Opinion

Retail operates like a pendulum. For years, the fashion pendulum has been swinging towards the hyper-casual. I wrote about the alleged “death of athleisure” as a false alarm nearly a decade ago. Not to be that smartest guy in the room, but my prediction was accurate that athleisure is here to stay. Today, so-casual-its-hilarious companies like Crocs are collaborating with the likes of luxury brands Stella McCartney and Balenciaga. The pandemic exacerbated this trend, with manufacturers unleashing a surge of jewelry and dresses built for the …

Dress Codes Are Back, But Consumer Response Is MixedRead More

Want to see a brand that embodies every single facet of the next-gen purchasing ethos? Look no further than Collusion, the most successful brand in ASOS’ catalog. Collusion came onto the market with a bang in 2018, launching with six diverse, body and gender-positive collaborators. A new batch of creatives come on board each season to help design the clothing and promote Collusion as a whole. The brand is currently sold exclusively on ASOS, joining ASOS’ own private label line, ASOS Design, and over 850 other brands on the fashion …

Learning from Collusion: The Gen Z Darling BrandRead More

As the former owner and CEO of Murray’s Cheese and a veteran supermarket executive, I feel compelled to weigh in on the current economy with some insights from the past. Having experienced the best and worst of times, I am only mildly optimistic about the future. That said, the headlines grow increasingly dim: inflation, recession, global stagflation, even “greedflation.” On the one hand, job openings are near record highs at 11.4 million in April alone. On the other hand, 6.5 million jobs were added in the last year. Record numbers of …

A Closer Look at Retail & Labor in Inflationary TimesRead More

If Walmart and Target are canaries in the retail coal mine, maybe there’s a third canary in the economic coal mine named Elon Musk who recently said we are already in a recession. Think what you will about Mr. Musk and his eccentric and stratospheric imagination … maybe he’s right. My friend Richard Baum, Managing Partner of Consumer Growth Partners, reminded me that “It's pretty common knowledge that by the time the government officially declares that we are in a recession, the country is usually on its way out of it. Not real genius on Elon …

Walmart and Target: Canaries in the Coal Mine?Read More

The groundbreaking Sephora and JC Penney collaboration has ended. And then just as quickly, Kohl’s tripled down on their in-store Sephoras, with plans to expand from 200 to 600 stores by the end of 2022 with an additional 250 stores in 2023. This will bring the total number of Kohl’s locations with in-store Sephoras up to a whopping 850 by the end of next year, eclipsing the number of Sephoras that were ever inside JC Penney, which peaked at around 650 stores in its heyday. An while we’re on that subject, Sephora stores in JCP looked like they …

Sephora and Kohl’s: Mismatched?Read More

So, if you think what is swirling around the world is just more complicated and painful than normal times, and that we will once again overcome and go on our merry way, you’d better read this. Forget about experiencing one “unknown” after another over the past two years. I’m talking about horrific, unexpected, and never-before shocks that threw the world into unknown places where solutions are still unknown. We “warp-sped” a Covid vaccine after millions of people died from it, only to face more communicable variants with the new B.2 now …

Unexpected UnkownsRead More

Editor’s Note: Arick Wierson, a columnist for The Robin Report, has undertaken the formidable task of dissecting and analyzing the broad and far-reaching consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as it relates to global retail. Understandably, we are presenting Wierson’s commentary in serialized lessons. This is the third of a three-part series. Lesson 3: The Losses Incurred in Russia Will Force Retailers and Brands to Proceed More Cautiously as They Contemplate Future Overseas Investments By the latest count, according to the list …

Lesson 3: How Retail Proceeds ForwardRead More