Future Commerce

Epizodes

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  Memorable Over Measurable: Retail’s Lost Wonders 30.09.2026 36min

  Taste can’t be manufactured, so brands are hiring the people who have it. Writer and gr8 collab founder Emma Apple Chozick returns to talk with Phillip about her creative process (sans content calendar), building ShopMy’s Signals Substack on proprietary data, and what the long-gone BEST Products showrooms can teach us about designing retail spaces worth remembering.
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  Rewind: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once 23.09.2026 1h 48min

  Welcome to Future Commerce Rewind, where we revisit our deepest and most enduring conversations. This week, we're playing back our April 2025 conversation with Andrew McLuhan, grandson of Marshall McLuhan and director of The McLuhan Institute. Andrew joins Phillip and Brian to explain why his grandfather's ideas still hold up: the side effects of a technology tend to become its main effects, and the Global Village was never as idyllic as it sounds. AI has become a companion, an advisor and a shopping assistant. McLuhan's asks the core question: what do our new tools extend, and what do they change about us?
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  Separating Real Signals from the Noise 16.09.2026 43min

  Phillip and Alicia welcome Merciv co-founder and CEO Shaia Erlbaum to the show to talk about how brands can read signals in real time, and verify their relevancy. Shaia argues that data itself is commoditizing, but verification is not. The most honest consumer signal lives too deep for surveys to reach, which is why our Signal Reports are looking deeper than stated behaviors and are telling completely new kinds of retail and culture stories.
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  Cartographies of Meaning 11.09.2026 22min

  A replay from VISIONS Summit: NYC feat. Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios. Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios took to the VISIONS stage at MoMA last year to enlighten a room of retail executives and brand marketers about the realities of worldbuilding. Their theory: a brand’s final form is decided by the public—and the strategist's job is to navigate that story, not control it. And they use Mercator, Buckminster Fuller, Guy Debord, free public Wi-Fi, and an acne sticker to back up their claims.
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  *TEASER* The Oreogate Lady Is NOT Real! 10.09.2026 1min

  Can anyone tell the staged from the real anymore? On today’s After Dark: We’re growing increasingly certain that everything is fake now. Amazon drones delivering your package to the deep end of your backyard pool? Curiosity bait. A bunch of Kindergarten moms actually keeping up in a group thread? A Suno commercial. That behind-the-scenes footage? AI-generated – but you watched it, didn’t you? PLUS: The minds of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have converged to craft what’s anticipated to be one of the most compelling documentaries we’ve ever seen. This episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members. Subscribe to listen at www.futurecommerce.com/plus
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  Retail Media In Your Ears: Inside Dollar General's 21,000-Store Audio Network 02.09.2026 39min

  The next big advertising opportunity is here. The audio systems in Dollar General’s 21,000 stores connect shoppers with advertisers and drive loyalty. Austin Leonard, VP and GM of Dollar General Media Network (DGMN), sits down with Phillip and Alicia to explain why the retailer has doubled down on audio and the role that non-endemic advertisers play in his long-term vision.
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  2026 Signals We’re Tracking: Commerce Evolves (Again), the Monoculture is Back, and Celebrity Prevails? 26.08.2026 27min

  Phillip sits solo to unpack conflicting economic signals: Shopify's monster quarter against a Census report showing eCommerce eating share while retail overall slows. What does this mean for brick-and-mortar? Although stores still make up most retail sales, their mission and value have shifted. The good has become secondary to the experience of acquiring it. Plus, he breaks down why the monoculture returned in a summer of shared events, and what's on the FC docket through November 3rd.
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  Shopify Earnings Go Wild, and American Retail is OVER. 19.08.2026 51min

  Phillip and Alicia open the back-to-school season with a modern dichotomy: NRF data shows shoppers playing chicken, while Shopify posts a quarter where agentic traffic tripled. PLUS: After a summer abroad in London, Phillip reflects on behaviors unique to U.S. shoppers.
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  Enter Through the Gift Shop: Inside MoMA's Retail Journey 12.08.2026 28min

  MoMA welcomes three million people to its Midtown campus in a good year. But the beloved cultural institution now has the power to reach multiples of that through a hoodie, a Lego set, and a chicken-shaped cutting board. Chief Retail Officer, Jesse Goldstine, joins the show to explain how MoMA inverted the museum retail model, how every product in the store thoughtfully ties back to MoMA’s art, and where the design institution draws the line between rolling out AI partnerships while protecting human craft.
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  Commerce Media's Day Two: The Agentic Shelf and the Measurement Reckoning 05.08.2026 43min

  Retail media is now a $100 billion industry. Collin Colburn, VP of Commerce and Retail Media at the IAB, says we’ve entered commerce media's "day two" –  the era where operational integration, interoperable measurement, and the arrival of the agentic shelf matter more than launching another network. We unpack why brands started calling retail media a tax, why Collin says we should blow attribution up, and whether an ad-supported agent can stay trustworthy.
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  *TEASER* The Dire State of Consumer Trust In 2026 30.07.2026 1min

  It's a birthday After Dark! On this episode, Phillip and Brian work through the current state of consumer trust (it's not looking good). PLUS: Everyone's a critic! The reviews of The Odyssey are in, and Brian thinks Tarantino would have done it better. Air Bud's also making a triumphant(?) return, rocking, some Air Jordans, appropriately. This episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members. Subscribe to listen at www.futurecommerce.com/plus
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  Bedfellows: How Boll & Branch Keeps Humans and AI in the Same Sheets 29.07.2026 43min

  Boll & Branch spent 12 years doing the unfashionable thing: perfecting the product first and figuring out distribution second. Chief Commercial Officer Katia Unlu joins Phillip and Brian on today’s episode to discuss Boll & Branch’s store expansion strategy, an AI-generated damage claim that went viral, and the case for stimulation over substitution.
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  VC Partner Predicts the Next Billion-Dollar Brand 22.07.2026 50min

  Maveron partner Natalie Dillon joins Brian and Alicia to challenge the consumer-collapse narrative: sentiment sits at post-9/11 lows while spending breaks records. Natalie sheds light on truths of today’s consumer, who is skeptical but continually shopping amid a cultural undertow where AI adoption stays surprisingly shallow, Gen Z turns skeptical, and analog living re-emerges as status. PLUS: Are cults the new future of commerce?
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  Content, Communities and the Future of Publishing 17.07.2026 34min

  Ben Dietz convenes Casey Lewis (After School), Daisy Alioto (Dirt), and Erica Chen (Media Futures Group, WPP) on the collapse of the wall between editorial and commerce. Publishers are shipping perfume, brands are hiring writers, and the relationship forming in your inbox isn’t human-to-human anymore.
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  The Future of the Funnel 10.07.2026 26min

  The funnel most marketers grew up on – see the ad, click, browse, add to cart, buy – did not gradually erode. It came apart almost overnight, as shoppers got comfortable discovering, deciding, and buying inside social feeds and LLMs, often in a single moment.
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  Service Is the New Storefront 09.07.2026 25min

  You are a VIP customer, and the bot still asks for your email. Klaviyo's Kelly Thacker on why "service is the new storefront" is finally more than a slogan.
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  From One to Ten Million Sends in One Month: Marketing is Orchestration Now 08.07.2026 15min

  Particle scaled from one million to ten million sends a month in weeks, not years, and doubled revenue. Here's the system behind it.
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  Owning the Social Moment 07.07.2026 17min

  Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling with the person living the problem every day.
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  Memory Is the New Competitive Moat 06.07.2026 24min

  Jake Cohen, VP of Insights at Klaviyo, and Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of eCommerce at The Bottle Club, sit down with Phillip Jackson at K:LDN to discuss why memory is the new durable advantage. Tim shares how The Bottle Club collected checkout context to better understand unique customer needs and bheavioral nuances to create more impactful campaigns. And Jake unpacks how other brands can apply the same discipline, interpreting engagement (not total spend) as a loyalty measure.
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  K:LDN 2026: The Architecture of Meaningful Connection 03.07.2026 19min

  K:LDN 2026 opened to more than a thousand merchants and set a clear vision with several key product announcements: Klaviyo’s expanding toolset has become powerful enough to let a brand of any size operate at a scale that once required a full team. The promise of personalization, long marketed but rarely delivered, has finally become something all brands can ship. Phillip Jackson sits down live with Klaviyo CMO Jamie Domenici and IDC research director Roger Beharry Lall to break down the trends that are shaping the future of retail and Klaviyo as an organization: the slow collapse of the linear funnel as shoppers move across LLMs, social, and search; the evolution of AI from a disparate chat window to an embedded experience where marketers work; and how the public beta of Klaviyo’s new agent, Composer, is helping marketers create campaigns rooted in data from hundreds of thousands of merchants.