How retailers are pivoting their way through chaos

Strategic pivots have been a defining theme for retailers this year because of the trade complexities and economic uncertainty surrounding the retail landscape. But they’re also one of those topics that resurfaces every few years.

Retailers aren’t just tweaking strategies anymore; they’re fundamentally reinventing how they operate, where they compete, and what they sell. From fitness ring maker Oura expanding into new sales channels, to Build-A-Bear flipping the script on its omnichannel strategy, to Dibs Beauty taking an old-school approach to gathering customer data, here’s how brands at Retail Brew’s IRL event in July have been navigating change in 2025.

Branching out

Healthcare ring company Oura had virtually no retail presence two years ago, but in 2025, it has expanded to 20 countries and now works with more than 40 retailers globally, according to Jeremiah Linder, Oura’s VP of global retail.

“It’s required a lot of infrastructure building within our organization,” Linder said. “When I joined [the company] two and a half years ago, I was the first person to start this retail journey for the business. Things like demand planning functions weren’t really framed up in a really structured way. Systems around that really weren’t set up to support a retail infrastructure.”

Unpacking SKUs

As tariff costs remain unpredictable to calculate, spice maker Burlap & Barrel split its product lineup into what its co-CEO and co-founder, Ori Zohar, described as “must never run out of stock” essentials with higher inventory levels, and created seasonal limited releases around those SKUs designed to create urgency and excitement—basically, “get it now [and] if you can’t get it, it’s going to be out of season,” Zohar said on stage during a panel discussion.

“What we’ve really tried to do is both do our best to plan this whole inventory process, but also communicate with our customers when things are limited, and turn that into an incentive to ask: Act fast, buy now and take advantage of it. But we also really try to communicate openly with our customers,” he added.

Casual backflip

Meanwhile, more dramatic pivots shaped up at Build-A-Bear fluffing up profits from its omnichannel strategy. The company flipped its entire model—transforming from a mall-based kids’ retail experience into a branded IP company that just happens to have vertical retail as one of its revenue streams.

“Start building out omnichannel and e-comm and outbound licensing and get an entertainment arm and be more serious about global expansion—and that’s what we’ve done, while making that retail extremely profitable,” Sharon Price John, president and CEO of Build-A-Bear, said.

The company went from 9% four-wall profitability when John joined in 2013 to 25%, with all stores now profitable. “We significantly changed the entire profile of that with the theory that well-run vertical retail is a cash machine and then you can invest in the creation of all these other aspects,” John said.

Stock and awe

Inventory management is another burning issue for retailers. For demand forecasting, “pre-sale” and “limiting SKUs” strategies are now standard practice, according to Maggie Barnett, CEO of LVK Logistics and COO at ShipHero.

“So the idea of making it so that it’s very limited quantity, and it helps with cash flow. You don’t have to worry about the demand planning so much,” she said. “And they’re also then limiting the SKUs, seeing the optionality around SKUs go down—so where you could get 12 shades of a lipstick before we’re seeing folks go down to eight. It does reduce some of that complexity. So, really sticking to their core SKUs is another thing.”

Dashing with clarity

When it comes to data, Dibs Beauty CEO Jeff Lee said data has helped the beauty brand pivot from being DTC-only to a traditional CPG name with nationwide presence at retailers like Ulta Beauty. “Data really helps inform what we don’t know,” Lee said.

Dibs Beauty is present across 1,400 Ulta stores, but the cosmetics brand’s access to data from Ulta is limited at best. “We are handicapped, obviously, by the fact that you have a large retailer with a lot more power and control over the data,” Lee said. “And the way to counteract that is—and it sounds so counterintuitive in this digital-first age—is literally to do the analog, in-person solution.”

“We touch every door we can,” he added, referring to the work done by his sales team. Lee said this helps Dibs Beauty get both first-party and zero party data on the ground. This zero-party data is collected via iPad surveys, samples, or by running little contests.

Talking about the brand’s overall data strategy, Lee said it is governed by the in-person customer more than anyone else: “The tension economy is at such an accelerated cycle now.”

Since Dibs’s founding in September 2021, Lee said the brand has lived to see “the downfall of paid [media], the surge of the influencer, and then the customer tuning the influencer out the second they get a whiff that it was a paid placement.”

On the same panel, fashion brand Frances Valentine’s CMO Katherine Brodie said a “mix” of looking into trends and surveying the customer determines the way the brand interprets and reads shopper data, “using the data paired with those customer insights to drive our decision making.”