Advertise on podcast: Retail Unwrapped - from The Robin Report

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! A family-owned, 150-year-old brand continues to succeed by sticking to the foundational values of the brand despite short-term disruptions and short-term market volatility. It’s no accident that Jockey has built something that is rare in the retail industry — a brand consumers have trusted for 150 years. Join Shelley and Mark Fedyk, President and CEO of Jockey, as they reveal how the brand has been an inventor looking for a better way or a way to solve a problem, why complacency is a threat, and how to make sure you don't lose sight and connection with the consumer. Learn how to steward a legacy brand through a marketplace moving at warp speed and why discipline is such a most powerful competitive advantage in retail. In Jockey’s case, family ownership is a strategic asset that has sustained its long-term momentum. Special Guest: Mark Fedyk, President and COO of Jockey For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! CEO succession can be a minefield. Who makes the decision?  Who gets the crown? Retail just lived through its most turbulent CEO cycle in a generation. Retail companies reported 41 CEO exits through August 2025, a 116 percent increase from the same period a year earlier making retail the top industry for CEO turnover. Join TRR contributors and retail experts Phil Lempert and Mark Cohen as they discuss and debate the imprecise science of leadership succession. This candid conversation holds nothing back on the both the great decisions and dismal choices in recent CEO appointments. Listen and learn who’s doing it right and who’s in for trouble among grocery and general merchandise retail brands. For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The fastest-growing consumer behavior shift isn't driven by a trend, a digital platform, or a fickle generation: it’s a weight loss drug. GLP-1 adoption is accelerating so fast that Ozempic is outpacing iPhone adoption curves in the same timeframe.  Retailers (both grocery and apparel) are treating this trend as a passing diet fad. Join Shelley with Liza Amlani, Founder of Retail Strategy Group and Ali Furman, PwC's Consumer Markets Industry Leader as they challenge retailers to confront how to serve customers when body sizes change faster than the systems built to serve them. One outlook? Up to 400 million apparel units could be misaligned with actual demand by 2027, with retailers facing up to a $5 billion margin hit from oversized inventory, returns, and markdowns. Listen and learn why the GPT craze is an opportunity, not a transaction, for retailers who build trust with consumers whose bodies, wardrobes, and identities are all in flux. That loyalty will outlast the drug itself. Special Guests: Liza Amlani, Principal and Founder, Retail Strategy Group and Ali Furman, Consumer Markets Industry Leader, PwC For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The Attention Economy is not a mandate for viral moments and six-second social clips. Long-form storytelling captures more attention, engagement and potential activation than fleeting moments of marketing distraction. Join Shelley and Bill Neff, Head of Marketing at Yeti, as they pull back the curtain on why one of the most admired consumer brands in America has built its empire by doing the opposite of what the Attention Economy demands. Yeti takes the long view in building its hunt-and-fish brand into a global lifestyle icon without losing its relevance. Yeti's is also a contrarian when it comes to its partnership and acquisition strategy. Bill reveals that Yeti partners for life. It is also disciplined in its approach to international expansion where Yeti's 16 percent international growth is proof that listening to local markets and responding accordingly is strengthening its global consumer engagement. Listen and learn how Yeti's philosophy is human-centric, trusting its ambassadors, communities, and outliers to tell the brand’s stories. Special Guest: Bill Neff, Head of Marketing, Yeti For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Many technology companies are built by people who create a solution for a nonexistent problem. SCAYLE was built by people who studied a problem and then lived it firsthand. For more than a decade, the team behind About You didn't just theorize about what enterprise ecommerce infrastructure should do—they built it, broke it, refined it, and scaled it inside their own business. They grew About You into a $3 billion online fashion retailer operating across 27 countries. By the time they launched SCAYLE as a standalone SaaS platform, they weren’t selling a solution they imagined; they were offering a real solution to a real problem. In this episode, Haley Boehning, CEO of Storyforge, sits down with Tarek Müller, co-founder of About You and SCAYLE, to explore what it means to know your customer, not from the outside looking in, but from understanding exactly where they stand. They discuss what it takes to build something that works at scale. How one earns trust in a new market. What Tarek learned that no one else could have taught him. And what it requires to take that hard-won knowledge into a new market, build credibility and land Levi's as their first major U.S. partnership as its global ecommerce platform across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Tarek candidly shares his insights about how to achieve visibility in the crowded American marketplace, and how to succeed by competing against ecommerce platform solutions optimized for commoditized search, not genuine discovery. This is a conversation about what happens when your story and your solution are the same thing. For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Although Agentic AI and LLMs may cause high anxiety for retailers that sees bots as competitors, the truth is that we are experiencing one of the most exciting times in retail that is on the cusp of change. About 23 percent of Americans have already made a purchase through AI, and Agentic Commerce grew 4,700 percent in 2025. The leading model makers—OpenAI (Chat GPT), Anthropic (Claude), and Google (Gemini)—all of them have peppered retailers with a new marketing vocabulary led by ‘context, visibility and intent.’ Join Shelley and Jackie, Gartner, Managing Partner at Gartner, as they decode and deconstruct why keywords and SEO are relics and Agentic AI is transforming complex, contextual search into meaningful discovery. Hear tips on how to master Agentic by understanding customer intent with clean, structured content data and how to keep control over your brand. This conversation is a clear roadmap to build your Agentic confidence and strengthen your own search and discovery practice.  Special Guest: Jackie Swanson, Managing Partner at Gartner Consulting For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Retail theater transforms the store to a stage, and that’s 130-year-old Hershey’s sweet spot. The iconic confectioner is quietly becoming one of the more sophisticated retail operators in the industry. Join Shelley and Stephanie Berman, Vice President of Retail for The Hershey Company, as they reveal how Hershey has rebuilt its entire retail practice around the balance between emotional equity and the disciplined science of motivating consumers to engage and buy. Learn how Hershey uses 3D modeling, virtual reality showrooms, AI-powered planograms, and performance data as a proving ground for new stores and redesigns. Stephanie shares how Hershey studies consumer social media behavior to identify real-time signals to inform product development, merchandising decisions, and promotional timing. The most important takeaway from this conversation may be the simplest: The brands that win in the attention economy are not the ones with the most products but rather they're the ones that show up at the right moments, in the right locations, with the right story. Hershey’s unique partnerships with the NCAA, Olympics, America 250 and acquisition strategy of brands like Dots and Lesser Evil keep the company relevant and popular with this generation of consumers. Special Guest: Stephanie Berman, VP of Retail for The Hershey Company For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! When Tim Baxter left Express, he thought he might semi-retire. What he discovered instead was a vision he'd been building toward for 30 years; a belief in the meaningful role a retail store can play in people's lives, and his conviction to bring it to life. In this conversation, Haley Boehning sits down with Tim to unpack the story behind The Baxter Collective, a new highly-curated physical retail platform opening its first store in Rye, New York. Designed to fill the white space between the endless aisles online and the niche boutique, The Baxter Collective isn't about reinventing the department store. It's about something older and more human: a neighborhood store where people feel welcome, the edit is done specifically for them, and the sales team knows their name.  The conversation is a masterclass in leadership and clarity of conviction. Tim talks about the moment he realized what was missing in retail today, not a format, but a feeling. He shares what he learned from 30+ years across Macy's, Express, and in his board seat at Stitch Fix about why brands lose their way, why simplicity is harder than it looks, and why the store manager is the most underestimated person in the business. Behind every bold business move is a leadership story. This is Tim Baxter's. If you've ever wondered what it takes to bet on a new idea after a long career, or how to stay close to the customer when everything around you is telling you to scale, this retail story is for you.  Special Guest: Tim Baxter, Founder, The Baxter Collective  For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The consumer movement to invest in secondhand is led by values: meaning, provenance, and sustainability. Re-commerce is not a niche; it’s a $180-$200 billion global, parallel economy growing up to five times faster than traditional retail. The brands that get this right think beyond the first sale and plan for the lifetime value of a product, including multiple sales. Join Shelley and Romain Fouache, CEO of Akeneo, as they discuss why eBay's acquisition of Depop for $1.2 billion strengthens its core business and marks a structural inflection point.  A data expert, Romain makes the case for the power of transparency. Secondhand operations are logistically incompatible with firsthand retail models. Every resale item is its own unique SKU, its own story, condition, and context. Brands that attempt to glue re-commerce onto traditional operations without rethinking their infrastructure are setting themselves up for expensive failure. Listen and learn how the brands that will win in re-commerce will be the ones with the richest, most comprehensive product information, including materials, origin, manufacturing details, and use history.  Special Guest: Romain Fouache, CEO, Akeneo For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The recent Supreme Court decision outlawing the “Liberation Day” tariffs has added another level of uncertainty to the financial outlook of American retailers. Join Shelley and Dan Altman, chief economist and bestselling author of the High Yield Economics newsletter, as they zero in on what the ruling will trigger for retailers and consumers. They discuss whether companies will claw back the tariffs they have paid. Dan says that although companies and the government have records of the money that was paid, it could be sorted out but would be extremely messy.  He adds it would be nearly impossible to refund consumers by tracing those purchases to specific people. Ultimately, with the change in tariffs retailers will have higher margins, so, will prices come down? Dan cautions, “We have seen the economy in a sort of paralysis, both in the job market and in investment plans, because people didn't know where these economic policies were going to land. But now we've opened up all this uncertainty again.” This candid conversation puts the challenges facing retailers squarely on the table predicting that small businesses will take the brunt of economic uncertainty over the next 12 months. Listen and learn how an economist clears the air on tariff chaos. Special Guest: Dan Altman, Chief Economist and Bestselling Author, High Yield Economics  For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! How does the retail frontline succeed, despite leadership dysfunction? The disconnect between corporate decision-making and the frontline reality has reached a breaking point. Store managers are caught holding the bag for supply chain disasters, tariffs, empty shelves, and operational chaos they never created. Join Shelley and Rachel Williamson, founder and CEO of Running Great Stores, as they unpack how frontline operational excellence is compromised when managers are denied the tools, training and authority they need to succeed. Rachel says that great leadership requires continuous investment in self-improvement, honest conversations with supervisors, and a willingness to address both wins and failures. She has spent decades turning around underperforming stores and she's witnessed firsthand what happens when flawed corporate leadership disables store teams. She is candid about the uncomfortable truth that retail has become a revolving door job instead of a career destination. The weakest link? Frontline leaders who lack the mentorship and training they need to develop the capacity for emotional intelligence. Frontline leaders who succeed have learned to take ownership of their own career development instead of depending on corporate training programs. Listen and learn why the retail profession is at risk of a leadership vacuum. Special Guest: Rachel Williamson Founder and CEO, Running Great Stores For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! There is widespread confusion about the popular and overused K-shaped economy meme. General understanding oversimplifies consumers into "haves, have-nots, and have-everythings," when the reality is far more nuanced and fluid. If retail executives make million-dollar decisions based on an incomplete understanding about the K-shaped economy, it's going to cost them. Join Shelley and Katie Thomas from the Kearney Consumer Institute as they challenge conventional wisdom about the economy that's leading retailers to misclassify customers and fail on pricing, assortment, and messaging. Katie reveals that the middle class isn't disappearing but rather is pragmatic and surprisingly mobile, selectively reallocating resources across all categories that makes traditional good-better-best models look obsolete. Listen and learn about the real crisis facing retailers; it isn't about hitting price points; it's about the growing price-value mismatch that risks losing loyal customers who have more options than ever in a marketplace where luxury brands have overpriced themselves and cheapened products at the bottom create an inevitable race to the bottom. Special Guest: Katie Thomas, Lead, Kearney Consumer Institute (KCI)  For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! A complete reversal of the traditional concept-to-market approach will improve margins, speed to market, and sustainability goals. What does that look like? Materials lead the design process instead of design leading materials selection.  Join Shelley and Liza Amlani, principal and founder of Retail Strategy Group and co-author of The Material Life, as they discuss why design innovation is typically mismatched with process innovation in the fashion supply chain, and what the consequences are. Liza says, “Process innovation is the most underrated opportunity in the fashion supply chain.” Listen and learn how Lululemon, Viore, and Uniqlo know their fabrics are their competitive edge.  Many other retailers still operate with design-led processes that create costly overdevelopment. This conversation challenges everything retailers may believe about their role in proprietary product creation and margin optimization. Guest: Liza Amlani, principal and founder of Retail Strategy Group and co-author of The Material Life For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Customers have high expectations in their transaction experiences that do not end with the purchase. Today’s empowered and convenience-focused consumers want easy returns, and FedEx is on a mission to make that a reality using AI as a tool to improve the experience.  Join Shelley and Jason Brenner, Senior Vice President Digital Portfolio at FedEx as they delve into the fascinating world of returns logistics and how the process has evolved. Jason says consumer familiarity with ‘no box, no label’ returns jumped from 37 percent to 48 percent in just one year. He attributes the increase to consumers’ perceived value around the experience. “Nearly half of U.S. customers say they're now familiar with ‘no box, no label’ returns and the usage continues to increase year over year; the reason is that once shoppers try it, they understand how convenient and how low stress it can be,” he adds. Their conversation deconstructs shipping logistics and reveals why confidence comes from predictability and visibility that is grounded in a simple UX supported by reliable communications with thoughtful updates throughout the post-purchase journey. As with any customer service, trust, reducing stress and anxiety and managing expectations are crucial. Listen and learn how this iconic logistics organization continues to push the envelope to deliver better customer experiences. Special Guest: Jason Brenner, Senior Vice President Digital Portfolio, FedEx For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Last week, Shelley caught up with five more innovators at NRF 2026 to get their takes on the retail industry and an outlook for this year. Their conversations ranged from the connected store and talent development to geolocation analytics and the need for personalization.  Listen and learn from the experts.  Matthew Cry transformed his retail leadership experience by leveraging a better way to engage with customers and product with daily insights. “The physical store is the pulse on everything that's happening, connecting your inventory, shoppers, store teams, what's being bought, and what's not being bought. So, we're thinking when a customer is in that moment looking for something, we should be able to show her other products that are available in her size, and we should be saving the sales associate time from not having to do that manually.” Kimberly Minor’s explains there is no longer a direct linear career path: “How do we create pathways to new jobs, and how do we prepare people to be flexible so that they are ready when new opportunities open?” She adds “If you're curious about what your future could look like, then you should be curious about what other opportunities are available.” As a professor at FIT and Parsons School of Design, Marie Driscoll distills the underlying trend in retail to the range of AI tools that are aiding the retail practice. Her NRF observations range from Mango , Dick’s and LVMH to the K-shaped economy and the challenges of real estate and the luxury market. From a consumer perspective, going into 2026, she says, “I think the consumer is sitting in the best seat. She has so many choices, and the retailers that are creating valuable services for their customers will win.” Dominic Miserandino explores what makes the customer experience joy; he says experiential is a human connection.  As a connector, he adds, “I think we have evolved into a non-experiential, transactional retail culture, meaning DoorDash, press the button; Uber Eats, press the button. And the consumer is saying, yeah, that's awesome.” As an antidote, he adds, “You have to seek the emotional connections of humanity. So, retailers need to think about how they can humanize at scale.”  is the connection among them all.”   Gary Sankary’s work on mapping and geo-spatial analytics helps retailers understand why things happen where they do inside and outside stores—everything from the global all the way down to the neighborhood. As a contrarian, he says, “I'm going to be an outlier here and say Agentic AI is not going to innovate; what drives retail success is innovation and design. What AI is helping us do is expand the scope of the things that we can look at.” Matthew Cyr, CEO, Founder, Crave Retail Kimberly Minor, CEO Co-Founder, WOC Retail Alliance (WOCRA) Marie Driscoll, TRR Contributor, Professor, FIT, Parsons School of Design Dominic Miserandino, Founder and CEO, RTM Nexus Gary Sankary,Retail Industry Lead, Esri For more strategic insights and compelling content, visit TheRobinReport.com, where you can read, watch, and listen to content from Robin Lewis and other retail industry experts, and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.