall, 40% of new shoppers visit e-commerce sites with a clear item in mind, while the other 60% are simply browsing or have a more flexible intent, suggesting most consumers simply do not know what they want to buy.

And although the younger cohort was giving its purchases a fair amount of thought, the survey, which recorded responses from 1,000 shoppers across the US, also found that both Gen Z and millennials are 50% more likely to spend more in the future versus older generations.

“Everything in today’s e-commerce environment is being driven by increased intensity of the research phase and true generational divides during the current macroeconomic environment,” Jaysen Gillespie, VP of product marketing and analytics at RTB House, said in a statement. “Marketers can no longer rely on broad assumptions about their potential customers. To win, brands must meet their customers across all devices and out-maneuver competitors during the critical research phase.”

The proclivity for research among Gen Zers also extends beyond their computers. Per a 2025 YouGov survey, 69% of Gen Z said they started their “decision-making” process when considering a purchase online, but 53% actually still went to a store to browse.

The findings come in light of rising costs and tightening consumer budgets. Recent reporting from USA Today found that shoppers were exhausted by inflation and tariff-driven price increases.

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Gwendolyn Maass is SVP of investment and activation at Rise, a full-service media agency that’s worked with retailers and brands like Ulta Beauty, ColourPop, and Stanley Steemer.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? The work my team does ensures that consumers see what retailers are selling when, where and how they want to experience it—from social media to CTV to digital boards to print ads and everything in between.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? My job is all about helping retailers achieve business outcomes, and doing so requires creative solutioning that frequently goes outside of scope. To me, partnership isn’t about buzzwords; it’s about digging in, asking the right questions, and trying ideas that sit just outside the expected. When I treat a client’s problem like it’s mine to solve, that’s when the most creative answers show up.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Years ago, I was part of the pitch team that won the biggest piece of business in the agency’s history to date. It required months of work and diligence across all disciplines. When we found out we won, I had the privilege of announcing it to the agency. When everyone learned the news, they burst into cheers and applause. It was a total team effort and took every person in our mid-sized agency to get it onboarded and running. We then enjoyed a near-decade-long partnership, which made it all the more rewarding.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? Do I have to choose just one? I’m excited to see how AI will continue to impact personalization and the sophistication of loyalty programs—not just in the digital offers presented to customers but also with personal in-store or in-app interactions.

What’s your go-to coffee order? Americano with half and half.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? “Go ahead, perm your hair—it will look great!” Umm, nope.

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? As a true Gen Xer, cassette tapes for my Sony Walkman were among my favorite retail products at age 15. Today, I’m all about kitchen gadgets, cooking utensils, and anything health- and wellness-related.

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Rising fuel prices resulting from the US-Israeli war with Iran could spell bad news for retail sales, according to new analysis from Coresight Research.

Coresight’s latest monthly report predicts that rising gas prices resulting from the conflict will have an “upward pressure” on grocery prices, and that items with a short shelf life “will be the first to feel the impacts of the energy spike.” Consumers also will be “limiting non-essential trips to stores” to conserve gas, the report predicts.

It will surprise no one that Coresight predicts lower-income consumers will feel the most pinched, as gas and groceries demand an outsized portion of their disposable income. But even affluent consumers could tighten the purse springs as a result of stock market volatility caused by the Middle East conflict, per Coresight.

It’s never a bad idea to have physical stores looking as good as they do in their commercials, but if it’s costing shoppers more to get to them and they’re facing higher prices, it can’t hurt to be snappy about cleaning up that spill in Aisle 7. Or, as Coresight puts it slightly more officiously, “retailers should not overlook the store fundamentals, such as in-store execution, in supporting traffic and sales in discretionary retail.”

In this volatile political climate and economy, “uncertainty is the new certainty,” Coresight declares Rumsfeldingly, not once but twice in the report. Still, Coresight projects retail sales will grow 4.2% YoY in March, then slow down to about 3.5%–3.7% in April and May.

NRF recently predicted that retail sales would increase 4.4% in 2026 over last year, but didn’t factor the Iran war into its calculation, because there’s “too much uncertainty,” Mark Mathews, NRF’s chief economist and executive director of research, said. NRF, he continued, “will continue to assess potential impacts and issue a re-forecast if circumstances dictate so.”

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In a marketplace where speed is everything, the conversation “lumbered on” for eight years, Bill Catania, CEO of OneRail, told Retail Brew.

The last-mile delivery network and logistics platform, founded in 2018, had been pitching FedEx on the idea of partnering so the carrier service could offer same-day delivery to its 2.3 million active customers. But it wasn’t until 2025 that FedEx got serious about same-day delivery, Catania said, and that’s when things “accelerated dramatically.”

Now that vision is a reality with the launch of FedEx SameDay. Through its partnership with OneRail, FedEx is connected to a national network of 1,000 delivery partners providing two-hour and end-of-day service as well as real-time tracking, proof of delivery, and predictive ETAs to customers.

“The OneRail team offers a great opportunity to—I don’t want to say flip a switch—but effectively unlock that capability nationwide,” Jason Brenner, SVP of digital portfolio at FedEx, told Retail Brew. “This is a good opportunity for us to go to market quickly.”

So why did FedEx wait until now to roll out same-day delivery, when companies such as Amazon have been offering it for more than a decade? For OneRail, which is ultimately enabling that ability, the answer comes down to how hard it is to build a reliable nationwide network that a company like FedEx could trust to meet its standards.

“Every overnight success takes a decade,” Catania said.

The challenge of scaling: That process entailed assembling a pool of 1,000 delivery providers and 12 million drivers, then connecting them with retailers in real time and serving as a bridge between supply and demand in a decentralized marketplace.

Given the difficulty of building this kind of network piecemeal, OneRail made the decision early on to be an aggregator. “We’re able to connect supply and demand in a way that provides dependability, because we’re not relying on one carrier,” Catania said. “We’re like a mutual fund for carriers.”

As this aggregation of third-party carriers expanded its footprint over the last eight years, OneRail eventually became a viable option for retailers such as Lowe’s, Tractor Supply, PepsiCo, and Signet Jewelers—partnerships that in turn helped the company reach the kind of “critical mass” that would make it appealing to FedEx, Catania said.

“Certainly FedEx could go build this themselves,” he said. “They have plenty of capital. They have brilliant people. But how long do you want to take to build it? Or do you want to go to market now with a scaled solution?”

The right price: Brenner said there is a possibility that in the long term, FedEx could develop the capacity to offer same-day delivery internally, but acknowledged that “all of this takes a lot of time and energy to build out.”

“We’re solving for a number of things all at once here,” he said. “Obviously the cost to our customers has to be competitive, and competitive cost in this space requires extremely high density.”

Indeed, getting the unit economics right has been key to OneRail’s success. Some of that came with scale, Catania said, but technology and AI in particular were essential to lowering costs. Without its AI-powered dispatching service, he said, the company would need 5,000 employees sitting in a building every day routing deliveries. Instead it processes 60–100 deliveries a second and 300,000 deliveries a day automatically using historical data and machine learning. 

“That’s where the cost-saving starts,” Catania said.

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While we’re still awaiting news of Lululemon’s new chief exec amid the increasingly contentious search, many other retailers landed on C-suite decisions this month. Here are the ones to know:

• A week before reports claimed the company was mulling a merger with Estée Lauder, Puig appointed Jose Manuel Albesa, its deputy CEO and beauty and fashion president, as its new CEO, taking over for Marc Puig, who shifted to executive chair.
• Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos is stepping down from his role on January 1, and Ahold Delhaize USA CEO JJ Fleeman will exit his position in June with plans to fill Vasos’s role. Ahold Delhazie USA also promoted Abby Cook, VP of US strategy and portfolio, to SVP of Own Brands.
• David Simon, president and CEO of retail real estate giant Simon Property Group since 1995, died at age 64. His son, Eli Simon, was named to succeed him.
• Swiss sneaker company On announced its five-year CEO Martin Hoffmann will be replaced by co-CEOS David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti on May 1 as the company enters its “next growth phase.”
• Vera Bradley named Ian Bickley, a Coach vet and former CEO of The Body Shop, as its next chief exec, and Martin Layding as its chief operating and financial officer.
• Build-A-Bear Workshop CEO Sharon Price John, who has led the company since 2013, is retiring on June 11, with chief operations and experience officer Chris Hurt set to take over.
• LVMH tapped exec Philippe Farnier as deputy beauty CEO of Parfums Christian Dior.
• After hiring a new chief brand officer last month, Claire’s further built out its C-suite, adding Walmart and Macy’s vet Jillian Cueff as its chief merchandising officer.
• Nordstrom’s VP and Fashion Director Rickie De Sole is stepping down from her role next month.
• Caroline Brown is exiting as global brand president of The North Face, and Chris Goble, who has been leading parent company VF Corp’s emerging brands portfolio, will assume the role.
• Land’s End named Sarah Sylvester, marketing exec at Victoria’s Secret, as its first CMO in almost a decade. Williams-Sonoma and Michael Kors also added new CMOs.

Good footing: One CEO move we won’t be reporting on anytime soon is at Adidas, which extended its CEO Bjon Gulden’s contract to the end of 2030.

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At risk of ruining a pleasant (or perhaps not so pleasant) surprise, April Fools’ Day is this Wednesday, and you can expect a number of brands to test out their comedic chops with some kind of marketing prank. Sometimes these attempts generate laughs; other times, controversy. We’ll see how brands fare this year. In the meantime, check out Retail Brew’s four-decade compendium of retail brands’ April Fools’ pranks for a sampling of famous examples.

Here’s what else is going on in retail this week:

In data releases: April Fools’ also just happens to be the day the US Commerce Department is releasing its monthly retail sales numbers for February. The previous report showed sales in January declining 0.2% from December, and rising 2.9% from the year before, with much of the month-over-month drop coming from motor vehicle and auto parts dealerships.

Sales events: More spring sales are running this week, furthering the case that this is increasingly a season for deals. Amazon’s Big Spring Sale started last Wednesday and will run through Tuesday, with discounts up to 40% across 35 categories. The event comes even as Amazon plans to move up its annual Prime Day event to June from July. The company hasn’t explained why it made the move, but it’s likely to affect the wider e-commerce landscape, which in recent years has followed Amazon’s lead when it comes to summer sales. It will also impact Amazon’s financial reporting, moving any gains from the event to Q2 rather than Q3.

In conferences: The National Hardware Show is in Las Vegas this week. The event connects retailers, wholesalers, distributors, product development teams, inventors, and global factories. The organizers encourage companies to bring their full buying, sourcing, and product teams to

“discover new products, assess global factories, explore private label, and get sourcing strategy support.”

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Bubs was a cult favorite Swedish candy with steadily growing sales and a small international business when its founders, the Lindström family, sold it to Norwegian CPG giant Orkla in 2023. Neither had any idea that, in a year, a Swedish candy craze would sweep the US.

One weekend in January 2024, an influencer’s viral TikTok chronicling her visit to New York City chain BonBon to get Swedish sweets, including Bubs’s dual-flavored marshmallow-gummy hybrid candies, kickstarted a stateside consumer obsession that sent lines snaking, sales soaring, and new candy stores opening to capitalize. Soon, a global Bubs shortage ensued: retailers, distributors, and consumers were calling nonstop, and the candies were even being sold on the gray market, Niclas Arnelin, who was Bubs’s CEO before its sale and has since shifted to lead its international expansion, told Retail Brew.

“As a company, you need to ask yourself, ‘Is this hype [lasting for] two weeks, or is it two months? Or is it two years?’ We had no clue,” he said.

Fast forward two years, and with expansion into 35,000 US retail locations to show for it, it’s clear the Bubs bonanza is still quite sticky.

Taking a bite: Prior to its US expansion, exports were only about 15% of Bubs’s total revenue, so to strategize how to handle its newfound US popularity in 2024, it partnered with Business Sweden, a partly government-owned consultancy that helps Swedish companies expand internationally.

That led Bubs to partner last year with Texas-based manufacturer Mount Franklin Foods, which now makes and sells Bubs products in the US, conducting consumer tests to determine its US flavor lineup (Swedish favorite raspberry licorice was a “no-go” in the US, according to Arnelin). But while Arnelin said Business Sweden recommended Bubs start small with mom-and-pop shops, Bubs and Mount Franklin Foods chose to take advantage of the demand and grow brand awareness by pitching its packaged Bubs to the biggest names in retail.

Now, its 5.5-ounce bags are sold at nationwide retailers including Kroger, Target, and Walgreens, and in bulk packs at Costco.

Eye candy: Arnelin began his food career selling US brands—first candy giant Mars, then bakery brand Sara Lee—in the Swedish market. Now he’s doing the reverse.

“I must admit that it has always been a dream of mine to be able to launch some brand in the US,” he said. “Given this opportunity, it’s just amazing.”

While Arnelin said he “humbly” recognizes that user-generated content drove Bubs’s US success, the brand is more in the driver’s seat now. An NYC Bubs pop-up last fall garnered 3.1 billion media impressions, while its aggressive retail strategy has renewed the excitement as shoppers discover the products and post taste-tests in their cars in their local grocers’ parking lots. Arnelin said velocities at retail have been strong so far, with a new 10 oz. sweet and sour mix just launching Walmart, and expansion on Amazon forthcoming.

“We’re not in it to just capitalize on the hype,” he said. “That’s not how we drive or build brands as a company. We are in it for the long run. We want to be a big player in the market, and we will take the effort to become that…We’re not backing up now.”

Sweet serendipity: With the Bubs’s sale coming just a year before its viral moment (its sales had been growing an average of 10% annually when it was sold), Arnelin, who was also a small shareholder alongside the Lindström family, doesn’t have any what-ifs.

“You should never have second thoughts in life,” he said. “All stakeholders in that deal were happy. The sellers were happy and the buyers were also happy at the time. But of course, when the stars are aligned and you can move really fast, that is luck.”

In fact, while Bubs had “slightly” considered US expansion prior to 2024, Arnelin believes its recent growth wouldn’t have been possible without that sale to Orkla.

“If we weren’t bought by a bigger company with bigger muscles, we wouldn’t [have] been able to go this broadly this fast,” he said.

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Retailers at Shoptalk Spring in Las Vegas this week were desperately seeking an AI playbook. The vast majority of attendees had questions about the hype-versus-reality of agentic commerce, or agent-assisted shopping.

Shoptalk, which ran from March 24 to March 26 at Mandalay Bay, featured a buzzy array of AI announcements from tech giants including OpenAI and Google. Brands and retailers seemed to realize that agentic commerce is a new front door consumers are using, and the conversation moved from “How do we build something?” to “How do we build something useful?”

The buzz around agentic AI started at NRF two and a half months ago, and people at Shoptalk were still looking for answers to questions like: Will people really hand over shopping to AI agents, even if the technology makes it seamless and easy? However, there was still no real consensus.

Ret(AI)l therapy: Google went big on agentic commerce—literally—taking over the walkway with a massive e-billboard attendees couldn’t miss.

OpenAI rolled out a new shopping experience on ChatGPT that can browse and compare items, and drop relevant product information all in one place. It’s a revised version of OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol, which delivers real-time product data from merchants—including Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, The Home Depot, Best Buy, and Wayfair—directly into ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, Gap said it is partnering with Google to let people complete purchases directly within AI agent Gemini, becoming the first major fashion brand to collaborate with Google on agent-driven AI commerce. And beauty retailer Sephora said it is rethinking its beauty shopping experience with the launch of its app in ChatGPT.

“People that were never involved in retail directly—like Google, they were always kind of side-involved, and ChatGPT—coming here and dropping news, so it’s exciting,” Scot Wingo, CEO of AI startup Refibuy, told Retail Brew. “They see the [retail] vertical is really important for the initiatives they’re trying to drive around AI.”

OpenAI is also phasing out its instant checkout feature and letting merchants use their own checkout.

“We’re in the early days of AI commerce in general and agentic commerce,” Mahak Sharma, product partnerships at OpenAI, told Retail Brew. “And just like any technology has its adoption cycle and timelines, we are in that cycle as well.”

“It takes time to change user behavior and do it in a way that the technology completely supports it,” she added. But it’s not going to be a “one-step process.”

Multiple partners: Home Depot’s EVP and CIO Angie Brown said the home improvement retailer is working with a variety of tech partners, from Google to OpenAI to Microsoft, to see what hits over time, at a panel discussion on Wednesday.

“We’re testing to see what the consumers are going to latch onto,” Brown said. “There’s also an element where companies are testing the things that are going to help drive their revenue models, and so we’re in it together.”

It’s a dynamic and interesting time for online shopping, Reddit Co-Founder and CEO Steve Huffman said, during his keynote. “Those of you who’ve been on Reddit—you know this is true—there’s kind of like this anti-commercial vibe to it that comes from the authenticity,” Huffman said, “But what’s funny is that 40% of the conversations on Reddit platform-wide are commercial in nature because it turns out that the question behind every question is, ‘What should I buy?’” (Reddit this week rolled out new updates to entice merchants to start selling on its platform.)

So questions about AI were everywhere, and the AI takeover was visible across the Shoptalk Spring showfloor. “Every booth has AI integrated, even companies that do returns or supply chain. Everything is AI-oriented,” Wingo pointed out.

Justin Honaman, global head of worldwide retail, restaurants, and consumer goods at Amazon, said that while NRF was just two and a half months ago, many of its customers have a clearer understanding of what agentic commerce actually is now.

“When you start getting questions from customers, it’s powerful,” he said.

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Dollar General, the ubiquitous discount chain with more than 20,000 locations across the US, is getting a new head honcho at the start of 2027. The company announced on Tuesday that CEO Todd Vasos will serve out the rest of the year and then step aside for outside hire and grocery industry veteran JJ Fleeman Jr.

Vasos was a longtime Dollar General employee with a background in drug stores, while Fleeman has spent the last 36 years at global grocery chain Ahold Delhaize, which owns US supermarket chains Food Lion, Giant, Hannaford, and Stop & Shop.

• Vasos served as CEO from 2015 to 2022 and then from 2023 to the present, and first started at the company in 2008 as a division president and then as chief operating officer.

The company commended Vasos for his role in building out Dollar General’s supply chain, including developing an internal distribution network for frozen and refrigerated goods called DG Fresh, and for guiding the chain’s international expansion into Mexico.

Vasos also notably stepped in when the company was in need. Less than a year after retiring for the first time in 2022, he returned as CEO to replace his successor, Jeff Owen, in order to “restore stability and confidence in the company,” David Rowland, Dollar General’s chair of the board of directors, said in a statement.

The announcement that Dollar General is bringing on an executive with a background in grocery comes just a few weeks after the retailer told shareholders about an initiative to grow the non-grocery side of its business. Per its latest earnings call, the company plans to increase sales of nonconsumable categories and to create more of a “treasure hunt” experience at its stores. In addition, it revealed that sales growth in nonconsumables had outpaced consumables in Q4.

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Are hotels the new department stores? Well, maybe not just yet, but they’re definitely filling a gap that luxury retail left behind.

As traditional department stores struggle with foot traffic and bankruptcies, hotels—already built around experience—are emerging as a more natural home for discovery-driven retail.

Just ask Elyce Arons, CEO and co-founder of luxury fashion label Frances Valentine, which has launched a capsule collection in collaboration with The Colony Hotel, a historic establishment in Palm Beach.

In its first-ever collaboration with a hotel, the brand has introduced a range of caftans, tote bags, accessories, and T-shirts featuring embroidery and motifs reminiscent of both brands.

For Arons, a longtime customer of the hotel, the partnership happened “organically” over the past year.

“The Colony is a great place for us; Palm Beach is a great place for us,” Arons told Retail Brew. “Because we started with caftans, and we use a lot of bright colors and big, beautiful prints, [people] associate us with resort and with vacation.”

Arons believes the collaboration is a fun way to connect both with the brand’s existing customers and also guests at the hotel.

“Anybody who’s staying at The Colony is potentially a Francis Valentine customer, because she’s chosen that location, she’s chosen that hotel, and particularly with these pieces, it all really resonates,” she said.

Through with the gift shop: We’re past the days where hotels treated their retail shops as an afterthought. Instead, they’re turning boutiques into brand extensions designed to capture guests at their most relaxed, aspirational, and willing to spend.

Even The Mark in New York City—known for its celebrity clientele—recognizes this, and has over the years amped up partnerships with luxury retailers such as Frédéric Malle and Lingua Franca along with regular pop-ups to boost its business.

“As a brand, we try to develop these products, not only to merely sell them or to develop the business. The idea really for us is to access the home of a consumer. There are not many hotels who have this power,” Etienne Haro, general manager at The Mark, previously told Retail Brew. “And this power is one of the most incredible opportunities of a hotel.”

The same goes for hotel groups like The Standard with its own merch shop or The Colony Hotel’s other retail partnerships with brands like Goop and Dolce & Gabbana.

Chalk it up to experience: This growing overlap between hotels and retailers underscores a broader shift: Luxury is moving deeper into the experience economy, where the product alone is no longer enough.

“Consumers don’t really think as much by category,” Katie Thomas, lead at Kearney Consumer Institute and co-author of Kearney’s global luxury industry outlook report, previously told Retail Brew “They’re thinking just about the overall, holistic experience. Brands are increasingly doing a better job of partnerships and figuring out where there’s overlap and not staying too siloed into what has traditionally defined luxury.”

Arons noted that while hotels can’t necessarily replace something like a traditional department store for luxury retail, they complement each other.

“There’s room for both,” she said. “Department stores really fill a need for people on a day-to-day basis, just all the time, because when you go there, you can go pick up your lipstick, buy a pair of shoes, get jewelry, get apparel.”

She added that retail shops at hotels are not only a good way to pass time but also simply a great place to discover new brands.

“I’m always wanting to go in and take over the shop and buy for them, because a lot of shops just miss the boat so many times because they’re not realizing the people they’ve got staying in this hotel,” she said. “All these women have expendable income, and they’ll go buy a gift for somebody, or they’ll go buy something to throw on that night to go to dinner. I think there’s a real opportunity there for so many of them.”

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More than half (52%) of 7- to 14-year-olds report having added items to shared online shopping carts, and a quarter have independently ordered from food apps, according to a new report on Generation Alpha from PwC.

The report christens Gen Alpha “the youngest chief influence officers” and describes them as having been “born with the buy button at their fingertips.” The online survey polled 1,004 kids aged 7–14 in January and February.

While Gen Z, the next oldest generational cohort, are often dubbed digital natives, the report notes that Gen Alpha spent “their earliest years,” during the Covid pandemic, “going to school on screens,” and may be even more immersed in technology.

Nearly half (46%) of 7- to 9-year-olds reported already owning a smartphone, and that jumps to 89% among those aged 13–14. And whether it’s on their own phones or their parents’, they’re making purchases on them, with 12% of those aged 7–9 saying they’ve bought products using digital wallets (like Apple Pay), as have 23% of 13- to 14-year-olds.

In other words, these aren’t Gen X kids who merely tugged at parents’ sleeves to get them to buy Froot Loops.

“Generation Alpha isn’t a future consumer segment waiting in the wings,” the report reads. “The kids are participating now, influencing billions in household spending and building brand relationships that could last decades.”

As for how to reach those pint-sized consumers, placing ads on the nightly news probably won’t cut it. Among Gen Alpha respondents, 68% said they’re regular users of YouTube, followed by gaming platforms (54%), and streaming services (49%). TikTok use grows with age, with only 21% of 7- to 9-year-olds using it regularly, compared to 46% of those aged 13–14.

“If your brand isn’t on social media, gaming platforms, and streaming services, you’re likely invisible to this generation,” the report advises. “Influencer partnerships, in-app placements, and social commerce are foundational.”

Of course, you’ll want to be very careful when it comes to marketing to little Riley and Sawyer. In 2025, The Walt Disney Co. was hit with a $10 million FTC fine for failing to label some videos it posted to YouTube as “Made for Kids” and allegedly collecting personal data on kids under 13 without parental consent.

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Reddit has added new shopping tools to monetize authentic human conversations on its platform.

On Tuesday, the social media platform announced the rollout of Collection Ads, which combine a lead image with shoppable product tiles in a single carousel, connecting discovery to purchase. Collection Ads sit under what Reddit has dubbed more broadly as Dynamic Product Ads.

CMO Jim Squires said the platform’s ad strategy is people-first thanks to the unfiltered nature of conversations that take place on Reddit.

“Reddit has been around for over 20 years,” Squires told Retail Brew, “and the DNA of the platform is it’s the most human place on the internet, and that’s become even more important as AI has propagated, and we are inundated with more information than we’ve ever had.”

Squires noted about half of the posts on the platform are “commercial in nature” and interest in shopping among Redditors runs the gamut from clothing and beauty to B2B tech and home goods. The key difference, Squires said, is shopping intent is more skewed toward higher-value, higher-consideration purchases—cars, electronics, premium clothing—not low-cost commodities “that you’re just going to pick up at the grocery store.”

“To start with humans and that behavior, and then we have our business partners, which we want to support and enable to connect with people and communities on the platform,” Squires said. “That connection between businesses and people happens through our marketing products like Dynamic Product Ads and Collection Ads.”

Reddit is also testing Community and Deal overlays that integrate Reddit content directly into the ads experience. The company reported $690 million in ad revenue for its most recent quarter.

Shopify play: Reddit’s new Shopify integration (still in testing) makes it easier for businesses to set up and ramp up things like product catalogs and tracking on the platform. With Shopify, brands can automatically figure out which products to show each user based on their interests and browsing to potentially help drive sales with less manual work.

“I think about the Shopify relationship as we want to make it as easy as possible for all businesses—small all the way to large brands—to be able to get onto Reddit,” Squires said.

Overall, he added, “people are actively making purchase decisions, and [we] want to give them the ability to do that effectively, and we want to deliver performance for retailers on the platform.”

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Amazon is reportedly moving its Prime Day shopping event from July to June for the first time.

The summer deals event that typically happens in mid-July is expected to take place closer to the last week of June, Bloomberg reported. Amazon has been tweaking its Prime Day playbook over the years to expand everyday purchases on its marketplace.

Last year, it held its longest Prime Day—four days, from July 8 to July 11—for the first time. In 2022, the e-commerce giant soft launched hosting a second Prime Day in the fall, which started as an experiment on Amazon’s part to get rid of Covid-era excess inventory sitting in its warehouses. However, the company has continued to host similar sales events in October ever since which it dubbed “Prime Big Deal Days.”

Brands selling on Amazon said the decision to move Prime Day to June this year could benefit their sales, as July is traditionally considered slower with people taking time off for vacations. Merchants are preparing by shipping products early and moving up their product launches.

Seller beware: “[Amazon is] trying to be out there first,” Phil Masiello, founder and CEO of Crunchgrowth, which handles Amazon stores for roughly 100 brands across food, apparel, and electronics, told Retail Brew. “That’s why they’re playing around. That’s why they’re changing the rules.”

“The second thing is they’re a logistics business, so they’re trying to move products, so there’s something else that they’re seeing,” he added.

Meanwhile, makeup brand Grande Cosmetics is betting the June timing could work in its favor and help capture consumers before peak vacation season. Grande Cosmetics did not share specifics about the exact product it is launching with Retail Brew.

“We had to be more proactive with [inventory] forecasting, making sure we have all product in-house and ready to go a full month earlier than we’d normally be planning for,” Sabeen Mian, president of Grande Cosmetics, told Retail Brew in an email.

Mian said Grande Cosmetics, known best for its eyelash- and eyebrow-enhancing serums and tinted gel, has decided to move up one of its new product launches to June instead of July to ensure it goes live well ahead of Prime Day, allowing the company sufficient time to build reviews and drive traffic to its product page.

Brand with a plan: “Brands can’t rely on deep discounts alone,” Mike Black, chief growth officer at digital commerce research firm Profitero+, previously told Retail Brew. “They must deliver lasting value and use content and reviews to drive loyalty in a more price-sensitive market.”

“The earlier timing does require a more strategic approach to discounting, given the proximity to other promotional moments across our retail partners that have been planned out prior to Amazon’s news of the shift in dates,” Mian said. “It did however encourage cross-functional alignment earlier in the year, which has been a positive shift for overall execution.”

Ultimately, Masiello said, Amazon wants to control the shopping calendar and these changes help the e-commerce giant keep everyone guessing. “When people know that Prime Day is coming, they stop shopping everywhere [else] for the deals on Prime Day. That’s what Amazon wants,” he said. “They’re constantly going to do things to make sure that the competitors don’t nail them down to a specific date.”

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From store closures and geopolitical tensions to rising costs and supply chain disruptions, retailers seem to be facing a never-ending sea of challenges. And luxury hasn’t been exempt.

Kearney’s 2026 global luxury industry outlook, however, shows signs of stabilization.

While a spending pullback in China and sweeping C-suite changes across luxury brands have shaken the industry, “the global luxury market is stabilizing at a more measured pace,” per the report.The company predicts a growth of 2%–4% in 2026 that is likely “unevenly distributed across regions, categories, and client tiers.”

Still, Katie Thomas, lead at Kearney Consumer Institute and co-author of the report, told Retail Brew she’s not “overly bullish,” as aspirational consumers continue to weigh whether to spend on luxury or trade down to mass-market brands.

Instead, the study found that spending remains concentrated among the top 2% of consumers, who now account for “nearly half” of total luxury spend with “traditionalists” remaining “resilient” when faced with changes. In fact, 50% reported no behavioral changes in response to price increases.

“The luxury market is a great example of even further illustrating the K-shaped economy because you do see that high-net-worth consumer propping up the spend, but there’s risk to only catering to that consumer,” Thomas said. “That’s what I hear a lot of brands want to do is really stay focused on this high-end person, but you have a lot of people chasing what is ultimately a small group of consumers.”

But whether it’s a high-net-worth customer or an aspirational shopper, one thing is clear: Consumers are increasingly scrutinizing the “price-value equation,” she said.

Citing price hikes in leather goods as an example, Thomas added that shoppers aren’t entirely convinced it’s worth investing in traditional luxury names or whether they’re better off opting for more “approachable luxury” brands.

“It’s…not even about if you can afford these price increases; you don’t want to feel like you’re being taken for a ride,” Thomas said.

It’s also why the report points to a continued shift toward luxury experiences—travel, wellness, and even biohacking—as consumers perceive greater value in those categories.

Thomas noted that while these categories fall outside traditional definitions of luxury, consumers are increasingly prioritizing spending on hospitality and other high-end experiences, with continued growth in luxury stores and spas. At the same time, elements of beauty and wellness are becoming more accessible, from IV infusions and red light therapy to elevated food and beverage offerings.

Ultimately, for brands hoping to capitalize on the experience economy, the path forward may lie in blending products with experience. “[Consumers] don’t really think as much by category,” Thomas said. “They’re thinking just about the overall, holistic experience. Brands are increasingly doing a better job of partnerships and figuring out where there’s overlap and not staying too siloed into what has traditionally defined luxury.”

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Not unlike the little customers it serves, the baby category is a sensitive, sometimes temperamental business. Not just any old retail experience will do when you’re selling essential, life-altering products like strollers and breast pumps.

These category-specific needs are partly why the last couple of years have been challenging for some premium baby brands. Ever since Buy Buy Baby got swept up in the bankruptcy of parent company Bed Bath & Beyond in 2023, there’s been a massive hole in the retail ecosystem for baby brands that require a higher-end brick-and-mortar experience for their products.

The question facing brands is which company will rise to the challenge. With many retailers focused on lowering costs and providing plentiful product options, who is ready to offer a more curated and service-oriented approach that made Buy Buy Baby distinct?

Perhaps surprisingly, given its recent struggles to find a winning strategy in the current retail environment, Target appears to be the company stepping up. Earlier this month, it announced a strategic reinvestment in its baby department aimed at making its stores destinations for premium brands. The plan includes the launch of a “Baby Boutique,” essentially a specialized shop-in-shop for higher-end products; an expanded version of its “Baby Concierge” service, which provides expert support to shoppers; additional store space so customers can better find and discover products; and the addition of 2,000 new “thoughtfully curated” items.

Babies and bricks: UPPAbaby is one of the brands collaborating with Target on its new merchandising strategy, as it tries to find a new brick-and-mortar home for its product following the closure of Buy Buy Baby locations in 2024. While the stroller- and car seat-maker was diversified across a number of independent outlets and channels, Buy Buy Baby was its biggest national retail partner and the place where many shoppers could test its products, Amy Alabaster, chief revenue officer at UPPAbaby, told Retail Brew.

Moving more of its business into digital channels helped the brand weather the transition, she said, but ultimately, the executive team “always wanted that brick-and-mortar side to come back in a significant way.”

This commitment stems from a belief in the core value proposition of the in-store experience: “I think physical retail holds critical importance to premium brands like UPPAbaby because customers want to try products before they buy,” she said. “And for us, it’s really important that customers get to experience what makes our products premium.”

So the timing of Target’s announcement was opportunistic for both UPPAbaby and Target, which has faced declining sales and reputational damages from a series of public relations mishaps. The reinvestment marks its latest attempt to turn its business around. But in this case, rather than trying to keep up with its competitors on price or convenience as it continues to do in other aspects of its business, it’s offering a distinctly higher-end experience in an underserved category. “This is a category that’s gone untouched for years, and there is so much potential in front of us,” Target Chief Merchandising Officer Cara Sylvester said in an earnings call.

Getting these premium brands on board took some effort, however, including working closely with prospective partners on what the new retail experience would look like—a level of outreach that convinced UPPAbaby to finally make the move into Target.

“To be very candid with you, Target’s been approaching us for 15-plus years, but a lot of it really came down to whether or not there was a reason for this to exist,” Alabaster said. 

Buy Buy Baby closing was one big reason to pursue a partnership, but it wasn’t the only motivation. Starting in 2024, the brand started working with Target to put together a vision for its Baby Boutique concept that would fit its needs. The result is “a manifestation of their shared vision,” Alabaster said, rather than something developed exclusively within Target.

Less is more: At the core of this vision is a greater focus on quality over quantity—and an elevation of what some see as the most important function of retailers: curation.

It’s the job of retailers to curate their product selection in a way that helps consumers choose and avoid decision fatigue, Sarah O’Leary, CEO of Willow, maker of portable breast pumps available at Target, told Retail Brew. However, she said right now there is a “a shift in the other direction,” in which platforms such as Amazon offer millions of items with minimal curation, leaving customers to wade through customer reviews that are not always reliable.

Target’s investment in its baby category is an opportunity to reset and work more actively and collaboratively with the retailer on merchandising its products, she added.

“There’s not been a place for women to really learn about the products, touch and feel products, and get that curated experience,” O’Leary said. “I think Target is absolutely the account that has the opportunity to lean into that space.”

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The pace of fast fashion is quickening. Trend cycles have only shortened since the pandemic, which means consumers are buying clothes more frequently, incentivizing retailers to produce copious garments, more than half of which are made from polyester.

Once clothing items are no longer en vogue, they might be sold on resale platforms, donated to secondhand stores, or repurposed into cleaning rags—but that’s the best-case scenario. Mostly, the nearly 100 million tons of annual global textile waste go into landfills or are burned.

Reju, a polyester recycling company, offers a unique alternative: It repurposes polyester, a synthetic material made from petroleum that can take up to 200 years to disintegrate, by breaking it down to its molecular components and then rebuilding it into a stronger, better-quality fiber, ready to be made into completely new garments. One material scientist told Morning Brew that Reju’s method is the “holy grail” of the circular economy, and an industry expert said the company is proof that investors are ready to support sustainable textile innovation to tackle the global waste crisis.

And the crisis only stands to worsen: One estimate posits that the world will produce 134 million tons of textile waste annually by 2030, and more polyester will be manufactured to keep up with the industry’s cadence.

Down to the studs

Reju sees opportunity in this quandary. At its Regeneration Hub Zero in Frankfurt, Germany, Reju takes textile waste destined to be burned or tossed in a landfill and uses it as feedstock for its polyester recycling process. First, polyester is extracted from the textile waste, then de-polymerized, or broken down to monomers.

“It’s like if you had a bike chain, you cut all the links, and you have now a bunch of links, but they’re not connected anymore. They’re just molecules,” Reju CEO Patrik Frisk explained.

Reju’s chemical recycling process relies on glycolysis, which uses a liquid called ethylene glycol to break the bonds between polyester molecules. Once the polyester has been separated into molecules, Reju cleans it of additives, colors, and bacteria before re-polymerizing it—reconnecting all the links into a chain—and turning it back into clean polyester.

“The idea here is to take this mixed post-consumer textile,” Frisk told Morning Brew, “extract the polyester, cleanse it of any impurities, de-polymerize it…then re-polymerize it and make new yarns and fabrics at a higher quality than what you got coming in. So now that you put it back into circulation again, you’re making a better product out of it.”

Scaling up

Reju can de-polymerize and re-polymerize at scale because of its catalyst, which is a component added to the chemical reaction that speeds it up. The catalyst can be reused many times without deactivating. Frisk said the catalyst allows Reju to recycle polyester efficiently and quickly, allowing for a larger impact.

“[We are] able to do it quickly with as little energy as possible to get as high yield as possible, which also then plays back into the environmental aspect of carbon emissions,” Frisk said, adding that Reju uses 50% less carbon than “taking oil out of the ground and making polyester out of it.”

What separates Reju from other textile and polyester recycling companies is that its process uses both mechanical and chemical recycling and does so using less energy than competitors, CTO Antoni Mairata said. In general, textile recyclers that rely only on mechanical processes are more sustainable than their chemical recycling counterparts. But using the catalyst, Reju’s chemical recycling needs less energy to function.

“The energy you cannot change. It is intrinsic to the chemistry, to the process. What you can change is the speed at which that happens,” Mairata told Morning Brew. “And this is what the catalyst is doing. This is why our technology has an advantage. It takes minutes for the reaction to be over.”

Michael Bockstaller, a chemist and materials science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Morning Brew that Reju seems to be achieving that goal, and that the company’s work is “very promising.”

“De-polymerization [is] the holy grail in polymer recycling,” Bockstaller said. “This is going to be the critical step in the circular economy if we want to make this a reality as far as polymers are concerned. I’m happy to see this progress.”

Going stateside

Reju is working with Goodwill and waste management companies to acquire feedstock, and after repurposing polyester fibers, Reju sells its textiles to retailers and brands, including car and furniture companies and airlines, which benefit from using recycled fabrics when complying with extended producer responsibility regulations. Reju said it couldn’t yet comment on brand partnerships or expected output.

Reju plans to construct its regeneration plants primarily in the largest producers of textile waste—the US and Europe—and recently announced plans to build its first US site in Rochester, New York. The plant will be New York state’s first big shot at textile innovation and bring new industry jobs, too, Ali Schachtschneider, a textile innovation consultant with a background in sustainable biomaterials, told Morning Brew.

“I’m a fan of any material innovation that really moves toward scale,” Schachtschneider said. “So this is a good indicator that Reju has the financing and the backing that they need to move the needle in a good direction.”

Reju’s progress is also a positive indication for the entire textile innovation industry, according to Schachtschneider.

“There’s also a number of other companies that are doing really cool things directly in the polyester space,” she said. “So I’m happy about what this announcement of Reju’s plant does for making the investors of these other companies have a little bit more faith that they’ll get to scale eventually.”

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Meta is making product changes to make it easier for users to find and buy products across Facebook and Instagram with new tweaks and tools.

On Tuesday, the tech giant said it is expanding the Facebook affiliate program, which lets creators tag products from retailers in their Facebook posts, to new partners including Amazon, eBay, and Temu in the United States; Mercado Libre in Latin America; and Shopee in Asia.

Meta is also testing a similar affiliate program for Instagram, the company said. Creators will be able to highlight products directly in their posts and Reels, and earn money through these new affiliate partners.

Essentially, Meta is giving creators more ways to recommend products across Facebook and Instagram. On Instagram, creators will have a new tag feature that they can use to flag items from a brand’s catalog or through affiliate links directly in their Reels, turning any Instagram video into a digital storefront.

The new product tagging feature is one of the ways Meta wants to turn creator content into a sales channel for brands and retailers and a new opportunity for creators to monetize their content.

Plus, Meta is opening up its existing Shops feature to advertising in overseas markets. The tech giant will let brands in Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK, and Australia plug ads in Shops.

Impulse buying: Meta is also introducing a new “Buy Now” button that will sit within ads running on its apps.

After clicking on an ad, Meta users may see a Buy Now button that will let them make a purchase from a brand, Meta said. Advertisers will get to choose the checkout partner and will fulfill the order directly.

Katya Constantine, CEO of agency Digishopgirl Media, said Meta is taking a page out of TikTok’s Shop’s playbook, which proved that customers will shop on a social media platform. Meta is building tools to make it easier for users to transact and discover, she added.

“Meta is taking those learnings and really making it a lot easier, both from a discovery perspective of what they’re doing with affiliates to conversion with how the information comes through and how easy it is to transact,” Constantine said. “I don’t think they’re going to be a retailer, but I do think that they are trying to capture more of the advertising dollar and affiliate dollar.”

TikTok rolled out its affiliate program, where creators post about products they love and earn a cut of every sale, in 2023. One candy brand made $1.4 million in one quarter after using TikTok’s affiliate program, the Wall Street Journal reported.

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Mark Simon is VP of strategy at intelligent automation software company Celigo, which works with companies like Therabody and PayPal.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I start by telling people that, at the simplest, I work with companies to help them automate their businesses. While we can think of integration and automation as the “invisible plumbing” of retail—and for many companies it is—I work with companies to help them think strategically and use automation as a business differentiator to drive their top-level goals. At 90% of companies, when everything works, no one thinks about its integration and automation. When it doesn’t, it’s all anyone can talk about. You can take a look at Shopify’s Cyber Monday breakdown last year, for example, which showcased how important e-commerce infrastructure is to so many businesses. My job is to help retailers see the opportunity to accelerate their growth and ensure customer experience excellence by taking a proactive approach. We can make sure orders, inventory, payments, and customer data are all talking to each other (through integrations) so teams can focus less on putting out fires and more on actually growing the business.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? Most people assume I’ve always been a retail consulting or strategy person at a software company, but I actually started as a software engineer in the wild west days of e-commerce on the front lines. I was writing code, breaking things, fixing them, and learning in real time how messy retail systems really are. Later, I ended up as CTO on a founding team, which forced me to zoom out from “Does this work?” to “Does this actually move the business?” That for me was the big transition from being a technologist to being a business leader. That early, very hands-on experience is still how I think today: Strategy only matters if it survives contact with real systems, operators, and customers.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? It is impossible to pick a single project; what jumps out to me is any project where the customer comes in asking us to solve a narrow-focused problem, like integrating their new e-commerce platform with their ERP. It is always very fulfilling to work with experienced teams who will let us take a step or two back and understand why their existing solutions don’t meet their needs, learn their business and the goals, and then provide a solution both to the short-term need but also show them how Celigo can help the entire business run better by allowing them to not only build Order to Cash automations more quickly, but also help them manage those automations much more efficiently by leveraging less technical resources that are closer to the business problem.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? The trend I’m most excited about is AI finally moving into the “boring” parts of retail. When AI helps prevent stockouts, resolve order issues automatically, or smooth peak-season operations, that’s when it stops being hype and starts delivering real results.

What’s your go-to coffee order? I grew up in Seattle but didn’t start drinking coffee regularly until I had kids and to keep things simple, I adopted my wife’s order. Ten years later, it’s still my go-to: a split-shot Americano topped with steamed soy.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? To “just add more people” instead of investing in automation and modern cloud systems while I was leading technology at a high-growth e-commerce startup. I quickly ignored it, and I’ve since seen how transformative the right systems can be for a company.

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? When I was 15, my favorite retail product was my first real piece of outdoor gear: an REI down sleeping bag I used for hiking and backpacking. Now, my favorite purchase is a great pair of skis, since skiing is the sport I love most and enjoy with my family.

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