Editor’s note: We’re rerunning stories this week from our yearlong Quarter Century Project, in which we examined the last 25 years in retail.

When you think about where direct to consumer (DTC) came from, it started with a simple concept: Anyone could come up with an idea and create their own online store. Then in the mid-2000s, e-commerce platforms like Shopify made it easier for anyone to launch an online store. And social media giants like Facebook (now Meta) gave brands new ways to reach customers directly, and that’s really where this whole world was born.

During the 2000s, DTC was dominated by massive mail order catalogs and late night TV was a wild west of “as seen on TV” products that promised to change lives. The DTC revolution started when disruptors like Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, Casper, and Blue Apron showed everyone that slick websites and cheeky ads plastered all over Instagram feeds and subway commutes was a legit business model. These brands mastered the DTC playbook—-cutting out the middleman, slashing prices, and turning customer feedback into product gold.

The 2010s brought the DTC boom with companies like Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper, and Away, proving that DTC could build massive brands by cutting out retailers and going straight to consumers with clever marketing and subscription models.

Today, DTC has evolved from a scrappy alternative into the mainstream (nearly every major brand has some direct sales component) and is an essential part of how all modern brands operate.

Keep reading here.—VC

There’s no single moment in fashion history when the industry shifted gears, but there is one brand most insiders point to as the starting line: Zara.

The Spanish retailer that first set up shop in 1975 scaled globally between the ’90s and early 2000s and fundamentally restructured how the world came to understand fast fashion.

“Zara is the godfather of all fast fashion,” Michael Prendergast, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal’s consumer and retail group, told Retail Brew.

By refining the model of vertically integrated sourcing and rapid store replenishment, Zara brought designs to shelves within weeks and expanded collections to be year round.

“They were the innovators of sending designers and merchandisers to Paris Fashion Week, taking pictures…going back to their hotel room, uploading it back to headquarters, and then headquarters being able to technically knock that product off within 30–60 days, and get it throughout their global network, onto the floors of their stores,” Prenedergast said.

Keep reading here.—JS

We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2025 by a Retail Brew colleague.

Just over a decade ago, could you have imagined a world where your phone stood in for, well…pretty much everything, including cash, cards, even your subway pass?

Apple did. And in so doing, it turned the daily ritual of rummaging through our wallets for the “right” card into the much cleaner, cooler act of pulling out a phone and tapping.

Thanks to Retail Brew Reporter Alex Vuocolo’s keen eye (and enviable POS-system fluency), we got a deeper look at how Apple Pay went from a novelty option to something accepted by more than 85% of US retailers in under 10 years.

The significance for Apply Pay was that when merchants started updating their POS systems to communicate with these new chips, many saw an opportunity to add another technological capability called near field communication (NFC). This technology is what mobile devices use to communicate with each other and it also happens to be the backbone of Apple Pay.

“Once they looked at these strategies for replacing their terminals, that’s when they said, ‘Well, listen, it doesn’t really cost that much to add this NFC technology as well,’” [Christopher Uriarte, payment expert at Glenbrook Partners,] said. Once that technology was embedded, he added, your iPhone was as good as your credit card.

What else is new? Even though contactless payments like Apple Pay are becoming the default at retailers around the world, Walmart remains one of the major holdouts. Shoppers won’t find NFC payments like Apple Pay or Google Pay at checkout, but instead, they can use Walmart’s own payment tools.

Still, as Alex notes, for consumers it all comes down to one thing: convenience. And in 2025, tapping to pay was about as convenient as it got.

Read the original story here: How Apple Pay became ubiquitous at retailers—JS