Street Talk with Arthur Z

Sydney Badger, VP of Commercialization and Circular Strategy at Fillogic, joins Arthur Zaczkiewicz fresh from Climate Week to explain why circular fashion keeps stalling: nobody has built the sorting infrastructure, quality resale supply is hard to identify, and brands won't prioritize anything without a revenue line. They also cover how AI is identifying untagged returns, what the K-shaped consum...

Kate Assaraf, founder and CEO of Dip, joins ArthurZaczkiewicz on Street Talk to explain how a sustainable hair care brand grows by selling less. Dip makes salon-quality shampoo and conditioner bars that last so long she keeps them off Amazon to protect independent refill stores and salons. Assaraf talks about the K-shaped economy from both sides,the day her contract manufacturer went bankrupt, and...

Kate Sanner, founder and CEO of Beni, built an AI browser extension that shows shoppers a cheaper secondhandversion of whatever they're about to buy, before they buy it. Sanner tells Arthur Zaczkiewicz how Beni normalizes over a million resale listings an hour from Poshmark, eBay, The RealReal, Depop and ThredUp into a 300-million-item catalog, why she built Beni around “pull” instead of “push...

Keith Carpentier is the CEO and founder of QBuster, the queue management platform now operating in over 10,000 retail locations — including TJ Maxx, Disney, TSA, Cinemark, and a fast-growing roster of healthcare facilities. QBuster manages more than one billion customer transactions annually. In this episode, Keith joins Arthur Zaczkiewicz to unpack why checkout remains physical retail's most...

Julia O'Mara, co-founder and COO of Pickle, joins Street Talk to explain how a peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace turned everyday closets into a real income stream — one top lender made $50,000 in a single month. O'Mara walks through Pickle's pivot from a failed social polling app to a rental platform now live in all 50 states, how logistics and AI-assisted listings work, and why...

Nancy Rhodes, founder and CEO of Alternew, joins Street Talk to unpack the business case for post-purchase infrastructure in fashion — the tailoring, repair, and care services brands leave on the table after checkout. Rhodes explains why fashion's approach to circularity has been backwards, how Primark, Piper & Sky, Coach, and Levi's are already building repair into their post-purchase...

Shikha Jain, Lead Partner Consumer and Retail at Simon-Kucher, joins Street Talk to discuss the New American Dream Study — a 5,000-person survey conducted in 2026, the year America turns 250. The results challenge the prevailing narrative of consumer fatigue. The American Dream is still alive across every generation — but the barriers to reaching it are steeper than they have been in decades. High...

Karen Giberson, President and CEO of the Accessories Council, joins Arthur Zaczkiewicz to explain why independent and specialty retailers are gaining ground on department stores —and why accessories, fashion's original impulse category, are at the center of it. Karen breaks down how tariffs have hit handbags and other categories in waves, what California's new sustainability regulations mean for b...

Disney Petit, founder and CEO of LiquiDonate, joins Street Talk to unpack the economics of retail returns — an $890 billion annual problem that mostly ends in landfill. A former early employee at Postmates, Petit explains how her software reroutes unsellable returns and overstock to a network of more than 4,700 nonprofits, cutting shipping distanceby 90% and total cost by 60%. The conversation cov...

Jessica Murphy, Co-Founder and CEO of TrueFit, joins Street Talk to talk about what two decades of fit intelligence infrastructure means at the moment agentic commerce goes mainstream. TrueFit operates a network spanning 91,000 brands and hundreds of millions of shopper profiles. Now it's connecting that intelligence directly into AI shopping agents via MCP — placing fit data inside the agenti...

Adam Baruchowitz, co-founder and chief recycling officer at Return to Vendor, has spent 20 years inside fashion's waste stream. His company is building a circular materials platformanchored on monomaterial nylon design — and his argument for why circularity keeps failing is the clearest you'll hear. On this episode of Street Talk, Arthur Zaczkiewicz and Baruchowitz get into the economics of textil...

Newsletter signup CTA: Get the Street Talk newsletter — retail intelligence for C-suite decision-makers. Subscribe free:https://street-talk-studio.kit.com/ Angelica Reyes, Global CMO and US General Manager at Skeepers, joins Arthur Zaczkiewicz for a direct conversationabout why user-generated content has moved from marketing tactic to retail infrastructure. The traditional purchase funnel has coll...

David and Jodi Harouche, co-founders of Multimedia Plus, have spent 29 years building technology for one of retail's most underinvested assets: the sales associate. On this episode of Street Talk, they explain how their platform Insight turns in-between-customer time into competitive advantage — and why storytelling, not product specs, is whatseparates a great associate from a forgettable one. The...

Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations, joins Street Talk to cut through the noise around agentic commerce — separating what retail brands need to act on today from what remains a directional future. With 900 million weekly users on ChatGPT and 2.5 billion daily AI-first search queries, the search landscape has already shifted. But end-to-end agent transactions? Still early. Maher maps the consumer...

Marcelo Guimarães, co-founder and CEO of Fashinnovation,built one of fashion's most active global innovation communities from a single event in New York in 2018. It now operates across more than 100 countries. On Street Talk, he and Arthur get into the real frictionbetween fashion's creative culture and the tech world's operational logic, why most brands aren't ready for AI adoptio...

Jesica Elise Wagstaff, author of fashion theory newsletter A Sunday Journal on Substack, joins Street Talk to examine why brand identity has become retail's most underestimated problem. Drawing on theorists from Bourdieu to Baudrillard, she explains how the viral trend cycle has caused brands to abandon the cultural language consumers rely on — and why the mostinformed shoppers are already fil...

David Dorf, Global Head of Retail Industry Solutions at Amazon Web Services, joins Arthur Zaczkiewicz to break down what AI actually means for retail right now — and why most companies are thinking about it wrong. David introduces his two-part framework: agentic commerce (the AI-powered front-end experience) and the invisible AI reshaping back-end operations. He explains why retailers need to show...

Ward Kampf, President of Northwood Retail, has spent more than 30 years building retail environments that don't look like retail environments — and betting on founders before the market caught up. In this episode, he breaks down how Northwood evaluates acquisitions, why configuration now determines omnichannelsuccess, and what TikTok-born brands are doing to traditional tenant selection. He al...

This week on Street Talk, Arthur Zaczkiewicz sits down with Dora Lau — designer, president, and CEO of Dora L. International — for a conversation that spans Hong Kong opera stages, a debut fashion line that didn't sell a single garment, and the realities of building a global intimates business from scratch. Dora unpacks what it took to grow a 60-person, multi-continent operation serving specialty...

Five-time CEO and founder Terri Eagle has sat at the leadership table of some of the most recognizable names in luxury and beauty — Montblanc, David Yurman, F. Schumacher & Co. Now running her own advisory firm, she works with founder-led and family-owned businesses to build enterprise value, strengthen leadership, and prepare for succession. In this episode, Terri and Arthur dig into the real...

What does it look like to build a fashion brand entirely on your own terms — and walk away from Saks and Nordstrom when the terms no longer make sense? In this episode, Arthur sits down with Hadley Pollet, Founder, CEO and Creative Director of the Hadley Pollet brand — a women's accessories and lifestyle label she launched in 2002, inspired by the aftermath of 9/11, and has grown for over two...

Guest: Abraham Maslavi, co-CEO of Jovani Host: Arthur Zaczkiewicz, Director of Content, Corner of Fifth | (ex-WWD) In this conversation Abraham and Arthur discusses the evolution of the Jovani brand, its diverse collections, and the importance of accessibility in luxury fashion. He emphasizes the emotional connection with customers, the impact of technology and AI on fashion, and the commitment to...

Guest: Bruce Findlay, Managing Director at Landsec | (ex-Diesel, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger) Host: Arthur Zaczkiewicz, Director of Content, Corner of Fifth | (ex-WWD) This episode serves as a strategic masterclass for retail leaders navigating the "new normal." The conversation moves beyond the cliché of "retail is dying" and instead focuses on its scientific evolution. Findl...

Strategy over Survival Retail leadership is no longer just about managing inventory; it’s about mastering the intersection of technology and human-centric experience. On today's episode of Street Talk we sat down with Jay Hakami, President & CEO at SKYPAD, to dive deep into what is actually moving the needle for enterprise retail in 2026. Key takeaways for the C-Suite: Operational Agility: Why...

Edward Hertzman discusses his journey from the textile industry to founding Athletech, a platform focused on the fitness and wellness industry. He shares insights on the industry's evolution, the intersection of wellness with hospitality and beauty, and the launch of Hertzman Global Intelligence. Hertzman emphasizes the need for a new approach in sourcing and retail, highlighting the ongoing disru...