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

Maeve Allsup

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Retail chatbots are evolving, and bringing new challenges

It’s time to rethink everything you know (and hate) about chatbots

Retail’s chatbots are evolving, and bringing new challenges

A Starbucks cup coming apart against an abstract background

Is Starbucks’s Odyssey changing retail loyalty forever?

The new program is gamifying rewards on the blockchain.

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This Gen Z founder has a different take on Web3 and fashion

No, we’re not just talking digital clothing for Roblox avatars.

This Gen Z founder has a different take on where Web3 can take fashion

A neon lit retail clothing store showing a rotating group of outfits on a mannequin with augmented reality

Tech

RTB VE: No More Robo-Talk-video embed

Speakers

Questions?

The days of speaking like machines to shop online are ending—thanks to the machines themselves. Join Retail Brew and Bloomreach to explore how conversational AI is bringing back the human side of shopping with context, clarity, and real dialogue.

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No More Robo-Talk: Online Shopping as it Should be

Erin Cabrey

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

Wayne Liu is chief growth officer and president of America at beauty and fashion tech company Perfect Corp.

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

As Perfect Corp’s CGO and president of America, I help some of the world’s biggest beauty and fashion brands bring cutting-edge AI experiences—like virtual product try-ons, skin and hair analyses, and more—to life. My job is to bring together technology, creativity, and business strategy to help brands use these tools to enhance how people discover and interact with products, whether online or in-store.

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

A big part of my job is acting as an interpreter, bridging the gap between technical teams, creative marketers, and brand executives. I often find myself helping AI engineers see the artistry of beauty and brand leaders understand the potential of code. It’s like being multilingual, just across disciplines.

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

 Creating PerfectGPT, our AI-powered beauty assistant, has been one of my proudest moments. It brings together analytical AI, generative AI, years of domain expertise, and an intuitive user experience to offer shoppers smart, scalable, and deeply personalized beauty advice. Building and perfecting PerfectGPT has been a long and, at times, challenging process. We have high standards for its specificity and accuracy, and meeting them has taken a lot of trial and error! But, we’re gearing up for PerfectGPT’s commercial rollout this year. I’m so proud of the work our team has put in and excited to see the spark in customers’ eyes as they experience AI that just “gets them”—that’s always rewarding.

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

I’m fascinated by the shift from traditional, linear shopping behaviors—like “search and buy” or “browse and buy”—to a more dynamic, multi-directional journey. Today’s consumers jump between inspiration, education, evaluation, and purchase in a non-linear way, often influenced by social content, virtual try-ons, expert reviews, and AI recommendations—all at once. What excites me is how AI enables brands to adapt to this complexity and meet consumers wherever they are in the journey. AI can recognize intent, preferences, and context in real time to serve up the right experience—whether that’s a product match, a virtual try-on, or tailored advice. Retailers are no longer concerned with leading shoppers down a certain path anymore, but instead about designing a responsive ecosystem that follows shoppers’ leads.

 Grande hot latte with 2% milk, no sugar. It’s the perfect blend of calm and focus before a day full of AI, innovation, and investor calls.

Worst piece of advice you’ve received? 

“Act quick, fall fast, learn faster.” It sounds bold, but the reality is that sometimes you need to act fast, and other times, thoughtful planning is necessary. In high-stakes situations, you can’t always afford to fall—and if you’ve planned well, you likely won’t. Strategy is about timing, context, and clarity—not speed.

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

Vinyl records, both then and now. Today, I admire records’ craftsmanship and sound, and the ritual that spinning a record offers. At 15, it was all about the music, the magic of album art, and the process of searching for that perfect record. I remember spending hours digging through the stacks, flipping through rows of albums; when something jumped out at me, it felt like striking gold. That’s one of my favorite parts of retail: that discovery can be an experience in-and-of-itself. In an AI-driven world, vinyl is a reminder that sometimes the best things are unexpected and happen by chance!

Coworking with Wayne Liu

He’s chief growth officer and president of America at Perfect Corp.

Vidhi Choudhary

Walmart is integrating new technologies into its e-commerce plan as part of a larger reset.

This includes adding a nutty chatbot to manage customer service to selling Walmart goods on gaming platform Roblox.

“A standard search bar is no longer the fastest path to purchase, rather we must use technology to adapt to customers’ individual preferences and needs,” Suresh Kumar, CTO and CDO of Walmart, said in a press statement.

The announcements come at a time when the “every day low price” retailer’s e-commerce business is 

“At the heart of our platform strategy is developing common global core capabilities that are built once and deployed across Walmart US, Sam’s Club, and Walmart International,” Kumar added.

” technologies when it first shared its plans at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

: One thing that stands out about Walmart’s customer service chatbot is that it is designed to actually take actions like “cancel order,” and “initiate refund,” on behalf of shoppers with the help of generative AI, Derek Schatz, group director for technology operations at Walmart, told Retail Brew at a company preview event last week called Retail Rewired.

“It’s not just prompting you into a workflow, but by simply saying, ‘cancel my next order,’ it can go through and take that action for you,” Schatz added. The retailer said it has been testing the chatbot for over a year.

“If you’re engaging with the app today, and we can give you the answer here, that’s a better experience than having to have you go through more and more work,” Schatz added.

 According to Justin Breton, Walmart’s head of brand marketing innovation, the next generation of customers are using social media to inform their purchases.

“They’re spending a significant amount of time on gaming platforms,” Breton said. “In fact, on a platform like Roblox, users are spending more than two hours per day on that platform, socializing with friends, engaging with brands, so it’s important for us to be there.”

Walmart Discovered on Roblox is an activation where customers can find digital items the same way they would in a Walmart store. Earlier this year, Walmart was the first brand to launch real-world commerce on Roblox for its nearly 80 million daily active users.

“One of the biggest learnings that we had from the first drop to the second drop was that price point really matters,” Breton said. He said he found through the Discord community, that’s complementary to Roblox, that anywhere between $10 to $20 is the right price point to lean into for this immersive commerce experience.

To take on the virtual world, Walmart has also launched a new experience called Walmart Realm, its first immersive commerce destination that is driven by social trends and curated by influencers. And Walmart is planning to launch a virtual brand shop on the social platform Zepeto, which has 20 million active users. Zepetto provides 3D avatar customization in virtual environments.

“Our strategy is really to get more customers, specifically that next generation of consumer, shopping more things—like beauty, fashion, and home, through channel expansion, through platforms using our platforms, retina, and immersive commerce API [Application Programming Interface] to make that commerce experience seamless,” Breton said.

Walmart is taking customization to the next level by giving each user a personalized homepage. The retailer has launched its in-house content decision platform that matches content Walmart has online to each individual customer.

“The nearest Walmart to all of us is in your pocket, on your phone, it’s our app, it’s in your desktops, and that’s what personalization really helps us unlock,” Hetvi Damodhar, Walmart’s senior director of e-comm personalization who led the Content Decision Platform presentation, said.

“It helps us deliver our vision of building a truly unique store for every single one of our customers,” she added.

“My favorite part about this is actually when we started building this platform, we knew we’re going to need to exponentially increase the amount of content we have access to online, and so we’ve developed an internal platform that uses generative AI to pull together both dynamic text and dynamic images and create a custom made piece of content for our customers,” Damodhar explained, adding that this technology is already in use in “certain pockets” of Walmart’s US website and app.

Walmart is rewiring its e-commerce strategy with generative AI

Walmart is expanding its channels, platforms and touchpoints for e-commerce with generative AI.

We don’t have to tell you that acing today’s retail game is tough stuff. But if you wanna stay at the top of your class, leveraging every tool at your disposal is 

. That’s where the Internet of Things (IoT) comes into play. IoT is revolutionizing the way retailers crush their goals by providing business owners data-rich environments that improve decision-making, boost customer satisfaction, and increase profits. But how can you put it into practice? That part can feel tricky.

Luckily for you, T-Mobile has put together 

Unleash IoT in retail to accelerate growth

a tell-all that breaks down how IoT is transforming retail organizations today and in the future. You’ll get must-know info on how to unlock the benefits of IoT in inventory management, personalized customer engagement, efficient workforce connectivity, and so much more.

Fill out the form below to stay in the know.

T-Mobile for Business

How IoT is launching retail into the future

Andrew Adam Newman

The cliché in the last century was that students should bring apples for schoolteachers, but these days it’s more like parents need to buy their kids Apples for schoolwork. And a new survey suggests that the pressure to buy new devices for back-to-school is saddling parents with debt.

More than half (55%) of parents said that buying new tech for their kids required them to go into credit card debt, use a payment plan, or borrow money from friends or family, according to 

 from ecoATM Gazelle, which sells pre-owned tech devices.

The survey, conducted through Pollfish, an online platform, polled 1,000 parents with children 8–18 on July 31.

On second thought, maybe forgo Apple: 41% of respondents said that, due to inflation, they were more interested in lower-cost tech brands and deals.

But whether it’s a fancy device or a basic one, parents seem to think that if the school’s not providing one, they’d better shell out. More than two in three parents (67%) said tech devices were necessary for their children to access classwork, homework, and educational resources.

Some parents are more able to equip their kids than others. Among parents with household incomes above $100,000 annually, 77% said they buy tech for their kids at least once a year; among parents with household incomes below $50,000, only 57% said they did.

As often is the case with polls commissioned by companies, ecoATM Gazelle has a dog in this fight, and naturally asked parents if they were considering used or refurbished devices. Nearly one-third (32%) said they were.

Three kids with electronic devices on a sofa.

More than half of parents go into debt buying tech devices for kids

The ecoATM survey also found that inflation has made parents seek lower-price brands and deals.

More than half of parents go into debt buying tech devices for kids for school: survey

At its Think Retail conference on Tuesday, Google made its annual pitch to merchants to use its search and AI tools—with a few improvements—as they prepare for the holiday season. The tech giant may have 

 to the FTC recently, but that’s not stopping it from finding ways to meet its holiday targets.

, the search behemoth said that in the coming weeks, retailers around the world using Merchant Center Next will be able to use Google’s search capabilities to jump on shopping trends that are going viral.

“The trending data is a key way that we can go focus on that, where it’s, here is what users are currently shopping for and looking for right now, and including the words and the way the users are actually framing it, the way they’re searching for it, and allowing the retailers themselves to act on it,” Jeff Harrell, Google’s senior director of merchant shopping, told Retail Brew.

Google said the feature may help retailers “make better informed inventory decisions” and help them craft product descriptions that include key terms shoppers are using to search for items. To cite an example, Harrell wrote in the blog post that retailers using the tool may find that “denim bermuda shorts” are popular, and shoppers are searching for “long denim jorts” to find them.

Google's search trends tool for retailers and merchants

“[A] five days shorter holiday season is a pivotal thing we need to be thinking about [this year], and this will allow the merchants to be smarter and act faster,” Harrell told Retail Brew. Thanksgiving falls late this November, making this a compressed holiday shopping season.

Google also introduced “generative AI-powered insight summaries” in the analytics tab, which will show merchants “summaries of recent product performance.” This could include things like “how your clicks on denim products were up 20% over last month, so it might be worth re-stocking,” Harrell added

“We’ll also use AI to answer specific questions about…product data with new custom reports,” Harrell wrote. If a merchant asks for the performance of its bestselling dresses, for instance, Google will “turn over a custom data set with the answers.”

“This year, retailers that turn data into decisions will be set up to win the shopping sprint,” Harrell noted.

Google logo with binary code and ai elements

Google tweaks tools for merchants ahead of holiday season

Google is introducing new AI and search upgrades to help merchants.

Google tweaks shopping tools for merchants ahead of the holiday season

Alex Vuocolo

Best Buy is increasingly embracing technology to improve its customer experience, and now it has unveiled a new holographic mascot and rebrand.

The electronics retailer said customers are looking to the company to “play a bigger role in helping them discover new technology,” and its new tagline, “Imagine that,” is designed to reflect that change in approach.

“We’re embracing this change, and we’re excited about it, because we know it’s where our customers want us to go,” Jennie Weber, Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, said in a statement. “They want technology to level up their lives—to help them do more of what they love—and there’s no one more passionate and better positioned to do that than Best Buy.”

As part of the change, the retailer’s new mascot, Gram, will start appearing in advertisements and is already 

In addition to the new mascot and tagline, the company is giving its brand “a modern look and feel,” which it plans to roll out in phases. This includes a new color palette that adds magenta, teal, and red to its familiar yellow and blue.

The rebrand follows a series of investments in technologies designed to better serve customers, including a generative AI-powered customer assistant Best Buy announced in April, around the same time it 

The Best Buy app also now includes a new, personalized home page with a “Discover” tab featuring new tech, and a new payments and rewards system.

The brand is also leaning into what it sees as a growing preference for video content among customers, with plans to roll out 500+ videos on the Best YouTube channel by the end of the year.