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

Desktop computer with shipping boxes and money

Retailers grapple with returns

Total returns accounted for more than $761 billion in merchandise for US retailers in 2021—nearly 20% of which occurred after the holiday shopping season, per NRF.

Retailers grapple with the financial impact of the returns process 

Maeve Allsup

Map of the US showing warehouse locations

Here’s where experts say the next warehouse hotspots will be

Long Beach and Newark aren’t likely to relinquish their status as warehouse royalty, but companies are being forced to expand their footprint further inland.

Forget last-mile, it’s supply chains’ first mile that poses the biggest challenge for companies

Despite improving technology, investments, and consumer pressure, farm level visibility is rare.

A manufacturing plant icon depicting the retail supply chain

Supply Chain

Jeena Sharma

De minimis’s impending doom has finally arrived as the tax loophole that allowed for goods under $800 to come into the US duty-free 

Naturally, retailers across the US are on edge, especially as the holiday season looms and consumers remain cautious about their spending.

Two experts Retail Brew spoke with said the impact of the tax exemption will be immediate and possibly most visible during the holiday season.

“It’s not a one-size-fits-all plan that when we talk to our clients, like ‘I’m going to pass on all the costs to the customer,’” Irina Vaysfeld, principal in KPMG’s trade and customs practice, told Retail Brew, explaining that while some retailers might choose to pass on some costs to consumers, others might evaluate price increases based on their SKUs.

“There is a lot of work that’s gone into thinking about how the consumer will be impacted,” she said. “But we, of course, do expect an impact this year.”

Per Vaysfeld, the goods that were already in transit to the US will not benefit from the de minimis exemption once they arrive, which means holiday shoppers should factor in imminent price increases as they write out their gift lists. This also means retailers will see some significant changes in either the amount of products shoppers are willing to purchase for the holidays or the $$ they’re willing to spend.

, meanwhile, have already projected a $100 million dent in their profits with tariff costs.

“Consumers’ budgets were already very tight, and we saw consumers scaling back their preferences, moving to private label brands or chicken rather than beef, or gravitating toward warehouse clubs and mass merchandisers like Walmart and dollar stores,” John Harmon, senior retail and technology analyst at Coresight Research, told Retail Brew. “So the consumer is really stretched.”

He added that beyond passing on the costs to shoppers, he has seen some retailers simply “drop” selling certain products, assuming consumers will just not buy them at higher prices—a trend that’s likely to carry into the holiday season.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom for the holidays, if you believe Harmon, who said shoppers will continue to shop, but just looking for cheaper alternatives.

“Consumers will find a way to get goods for the holiday,” he said, listing as examples “mass merchandisers, secondhand, thrift stores, and dollar stores.”

De minimis has ended, holiday sales will see an immediate impact

Experts told Retail Brew that price increases are imminent and retailers will see a shift in consumer purchasing patterns in the coming months. 

De minimis has ended and holiday sales will see an immediate impact

Among the many headaches retailers face, shipping sits near the top of the list. While big corporations often have the resources to absorb high international costs and delays, smaller DTC and independent brands are left footing the bill and feeling it in their margins.

Logistics platform Mayple Global thinks it has a fix. Its new service, Mayple Direct, is launching in partnership with Emirates Courier Express, the end-to-end global integrator solution from Emirates. And yes, we do mean 

 Emirates—the one better known for luxury air travel.

Through the agreement, Mayple will tap into its centralized logistics hub in Dubai, while Emirates will leverage its global passenger fleet to deliver packages to eight underserved international markets. The idea: make global shipping for US e-commerce brands as seamless as sending a package across the country.

“If you want to start a brand and sell something within the US, you could do a simple Google search, and you’ll have many 3PLs,” Ammar Moiz, founder and CEO of Mayple Global, told Retail Brew. “They’ll say, ‘Yeah, we can pick up and pack and ship within the US and integrate into Shopify’…It’s kind of plug and play.”

He added that globally, retailers often have to go through middlemen that act as international distributors for them, which while for a “multinational conglomerate” is less of a concern, for a brand with fewer resources, it’s more complex.

“What we do is essentially a global hub-and-spoke model, so we replicate the same model, similar to a US brand that doesn’t have a warehouse in each state,” Moiz explained.

By being centered in Dubai, Mayple is also able to take advantage of the city’s “extensive free zone network” which allows goods to move in and out more easily.

“If you’re shipping something to Manchester, it would typically go to London, get sorted [by] some hub, and then get driven to Manchester and delivered to the final address,” Moiz said. “[Instead], you can get it on a direct flight to Manchester and then get it delivered. It is essentially cheaper, faster, better for the environment, because you’re using more direct routing, and it allows for essentially a US brand to be able to ship to a customer in the UK for under $10 and have the package delivered in two days.”

Mayple Direct is also beneficial for US-based companies dealing with changing trade regulations and tariffs as it enables them to bypass the process of having a product shipped to the US from a potential manufacturing hub in Asia and then back to a different country again.

“What we create is essentially this global hub for them where they can import inventory in and then ship it out for their international customer base, and save on the tariffs,” he added.

According to the company, brands on its platform already ship to more than 80 countries, with average delivery times of 3.5 days from checkout to doorstep and a 99%+ deliverability rate. The model also opens up smaller markets that retailers might otherwise ignore.

“We’re not expecting a US brand to set up a logistics operation just for the Kenyan market,” Moiz said. “But if you aggregate these smaller countries together, we’ve seen it make a meaningful demand base. It can generate 25%–30% of your international demand.”

How Emirates and Mayple are shaking up the global retail shipping game

A new partnership aims to cut costs, speed up delivery, and open new markets for US brands.

Erin Cabrey

 spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click 

Lena Kwak is co-founder and VP of product at Starday Foods, an AI-powered food product innovation company.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? 

I drive product innovation at Starday Foods and help decide which CPG products we launch based on my background founding food companies and leading the R&D department at the three-Michelin star restaurant, The French Laundry. I combine my culinary experience, food science, and nutrition background to help turn Starday’s trend insights into flavorful, practical products that fill gaps in consumer demand.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile?

 In the tech world, “product” often feels dehumanized and overly data-driven. A big part of my role is to reintroduce the human element and advocate for the complexities of real behavior behind the numbers. When I analyze these numbers, I’m not just looking at trends; I’m forming hypotheses on what is driving this human behavior—often through the lenses of identity. At Starday, we like to understand all these trends together to know the full network of problems we need to address. Instead of responding to each trend that comes up, we see how the trends interact with each other, match the patterns and create the product that matches those patterns the best.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on?

 Our chickpea protein toppers, All Day, is my favorite product to date—and it pretty perfectly shows the power of what we can develop by understanding the complexity of human decision-making. Our data was starting to show a rising desire for more vegan protein options, while also a matching interest in cleaner vegan alternatives at the same time. Because of that, we chose to use a chickpea base for our toppers to satisfy both intersecting trends. People want convenience and nutrition, but they also crave variety and excitement. That insight led us to develop All Day—it’s an easy, seamless way to add flavor, protein, and novelty to meals.

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about right now, and why? 

While it is certainly not the sexy macronutrient on the market, fiber is a tried and true supplement that most Americans need more of. With growing awareness of the importance of blood sugar control and digestive system diseases, more products are on the market with increased fiber. Though these are less popular than products that promise silver-bullet solutions, fiber offers a wide range of proven health benefits and should not be overlooked.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? 

“Never give up.” I think it’s important to understand where to let go and pivot sometimes.

What was your favorite retail product when you were 15, and what’s your favorite retail product now? 

Tortilla chips—it stands the test of time, and I’ll always love a good tortilla chip.

A portrait of Lena Kwak,  co-founder and VP of product at Starday Food against a pink graphic backgrond.

Coworking with Lena Kwak	

She’s co-founder and VP of product at Starday Foods.

Vidhi Choudhary

Shopify has supercharged its shipping and end-to-end fulfillment system, now fully built into the Shopify platform.

Shopify merchants can now ship with top carriers like FedEx, DHL Express, UPS, and USPS at the lowest rates, print unlimited discounted labels, and manage every step without leaving Shopify. Overall, the new tools speed up order processing, cut shipping costs, and protect against errors for merchants. This update is largely focused on improving Shopify’s shipping product.

Separately, the Shopify Fulfillment Network has also expanded its 3PL partnerships with global partners like Amazon MCF, BigBlue, DHL Fulfillment Network, GoBolt, Mayple, and Stord—connecting merchants to the right logistics partners for any scale.

“One is we are changing our focus from just merchants with simple shipping needs to merchants with more complex shipping [needs],” Vibhor Chhabra, director of product for shipping at Shopify, told Retail Brew.

Overall, Chhabra said, Shopify is taking a very “partner-centric approach” with shipping now: “We used to have a limited set of partners in the US and outside markets, but we developed a new platform for shipping, which makes it very easy for us to add new partners in any country in the world.”

Chhabra said Shopify’s global shipping partners are essential because they offer merchants the choice they need, and give shipping providers access to Shopify’s merchants, and this updated platform is where both sides can easily connect.

“As the economic and the trade scenarios change, we want to make sure that we have equipped merchants with the right tools to enable them to rapidly respond to changing needs,” Chhabra added.

: Shopify has also upgraded the platform to address clients and merchants that operate at more scale and have advanced needs.

Chhabra said the shipping updates are geared toward merchants shipping products on their own. “This could be a small merchant, this could be a large merchant. So shipping serves that set of customers,” he said.

The through line, Chhabra said, is that as merchants grow, they often patch together shipping tools for things like address validation, insurance, and delivery predictions. With these new upgrades, it’s all baked into one service at no extra cost beyond the Shopify subscription, except for labels.

According to Mark William Lewis, founder and CEO at commerce agency Netalico, Shopify is trying to keep merchants on the platform longer, but lingering trust issues with logistics can prove challenging. He added that once a Shopify store hits a couple hundred orders, “most people plug-in from ShipStation or some ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning].”

“[Shopify is] realizing that a lot of people are paying a lot of money for other systems outside of Shopify, and they’re like, ‘Why couldn’t we do that?’” Lewis said.

The Shopify logo seen displayed on a smartphone next to a shopping cart.

Shopify upgrades its shipping product to serve enterprise customers

The e-commerce platform aims to serve merchants that have more advanced shipping needs.

Isaac Hetzroni—or as he’s known to his more than 500,000 social media followers, The Sourcing Guy—may only be in his 20s, but he’s got decades of supply chain experience.

As a kid in Canada, his family owned a dancewear apparel company and he essentially grew up in a factory, learning the intricacies of fabrics and apparel production, he told Retail Brew. Then, when his father moved into electronics manufacturing in China, he, too, traveled to the factory there, developing an “unbelievable fascination” with manufacturing. In college, he started his own gig making merch sourced abroad and brought in more than $1 million in revenue.

Aiming to diversify this supply chain amid the onset of Covid-19, he toured, and began posting content about overseas factories from Turkey to Thailand. But he’s gained the most traction in the last year, as tariffs have “made sourcing and supply chain sexy,” Hetzroni said.

As tariffs have sent brands scrambling to save their margins, global supply chain expertise has not only become a coveted skill in the retail industry, but also, more surprisingly, a viral topic on social media, as 

 piqued consumers’ interest this spring by sharing the behind-the-scenes of where consumer products are made—even if many of those claims were 

With The Sourcing Guy and his own sourcing agency, Imprint Genius, Hetzroni said he’s capitalizing on both, en route to helping build a “unified global economy through manufacturing.”

Across Instagram and TikTok, Hetzroni has shared stories of 

 from Vietnam; spoken with manufacturers of leading brands of 

; pulled back the curtain on events like giant Chinese import and export event the 

At first, getting manufacturers to open up their doors to the internet wasn’t easy. He started with those he already worked with closely, but as the videos have taken off, most of the factories are now coming to him. Before a recent trip to India, he posted to social media looking to fill some filming slots and he said his inbox was filled with more than 100 DMs, and recently filmed in eight factories across two days in Portugal.

It’s a win-win for the factories, who now get customer inquiries from the videos, giving Imprint Genius a small commission for the business it sends their way. Plus, Hetzroni can use those factory tours when pitching clients to “paint a better picture” of who they’d be working with.

“We’re able to build a lot more relationships with really cool factories through the content,” he said. “Now that we have the relationships, our agency side of business is able to then more confidently go and manufacture products with those specific factories, because it’s a deeper relationship.”

 Through Imprint Genius, Hetzroni said he currently mentors ~400 brands across categories like apparel, accessories, and supplements, doing more than $1 million in sales, “troubleshooting” their supply chain issues, and working on diversifying supply chains, lowering costs, and launching new products. It also offers resources for new brands to learn the basics of manufacturing and sourcing.

Tariffs, of course—how hard they’ll be hit, and how to figure out where to move manufacturing next—have become a top issue for brands he consults. Still, issues like on-the-ground quality control—which prevents a brand from, say, receiving a $100,000 order of shoes from China in the wrong color—remain evergreen.

“Because I’ve been studying this for so long, I can very quickly hop on a 20-minute call and help these companies make really large decisions during all the craziness and really work with them on solving their supply-chain headaches,” he said.

Videos on freight forwarding and quality control aren’t 

 the most riveting, so the more entertaining behind-the-scenes manufacturing content has acted almost as a Trojan horse to get the right people to the right education content as they engage with and share it, he said. While his videos (and follower count) benefited from their similarity to 

, he believes he’s built up the trust with his follower base, largely by having his own boots on the ground, to be a reliable source.

“My larger purpose here is trying to be that guiding light for the aspiring entrepreneurs on how to manufacture in all these other countries that have fantastic infrastructure and have fantastic factories,” he said. “There just isn’t enough education or visibility on how to do it.”

The Sourcing Guy supply chain influencer on TikTok

Meet the sourcing influencer helping brands navigate the trade war

Isaac Hetzroni, aka The Sourcing Guy, has amassed half a million followers posting overseas factory tours and supply chain advice on Instagram and TikTok. 

Tariffs are making a huge dent in US consumers’ budgets—$12.2 billion worth, to be exact, a new survey found.

Per Omnisend’s latest research that included responses from 1,200 US adults, Americans are now spending about $47 extra per person on a monthly basis.

Meanwhile, 1 in 7 shoppers is spending $100 or more per month.

“You won’t see a ‘tariff’ line at checkout—you feel it in the grocery total, the back-to-school cart, and the small online orders that now cost a bit more to bring to your door,” Marty Bauer, e-commerce expert at Omnisend, said in a statement. “For most families, it just means less breathing room at the end of the month.”

Of course, there are some areas where consumers are feeling the pinch more than others.

66% of those surveyed noted they’ve seen prices shoot up since the tariffs, particularly when it comes to retailers such as Amazon (34%), Temu (30%), and Walmart (27%).

Meanwhile, Temu and Shein have felt the impact of the 

 of the de minimis loophole more than most.

68% of shoppers said they had cut down or completely stopped shopping from Temu and Shein when the Chinese marketplaces lost their price advantage.

Instead, 23% said they had already bought or were looking to buy from countries like Canada or Mexico in order to circumvent “price shocks.”

Man carrying a big piece of money that's disintegrating behind him 

Tariffs are costing American shoppers $12.2 billion monthly

Per Omnisend’s latest research, Americans are now spending about $47 extra per person.

Tariffs are costing American shoppers $12.2 billion monthly: survey

Founded in September 2021, the brand famous for its two-in-one blush and bronzer sticks, has grown through influencer marketing and social shopping strategies. It has also received funding from consumer-focused private equity firm L Catterton. Ask Dibs’s co-founder and CEO, Jeff Lee, why everyone wants to sell beauty online and he has a deep answer: “People have an emotional attachment to it.”

We caught up with Lee recently on the sidelines of Retail Brew’s Rewiring Retail: Mastering Data, Inventory, and the Online Customer Experience in New York City about tariffs, AI, and the holiday season.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What can you tell us about changes that you’ve made at Dibs Beauty because of tariffs?


You control the panic. That’s the first thing. It’s emotional more than anything. When the tariffs are changing constantly, all you can do is the best, which is—first of all, plan. Get as much inventory as you can and just scenario-plan. That’s all you can do.

There’s never enough inventory, but we had a lot of it come in. And actually it’s raw materials that matter a lot as well. So there’s a lot of hidden nuance to what the tariffs are carrying with them, creating a lot of supply-chain shocks beyond just price, you have to anticipate that for your supply chain.

What can you tell us about Dibs Beauty and its prep for the holiday season?

We definitely believe in this customer, but the customer is pressured, so we want to make sure we’re offering value for them. They’re really careful, they are still spending the dollars, but they’re watching for every single dollar.

Any other hot takes for this holiday season?


Well, No. 1, it’s going to start earlier than ever. And No. 2, it’s going to go longer than ever. I think everyone saw Amazon Prime extend that period, and they’re going to do the same for the holiday. And No. 3, the messaging is going to be different. It’s going to be a lot more about putting the customer first, rather than just simply an appeal to the discounting.

Why does everyone want to sell beauty online?


Beauty is an emotional thing, and it’s been part of civilization. I always say, if you go back to ancient Egypt, the thing that they found in the tombs 4,000 years old was makeup. People have an emotional attachment to it, and it’s something that’s so easy, that you pick up and transform your own self in a personal way. So that’s part of the reason why beauty has become so popular online. But for us, we really believe that beauty is truly about an emotional connection with the customer as well.

A healthy CPG business should be optimizing their user reviews, but I really caution against doing a full 180 and completely ripping apart the things that have worked for you, because early on, the AltaVista CEO said that they were going to win in search. Now it’s Google. We haven’t found a true winner yet, and I think it’ll be some time before we find that one great solution that replaces all search for customers discovering brands.

We’re very careful with generative AI, I have to say. And so it’s got a beautiful advantage in that it helps us lay out the groundwork for creative and all the marketing that we do. But do you use it to deliver a finished product? That’s something we’re still kind of holding our hands at. Because you have to have a human touch in that final sign-off as a brand.

Dibs Beauty CEO speaking on a panel at Retail Brew's Retail Rewired event in NYC

Dibs Beauty CEO on tariffs: ‘You control the panic’

Speaking about the state of the shopper, Lee said the customer is pressured. He added they are still spending the dollars, but they’re watching for every single dollar.