Category: retailing | 零售 | 소매업 | 小売業

Looking back to when I started this blog, it would have been reasonable to expect an inevitable march of retailing from offline to online. Amazon was on a tear and search advertising volumes were increasing year on year. By the time I was at Yahoo! search advertising (focused on online retailing) counted for about half of all revenue for the company.

At that time Yahoo! had a Spotify-like subscription streaming music service that was viewed as a threat to Apple’s iTunes download only offering. When I worked there Yahoo Music was the number one online music site in terms of audience reach and total time spent by consumers on the site. Also display advertising was much bigger for brands than it is today and Yahoo! was guaranteed a good share of the online marketing spend from any movie launch at the time.

The reality of online retailing, was slower than our expectations. While COVID drove an increase in online retailing there has also been corresponding innovations in retailing as well.

Amongst the pioneers in this change have been luxury brands like Burberry and Nike, who brought digital into their stores to provide a superior customer experience.

Adidas brought manufacturing into its stores with its speedfactory experiment, allowing for fast time to market and customisation.

Supreme changed the cadence of retailing with the Thursday morning ‘drop’ which saw queues outside stores. Every Thursday became a launch day as far as their customers where concerned. The queue has moved from Apple’s annual cadence, to every week.

Motorsport fandom + more things
Motorsport fandom is strange. Back when I was a child motorsport fandom was a bunch of anoraks – literally. There was a category of clothing that you could buy from mail order catalogues and retailers like Demon Tweeks called a rally jacket. This was a coat good enough to deal with some cold wet weather branded by a car company or a tobacco brand.

Motorsport fandom, in particular single-seater race series are starting to see very different types of fans who learned their supporting ideas from the K-pop armies which are a symbiot of the artist promotion machine. While both promotion machine and fans are separate with very different tactics, they were united by a common goal to a point.

This isn’t the first time that media has brought in new fans, gaming created fans in the past. But the current motorsport fandom is interesting because of the cultural friction that it brings for drivers and legacy fans. From hate campaigns and death threats against drivers to ‘idol’ style objectification – women are demonstrating traits that would define toxic masculinity. All wrapped up in pastel tinted social media posts and Etsy products – so that makes it all fine, doesn’t it?
Beauty

‘A marker of luxury and arrogance’: why gravity-defying boobs are back – and what they say about the state of the world | The Guardian

Business

Microsoft saved $500 million last year thanks to AI. This year, it’s laid off 15,000 employees | Quartz

China

Thinking Through Protracted War with China: Nine Scenarios | RAND and Trump is enabling Chinese power – by Noah Smith

Consumer behaviour

More than “I do”: Legal status and cultural distance shape marriages and separations | CEPR

The evolution of stupid | FT – this reminded me of the debate about calculators in maths and physics exams when I was at school

Design

Why carmakers need to bring back buttons

How Renault is speeding up car development to match Chinese rivals | FT

‘When was the last time I saw one of those?’ Car magazine – on the consumer’s obsession with screens over driving experience

FMCG

Japan’s mayo king calls time on baby food as inflation bites and births fall | FT

Health

A Close Look at Auxiliary Prescription Labels | Inconspicious Consumption – interesting intersection of regulation, consumer experience and design

Japan

Alimentation Couche-Tard drops its $46bn pursuit of 7-Eleven owner | FT

Luxury

LVMH’s Loro Piana placed under court administration over worker exploitation | FT – it seems to be a feature of the LVMH management ‘system’ rather than a bug

TikTok won’t grow your luxury brand in the long term | The Drum

China could give luxury titans a run for their money | FT – this was only a matter of time. See also Swatch activist ups pressure as profits plunge over China weakness | FT

Marketing

WPP has its next CEO – but what do clients make of heir apparent? – It’s not indifference. It’s pragmatism. Marketers like this don’t want to buy into the idea that a leadership change signals sweeping transformation. After all, Rose doesn’t start until September. Until then, they’d rather stay focused on the present, not the promise.

Ryan Kangisser, a bellwether for client perspective thanks to his proximity to them as the chief strategy officer at MediaSense, expanded on the point: “I do think that often the industry cares more about these sorts of appointments than clients do. Especially if clients have got a really solid client lead, or business lead, then they’re the people who they feel are the ones driving their business.”

Cindy Rose is the right choice for a CEO (but maybe not at WPP) – The Media Leader

WPP turns to Microsoft executive as AI threatens ‘Kodak moment’ | FT

Cindy Rose WPP: Why Cindy Rose will lead WPP to recovery, ET BrandEquity

Is Accenture interested in all or some of WPP? – More About Advertising – it would make sense for Accenture to do their due diligence at the very least

Why Nike Quietly Launched on Substack

Media

Apple TV+ Became HBO Before HBO Could Become Netflix | Spyglass

Amazon Breaks Up Wondery Podcast Studio, CEO Jen Sargent Departs | Hollywood Reporter – issues with the business model for audio offerings, curious to know if Vox will follow suit? The shows that moved to SiriusXM are interesting, SiriusXM is a subscription-based satellite and internet radio service

Online

Google, Microsoft and Amazon face pressure over data sovereignty – Rest of World

Shitposting as a National Asset – DARC

Is Everything a ‘Humiliation Ritual’? | GQ and Humiliation Rituals | Protein – on the nature of social media rewards, but could as easily apply to many unscripted TV formats.

Reddit at 20: A Look Beyond the Upvotes – 3 Quarks Daily

Chinese police crack down on young women writing homoerotic fiction | Le Monde – this is interesting because its been an area of Chinese online culture which has escaped censure so far despite the government’s concern about traditional family values under the Xi administration

Disinformation warriors are ‘grooming’ chatbots | FT

Retailing

China falls for American-style bulk buying at Sam’s Club despite US trade tensions | Ft

Security

Data Warfare – DARC – interesting theory.

Axios Future of Cybersecurity: 1 big thing: A tale of two generative AI futures – differing opinions from Defcon in Vegas on the impact of AI on hacking and cyberdefence

From Tactical Trench Killers to Strategic War Winners: Doctrine, Operational Art, and Tomorrow’s Drone-Enabled Maneuver Warfare – Modern War Institute

Building Trust in Military AI Starts with Opening the Black Box – War on the Rocks

The Innovation Imperative: Why Tactical Ingenuity is Not Enough | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University

Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Iran From Within — ProPublica

Software

Nikkei Asia podcast on how the Korean media industry and gaming developers are using AI – South Korea pushes limits of AI in gaming and entertainment – YouTube

Axios AI+ 1 Big Thing: AI’s elusive coding speedup – small sample but interesting study. Part of the problem might be the corpus that would underpin coding for open source projects.

Five things I believe about actually-existing AI today | Dave Karpf

Technology

An OpenAI Acquisition Turns Into a Google ‘Hackqusition’ | Spyglass – hackquisition is the new acqu-hire

Telecoms

Broadband’s tiny barbarians gather at BT’s gate | FT
August 23, 2025
Augmented retailing
What I’m calling augmented retailing is a step change in technology in retailing from efficiency to effectiveness.

Retailing efficiency

Before we talk about augmented retailing, let’s go through efficiency which has been the focus for a long time. Depending on the way you want to look at this, you could look back centuries to the foundation of a technology multiplier: children.

Family retail businesses had family members working in their business from once they could understand and act on instructions. I have friends that started working in the family restaurant from 6-years old. I started working on the family farm (ineffectively) from a similar age.

Weighing scales were starting to become standardised by the middle-ages and giving short measures could see you punished.

The next innovation were payment related, such as currency and credit.

At the end of the 19th century thanks to industrialisation you started to see the origins of supermarkets as we now think about them. Sears Roebuck was the exemplar for mail order business, from which we now have Amazon and the countless e-tailers out there. Around about the same time the cash register was invented, which allowed cashiers to deal with more customers in a given amount of time. Cash registers then improved over the next century.

At the end of the 20th century we start to see e-tailing emerge. Accelerating mail order from being a niche to becoming a mainstream form of retail. Around the same time, you also saw cashier-less tills come in and other techniques to make shopping even more self-service.

Augmented retailing

Augmented retailing isn’t for the primary benefit of the retailer; but the customer. That’s more radical than it sounds as I write this down.

Look at other trends that marked change in retail and its about inconvenience to ‘create’ demand:
- Apple retail product launches.
- Abercrombe and Fitch / Hollister’s ‘club style’ door queues.
- Drop culture.
- Raffles to win the right to buy a product.
I have started to see innovations that are focused on the effectiveness of the consumer experience, rather than being orientated around retailing efficiency.

Mylowe virtual advisor

Lowe’s is a DIY superstore, rather similar to B&Q, Homebase or Toolstation in the UK. Like B&Q, Lowe’s has on-site experts to advise customers and help them select parts for projects.

Mylowe helps the experts by augmenting their expertise, providing a faster, better experience for Lowe’s customers.

A-eye

Indian snack manufacturer Britannia worked with their agency VML India to aid blind consumers to shop independently. The app christened A-eye uses Google’s Vertex AI to recognise products on shelves and provide information about the product (quantity, ingredients, instructions etc.). Think about the personal confidence that this would bring to the user in their everyday life.

Albert Heijn provides cooking tips

Dutch supermarket brand Albert Heijn uses generative AI to help consumers by answering cooking questions. `Mijn AH assistent’ helps customers in their food shopping for food ingredients.

More related content here.
June 15, 2025
Walsh’s + more stuff
Walsh’s of Mullingar

Walsh’s is the kind of business I grew up with in Ireland. In my part of the world it wasn’t the Walsh’s it was Kelly’s and Salmon’s who both ran general stores on the edge of my parish. It was a mix of groceries, cigarettes, a top-loading cabinet of ice creams. In the local market town there was O’Meara’s who still run a supermarket, Lynch’s who run a hardware store, builders yard and farm supplies and Hayes – a chemist and veterinary pharmacy. Like Walsh’s they are all multi-generational businesses with customers from the same families over successive generations.

Maintaining a multi-generational business was (and still is for many) a matter of pride. It can be a great business, you know your customers needs and personalities far better than I ever did working for the likes of Unilever. The Walsh’s will have been with their generations of customers at key times in their lives: engagements, marriage, anniversaries and retirements.

When my Uncle died and we had a wake for him, I met the the pharmacist who looked after his personal and farm needs and her Dad who had filled my prescription for cough medicine as a child. There were people from the hardware store, farm supplies, the newsagent who my family always got their copies of the Irish Farmer’s Journal and the Connacht Tribune.

The Walsh’s are wrapping up because their business can no longer compete with the scale of online jewellers.

It’s interesting that COVID was the inciting incident that broke the generations of consumer behaviour, brand loyalty and relationships. The second factor that the Walsh’s named was the hollowing out of people living within the market town of Mullingar. That’s especially interesting given that Ireland currently has a chronic housing shortage makes me wonder what is going on.

More related posts:
- Ramblings on consumption – trying and failing to understand my Uncle.
- Ireland by Frank Delaney – reading a book that caused me to look at the fraying aspects of Irish life in the face of modernity.
- Roots – more about life in rural Ireland.
Concepts as viral marketing

Chris Spargo runs one of the most interesting British YouTube channels looking at the minutae of the UK from supermarket clock towers to book barcodes and milk packaging. This film looks at how The Glass Committee funded by Pilkington Glass created outlandish concepts that promoted discussion. Weirdly enough some of the ideas found themselves from the most outrageous concepts into Britain’s new towns developments.

A history of hacking

Frederico Mazzini goes through a history of hacking with a focus on culture. Even though it was presented for Tokyo College, it had a very western centric slant to it. Interesting points about hacking is an explicit political activity in some non-US cultures – notably France, Italy and Germany.

What became apparent was that Mazzini lacked was any kind of understanding of hacking in Japan, which runs with a much lower profile than their counterpart western communities according to Trend Micro.
May 25, 2025
Liberation day + more things

Liberation day

Liberation Day was a glorified press conference where the Trump administration revealed their tariff scale on every country around the world. Weirdly enough, Russia wasn’t tariffed. Here’s some of the interesting analysis I saw prior to, and after the event.

The Trump administration leant into an aesthetic influenced by patriotic memes, the steeliness of The Apprentice and generative AI – a look I call Midjourney Modern. Liberation Day was no exception.

The Economist did a hot take that calls the whole thing a ‘fantasy’.

America’s Cultural Revolution – by Stephen Roach – Conflict – Stephen Roach was an Asian focused chief economist at Morgan Stanley. The American Cultural Revolution narrative is something I have heard from a few contacts in China and Roach echoes that perspective in this article.

China says weaponising agriculture in US trade war should be off-limits | South China Morning Post – agricultural price shocks in the past have led to civil disruption in China

Liberation Day and The New World Order | Fabricated Knowledge

Opinion | I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America. – The New York Times – President Trump is focused on what teams American transgender athletes can race on, and China is focused on transforming its factories with A.I. so it can outrace all our factories. Trump’s “Liberation Day” strategy is to double down on tariffs while gutting our national scientific institutions and work force that spur U.S. innovation. China’s liberation strategy is to open more research campuses and double down on A.I.-driven innovation to be permanently liberated from Trump’s tariffs.

Beijing’s message to America: We’re not afraid of you. You aren’t who you think you are — and we aren’t who you think we are. – Thomas Friedman – Overall, I would agree with the sentiment, BUT, you have to remember what he’s been shown is the best view of what China can do and reality is much more complex. I still think that there is a lot of the future being made in places like France, Finland, Latvia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan – as well as China. What China does best is quantity that has a scale all of its own, something America has historically excelled at.

Consumer behaviour

Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, Joseph Winkelmann :: SSRN

Culture

Montreal DJs move clubbing from midnight to morning, adding coffee and croissants | Trendwatching – early morning clubbing, reminds of Marky J‘s mornings at the Baa Bar in Liverpool.

Health

Is Gen Z more mentally ill, or do they just talk about it more? | Doomscrollers

Europe Rapidly Falling Behind China in Pharma, Astra Chief Warns – Bloomberg

Ideas

I’m Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better | Joan Westenberg

Innovation

Samsung Develops Groundbreaking Achromatic Metalens With POSTECH – Samsung Global Newsroom

Korea

South Korean movie theater launches monthly knit-while-you-watch screenings | Trend-Watching

Luxury

Counterfeit luxury goods: London raids miss the target | Dark Luxury

Vogue Business Index top 10: Preppy is back and so is Ralph Lauren | Vogue Business

Polène: The global success of the French handbag made with love | Le Monde

Marketing

X-tortion: How Advertisers Are Losing Control Of Media Choice | Forrester – I am surprised how ‘on the nose’ Forrester is in this post.

Technicolor, Parent Company of The Mill, MPC, and Mikros, Facing Potential Closure | LBBOnline – this hit the creative industries like a lightning bolt.

Influencer Marketing: The quiet reset in the influencer economy, ET BrandEquity – the total number of influencers has shot up from 9,62,000 in 2020 to 4.06 million influencers in 2024, reflecting a staggering 322% growth.

Materials

DIY Birkin? China’s Gen Z 3D print dupes, share on RedNote | Jing Daily – Armed with affordable 3D printers and free design templates, young consumers are crafting their own versions of iconic luxury accessories. – Homage flowerpots or penholders rather than ‘dupes’ but 3D printing feels mainstream

Online

Revealed: Google facilitated Russia and China’s censorship requests | Censorship | The Guardian – After requests from the governments of Russia and China, Google has removed content such as YouTube videos of anti-state protesters or content that criticises and alleges corruption among their politicians. Google’s own data reveals that, globally, there are 5.6m items of content it has “named for removal” after government requests. Worldwide requests to Google for content removals have more than doubled since 2020, according to cybersecurity company Surfshark.

The reason you feel alienated and alone | Madeline Holden – your Dunbar number is filled with para-social relationship rather than social relationships.

China’s fragile online spaces for debate | Merics

AI Discoverability: Amazon’s Mistakes NN Group

Retailing

Lidl TikTok Shop launch sells out in under 20 minutes | Retail Gazette – I am curious about Lidl fulfilment approach

Security

Military delegates lose sway at China’s signature political gathering | FT

Putin is Unlikely to Demobilize in the Event of a Ceasefire Because He is Afraid of His Veterans | Institute for the Study of War – which poses economic challenges in Russia and a greater incentive to attack outside Ukraine once the conflict winds down

Exclusive: Secretive Chinese network tries to lure fired federal workers, research shows | Reuters

FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado – Ars Technica

Technology

Google’s Sergey Brin Asks Workers to Spend More Time In the Office – The New York Times – 60 hour weeks are productivity sweet spot according to Sergey Brin. Silicon Valley looks more-and-more like Huangzhou.

Alibaba exec warns of overheating AI infrastructure market • The Register

Telecoms

SoftBank and Ericsson agree to collaborate on next-gen telco tech

Web-of-no-web

Meta announces experimental Aria Gen 2 research smart glasses | CNBC

WeRide to open driverless taxi service in Zurich | EE News – Chinese operator is set to launch a fully unmanned taxi service in Zurich in the next few months. This follows the launch of its latest generation Robotaxi, the GXR, for fully unmanned paid autonomous ride-hailing services in Beijing. The GXR, with a L4-level redundant drive-by-wire chassis architecture, is WeRide’s second Robotaxi model to achieve fully driverless commercial operations in the city following pilot trials.

Wireless

London’s poor 5G blamed on spectrum, investment, Huawei ban • The Register – the comments nail it

April 6, 2025
DeepSeek & more things

DeepSeek

I decided to pull together some of the better resources I could find on DeepSeek. It distracted and disrupted my writing calendar as I was researching a post what will be called Intelligence per Watt, once i have it published.

John Yun’s take on DeepSeek is well researched and thoughtful rather than a hot take trying to explain why the sky fell in on Nvidia’s share price.

ChinaTalk have put together a large amount of expert opinions on DeepSeek.

DeepSeek FAQ – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates | FT

DeepSeek displaces ChatGPT as the App Store’s top app | TechCrunch

Advances by China’s DeepSeek sow doubts about AI spending | FT

DeepSeek cost tough for Nvidia but great for corporate world | Axios

Consumer Behaviour

Going gaga over Labubu – by BBH Culture Studio – Bleats – Chinese toymaker POPMART is the Bearbrick of the 2020s

We Asked 12 Young Men Across America How They Feel About Trump, Masculinity, and Money. | Esquire

Everyone’s done with dating apps | Doomscrollers

FMCG

Health

Rapid trials prompt deals rush for Chinese ‘super me-too’ drugs | FT

More than one in 10 women are taking weight-loss jabs, survey finds | The Telegraph – Concerns around those who are a healthy weight obtaining injections privately, as well as distribution of fake pens

Study: 67% Of Gen Zs Want To Take Charge Of Their Health But Face Gaps In Communication | Provoke Media – Despite being known as the digitally native generation, Gen Z is skeptical of online health information and even telehealth appointments. In fact, eight in 10 Gen Zs say they’ve encountered false or misleading health information online and more than 60% say prioritizing in-person visits over virtual ones is important to feeling respected by healthcare providers.

Innovation

Have America’s industrial giants forgotten what they are for? | FT – Critics say fragmented ownership, weak culture and a fixation on financial results have harmed innovation. The ghost of Jack Welch and Chicago School of Economics continues. But all this isn’t a new idea Judy Estrin’s book Closing The Innovation Gap laid all this out back in 2008.

Legal

“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed – Ars Technica

Luxury

Louis Vuitton APAC strategy: Inside the luxury brand’s Asian success | Jing Daily – “Given the economic downturn and competitive luxury market in China, Louis Vuitton has been seen adjusting its strategy to appeal to more diverse audiences, i.e. launching more affordable bag styles, participating in pricing games (points collecting, coupons refund), and launching cross-over marketing activities,” says Yu.

This year alone, the house has hosted its exclusive four-hands dinner at its Michelin-starred restaurant, The Hall, alongside Chengdu’s Latin American Michelin one-star restaurant, Mono; launched ultra-limited-edition diamond bracelets and a serpent-inspired timepiece for the Year of the Snake; rolled out its highly anticipated Murakami collaboration; and unveiled a new men’s store at Shanghai’s IFC Mall.

“[Louis Vuitton’s] strategy is rooted in consistency,” says Xuan Wang, activation director and partner at Tong Global and luxury PR veteran. “It has embraced a more localized approach — granting its Chinese team greater creative autonomy — while not losing the essence of the brand.”

Breitling to add a third watch brand? | Professional Watches – I am not sure that this is going to work out that well.

Marketing

How Beats navigates being at the forefront of culture, not culture wars | The Drum

Materials

Interesting video on carbon fibre fabrication and how it has evolved over time, from an artisanal process to mass manufacturing.

Media

Apple asks court to halt Google search monopoly case | The Verge

Online

The Death of Social Media – by Jonathan Stringfield

Social media is dead – Boundless Magazine

Retailing

Japan’s Costco Resale Shops Struggle to Distinguish Themselves – Unseen Japan

Technology

Antiqua et nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence (28 January 2025) – the Holy See on generative AI

Reckitt: Don’t use AI to increase efficiency at the expense of recruiting junior talent

Kaspersky finds hardware backdoor in 5 generations of Apple silicon – Robby Pedrica’s Tech Blog

Tools

AI prompts for communication and PR | Gemini for Workspace | Google Demini – useful for strategists as well

Web-of-no-web

The mainstreaming of AI glasses starts today | Machine Society

endless.downward.spiral – is this the beginning of the end of What3Words? – Terence Eden’s Blog

Meta’s CTO said the metaverse could be a ‘legendary misadventure’ if the company doesn’t boost sales, leaked memo shows – probably not that likely.

February 28, 2025

Category: retailing | 零售 | 소매업 | 小売業

Motorsport fandom + more things

Beauty

Business

China

Consumer behaviour

Design

FMCG

Health

Japan

Luxury

Marketing

Media

Online

Retailing

Security

Software

Technology

Telecoms

Augmented retailing

Retailing efficiency

Augmented retailing

Mylowe virtual advisor

A-eye

Albert Heijn provides cooking tips

Walsh’s + more stuff

Walsh’s of Mullingar

Concepts as viral marketing

A history of hacking

Liberation day + more things

Liberation day

Consumer behaviour

Culture

Health

Ideas

Innovation

Korea

Luxury

Marketing

Materials

Online

Retailing

Security

Technology

Telecoms

Web-of-no-web

Wireless

DeepSeek & more things

DeepSeek

Consumer Behaviour

FMCG

Health

Innovation

Legal

Luxury

Marketing

Materials

Media

Online

Retailing

Technology

Tools

Web-of-no-web