Retail Pulse Report: Shoptalk 2025

The show’s post-pandemic bump seems to be fading fast.

Proof of life: That’s me on the left. In a trucker hat.

It has been too long since I was able to attend a conference and actually go to sessions, so I was really looking forward to Shoptalk this year, as I had quite a bit of time for content.

Hmm.

The Theme: Retail’s New Golden Age

I know that you often have to pick a theme well in advance of a show, and just like retailers picking next spring’s fashions now, with that kind of gap it’s easy to miss big. As we’re sitting around waiting to see if consumers’ crumbling confidence turns into a pullback on spending, this theme seemed like a big miss.

I mean, I guess if you look at it in the context of the Roaring 20’s – which the show embraced heavily – and what came after (the Great Depression), then possibly this theme is more prescient than it seemed at first. There was a frantic element to a lot of it. I can’t speak to if it has felt that way all along, as this is the first Shoptalk I have managed to get to, but I doubt it. When the CEO of Levi’s can get out-attended by some VP from Meta talking about how Llama is giving a (questionable) boost to Instagram, especially when those sessions ran back to back, there is something amiss.

Is 2025 going to be retail’s Golden Age? No. I can see how you might get that idea in late spring / early summer of 2024 – supply chain disruptions from the pandemic were finally righting themselves, consumers were very loudly saying they want to come back to stores (even as they still were resisting coming back to offices), and inflation was showing glimmers of coming down, along with some anticipated rate cuts from the Fed.

But here we are in 2025 somehow reliving the impact of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, with threats of trade wars, localized recessions tipping into global recession, oh and also the looming threat of stagflation as radical labor cuts in the US federal government run into resurgent inflation as tariff costs get passed on to consumers. That doesn’t sound much like a Golden Age to me.

If it were up to me, I would’ve gone with something a lot more pragmatic. Living With Permanent Uncertainty, maybe. Or Enticing the Cautious Consumer.

I know, I know, not very compelling necessarily, but perhaps less out of touch. To borrow a phrase from a slightly earlier era, this felt more like playing the fiddle on the deck of the Titanic. That’s overly dramatic – maybe it won’t get that bad. But 2025 sure ain’t gonna be “Golden Age” great.

The Content: Sanitized Platitudes

This one’s probably going to get me into trouble. And, to be fair, I heard from others that there were better sessions than I attended, so perhaps I just made universally bad choices. I tended to try to hit sessions that focused on the future of retail, consumer behavior, omnichannel, loyalty, customer experience. I was not interested in branding or retail media. This is what I found.

Here’s some sage advice: design products that people really want, and then you can charge whatever you want for them.

I don’t know why more companies don’t just do that?

Another great comment, that perhaps spoke to a mismatch in speakers and topics? Or not enough prep? The speaker and session will remain nameless: (in response to a question about where retail is headed) “I don’t really look at retail’sfuture, I’m more interested in equities.”

A scary prediction: “The best retailers in 2030 will have converted all customers to known and identified.” I guess, whether you as the consumer want that or not? The speaker used the Sam’s Club portal as an example for getting there, but while it’s better than nothing, it’s still too late. For anything that is purchased less frequently than groceries, you need to influence that purchase right then, and a portal at exit won’t help that. Most retailers I talk to struggle to find ways to incentivize customers to identify themselves early in a shopping trip (especially but not limited to stores). You can’t force that – that’s just creepy and dystopian. Incentivize is the key word.

Speaking of creepy, is it true that Walmart delivery people who deliver to the refrigerator wear GoPro style cameras and record everything they see in your house as they go? I found this article from 2019 that spun it as safety for the consumers opting for the “InHome” service, that they could watch the delivery person and make sure nothing is disturbed or stolen. The speaker who said all retailers need to force identification of all shoppers said that Walmart is selling lifestyle analytics to vendors based on insights they’ve gleaned from the InHome delivery cameras. “Creepy” is inadequate to describe this, if true.

This one from Richard Dickson, President & CEO of Gap (in answer to the question, who would Gap or Old Navy be if they were a person?): “There is no personification of who Gap or Old Navy would be as a person, it's about giving you the tools to create your own style.” And I think the hardest part about that statement is that he’d just spent a good amount of time talking about how Gap stood for jeans and music and how those intersect in cultural moments – touchstone moments, I would say, though he didn’t use those words. Talk about taking something significant about a brand and burying it in a sanitized platitude. We stand for whatever you want us to stand for?

Oh yes, and Clara Shih, VP of Business AI at Meta shared how you could possibly get into arguments with Instagram posts that can talk back to you in the future, which people in the audience actually applauded. She ran a video of a user asking a sponsored post about a bar soap shampoo if it would work for her hair type. The ad paused, and responded “Tell me more about your hair. Is it curly, straight, fine, thick?” And some kind of uplifting brand selling would happen. If my ad talked back, that would be a quick skip, not a cheer.

That said, there were some interesting nuggets, if you knew how to find them:

• There appears to be an upper limit to the percent of eCommerce that will come from a brand’s DTC site, and it is somewhere between 14.7-14.9% - and will remain at that level by 2030 (estimated by EMARKETER). eCommerce as a percent of retail will grow, so the dollar volume sold via DTC will also grow, but as a percent of eCom, for some reason consumers just won’t budge more (as Nike found out to their cost). I would love to know what drives this.

• Michelle Gass, CEO of Levi’s, did point out that their split of men’s vs women’s was 70/30, and she felt that it was big miss that it was not half. “We should own everything denim in dressing the consumer.” That is what you call taking a stand.

• The future of search – GenAI does promise to disrupt search, or what Google called a “red alert moment”. One consequence of this shift is the need for much more comprehensive tagging or attributing of products. This should not just be an eCommerce exercise. We’ve talked a lot in the past about “customer-centric merchandising” or “customer-centric assortments” – you can’t get there with color, material, and vendor as your only attributes. GenAI promises to make that easier, and promises to pay that effort off not just in consumer search, but store associate search, and even buyer or allocator search.

The Exhibit Hall: Where The Swimming With Sharks Really Happened

Mandalay Bay, where the conference was held, has a shark reef, and of course in the startup world we have Shark Tank (Kevin O’Leary was even a speaker but I missed that session). So the shark theme was pretty prominent. But the real sharks were swimming in the exhibit hall. That would be all the vendors who paid to have a booth, as they hunted for any hint of chum in the water (a real retailer with a real retailer badge).

When you have vendors giving away customized Uggs – or pictures with a local shelter’s rescue puppies – just to get retailers into a booth, you know you have a problem. A traffic problem.

Shoptalk is famous for its meetups, which one, seem like a logistical nightmare that actually went off without too many hitches, and two, overall seemed to be genuine and focused. Full disclosure: Aptos as a first time exhibitor got a booth and paid for 10 meetups, of which one was a no-show, but the rest seemed interesting and valuable.

And Shoptalk also puts the meetups at the end of a long road of vendors’ booths, so retailers theoretically have to walk past a bunch of us sharks to get to their appointments. But it still wasn’t enough. For our part, the booth traffic we had was great but was still pretty sparse. We spent a lot of time speculating about how we could still get the benefits of spontaneous walkups without the expense of a booth. If Shoptalk is going to stay relevant, this is a problem they are going to have to solve. Exhibits are easy money, but it’s also easy come / easy go when it comes to budgets.

What Did We Learn This Week?

In 2022, NRF in January pretty much got cancelled by a late resurgence of Covid. If Aptos had come to that NRF, I wouldn’t have made it – I would’ve been at home sick that year. That spring, everyone who was feeling newly immune-boosted went to Shoptalk to make up for missing out at NRF. And came back raving about the content, the people, the meetings, the networking. I think Shoptalk has benefitted from that bump. But NRF was more back than ever this year, and in contrast, Shoptalk felt out of touch and maybe tad desperate.

Will I go back? Maybe. The meetings were good. But I could give or take the rest. And no, I did not attend the Lil John Beach Party, let alone where all white.

What does it mean for retail? Well, I mean, if you just design products that people want, they’ll buy them, and you’ll have pricing power. So I guess, get on that already!

This week I’m at the Retail Technology Show in London. Aptos is sponsoring one of the lounge areas, so come by and see me there (or in sessions whenever I can be). And program note, next week I will undoubtedly cover what I learn from that event too. Until then!

- Nikki