Retail Unwrapped - from The Robin Report

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! AI continues to make headline news throwing retailers into disruption. But the real news is that retail is in crisis and it’s in the physical store. Join Shelley and Mark Cohen, TRR contributor and former Director of Columbia University's Retail Studies Program, as they challenge the industry&...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The biggest threats to retail are hiding in plain sight. And the biggest problems facing retailers are caused by not asking the right questions. This is not convenient management theory; it is missing the key signals that are reshaping the retail industry. Join Shelley and David Katz, EVP and Chief...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Everyone thinks AI will replace the workforce. But that’s the wrong assumption. The real question is what human work will become more valuable once machines handle the basics.  Join Shelley and Ron Thurston, author of Retail Pride and Human Pride and a 30-year retail veteran across Apple, Gap, Tory...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The weakest link in most data strategies is the human factor; it’s the team members who can’t agree on measuring what matters. Add to that, communications often break down in the best tech solutions to deploy and how to integrate them to prevent data fragmentation. Join Shelley and Tim Shea, Founde...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! AI search is growing at over 300 percent while traditional browser search is declining. Most retailers and brands are completely unprepared for what that means for their search visibility. Join Shelley and Heather Holmes, Founder of Publicity for Good, as they unpack how brands need to think like t...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! As organized crime gets bolder and more sophisticated, so do the tools that retailers can deploy to stop criminals in their tracks.  ORC has become a $112 billion annual loss for retailers with mass theft feeding fencing operations across a retail enterprise. Every retailer needs to be concerned ab...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Just released, ICSC and McKinsey do a deep dive in a new report, “Shopping in the age of AI: Redefining stores for a new era.” Spoiler alert: Agentic AI could drive up to $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030.  Join Shelley and Stephanie Cegielski, Vice President of Public Relations and Indust...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Iconic Century 21 closed its doors in 2020, not the first retail victim of the fallout from the pandemic. Five years later the brand’s comeback story marks a page in retail lore. Join Shelley and Larry Mentzer, COO of Century 21 NYC as they tell the story of the courage it takes to learn from mista...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! Conversations in C-suites about AI typically bring up cost efficiencies, job cutbacks, competitive edges and workplace transformation. What leaders don’t discuss is being human in an AI era and what fundamental human skills and talents are not replaceable. Often the human being gets forgotten and p...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! The global luxury market has been experiencing a quiet crisis, and the war in Iran has accelerated its fragile spiral downward disrupting the Middle East as an emerging luxury market. With over $7.5 trillion in Gulf regional wealth projected to double by 2050, the big question is not whether luxury...

We'd love to have your feedback and ideas for future episodes of Retail Unwrapped. Just text us! AI isn’t just a use case; it's a new commerce channel and operating model designed to amplify loyalty economics. Agents will help customers personally through discovery, comparisons, purchase, and fulfilling their orders. So retail, which has always been shaped by that interface between the cu...

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...

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 indust...

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 tre...

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 curt...

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 sho...

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...

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 reve...

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 Boe...

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...

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 rul...

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 ne...

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...

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 Retai...

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,...