Future Commerce

Episoder

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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.
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  *TEASER* Was E.T. Slimy or Dry? 29.06.2026 2min

  On this edition of After Dark: Spielberg's flop(?), GLP-1s are melting nightlife, Midjourney's health pivot, and why this is the Bad Place. this episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members – sign up now at futurecommerce.com/plus.
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  Korean 'Dopamine Sites' Let You Shop Without Shopping 24.06.2026 56min

  Phillip and Brian run the docket: why "proof of work" is the new luxury signal, what the AI export-control fight shares with a brand guarding its trade secrets, and how AI is flooding the patent office while quietly favoring incumbents. But perhaps the most profound part of the conversation lies in two trends taking internet culture by storm. "Tasteslop" and Korea's "dopamine sites" appear as distinct ideas, but they’re actually two faces of the same impulse: consumption stripped down to pure signal.
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  Inside Lululemon’s Resale Engine 17.06.2026 48min

  Resale is forcing brands to rethink product design, pricing, and customer acquisition from the ground up. Ryan Rowe (Archive) and Alison Buchanan (Lululemon) join Brian and Alicia to unpack how lululemon’s Like New evolved from a sustainability pilot into a meaningful commercial channel. We unpack messy reverse logistics, the AI agents now quietly running warehouse decisions, and the organizational vision required to make circular commerce work across a vertically structured enterprise.
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  The Machine Ate the Storefront, PayPal Mapped the Collapse 10.06.2026 20min

  Dr. Mark Grether, SVP and General Manager of PayPal Ads, joins Phillip from PayPal's Manhattan offices to argue that the merchant storefront is migrating off owned websites and into LLMs. This may make the mechanics of customer experience and loyalty a bit murky, but Mark explains how PayPal's "transaction graph,” built on real purchases across 30 million merchants and 400 million consumers, acts as the deterministic identity layer that the post-cookie ad world has been missing. We also cover the evolving world of commerce media, from zero-click commerce and CTV attribution to PayPal Ads’ newest product, Storefront Ads, which transforms the creative into the checkout.
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  Nearly 1B Strong: Snapchat Has Retail’s Most Overlooked Audience 03.06.2026 42min

  Snap, Inc.'s Sid Malhotra makes the case that the platform most brands wrote off as "babies and teens" has quietly grown up. Now, commerce is migrating into these private, conversational spaces where nearly one billion users actually spend their time. We dig into why the traditional funnel no longer holds consumers’ nuanced behaviors, how creators and chat shape decisions long before the last click, and what AI Sponsored Snaps mean for brands willing to be the answer rather than just another link.
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  After Dark: "You're Not A Visionary, You're A Vendor" 29.05.2026 1t 6min

  Get all After Dark releases by joining Future Commerce Plus: www.futurecommerce.com/plus. Future Commerce Plus members get 20% off STRATA: www.futurecommerce.com/strata. An AI agent burns $12 building a fake Android phone nobody asked for. From there: Pope Leo's encyclical, a tick crisis blamed on vanishing chickens, a website that's cookied Phillip into Spanish forever, and The Devil Wears Prada 2, feat. why media was the visionary all along.
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  LIVE @ Google Marketing Live: The Infrastructure Connecting Your Agent to 60 Billion Products 27.05.2026 22min

  Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip and eCommerce reporter Nicole Silberstein sit down with Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, who is behind the foundational commerce infrastructure powering the Shopping Graph and Universal Commerce Protocol. Gupta breaks down the GML announcements: UCP's expansion beyond shopping into hotels and food delivery, the multi-item Universal Cart that spans Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail, and why the future of agentic commerce still depends on merchants nailing the fundamentals.