Viki Zabala

Retail doesn’t have a markdown problem. It has an overassortment problem that shows up as markdowns. The distinction matters. Markdowns are the symptom: visible, measurable, and easy to budget for. Overassortment is the disease: harder to see, harder to quantify, and almost never owned by a single function. At its core, overassortment is a capital…

Artificial intelligence promised to kill gut decisions in retail. Instead, it made guessing more expensive. Retailers have added more AI tools, more dashboards, more predictive models — all of which have created more noise. And it’s left retailers more uncertain about their decisions and further from their customers than ever before. The problem with retail’s…

It happens all the time: brands pour time, money and resources into launching a new product, only to watch it flop once it hits the shelves. Timing or shelf placement are easy to blame, but launches often fail because brands skip the most important step: engaging with consumers before going to market. Gut instinct, historical…

Private label isn’t playing backup anymore, it’s running the show. Once the bottom-shelf generic you bought with a sigh, today’s store brands are the reason shoppers are skipping logos and chasing value that feels just as good (if not better). First Insight’s latest report, The Quiet Takeover of Private Label, shows just how far the…

Shipping, and whether or not it’s free, has been the de-facto decision maker for online shopping conversions ever since Amazon.com introduced its Prime membership in 2005. What started out as a way for non-Amazon retailers to remain competitive and to incentivize shoppers to buy more online has now become a very expensive customer expectation. In…