ClickZ

AI is often sold to small brands as the great equalizer. The pitch says a 12-person team can finally operate like a 1,200-person one. Katie Omstead, President of Lo & Sons, has a more exact read. AI has closed the distance between small and enterprise brands. But the remaining distance is made up of problems AI can’t solve. Lo & Sons creates premium travel and work bags designed to make life on the go easier. Helen Lo founded the brand more than 15 years ago.

HelloFresh serves roughly a billion meals a year. That sounds like the ceiling of a category it helped invent. Assaf Ronen does not read it that way. Set against the 500 billion dinners served across the Western world, a billion is a rounding error. So the Global President of HelloFresh Group and CEO of HelloFresh North America still runs the business like it is just getting started.

The $300 billion skincare industry has a problem it rarely says out loud. Over-the-counter skincare cannot legally change your skin. The moment a topical ingredient does something real, it counts as a drug. So it needs a prescription, a doctor, and a supply chain. Almost no consumer brand wants to build all that. Most companies route around that wall. Jack Jia walked straight into it. Jia is the founder and CEO of Musely.

While most mattress brands still compete on coil counts and pillow tops, Saatva has spent the last few years competing in the Olympics. For a luxury brand built around a premium product, white glove delivery, and a long consideration cycle, putting national TV and a Team USA sponsorship at the center of the strategy looks like a gamble. Joe McCambley, Saatva’s Chief Marketing Officer, frames it instead as the logical end of a decade-long climb up the funnel.

Marc Jacobs – Summer 2026 campaign and brand identity refresh What it is: Marc Jacobs released its Summer 2026 campaign, part of a platform the brand calls ‘Question Marc,’ alongside an updated visual identity. The campaign runs as a series of short-form video vignettes built around friends, conversation, and the brand’s Scene bag, released in episodes across social and video platforms rather than as a single drop.

Most luxury brands say they protect their identity. Very few can explain precisely how. At Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona, Alexei Obolensky, CEO of Christian Louboutin, did something unusual for a leader at a retail conference: he described the actual mechanics behind the brand’s decision-making, the internal architecture that determines what gets made, what gets declined, and where the next idea is allowed to come from.

Launching genuinely new technology into a category defined by simplicity is one of the harder marketing problems in retail. The product cannot be explained with a photograph or a thirty-second ad. It has to be held, activated, and experienced.

The Christmas retail window is the most competitive activation period in the UK. Every major brand wants Oxford Street, every luxury retailer wants a spectacle, and every activation agency is pitching the same concepts. Standing out in that environment requires something more than a well-executed facade. It requires a reason for people to come back.

There is a version of community marketing that exists almost entirely in brand decks: the language of connection, belonging, and purpose that sounds meaningful and delivers very little.

Pop-ups have become so common they have almost stopped meaning anything. Every mall has them, every brand has done one, every activation deck includes a section on experiential. The question worth asking is not whether you should do a pop-up, but whether you have earned the right to do one that people will actually remember. Mark Blundell, Chief Retail Officer at Harrods, spoke at Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona as part of a panel on turning temporary spaces into lasting impressions.