Retailers are taking a page from Amazon’s online stores playbook—but with a twist.

Over the last year, specialty retailers Lowe’s (December 2024), Best Buy (August 2025), and Ulta Beauty (H2 2025) have each unveiled their own third-party marketplaces. This new wave of curated third-party marketplaces isn’t about becoming the so-called “everything store” like Amazon. Instead, it’s an opportunity for retailers to expand their product selection without the headache of holding inventory, offering shoppers more choice while keeping the brand experience tightly controlled.

Overall, this seems to be part of a broader bet that owning the marketplace layer means owning more of the assortment, monetization, and discovery game, two retail analysts told Retail Brew. According to eMarketer’s latest forecast, US e-commerce marketplaces have surpassed 40% penetration and are projected to exceed $500 billion in sales in 2025, with total marketplace sales expected to surpass $700 billion by 2029.

While Ulta, Lowe’s, and Best Buy are not exactly going head to head, each of the retailers now has a fresh growth lever to pull. As customers get more comfortable shopping at marketplaces, there’s a long line of merchants who could use the opportunity to get their products in front of shoppers via these platforms.

“Each of these companies wants to ensure that they aren’t missing sales because they don’t have some very specific item that somebody might want,” Zak Stambor, senior analyst for retail and e-commerce at eMarketer, told Retail Brew. “That’s the objective.” By partnering with a vendor like Mirakl, Stambor said, expanding product assortment would be a “fairly light lift” for these retailers.

Keep reading here.—VC

The future of fashion production, according to Dominic Kaffka, is adaptability.

For the creative director and executive producer of event creative and production agency Focus Grp, that means constantly reimagining what a live show looks and feels like. The agency is responsible for grand activations and sets at global fashion and retail events—including New York Fashion Week.

Kaffka said he believes that regardless of a shifting economic and political climate, the need for “live moments” is here to stay. While he admits that event producers need to constantly innovate on the job, he said “that live experience you cannot replace with an AR or a piece of content.”

It’s why at NYFW last month, the company was hired to produce six runway shows, including for top designers and fashion houses such as Jason Wu, Grace Ling, and Toteme.

Keep reading here.—JS

While Americans are buying trash bags and Great Value soda at Walmart, Walmart is buying…malls.

The big-box colossus just snagged a Norwalk, CT, retail plaza for $44.5 million, beating out a “substantial” amount of interest in the space by laying out the juiciest offer, according to Jeff Kintzer, a principal at Royal Properties, which represented the seller.

A Walmart store anchors the shopping center, so the chain moving from lessee to owner doesn’t inspire much intrigue by itself. As the New York Times reported, Walmart already owns most of its locations. But the deal is part of an emerging pattern.

Keep reading here on Morning Brew.—HV

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