Earlier this year, Vogue Business published a collection of 17 articles digging into retail’s current inflection point — and what’s next.
At Vogue Business’s first Future of Shopping summit, in partnership with Shopify and Google Cloud, held at The Bowery Hotel in New York, retail and brand leaders and disruptors discussed what’s next for retail, how consumer shopping habits have shifted (and are still shifting) and how they’re future-proofing their businesses for a hybrid era of retail and commerce.
Approximately 185 industry attendees gathered in lower Manhattan to hear speakers’ takes on what’s next for shopping, and stayed on past the talks for cocktails and networking.
Below, the key takeaways from the day’s speakers.
In conversation with Saks Global CEO Marc Metrick
Saks Global CEO Marc Metrick joined Vogue Business executive Americas editor Hilary Milnes for a fireside chat, and cut right to the chase, addressing Saks’s July acquisition of Neiman Marcus Group (pending approvals). “That was step one in the formation of Saks Global,” he said. Now, the company is thinking about what the entity might look like outside of the US.
Looking back, Metrick addressed where Saks had managed to succeed where other multi-brand retailers have struggled. “You’re not supposed to deviate from strategy,” he said. “If there’s an economic downturn, if there’s geopolitical uncertainty, if there’s things that are going on around you, even a pandemic, just keep your head down, stick to your strategy and push through.”
Personalisation is top of mind, Metrick said. Though he couldn’t delve into the ins and outs of the still-pending Neiman Marcus deal, he did note a synergy across strategies for the retailers. “It’s about the specific customer experience. So the goal is not to differentiate between Saks and Neiman, or Saks from one of its online competitors,” he told Milnes. “It’s about differentiating between Hilary and Marc, and making it highly personalised.” This is where Saks is investing.
As for the luxury downturn, Metrick expects customers to come back in time. Consumers need innovation and a purpose to buy, which lulled, he acknowledged — but he’s excited for last season’s collections to hit the shelves. Is there an overblowing of the downturn? “There always is,” he said. “I’ll never forget in 2008 when they declared luxury dead.” Customers asked for plain white bags instead of Saks bags. “A few months later, it was booming,” Metrick said. “Fashion is a cycle, and we’re going through a cycle, and it’ll be back. It’ll roar back.”
What is the future of shopping?
Lisa Aiken, executive fashion director of Vogue and SVP of commerce at Condé Nast, joined Vogue Business and Vogue Runway deputy director Elektra Kostoni to discuss how multi-brand retailers and brands can achieve success in a retail industry that looks vastly different than it did 15 — or even five — years ago.
“Let’s call it as it is: we need to focus on profit versus growth,” Aiken said, noting that this was made abundantly evident in the last 21 months, with the collapse of multi-brand retailers from Matches to Farfetch. To do so, she said, retailers need to know their audience. “That’s what then allows you to take risks and differentiate.” At the centre of it all is the merchandising team, Aiken told Kostoni. “Buyers aren’t buyers. Buyers are sellers,” she said of the buyer’s role in selling clothing not only to the end consumer, but to the retailer’s team.
Post-pandemic, the big shifts include a move to more emotional shopping (“what do I want versus what do I need”) and a desire for more immediacy, as consumers shift back to occasion-based purchasing. Plus, there’s the “geography of it all”, as Aiken put it: consumers moved. Brands are playing catch-up, scaling their store footprints to react to that movement.
Aiken also highlighted the shifting role of wholesale; these days, it’s primarily a vehicle for brand discovery. Wholesale is part of a brand’s marketing strategy, while sales and performance are largely driven by a brand’s direct-to-consumer operations. Wholesale is shifting, too, however — it’s no longer just the multi-brand retailers that hold inventory leading the charge. It’s why Aiken, who held senior roles at retailers including Mytheresa, Moda Operandi, Net-a-Porter and more, left retail for publishing in the first place: the lines between the two are increasingly blurred.
The future of shopping, according to Aiken, is “hybrid everything”. All of a brand’s touchpoints — from store to socials and socials to IRL community — need to speak the same language, she said, which centres around one hybrid experience that a customer can dip into. “We need to think about it in a less rigid way,” she added.
Shopping’s next frontier: Personalisation, curation and unified commerce
Next, Essx NYC co-founder and partner Laura Baker, Daydream head of marketing and communications Jennifer Koen, and Shopify solutions architect Neilson Flemming joined Vogue Business’s Milnes for a panel on shopping’s next frontier. All three panellists are finding success by doing things differently. So how are they making it work?
For Baker, it’s all about community; concept store Essx was designed with New York’s creatives and young professionals in mind. “As soon as we opened, they came in,” she said. Soon, the celebs and athletes followed. What these consumer demos share is their repeat visits: they come for one brand, Baker said, and keep coming back for the new and emerging brands they discover in-store.
Daydream’s Koen also works with consumer needs top of mind. The AI-driven platform is geared towards the consumer that needs something to wear, has 10 tabs open and is frustrated that none of the sites remember sizing, preferences or any personal details beyond the basics.
Shopify’s Flemming harkened back to Aiken’s point about hybrid being the future of retail — brands need a smooth experience between in-person and online, he said, offering Essx as an example of a retailer that uses Shopify tech across its in-person and e-commerce offerings. “Remove the intersection and create one clear road for brand strategy and direction.”
Panellists agreed that what’s needed is a shift away from linear shopping. At Essx, “100 per cent of [the] experience is [the] selling staff”, Baker said. Essx educates both staff and consumers, to work with them on cultivating looks driven by taste and style, versus any one brand or prescribed look. Koen agrees; e-commerce is typically very taxonomy-driven, but that’s not the way we shop. “It’s not linear,” she said. Daydream requires a learning curve as consumers finesse how to speak to AI, but, Koen flagged, most people are navigating these changes already — so the fashion use case is well timed.
Understanding the age of the algorithm
In 2024, few topics have dominated the fashion conversation like that of the algorithm and its impact on how we dress and shop. This panel, hosted by US reporter Madeleine Schulz, brought together three Gen Z (or zillennial) voices to dissect the impact of algorithmic recommendations on how young shoppers and designers are operating today. Content creators and Substack writers Tariro Makoni and Jalil Johnson joined EB Denim founder and creative director Elena Bonvicini to dig into changing consumer journeys and design processes.
Whereas 2023 and early 2024 were dominated by “core culture”, the way trends move and develop has shifted, Makoni said. “As a culture, as things start to proliferate, we get sick of it. We’re almost in this wave of the algorithm where there is no longer ‘core’ energy, but there’s just your algorithm.” This is more dangerous from a consumer perspective, she added, as they instead look to replicate whatever full look is on their feed. “When we think about copy-paste culture, Gen Z has been trained, like the Pavlov’s Dogs study, to look at something and want to capture the whole image and then consume it. Because that’s what algorithms are.” This is, in part, why Johnson is on an anti-trends kick. “There are so many products out there in the world that the consumer doesn’t have to necessarily abide by what capital F fashion says is the trend,” he said.
On the design side, Bonvicini judges trends by their frequency. Quiet luxury, the panellists agree, has stayed the course. Though it was Bonvicini’s loud designs that got her noticed on social media in her brand’s early days, as she and her label have grown and matured, she’s remerchandised to be more minimal. And while she doesn’t consciously lean into trends (which has always been the case), designers have similar reference points. Only now, online, it’s heightened. “Five designers can put out polka dots in the same season and none of them can be looking at each other,” she said. “It just is an energy of us reflecting and referencing the same thing.”
To break through the noise, the panellists — consumers and designers — are looking to physical spaces. And online, Substack emerged as a standout tool for its expert insights and lack of algorithmic influence, as users sign up for the content they’re interested in. “I do think it is the future of shopping, and I think the brands that are tapping into it early are going to be in a different place in the brands that are not,” Johnson said. Will EB Denim get on Substack? “I will now,” Bonvicini laughed.
How AI will change shopping
Corey Moran, head of industry, luxury and fashion at Google, joined Milnes to discuss how AI will transform shopping. He was quick to point out that, despite the buzz, AI tech remains nascent, and brands and companies are still figuring it out.
But the potential is there. “If you are thinking about the customer journey from, you know, awareness all the way down to purchase, where would AI fit in? Everywhere is probably the answer,” he said, from product merchandising to returns management. Find the pain point, and AI can probably help solve for it.
Consumers all have different ways of shopping — especially across generations, “as we saw in that last panel”, Moran said. These different ways of wanting to shop are what he calls unified commerce. “Unified commerce is the idea that you’re meeting the expectation of every single person, whether they decide to shop online, whether they decide to shop in your store,” he said, noting that AI can help bridge this gap — which makes brands more excited than they are worried.
The potential is large, but it’s early days, Moran repeated. “So it’s about laying the groundwork right now.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
