Future Commerce

We Traded Family Dinners for Haunted Houses: Halloween Spending Data Shows Shoppers Want to Escape

Halloween is now America’s second-largest consumer holiday, surpassing Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day in total spend, especially in categories like home decor. From the

*TEASER* You Can See Everything, If You Speak Fielder

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Deloitte Predicts A $1.7 Trillion Holiday Season

Stretched wallets are still spending. Deloitte projects up to 4.8% growth in holiday spending this year, driven mostly by price of goods rather than volume of sales.  Sh

Aubrey Horowitz of Home Depot: "We Plan Halloween 3 Years in Advance"

Aubrey Horowitz, Merchant of Decorative Holiday at The Home Depot, is on the show to talk about the viral skeleton that set the Halloween decor bar 12 feet high. Aubrey s

Former Commerce Secretary Gutierrez on Leadership, AI, and America’s Role In the World

Phillip and Brian sit down with Carlos Gutierrez, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and former chairman and CEO of Kellogg, ahead of the release of his memoir, Sheer Will

Memorable Over Measurable: Retail’s Lost Wonders

Taste can’t be manufactured, so brands are hiring the people who have it. Writer and gr8 collab founder Emma Apple Chozick returns to talk with Phillip about her creative

Rewind: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Welcome to Future Commerce Rewind, where we revisit our deepest and most enduring conversations. This week, we're playing back our April 2025 conversation with Andrew McL

Separating Real Signals from the Noise

The in-house research team has hollowed out, and the LLMs picking up the slack are only delivering their best guesses. Merciv, the agentic brain behind Future Commerce’s

Cartographies of Meaning

Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios took to the VISIONS stage at MoMA last year to enlighten a room of retail executives and brand marketers abou

*TEASER* The Oreogate Lady Is NOT Real!

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Retail Media In Your Ears: Inside Dollar General's 21,000-Store Audio Network

The next big advertising opportunity is here. The audio systems in Dollar General’s 21,000 stores connect shoppers with advertisers and drive loyalty. Austin Leonard, VP

2026 Signals We’re Tracking: Commerce Evolves (Again), the Monoculture is Back, and Celebrity Prevails?

Phillip sits solo to unpack conflicting economic signals: Shopify's monster quarter against a Census report showing eCommerce eating share while retail overall slows. Wha

Shopify Earnings Go Wild, and American Retail is OVER.

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 tr

Enter Through the Gift Shop: Inside MoMA's Retail Journey

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 hoodi

Commerce Media's Day Two: The Agentic Shelf and the Measurement Reckoning

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 op

*TEASER* The Dire State of Consumer Trust In 2026

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Bedfellows: How Boll & Branch Keeps Humans and AI in the Same Sheets

Boll & Branch spent 12 years doing the unfashionable thing: perfecting the product first and figuring out distribution second. Chief Commercial Officer Katia Unlu joins P

VC Partner Predicts the Next Billion-Dollar Brand

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. Natali

Content, Communities and the Future of Publishing

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.

The Future of the Funnel

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