TECH

Adobe Stock

At Accelerate, Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers in Seattle, the e-commerce giant was focused on its Seller Assistant, which has been upgraded to include agentic AI capabilities, and Amazon executives talked about how they believe it is going to help brands run their business on the marketplace.

However, the big reveal of the show was Amazon’s announcement that it’s launching a plugin for its own assistant, Quick, and for Anthropic’s AI agent Claude. Amazon will now let merchants run their Amazon stores on Claude, the company said, without ever going into Seller Central, the main dashboard for merchant store data. It’s a move that hints at an evolution of Amazon’s stance on data sharing with tech companies like Anthropic and potentially other tech rivals like OpenAI which runs ChatGPT.

The plugin will connect a seller’s Amazon data, including their listings, real-time performance metrics, inventory levels, and sales analytics, directly to their Claude account, according to Amazon.

Keep reading here.—VC

      

Sponsored By Diageo

Careers and beers share a simple principle: Don’t let them go flat.

Diageo’s commercial teams help some of the world’s most-loved drink brands grow, stay relevant, and win with consumers. They’re the team behind brands like Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Tanqueray, and more.

Their commercial teams are part of why people keep coming back. Whether the focus is convenience, e-commerce, on-premise, travel, or another part of the consumer journey, you’ll turn shopper insights, analytics, and commercial strategy into new opportunities for growth.

Work across sales, category, marketing, supply chain, and customers to help Diageo’s brands show up in the right places in the right ways for the right occasions. From shaping assortments and building customer partnerships to unlocking e-commerce growth, your work can directly influence how consumers experience and choose their iconic brands.

Join Diageo’s commercial talent community to stay connected to future opportunities and be part of what’s next.

E-COMMERCE

Dr. Squatch

Editor’s note: Due to a formatting error, yesterday’s newsletter didn’t include the first several paragraphs of this story. Let’s give it another try.

Dr. Squatch, the men’s personal-care brand founded in 2013, has always faced a challenge on the DTC side: Its bar soap and other products are relatively heavy, meaning shipping is expensive. A typical order is roughly $30, with fulfillment and shipping costing the brand around $10.

“That’s a very large percent of sales that we dedicate to fulfillment costs, so anything we can do to reduce that is to our benefit,” Karl Mecklenborg, senior director of strategic operations at Dr. Squatch, told Retail Brew. The company used to cut that cost by using “economy shipping carriers,” but that led to headaches because the “service variability was very wide,” he said.

To address shipping snafus, Dr. Squatch switched its third-party logistics (3PL) provider a few years ago, gaining access to a larger number of carriers and doubling its US distribution centers from two to four.

Mecklenborg has been with the company for four years; two years ago, he took over the customer experience team, and something many outside of retail have never heard of reared its ugly head: WISMO.

Keep reading here.—AAN

      

Sponsored By The Ibotta Performance Network

Your next big growth win. Research from Circana shows that promotions are the most precise growth tool you have. We partnered with Ibotta to dig into this research. Read our white paper to see just how effective promotions can be + learn how you can use them in your marketing strategy.

COMMUNITY

Lorne Lucree

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

Lorne Lucree is a former beauty exec and founder of allergy-care brand Wizard Wellness, sold at retailers including CVS, Target, and Walmart.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I’m the founder and CEO of Wizard Wellness, the first drug-free, steroid-free allergy-care brand built at the intersection of beauty and wellness. My superpower is product innovation: I spent 20+ years in prestige beauty at L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, and Unilever creating cult products… Now I’m applying that same obsession—sensorial experience, clinical science, packaging, raw material technology, usage ritual—to the most ignored aisle in retail. We’re the first brand to bring nasal microbiome science to allergy care, and my job is to make sure that science feels as exciting and intuitive to a Walmart shopper as it does to a beauty editor. That translation is everything.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? On any given day I might be negotiating content with a macro influencer, reviewing probiotic strain combinations with our supplier to unlock new respiratory health benefits, planning consumer claims testing for formats brand new to the allergy category, meeting with our Amazon and TikTok Shop agencies to read sales data, coordinating inventory for our upcoming CVS and Walmart launches, or sitting in a trade show in Barcelona or Hong Kong studying the latest raw materials and packaging trends. Then I go home and write product briefs for 2028 and try to be the best father I can be to Luna and Lola, my two daughters. The job description doesn’t exist yet—we’re writing it in real time.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Creating Wizard from scratch. What started as a personal frustration—being a chronic sinus sufferer who couldn’t find a single allergy product worthy of a counter—became a full category creation.

Keep reading here.—EC

      

Sponsored By ACI Worldwide

Did you know? New ACI research found that 40% of shoppers will abandon their cart over a surprise cost at checkout. Their 2026 report also reveals consumer insights on demand spikes, hybrid customer journeys, returns, and more. Take a look to gather learnings you can bring back to your brand.

swapping skus

Today’s top retail reads.

Casting doubt: Consumer confidence in September dropped to its lowest reading since 2014, according to the Conference Board. (the Wall Street Journal)

Moving target: After slashing prices on 3,000 items earlier this year, Target announced another batch of price cuts across nearly 2,000 items in categories like apparel and bedding. (Reuters)

In season: The outlook for retail sales during the 2026 holiday season is largely positive despite low consumer sentiment and persisting inflation. (WWD)

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

Francis Scialabba

Halloween shoppers are buying earlier this year and leaning cheap and analog — a quick read on what that shift says about holiday spending overall.