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Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

Retail Brew

Katishi Maake

retailbrew.com

Gen Zers are more resistant to ‘doom spending’ than you’d think

80% say doom spending and soft saving don’t reflect their financial habits: survey.

Gen Zers are more resistant to ‘doom spending’ than you’d think 

Resale is growing increasingly popular online: report 

45% of younger shoppers would prefer to buy secondhand online.

Alex Vuocolo

Shoppers’ pickier habits are spreading to essentials

Consumer spending reveals priorities.

Shoppers’ pickier habits are spreading to essentials, data shows  

E-Commerce

Vidhi Choudhary

Some brands are changing the way they view private labels—and it could reshape their product strategy.

Online subscription service Bespoke Post has more than doubled its private label portfolio from two to five brands in recent years, with owned brands—including rugged apparel gear by Line of Trade and travel bag maker Halfday—contributing more than 50% to its total sales.

“I think in the past, private labels felt more like what the big box retailers were doing, where it was just like a low-cost alternative, whereas what we’re trying to do is create actual brands that have a point of view and a brand ethos, and they’re distinct,” Bespoke Post Founder Rishi Prabhu told Retail Brew.

The trend isn’t limited to subscription boxes; some other brands are also doubling down on apparel in private labels. This year, boho chic fashion brand Anthropologie spun its private label brand Maeve into a standalone brand thanks to its growing popularity. Fashion platform Stitch Fix also told Retail Brew 

 that it will be headlining its private label offerings this holiday season, betting that shoppers will be drawn to their mix of quality and value.

Target saw early success within retail private label brands decades ago, particularly in apparel, and continues building that portfolio today. In February 2024, Target launched Dealworthy, a budget-friendly private label brand including apparel. Target’s owned brand portfolio—spanning food, wellness, and other categories—generates over $30 billion in annual sales. Even Nordstrom 

 with its women’s apparel private labels last year.

 In the apparel sector, private label penetration stood at 84.8% at the end of 2024, according to a report by Numerator. While legacy retailers like Target and Costco still look at private labels as a low-cost offering, the industry’s perception of the segment on the internet is getting elevated, and a key differentiator.

“The evolution has been that we’re using customer insights to create products that our customers are going to love,” Prabhu added. Fieldworth is the most recent addition to Bespoke Post’s assortment of private labels that also operates a home goods brand, a kitchen brand, plus Line of Trade and Halfday within its private label offerings.

Brad Jashinsky, director analyst at Gartner, told Retail Brew, “The exciting part for private label is that differentiation…but also it helps to hedge against price matching.”

But private labels aren’t just about price anymore; they’re about personality. Prabhu said the big shift in perception is about building brands that are long lasting: “The new lens is we’re really creating brands that we want to last forever, that could live within or outside of our ecosystem.”

This permanence matters because consumer priorities have evolved, Prabhu added: “And the reason the market has shifted its perception is because consumers—our customers—are really looking for authenticity in brands and that’s the potential competitive advantage here.”

“We’ve let our customer hold our hand, and they pulled us,” he said. “We followed where our customer’s going. We see the categories our customers really care about. We see where there’s white space opportunity, and we see where there’s areas that we think we can create something really great.”

Jashinsky agreed that one of the biggest shifts with the private label landscape in the last few years is the entry of smaller players.

“It used to be your Targets, your Walmart, your Costco,” he said, but ultimately, “the best way to compete, and one of the more profitable ways to compete for retailers is through differentiation. And I think private label brands are going to continue to play a bigger and bigger role in all of that.”

Private-label apparel is getting an attitude upgrade

From e-commerce shops like Bespoke Post to tech platforms like Stitch Fix, private label brands are showing up as a bigger part of overall retail strategy.

Instacart has released new AI tools for grocers to define the next phase of grocery shopping through AI-powered agents. The platform is also working with generative AI companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google to figure out how the next generation of digital agents will change grocery shopping.

The grocery delivery platform’s AI strategy comprises four new tools, including Cart Assistant, which provides personalized, omnichannel shopping support to retailers and learns from every interaction. Sprouts Farmers Market will be the first to pilot Cart Assistant on its website, app, and in-store through 

 (AI enabled smart carts with tablet like screens).

Another of the new tools is Store View, which gives grocers real-time shelf visibility, using image and video analysis to flag low-stock or out-of-stock items. Plus, Instacart’s Catalog Engine adds AI-powered nutrition, ingredient, and product data to existing product listings.

Meanwhile, Agentic Analytics converts retail data into instant insights, enabling the platform’s retail partners to pose complex questions and receive immediate, actionable answers.

“These new AI solutions mark the next chapter in our enterprise story—empowering retailers to turn generative and agentic AI into a true competitive edge,” Chris Rogers, CEO of Instacart, said in a statement. “In an era of rapid technological change, we’re helping grocers of all sizes not only keep pace, but also compete—and win—in an AI-powered world.”

—which helps retailers prepare their systems for AI-powered shopping assistants—said Instacart may be entering its enterprise era with these new tools. “It feels like the company is really leaning in, maybe even pivoting into what we call ‘merchant services,’ attempting to be less of a consumer company and helping their B2B customers and expanding that part of the business,” Wingo wrote in an email.

Instacart’s approach, Wingo said, builds on Etsy’s and Amazon’s successes with enterprise services. Etsy’s pivot was roughly five years ago, when the platform evolved from a pure marketplace to one where merchant services now represent a significant revenue stream. Similarly, Amazon generates substantial income from FBA, advertising, and other merchant services beyond traditional e-commerce.

“Maybe there’s more and easier/higher margin dollars to be made from B2B than the B2C side, or maybe this is a hedge (admission?) against losing the front door consumer experience and moving to more of a back-end orchestration/layer,” Wingo added.

Instacart rolls out new agentic AI tools for grocery chains

Instacart introduces Cart Assistant and Store View in its enterprise AI push.

Erin Cabrey

Since TikTok Shop’s launch two years ago, brands large and small have worked to turn the platform’s 170 million U.S. users from scrollers into shoppers. Increasingly, that’s included more food brands, offering products ranging from limited-edition Doritos and trending Swedish candy to fresh halibut.

TikTok Shop continues to gain traction, with overall sales up 120% YoY, and the food category’s growth more than doubling, according to Amanda Parker, head of food at TikTok Shop. While 

 has led the way, food is the second biggest category on the platform, accounting for nearly 14% of sales, according to Capital One Shopping.

And it isn’t just a place to find smaller, digitally native brands. Big CPG players like Frito-Lay, OLLY, Cholula, and Keurig now sell on the platform, too—even grocer Lidl 

 in the UK this year—along with a slew of emerging brands, like 

While the level of brand recognition may vary, the novelty of TikTok Shop for food presents a sort of level playing field for brands on the platform as they vie for the piece of the pie.

” has emerged to denote social platforms that’ve added e-commerce capabilities, Parker refers to TikTok Shop’s experience as “discovery commerce.” Often, the platform is driving first-time purchases, and in food, products like bundles or variety packs (as seen with brands like Poppi, whose 6-pack variety pack is its only direct TikTok Shop offering), tend to do well. Some brands, like viral Swedish candy maker BonBon, offer TikTok-exclusive products. For nonexclusive items, after that initial purchase, consumers might turn to TikTok Shop just to buy the one flavor they like from the pack, or to another platform to continue buying it. In that sense, TikTok Shop is “a feeder for an omnichannel business,” Parker said.

While it started rolling out a subscribe-and-save feature earlier this year to boost repeat purchases—used by brands like Hormbles Chormbles—Parker said “it’s squarely in that discovery of commerce zone that we definitely are excelling.”

TikTok Shop utilizes what they call an ACE framework (assortment, content, and empowerment) for partnerships, but this approach differs from brand to brand. Some, like native DTC brands, want to “accelerate” what they’re already doing well, and will work with cross-functional content teams to capitalize on trends and viral moments.

“We’ve seen some that have gone from zero to wild amounts of revenue on TikTok Shop really alone, and they’ll have a very different mechanism for partnership than, let’s say, a Mars or a big CPG player,” Parker said. DTC brand EZ Bombs (which makes bath-bomb-like seasoning “bombs” for recipes like birria) was a standout on TikTok Shop and found success through live shopping, Parker noted, and has since gained distribution at retailers like Walmart, Target, and Albertsons.

Those giant players, meanwhile, approach the platform more as an “offshoot” of a larger marketing push, and will work with TikTok’s ads team, she noted. While these big CPG brands will be making the bulk of its sales in retail stores, they’re still turning to the platform to test new flavors, identify trends, and attract new shoppers. Mars’s Skittles, for example, leaned into the freeze-dried candy trend last year with Skittles Pop’d, which it launched on TikTok Shop before it hit retail shelves.

For brands both large and small, the bulk of revenue is driven by affiliates, Parker said, which ultimately “democratizes” the opportunity for brands.

“At the end of the day, you can have all the budgets in the world or all the brand recognition off platform in the world, and the reality is that a small brand like EZ Bombs may have just as much success, if not more so, than a larger brand fully based on how they lean into all of the levers we have,” she said.

 Successful products on the platform have “combination of uniqueness”—flavor, appearance, exclusivity—and categories like puffed snacks, jerky, protein bars, and, of course, Dubai chocolate, have been recent standouts. But this year, TikTok Shop has been experimenting with offering fresh and frozen perishable products as well. This summer, it 

 with Pike Place Fish Market, a Seattle-based farmers market known for its fish-slinging to 

 on its platform. The effort drew “quite a crowd,” she said.

TikTok Shop is still in the “early stages” of selling these types of products, which are currently only allowed on an invite-only basis on the platform, but as large players like Omaha Steaks have also recently joined the platform, Parker said these foods could present “interesting gifting opportunities” this holiday season.

The opportunity for food brands on TikTok Shop

Emerging brands and big CPGs are turning to the platform to boost discovery for their food and beverage products. 

From freeze-dried candy to fish: The opportunity for food brands on TikTok Shop

Football season drove a surge in fan gear and sports equipment on Shopify in October, according to data shared first with Retail Brew.

People shelled out money to buy football shoes (up 106%), chin straps (up 97%), training equipment (up 91%), and gloves (up 90%), Shopify data showed. Demand for football face masks (up 63%) and helmets (up 44%) also accelerated.

The surge wasn’t limited to traditional sports retailers, as football gear is spilling over into the lifestyle and fashion segments, too. Lululemon’s 

 of NFL-licensed gear shows that athleisure brands are cashing in on football fever, blurring the lines between fan gear and everyday fashion.

 Beyond the gridiron, the changing weather in October also showed up in shopping habits. As temperatures dipped, Shopify shoppers went into full prep mode for the cold months ahead. Orders for snow shovels (up 228%), snow tubes (up 217%), and de-icers (up 184%), all rose sharply.

 As people spent more time inside, they also seemed to invest more in making their homes comfortable and beautiful. Shoppers gravitated toward pieces that add warmth and function: orders for jewelry armoires soared (up 266%), daybed orders jumped 137%, and closet shelf sales rose by 117%. Bigger furniture staples even saw gains, with double wardrobes up 92%, sectional sofas up 68%, and coffee tables up 45%.

 Meanwhile, parents leaned into toys that sparked creativity and imagination. Musical boxes struck a chord, soaring 158%, while toy cookware heated up by 136%. Orders for classic play dough sets jumped 93%, and toy abacuses notched up 67%.

Illustration of a football wrapped in $100 bills

Football must-haves, winter gear topped Shopify orders in October

Shoppers stocked up on football shoes, gloves, and chin straps.

Commercetools CEO Andrew Burton is candid enough to acknowledge that enterprise-level commerce is not easy. However, the head of the e-commerce platform—which powers retailers like Sephora, PetSmart, and Ulta Beauty—has partnered with fintech giant Stripe and OpenAI to launch an “agentic commerce protocol” to make it easier to do business on the platform.

Burton said in a statement that Commercetools will help clients implement new transaction standards

without the stiffness of legacy tech models that want to retain vendors within their own ecosystems with lockins or walled gardens. “Partnering with Stripe on ACP extends that advantage,” he said, “giving enterprises the composable foundation to move at the speed of their business, not the speed of their vendor.”

Commercetools has also launched a new shopping assistant, Cora, which provides seamless conversations with customers, whether they start chatting on a website, mobile app, or WhatsApp,

Burton spoke to Retail Brew about why conversational commerce is the next big thing and other holiday trends, as the company prepares to go public in the next few years.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Can you talk about the recent Stripe collaboration?


The joint work we did with Stripe and now OpenAI is really the first time ever that we as an industry have created a standard for how commerce transactions can be done in this new agentic and AI-enabled world. Defining a standard by which people can have transactions occur in this rapidly emerging world is exciting because now it’s going to open up a whole new set of experiences and conveniences.

As shopper queries get longer, what do you think about the potential of conversational commerce?


This shift from searching to having conversations is really a shift from having a transaction to having a relationship. Think about the brands we love and know. Those are brands that you have a relationship with. You trust them. You expect them to show up a certain way. So, the reason I’m so excited about conversational commerce, and I do think it’s the next big thing, is it remembers what I know, how to interact with me, it remembers where I was, maybe the last time we had an interaction. And it then begins to tailor things for me.

Customers are really trying to figure out how to maximize the share of the wallet with their consumers. And it’s less about just getting more; it’s about really valuing and creating [that] ongoing relationship. And conversational commerce fits in that perfectly.

What trends are you seeing going into the holidays?


There absolutely is a lot of excitement about the shift that’s occurring, where people are now tracking, and they have hard metrics of traffic now that is occurring of customers engaging with them on the LLMs, on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft—Microsoft a little less so. But there is definitely tracking, and a reallocation or reprioritization of what channels people are coming in on. It’s still small, but it’s growing quite quickly. That’s the first major trend that we have seen, and that has gone from a curiosity to now it’s a core part of their business.

How do you think the definition of promotions has evolved over time?


I would say we’ve gone from promotions being a one-off or an event, or a transaction of “Hey, I’ll put this promotion in place and hopefully some people will come by and take advantage of it.” People are tailoring it to the journey of their customers and these are not generic journeys. What I’m seeing now is people really segmenting and sub-segmenting customers so that they can transact or buy more if it’s valuable.

I think what we’re seeing now is this elevation of how promotions are being used in the context of a customer life cycle.

I’ll share a couple things. The first is probably the most exciting for us: we’re just north of about $45 billion of commerce that we’re processing. 

I believe $100 billion of GMV [Gross Merchandise Value] is that next major milestone for us. We’ve got north of a billion-dollar valuation. We’ve got north of $100 million of ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue]. Those are more secondary metrics to us, because I believe when we’re helping our customers grow and expand their commercial volumes that we can also do well.

We did crossover profitability, that was earlier this year, and that allows us to innovate securely and innovate in ways that give us a lot of flexibility. In terms of the IPO, once we get to that $100 billion point, then we’re going to be at something that’s really unique. For us, it’s really getting there first, and then we’ll be able to evaluate the next steps for the company.

Commercetools CEO on shopper traffic from sources like ChatGPT

Commercetools’s CEO discusses the “reprioritization” of channels people are clicking on to shop

If you can’t beat them, join them. That’s the approach some retailers are taking with a powerful new middleman in e-commerce: AI-powered agents.

 with ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which launched its new protocol for funneling customers seamlessly from “

.” The announcement was the third in as many weeks, with Shopify and Etsy also striking deals with the AI juggernaut.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon explained the technology as the inevitable next step in the evolution of e-commerce. First, there was the search bar. Now, there are chatbots and, for now at least, capitalizing on that change means partnering with third parties such as OpenAI.

“We are running towards that more enjoyable and convenient future with Sparky and through partnerships including this important step with OpenAI,” McMillon said.

Yet retailers’ willingness to embrace the new comes as AI agents are already gaining ground among online shoppers. AI referral traffic to retail websites surged 4,700% YoY in July, according to data from Adobe Analytics, and it’s expected to jump another 515%–520% over the holidays.

For AI boosters, the benefits couldn’t be clearer: “Agents are a win-win for both the consumers and the merchants,” Melissa Bridgeford, CEO and co-founder of Wizard, an AI-powered agent specializing in e-commerce, told Retail Brew. “Agents are really going to solve that analysis-paralysis decision, helping consumers not only find what they want, but also make decisions around what they want.”

However, integrating with AI agents such as ChatGPT could also be a purely practical decision, aimed at retaining some control over a customer experience that is increasingly being mediated by third-party channels.

“There’s increasing concern that they have less agency in putting that story in front of customers,” Nikki Baird, VP of strategy and product at Aptos, said. “AI shopping is going to go through the roof this holiday season, and it’ll be about price and availability. It won’t be about my value proposition as a brand.”

While more and more web traffic is coming from AI agents, Baird said, many of these shoppers are being funneled directly to product pages, bypassing the category pages where customers would normally stop to browse.

Ya Wen, a former general manager at Amazon and SVP of the Americas at Payoneer, a payment services platform that works with e-commerce sites, said AI agents are just the latest distribution channel to gain purchase in e-commerce, and recent efforts at integration reflect a desire to follow the customer.

“They’re basically saying, ‘We recognize this is where the customers are going, so…we want to drive deeper integration to hopefully have better’—I don’t want to say control—‘but to provide better experience to those search consumers,’” he said. 

 Keeping up with consumers may require learning how to navigate a radically altered landscape for e-commerce. For instance, some experts believe retailer websites could soon become obsolete.

Bridgeford predicts that within the next decade, traffic to retail websites will fall to effectively zero. “It’s just going to slowly lose market share, and volumes are already dropping, and I think that trend is going to rapidly continue,” she said.

Yet even with the core of their e-commerce models under threat, retailers are beginning to see AI agents “less as a foe and more as a friend,” she added.

Whether that goodwill continues could depend on AI agents continuing to drive sales—one recent study found they still lag behind other channels in terms of conversions. A working paper from the University of Hamburg and the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management found that referrals from organic large language models (oLLMs) such as ChatGPT trailed behind traditional digital channels such as paid search.

The authors wrote that “the widely held expectation that oLLM is already superior to traditional channels is not supported by the data,” though it did show the channel was moving in a positive direction. 

AI agents are becoming a major e-commerce channel

As AI diverts more traffic from traditional channels, retailers are figuring out how to make the technology work for them.

AI agents are becoming a major e-commerce channel. Will retailers beat them or join them? 

In case you were wondering what problem AI should solve next, Amazon has an answer: helping you decide what to buy next.

On Thursday, Amazon introduced a new AI-powered “Help Me Decide” button that recommends products based on shopper browsing history and preferences. Amazon said the idea is to offer a clear product recommendation with explanations.

The goal is to help shoppers save time and offer confidence in their purchase decisions, Daniel Lloyd, Amazon’s VP of personalization, said in a statement. The tool taps into AWS tech like Bedrock, SageMaker, and OpenSearch to make those calls.

Amazon is not the only company trying to fight decision fatigue. Google’s AI Mode recently 

 its setup by giving users more visual options. Plus, existing Shopping Graph and Search Generative Experience suggest products based on intent and longer search queries.

Amazon’s Help Me Decide lives inside the Amazon Shopping app to recommend one product once consumers have viewed a few similar items. The button appears on the product page and the recommendation includes an explanation of why it’s the pick for the Amazon customer. Users can also see an “upgrade” or “budget” alternative before checking out.

“Amazon has created this situation of overwhelming shoppers with sponsored listings that don’t necessarily match what they’re looking for, and we see this especially with searches for specific brands or products that aren’t sold on Amazon,” Sky Canaves, principal analyst of retail and e-commerce at eMarketer, told Retail Brew.

Instead of seeing a “no results” message, they’re shown ads from sellers who paid for those keywords, she added: “This is now part of Amazon’s efforts to improve the shopping experience from one that has deteriorated over time as a result of the sponsored listings.”

Amazon’s AI-assistant, Rufus, which launched last year, also tries to refine the customer experience by providing a smaller set of recommendations, Canaves pointed out: “Rufus is aiming to provide a more curated experience for consumers, and I see this Help Me Decide feature as taking that one step further.”