Dog days of August?

Earnings season is well under way. So is back to school. We miss you already summer.

Fun times here at Maze. We made it onto the Inc 5000 list again this year. ?

In the news

• The AP on inflation - the cure for high prices is high prices. Reuters also wrote about it here.
• Big Lots is closing 300 stores with about 75 in California. They blame slowing demand for big ticket items. (CSA)?
• Temu - overtook eBay to become the 2nd most visited e-commerce website in the world. That’s not including app traffic which is where most of their sales occur.?
• Urban Outfitters - is all about experiences. They’re bringing live concerts to five college campuses. They will tie this closely to their local stores and special product drops and sales. (Billboard)
• Princess Polly is doing more experiences close to college campuses. (CSA)
• Walmart released a ‘Dorm Your Way’ immersive shopping experience. (RetailDive)
• Kohl’s is rolling out Babies R’ Us in 200 locations by the end of September. (CSA)
• Tapestry and Capri - their merger has been challenged by the FTC and still appears to be going to trial on September 9th. The FTC case seems pretty flimsy. There are plenty of brands like Métier that are ready to fill the void if a ‘monopoly’ were to raise the price of near luxury brands. (Hypebeast)
• Kate Spade - Eva Erdmann has joined as their new CEO.
• Victoria’s Secret - has appointed Hillary Super as their new CEO.?
• Amazon - there is a great article in Forbes (paywall) about the erosion of Amazon’s values and management principles since Andy Jassy became CEO. There are also the pandemic effects that continue to affect online businesses. Culture comes from the top and it’s simply much different than when Bezos was in charge.
• Amazon has been working with Mr. Beast. It hasn’t been going super well. Have we reached Peak Beast? (Business Insider)
• The Container Store is having a tough go of it. (RetailDive)
• Nike - in a first, has connected their loyalty program to JD Sports. Look for more of this as they get back into wholesale. (RetailDive)
• Pandora - talked about how the lab diamonds are 20% of the market and expects it to exceed mined diamonds in the next ten years. (Bloomberg)
• Macy’s says they’re seeing success with post-purchase offers using Rokt technology.
• Ace Hardware - This one has been everywhere lately but is worth repeating. They have a new experiential store model to be ‘immersive shopping experience that you can’t find anywhere else’. I love my local hardware store and see Ace’s goal here to go after their core categories and to build community as a strong differentiator to online and big box competitors. (RetailDive)
• Allbirds is looking at brand building to help get them through this tough year. (RetailDive)
• Target launched a denim takeback event earlier in the month. It’s good for a 20% denim discount during the same period. Other brands taking back old items in-store include Crocs, Anthropologie, Figs and Adidas. (RetailDive)
• Deloitte found that there’s a big gap between what consumers perceive as being personalized vs the larger amount that’s actually being personalized by brands. Some of it may be too subtle to be recognized.
• OpenAI - shared their current risks. They rated themselves at low preparedness in a number of categories, including cybersecurity threats. Results like this really stress the need for good governance. Thanks to the CDP Institute for sharing.
• Upwork found that Gen AI is slowing down productivity. Lots to think about with this study. (Econsultancy)??
• The Oreo-Coke collab we all need.

Our Partners

• Loop - their report on returns fraud was picked up by CSA. Loop CEO Jonathan Poma noted: "For every $100 in returned merchandise, retailers lose $10.40 to returns fraud.”?
• Loop also had a Consumer Loyalty Report and found that 68% of consumers expect a frictionless returns experience.
• Yotpo - has released benchmarking retention performance using data from over 50,000 brands. Thanks Tomer Tagrin.
• Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian had a good interview talking through a wide range of topics.
• Shopify - the checkout extensibility upgrade deadline for Shopify Plus was August 13th. Starting January 6, 2025, Shopify will start auto-upgrading shops to Checkout Extensibility and their customizations from checkout.liquid will be lost. ?