IADS Retail Park

Art in department stores goes back to 1875 — and the record has been continuous since.🎨 In this episode of IADS Retail Park, host Maya sits down with Selvane , Managing Director at IADS, to trace four phases of a 150-year relationship: store window, gallery, museum within the store, and independent foundation. From Le Bon Marché to Lafayette Anticipations and KaDeWe , across five continents. 👉 C...

In this episode of the IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya is joined by Anchita , to unpack Maya’s latest exclusive on the rise and fall of American Apparel 🧵. From a vertically integrated LA factory paying $80–$120 a day before ethical production was a marketing term, to two Chapter 11 filings and a $88 million acquisition that left the brand’s entire cultural infrastructure behind, Maya traces how one of...

The sportswear is spoken for — Adidas, Nike and Puma kit 37 of 48 nations. So what does the FIFA World Cup 2026 offer department stores?⚽ Host Maya and Christine of IADS examine the activations from El Palacio de Hierro , Bloomingdale's, Macy's , Nordstrom , Breuninger and Manor — and what each one reveals about the retailer behind it.🛍️. 🔎 Click here to read the full exclusive! Stay in the loop...

Everlane sold to Shein for $100 million in May 2026 — a brand once valued at $550–600M, with $90M in debt and common shareholders left with nothing. Host Maya wrote this week's Exclusive, so Selvane steps in to ask the questions. 📲 Click here to read the full exclusive! Find more interesting reads on IADS Exclusive Insights on Substack . Follow us on LinkedIn and visit iads.org . This is a public...

In this episode of The IADS Retail Park 🎧, Maya and Anchita explore the Metaverse beyond the buzz. ✨ What do Demain Beauty , L’Oréal, and luxury pioneers have in common? They’re experimenting with virtual experiences that educate, engage, and convert. 🛍️ From 75% memory retention through gamification to digital twins that reshape store planning, our hosts unpack the real business case for immers...

In this episode of the IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya sits down with Anchita , Head of Analysis and Prospectives at I.A.D.S. and author of this week’s exclusive, to examine why the advertising infrastructure retail built over the last decade is hitting a structural ceiling 📱. Based on👉 IADS Exclusive: The End of the Nudge by Anchita Ranka . For more insights and updates, follow us on LinkedIn at Inte...

They're not in the keynotes. They're not in the strategy decks. But when a retail transformation actually lands — when AI gets adopted, when a store team holds together under pressure, when corporate strategy turns into something a frontline team can actually use — there's almost always a middle manager making it happen. In this episode, Maya sits down with Christine , to unpack why middle manager...

In this episode of The I.A.D.S. Retail Park 🎧, Maya and Christine , explore the 2024 IADS Academy’s work on AI decision-making for retailers. A cohort of next-gen executives tackled “machine customers,” built the AIRI readiness framework, and created Lola — a retail-specific AI chatbot. 🤖 👉 Read the full exclusive here ! For more insights and updates, follow us on LinkedIn at International Asso...

Every January, retail's biggest names descend on New York for the NRF Big Show 🎙️ — and 2025 was reportedly a record edition: 40,000 attendees, 1,000 exhibitors, and more AI claims than you could count. In this episode, Maya sits down with Selvane , who was on the floor and in the rooms. They cut through the noise together — from agentic AI and "fantailing" to Target's culture strategy, Macy's bol...

Zara has closed 600+ stores since 2019—but total selling space has grown. Their new flagships look like "monobrand department stores" with local architecture, cafés, and luxury-grade design. What can department stores learn from this transformation? Maya and Selvane explore the "fewer, larger, better" strategy, the experience trap, and where Zara's limits create opportunity for department stores....

In this episode of IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Selvane , Managing Director of IADS, dissect this week's exclusive on the $10 trillion cost of manager disengagement. Drawing on Gallup's 2025 and 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports, Maya unpacks why $40 billion in enterprise AI investment is producing near-zero returns — and why both failures trace to the same layer. ➡️ Click here to read t...

Department stores have run two business models simultaneously for over fifteen years. The result is a financial architecture that punishes omnichannel behaviour from the inside out. In this episode, Maya and Selvane , unpack why the bottleneck was never technological, what a 7–10% ship-from-store cancellation rate reveals about incentive structures, and how the omni-cluster model redefines what th...

What does it take to build a retail empire on a single address? Maya and Christine examine the strategic logic behind the world's most iconic single-location department stores. From Royal Navy ship timbers to circus performances after closing hours, this episode explores why singularity can be more defensible than scale—and what La Samaritaine's €750 million lesson reveals about when it fails.🔗 C...

Zara has closed 600+ stores since 2019—but total selling space has grown. Their new flagships look like "monobrand department stores" with local architecture, cafés, and luxury-grade design. What can department stores learn from this transformation? Maya and Selvane explore the "fewer, larger, better" strategy, the experience trap, and where Zara's limits create opportunity for department stores....

45 days. 50% of annual grocery sales. 30-40% of automobile revenue. India’s festival season isn’t a shopping event — it’s an economic restructuring that happens every year. 🪔 This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Anchita examine how Amazon India turned a five-day sale into a month-long phenomenon where 85% of customers now come from non-metro cities. UPI accounts for 78% of digital payments....

25 billion Turkish lira in GMV. 18.3 million users. 550 business partners. Hopi isn’t a loyalty program anymore—it’s a B2B2C platform that does loyalty, MarTech, AdTech, and FinTech simultaneously. 💳 This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Selvane examine how Boyner Grup turned a department store loyalty program into a multi-merchant coalition serving 300+ partners, including its own competito...

Target ended DEI in January 2025—four days after Trump's executive orders. By January 2026, when ICE agents detained US citizens in Minnesota stores, Target said nothing. That silence defines the bind facing US retailers in 2026. 🎯⚖️ This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya breaks down the trajectory from George Floyd commitments to Louisiana v. Callais —the late-April Supreme Court ruling that end...

£24,000 per square metre. 18% operating margin. One building. One UK tax change cost it £80-90 million. 💷 Maya and Selvane examine the landlord-brand model that made Harrods one of the world's most productive retailers—and the pressures now testing it. Seventy percent runs on concession economics. Freehold ownership eliminates rent risk. But customer concentration (4% = 28% of revenue), QIA divid...

🎧 In this episode: Why Breuninger’s credit card captures 71% of turnover 💳 | How personal shoppers recruit at operas and cultural events 🎭 | The 3-minute runner system in footwear 👟 | Mrs. & Hugs private label success 🏷️ | Luxury buyback programs that keep spending in-house 🔄 🔗 Click here to read the full Breuninger Stuttgart Exclusive by Christine Montard ! For more retail insights and stra...

This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Christine examine what department stores are actually building with these renovations — from Nordstrom ‘s 1,670 sqm Beauty Bar to Macy’s 5,000 sqm commitment to Galeries Lafayette ‘s three-floor strategy. The brand counter model is dissolving. Whether the replacement can compete with Sephora' s 20-year head start is the question billions can’t yet answer....

In 2006, Abercrombie & Fitch ‘s CEO said it on the record: “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” It was company policy. And it cost them everything. 👀This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Christopher trace A&F ‘s decade-long reckoning — from a $40 million discrimination settlement in 2004 to an 8-1 Supreme Court defeat in 2015 to the Curve Love comeback. The problem wasn’t the lawsuit. It was t...

In this episode of IADS Retail Park 🎙️, we explore Galeries Lafayette 's seven-year journey to open India's first true luxury department store 🏛️Based on IADS Exclusive: 👉 "A landmark entry: Galeries Lafayette and the evolution of Indian luxury retail" This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit iads.substack.com/subscribe

€200M invested. Breuer's building. Gucci on the ground floor. But De Bijenkorf Rotterdam 's VIP services? Invisible. 👻 This week, Maya & Christine walk all five floors to find the gap between execution and visibility—and what every department store can learn from it. 🐝 📸 Full story here | ⏱️ 12 min This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to b...

🏢 A 40-year-old department store. 33,000 sqm. €750M in annual revenue. How? Korea built an entire VIC architecture where 5% of customers drive half the sales—through transparent €94K thresholds, allocation control, and lifestyle infrastructure the West hasn't replicated. Maya and Selvane unpack what makes Hyundai Apgujeong one of Korea's highest-performing stores per square metre. 📊💰 📖 Full re...

In this episode, Maya and Selvane unpack an exclusive from 2023 on the seismic shift in Chinese tourism post-reopening. 🛫 What do Galeries Lafayette , Harrods , and El Corte Inglés have in common? They rewrote the playbook—swapping tour-group tactics for wellness galleries, Michelin dining, and cross-border CRM magic. 🌍 But with Hainan’s duty-free empire doubling sales and XiaoHongshu rankings f...