6 truths from CommerceNext Growth Show that are defining retail’s future

Three days. Hundreds of retail leaders. Countless “aha” moments. CommerceNext Growth Show 2025 delivered revelations that went far beyond tactics—they revealed fundamental shifts in how successful brands are connecting with customers in an attention-scarce world.

Whether you missed the event or want to revisit the key discoveries, here are the six truths that will define retail’s future.

1. Win by showing up where culture already lives

The revelation: Success comes from identifying authentic cultural moments that your customers love and embedding your brand within them.

American Eagle’s Ashley Schapiro revealed a fundamental truth about attention: the brands that win aren’t the loudest, they’re the ones that show up where culture already exists. Whether it’s sports, music, or emerging social movements, the $614 billion attention economy rewards brands that become part of existing conversations rather than trying to manufacture new ones. The most successful marketers are cultural anthropologists first, advertisers second. They study where their customers are already emotionally invested and find authentic ways to participate in those moments.

2. AI is transforming marketing from reactive to predictive

The revelation: Traditional funnels are being replaced by AI that understands customer intent with unprecedented precision and creates hyper-personalized journeys at scale.

Stephanie Hileman from 1-800 Contacts demonstrated this transformation by moving beyond manual audiences and campaigns. Where they once managed 30+ audiences and 20+ campaigns, AI decisioning allowed them to support the same use case with one audience and two interactions, delivering a 5% uplift in orders per customer. Meanwhile, Avinash Kaushik from Tapestry emphasized that AI-powered platforms can analyze thousands of signals to determine whether someone is genuinely in-market versus just browsing, making marketing exponentially more effective. The winning approach combines AI decisioning for personalized journeys with intent-based targeting that moves beyond basic attribution to three levels of incrementality measurement: channel-specific impact, cross-platform optimization, and portfolio-wide performance.

3. Multimodal AI is unlocking discovery for things people can’t describe

The revelation: Shoppers don’t always know how to describe what they want. AI-generated images and visual prompts help consumers articulate needs they couldn’t put into words.

This insight from the press breakfast with Wayfair’s CTO Fiona Tan and Ulta Beauty’s CMO Kelly Mahoney reveals a powerful frontier for product discovery. Traditional search relies on customers knowing exactly what to ask for, but visual AI can bridge the gap between vague desires and specific products. When someone has a feeling or aesthetic in mind but lacks the vocabulary to express it, multimodal AI can generate visual options that spark recognition and drive conversion.

4. Get comfortable being uncomfortable—that’s where innovation lives

The revelation: The retailers thriving today aren’t those staying in their comfort zones. They’re the ones constantly expanding them through calculated risks and cross-functional collaboration.

This theme emerged across multiple retailer stories. Molly Hartney from Rack Room Shoes embodied this philosophy, leading her team to a 4x increase in abandoned cart recovery by tackling complex data integration challenges head-on. Andrew Tweed from 1-800-Flowers described their approach of turning specialists into “Swiss Army knives”—having analytical people tackle creative problems and vice versa. The result is teams that can move faster, think more broadly, and spot opportunities that siloed thinking misses. Discomfort isn’t a bug in the innovation process—it’s a feature.

5. Human connection is the ultimate differentiator

The revelation: As AI interactions flood the market, brands must strike a delicate balance: scale with AI but never sacrifice the human authenticity and connection that creates emotional bonds.

The challenge surfaced repeatedly across sessions and discussions. While AI enables unprecedented personalization and efficiency, brands that feel too automated risk losing the creative spark that builds emotional connections with customers—especially Gen Z, who demand authentic, human-feeling experiences. Suruchi Shukla from Minted exemplified this balance, emphasizing how their human-designed products and concierge services for wedding planning create experiences that feel increasingly premium in an AI-saturated world. The winning formula isn’t human vs. AI or choosing between efficiency and authenticity. It’s architecting systems where AI amplifies human creativity and connection rather than replacing it.

6. Build customer-obsessed feedback loops

The revelation: Success comes from staying obsessively connected to customer signals and cultural shifts, then turning those insights into business strategy faster than competitors.

This meta-insight emerged across all three days through retailer stories that showed the power of deep customer connection. Kim Waldmann from Foot Locker demonstrated how they’re using cultural signals to expand into women’s sneaker culture, recognizing shifts in fan behavior before competitors caught on. Away’s Valeria Dediu showed how they’ve grown from startup to global brand by staying obsessively connected to customer feedback loops—constantly listening, learning, and adapting their strategy based on what customers actually want, not what internal teams assume they want. The pattern is clear: winning brands don’t just collect customer data, they build organizational muscles to act on customer insights faster and more decisively than anyone else.

The bottom line

CommerceNext 2025 revealed that we’re at an inflection point. The old playbook of spray-and-pray marketing is officially dead. The brands that will thrive are those that embrace discomfort, leverage AI as a collaborative partner, and never lose sight of the human experience they’re creating.

The tools and technology exist today to implement these discoveries. The question isn’t whether you can afford to adopt them—it’s whether you can afford not to.