Merchandising

Ordinary retail is simple: the store sells other companies' brands. The shopper wants TIDE, NIKE, RAO'S, or LA ROCHE-POSAY, and the retailer earns a margin for making it available. Private labeling changes that relationship. The retailer places its own mark on the goods and asks consumers to trust its judgment and consistency even when the…

Retail has no shortage of “artificial intelligence shopping agent” demos that promise to get shoppers to the right product faster. And discovery is still hard. Shoppers still get lost in endless options, retailers still struggle with relevance, and the stakes are high when the product is physical. But in apparel and footwear, the failure that…

Memorial Day has long served as one of retail's most reliable revenue weekends, a moment when showrooms fill up, floor traffic spikes, and big-ticket purchases finally get made. This year, however, the familiar playbook faces some unfamiliar pressure. The conflict in the Middle East has raised the cost of energy and has people concerned about…

At some point in business growth, a retail catalog becomes too large to manage the same way. More products enter the system, supplier input becomes uneven, and the team looks for control without adding people every time the assortment grows. With artificial intelligence now part of almost every automation conversation, it naturally enters this one…

Brand used to guide choice. Increasingly, price is becoming the dominant decision influencer. Zappi’s 2026 CPG Mega-Trends report shows brand-name-only buying has dropped from 21 percent to just 10 percent in less than a year. At the same time, nearly one-third of shoppers (32 percent) say they will buy the cheapest option that meets their…

Consolidation has long been a key growth strategy across retail and CPG. Big companies have spent decades buying up competitors, acquiring niche brands, and expanding into new categories. Why? Ideally, a large, varied portfolio would drive scale, diversification, market share, consumer trend alignment, and business growth. But as the industry evolves, are portfolio cracks starting…

Managing inventory is challenging across all industries, but retailers face the added challenge of scale. While a standard company may need to plan for 100,000 products in a single warehouse, a major retailer needs to manage that same volume across thousands of different store locations. This makes even basic data collection difficult. For example, even…

In episode 506 of Total Retail Talks, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Kathy Gagliano, executive vice president of merchandising at Books-A-Million, the second largest bookstore retailer operating more than 220 stores in the United States. The discussion begins with the history of the company, dating all the way back to 1917 (0:55). According to Gagliano, the…

Inventory data has quietly become the most important customer experience (CX) system in modern retail, and the foundation of true, storewide intelligence that connects what customers see on shelves with what systems believe is available. When shelf reality and system reality match, every other experience promised — from personalization to buy online, pick up in-store…

After attending NRF Big Show earlier this year and EuroShop more recently, it’s clear that retailers aren’t short of ideas. They’re focused on what actually works, consistently, across stores, day in and day out, and that shift points to a broader reality the industry has been circling for some time. Retail’s biggest challenge is execution…