The Holiday Edition

Here we are at the end of the year. Thank you to all of our terrific clients and partners for making the year such a success.

Maze is going to NRF next month and we’re sponsoring the Rick Watson event on Sunday the 12th. We’ll be talking about the 5 Forces Affecting Commerce. You can register here.

In the news:

• Shopify - Carl Rivera talked with Modern Retail about their Enterprise growth strategy.
• Salesforce - Benioff said f it, we’re going to 2000 new sales hires for Agentforce. 1000 just wasn’t enough.?
• What’s next for retail in America. Quartz sees the economy getting back to normal. Whatever normal is now.
• Marketplace Pulse report - this is an excellent 2024 recap by Juozas Kaziuk?nas
• BFCM - The Klaviyo recap, Shopify recap, Adobe recap and Salesforce recap. There’s also a good recap that was recorded by Jason Goldberg and others.?
• Tariffs - if they happen, it would be huge for the resale industry. Supply Chain Dive also mentioned it would be good for off-price retailers like TJX.
• Dollar Stores? - Are Flashing a Warning Sign About Lower-Income Consumers. (WSJ)
• Amazon - Jason Del Rey of Fortune notes that of the time Jeff Bezos still spends at Amazon, 95% of it is focused on AI.
• Amazon - launched Amazon Autos. To paraphrase the words of Henry Ford: You can have any car you want, as long as it’s a Hyundai.?
• Foot Locker - sales were down 1.4% to $1.96B in the three months ending Nov 2nd. Nike accounts for 60% of all sales. (CNBC)
• Under Armour - detailed their turnaround plan at their first investor day in six years. They noted North America sales declines of 14-16% this year. (Retail Dive)
• Lululemon - had strong Q3 earnings driven by international growth. (CNBC)
• Indochino - Ryane Askew is their new VP of Marketing. (Retail Dive)
• HeyDude - Terence Reilly is the marketing genius behind Crocs and Stanley and has been at HeyDude since April. The WSJ details what he’s been up to: “At Crocs we had a relevance problem, and we changed that, and Stanley had an awareness opportunity,” HeyDude, he said, needs help with both.
• Lowe’s - is launching a home improvements marketplace. Rick Watson had some good comments on it. (Retail Dive)
• Hanna Andersson - has succeeded since 2020 when they went all digital. This is a great read. They did it through personal shoppers, a robust resale marketplace (#1 among kidswear brands) and a loyalty program. Their reputation for durable kidswear is a huge help. (Retail Touchpoints)
• Vera Wang - was acquired by WHP Global.
• Streetwear - goes full Liberace. (DNYUZ)
• Walgreen’s - might get acquired by PE firm Sycamore Partners. (WSJ)
• Kohl’s - has a new CEO.?
• LL Bean - has had slower sales this year and is having layoffs at their Freeport, Maine HQ. It’s been a tough go for others in the outdoor space like Orvis and REI. (RetailDive)
• Perplexity Shopping - has become a thing and works pretty well. It’s also connected to Shopify’s APIs. The downside: you need the Perplexity Pro plan at $20/month.?Here are all the details.
• Gartner - talks about Composable Regret.
• Marketing Brew interview with Joy Howard - the force behind Patagonia’s Worn Wear and now at Down Market. I really enjoyed it.?

• Rethinking returns - Gad Allon has good thoughts about it. This should rightly be a big story in January.

AI Stuff

• NielsenIQ - has a new report on AI advertising and it’s almost entirely negative. “Consumers intuitively identified most of the AI-generated ads, perceiving them as less engaging and more “annoying,” “boring,” and “confusing” than traditional ads.”
• Wired - wrote about how most viral posts on LinkedIn are AI generated.?
• Gary Marcus - argues LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns.

Our Partners:

• Shopify - launched a new case study with JB HiFi. To me, this is the Enterprise case study for Shopify at the moment. They went from $200M to $1B in revenue online on Shopify in the past 5 years.
• Shopify Winter Editions - caught us all by surprise last week. Lots of product updates. I anticipate more Enterprise updates in Q1 prior to NRF and Shoptalk.?
• Shopify - Christian Mackie put together this useful Guide to Shopify Checkout. It includes answers to common questions.
• Shopify - Keen posted about how much in-store checkout clutter was reduced by shifting to Shopify POS. This pictures speak for themselves.?
• Shopify - launched the guide to Shop Pay Component. This is for using Shop Pay off-platform.
• Loop - acquired Wonderment. This combines their returns management with Wonderment's advanced tracking capabilities.

Have a wonderful holiday.

Nick