David Roth

In Conversation: Kristin Wolf, Ulta Beauty

6 November 2026

When Everyone Else Is Retrenching, Ulta Is Buying Space NK

Kristin Wolf, SVP, Enterprise Strategy & New Growth, Ulta Beauty · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

Most retailers are pulling international spending home. Ulta Beauty is doing the reverse, and the way it is going about it is worth studying.

Kristin Wolf runs enterprise strategy and new growth at Ulta, the leading specialty beauty retailer in the United States: 36 years old, roughly 1,500 stores, mass to prestige under one roof. The overseas chapter is new, and deliberately messy in its method.

Three markets, three routes in. A joint venture in Mexico, a franchise partnership in the Middle East, an outright acquisition of Space NK in the UK. Wolf calls it exactly what it is: “a good experimentation” where the company is “learning very fast”, on the premise that “every market is different and really requires a different approach for entry.” The brand stays constant, the entry model flexes. Alongside this sits a bet on wellness, a $500 billion US market where, in her words, “no one is really curating experiences that serve the guest.” And on agentic commerce she is refreshingly blunt about the state of play. Asked for the key learnings, she says: it is too early. But Ulta has already launched an agentic shopping experience with Google’s Gemini, on the principle of being where the guest is going, not where they are.

Here is the tension a brand owner should sit with. Eighty per cent of Ulta’s US sales still happen in stores, and Wolf calls the store the beating heart of the model: 10,000 events last year, 60,000 associates. Yet discovery is fleeing to TikTok Shop and AI agents. The store sells. Something else finds you. That gap is where the next decade of retail is decided.

The Roth Read. If your international playbook has one entry model, you have a template, not a strategy. Ulta is running three at once on purpose. The question for you is not which channel wins, but whether the place that closes the sale and the place that starts it can still belong to the same brand.

David Roth In Conversation is a series of conversations with the leaders shaping the future of retail, recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026 in association with the World Retail Congress. A new conversation is published every Friday.

The loyalty card was never about loyalty. It was about data you could not otherwise buy.

4 November 2026

Every few years the retail trade produces a list of loyalty trends for the coming season, and every few years the list says much the same thing in slightly newer language. This year’s, a round-up from the trade site EXEIdeas, is as good a specimen as any, mainly because of what its conclusion admits.

The piece runs through the familiar eight: AI-powered hyper-personalisation, first-party data, omnichannel, real-time rewards, gamification, paid membership tiers, mobile apps, and loyalty wired into the point of sale. “The future of loyalty,” it concludes, “is not a card. It is a relationship.” True enough, but it skips a more useful sentence: the card was never really about loyalty either.

The list rewards the shopper who tells you things, whether or not that shopper loves you. Read plainly, every item on it is a way of extracting first-party data at the moment of purchase: what you bought, when you came in, what you nearly bought and walked past. The points are the fee the retailer pays you for that information, and the discount is the receipt.

This matters more in 2026 than it did in 2016 because the signals retailers used to rent from the open web are drying up. Third-party cookies are going or gone, the walled gardens charge more to reach your own customers, and the privacy rules have tightened around everything in between. First-party data, the kind a shopper hands you willingly in exchange for a reward, is now the one asset a retailer owns outright and no platform can repossess. That is why the trade press keeps circling it, and why the loyalty programme has become the last piece of ground a retailer controls.

It is also why the “relationship” framing misleads if you take it at face value. The EXEIdeas list treats paid membership, the Amazon Prime model of charging shoppers for the privilege of being loyal, as just another trend, when it does a different job. A points card buys data from the many. A paid tier sells status to the few, and in doing so tells you precisely who your most valuable customers are, because they have raised their hands and paid to be counted. One programme is a net and the other a filter. Retailers who run both without knowing which job each is doing end up with a bulging database and no idea who in it matters.

All of this data collection assumes the shopper is doing the choosing, and increasingly they are not. When a shopper asks an AI assistant what to buy, the answer is likely to turn on price, availability and whatever the assistant can read about the product, with the points in your scheme counting for little. The retailer’s hard-won first-party data sits inside a loyalty silo that is probably out of the agent’s sight, and nothing suggests it would carry much weight if the agent could see it. You can know everything about a customer and still lose them at the moment a machine makes the introduction on your behalf.

The list never asks what all that data is for when the thing forming the impression that decides the sale is no longer a human you can personalise an email to. Loyalty data was built to win the shopper, and the contest is moving to winning the shopper’s agent, which takes a different skill.

What to watch. See whether any loyalty platform starts exposing its first-party signal outward, to the agents and assistants doing the recommending, rather than hoarding it inward for email campaigns. A programme that makes its data legible to the machine without handing away the margin has understood where the moment of truth has moved.To the Machine Moment of Truth. One still counting app downloads has not.

The Roth Read. If you run a loyalty programme, stop asking how to make customers feel loved and start asking what, precisely, you are buying with every point you give away. Data you can act on is an asset. Data that dies inside your own app, probably unseen by the machine now choosing on your customer’s behalf, is a cost dressed up as a relationship.

Tally counts shelves. What it saves is hours.

3 November 2026

A six-foot tower with coloured lights and a screen reading “Hi, I’m Tally!” is now rolling down the aisles of Ralphs stores in Los Angeles. The robot is what gets the attention. The more interesting question is what happens to the time it saves.

Tally is an autonomous inventory robot made by Simbe Robotics, a firm based in Burlingame. It moves through the aisles on its own and uses cameras and computer vision to spot products that are out of stock, wrongly priced or in the wrong place. It then sends shop staff a list of jobs in order of priority. Simbe says more than 3,000 of its robots have been contracted for retail deployments worldwide, and Lowe’s, Tesco, BJ’s and Bristol Farms are among the reported hosts. Kroger owns the Los Angeles stores. The figure Simbe leads its sales pitch with is this one: Tally can “reallocate” up to 50 labour hours per store per week away from repetitive shelf checks.

That word “reallocate” is carrying a lot of weight.

Retail workers have heard this kind of reassurance before. Self-checkout was sold as convenience and electronic shelf labels as accuracy. Both were presented as help for the person on the shop floor, and both ended up changing what that person was there to do. Kathy Finn, president of UFCW Local 770, put the complaint plainly: workers “should not be finding out about major changes to their workplace only after new technology shows up in their stores.” NewsNation, citing new research on the future of retail jobs, reports an estimate that up to seven and a half million retail jobs could be automated away in the coming years, out of a workforce of roughly 16 million Americans. Kroger has announced plans to cut 3,000 corporate jobs over three years while it expands its AI tools. Those cuts are in head office, not in the stores, but staff take announcements like that as a sign of where the company is heading.

Tally clearly works. The question for any retailer or brand watching is what an empty shelf really costs them, and where the saving goes once a machine finds the gap faster than a person could.

A shelf that is fully stocked, correctly priced and neatly faced is the minimum a shopper expects, and nobody ever thanks you for it. Shoppers remember the assistant who knew where the tahini was, who told them the better avocados come in on Thursday, and who made the trip feel like a place rather than a warehouse with a till. Tally checks the shelf brilliantly but can do nothing about the people. A grocer who uses the 50 hours to put more knowledgeable staff in front of shoppers has bought itself an edge. A grocer who uses the robot to cut 50 hours has bought a cheaper version of a commodity. Commodities compete only on price, and that is a race against Amazon a grocer will not win and should not try to.

The robot doesn’t decide anything. The profit-and-loss decision is the retailer’s.

What to watch. Privacy. Simbe is careful to say Tally is “designed to understand shelf conditions, not identify or track humans,” and it separates shelf analysis firmly from tracking people. What Simbe hasn’t said is what the sensors capture, how long the data is kept or who can see it. A dozen high-resolution cameras going up and down a public aisle several times a day amount to a piece of infrastructure, and infrastructure gets put to new uses. Watch whether the robot that counts tins is ever asked to count footfall, how long shoppers linger, or the staff.

The Roth Read. If you run a store, Tally has just given you 50 hours a week and a question about what kind of store you are. Spend those hours on cheaper operations and your shop becomes more like everyone else’s. Spend them on people who make shoppers feel known and you have bought the one thing a competitor cannot scan off a shelf. The robot finds the gap. You decide what fills it.

Retail / Retail & Technology / Robotics
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History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 11: Mirror

2 November 2026

Mirror · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

77 AD

Reflections of our own image had a magical significance in ancient cultures. In early times glass polished stones or metal were used. The Romans coated flat glass with silver or gold foil.

Justus von Liebig discovered the chemical process of coating a glass surface with metallic silver in 1835. Today, mirrors are still made by coating a thin layer of molten aluminum or silver onto the back of a plate glass in a vacuum. However, mirrors and their capabilities are still evolving.

During the Renaissance, Nuremberg and Venice became centers of excellence for mirror production but by the middle of the 17th century mirror making was practised extensively in London and Paris. The Royal Palace of Versailles had incredible mirrors in the staterooms, which created a sensation at the time.

The mirror is a reflection of personalization and how important this strategy has been throughout civilizations. Whether an Ancient Egyptian buyer was looking at a reflection in polished bronze or today’s shopper is looking at a digital mirror that allows color and patterns to change at a click, the mirror teases the ego and influences almost every purchase decision.

Contribution to Retail History

Craftsmen such as Grinling Gibbons in the late 17th and early 18th centuries produced elaborately carved mirror frames, and Scottish brothers Robert and James Adam created ceiling-high fireplace units that used mirrors to create a special ambience.

As the 19th century progressed, mirror making became cheaper and mirrors were put into wardrobes, sideboards, and clothing retailers began installing them in and around store interiors and in changing and fitting rooms. Three-way mirrors were also introduced to help customers see themselves from different angles when trying on clothes.

Today, mirrors are taking on new dimensions as digital technology begins to extend their capabilities for retail use. For example, interactive mirrors in stores incorporate a camera which captures the customer’s body dimensions and stance. Using hand gestures, the customer ‘swipes’ different outfits from a display menu and the mirror shows their reflection with the selected garment superimposed over their on-screen image. The digital delay mirror records the customer’s reflection and outputs it on a two second delay, enabling them to see what they look like from the back.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

About the series. The History of Retail in 101 Objects is compiled and edited by David Roth, CEO of The Store WPP and Chairman of WPP BAV. It tells the story of retail through the objects that shaped it, from the cave to the connected store, organised across the historical periods in which each innovation made its mark. As David puts it, the history of retail is the history of mankind, and of retail’s vast contribution to society. A new object appears here every Monday.

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Bracken Darrell, VF Corporation

30 October 2026

The Value Creation Engine Is What Keeps a Heritage Brand Alive

Bracken Darrell, CEO, VF Corporation · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

In a world where you no longer know what is real, the thing you can prove really happened becomes the thing worth owning. That was the idea Bracken Darrell kept circling back to. Not nostalgia. Proof.

Darrell is the Chief Executive of VF Corporation, the group behind The North Face and Vans, both, he pointed out, turning 60 this year. He came to the job to rebuild the business, and he talks about it in the language of gardens and jazz bands rather than turnarounds.

He made three arguments worth holding onto. First, on heritage: VF keeps a physical archive for every major brand, pulls old products into new seasons, sends people to thrift shops to buy back the past, because “you’ve got 21-year-old kids who are nostalgic for time frames they never lived in.” Second, on reality: as AI floods the feed with things that may not be true, he is betting on live events, the climbing tour in London, the Vans Warp Tour, experiences people know were real because someone they know was there. Third, on the money. He refuses to treat short term and long term as a trade off. He is here for the long term, and the short term is simply the road sign that tells him he is driving the right way.

The sharpest thing he said was about brands and investors, who so often talk past each other. A brand, he argued, cannot live on vision. It needs an engine that makes money, or the plant fades. That is the sentence to sit with. Love of a brand is not a strategy. Cash flow is what fertilises the culture.

The Roth Read. If your brand story cannot be proven real, AI will soon out-manufacture it, so invest in experiences people physically attend. And stop pretending heritage pays the bills: it is the value creation engine that keeps the heritage alive, not the other way round.

Air Jordan By Nike, by Drew Green

29 October 2026

Drew Green on Air Jordan By Nike. One of 121 stories from Brand Stories from Brand Champions, which I devised and curated for The Store, WPP.

Michael Jordan is not only the greatest basketball player of all time; in my eyes, he's one of the greatest businessmen.

I'm a former athlete and played varsity basketball so, growing up, Michael Jordan was my idol. When Nike launched his Air Jordan line in 1984, I was instantly hooked. And so were millions of other kids, his sneakers would sell out in seconds. Although Michael Jordan retired from competitive basketball in 2003, Air Jordans remain a top selling sneaker, which demonstrates the incredible power of his multibillion dollar brand.

Michael Jordan inspired me to dream big. His transformation from elite athlete to celebrated businessman showed me that if you believe in yourself and put in the hard work, you can do anything you set your mind to. I have embraced these mantras as an entrepreneur and instill them in my own team.

Drew Green
Drew Green is an award-winning entrepreneur and expert in managing fast-paced, high-growth companies. A visionary leader, Green has created one of the world’s fastest growing apparel brands. Green is a shareholder, mentor and/or member of 15 Canadian private company boards across Technology, Commerce, Ed-Tech, FinTech, Block Chain and Real Estate. A sought after Technology, E-commerce and Retail expert, Green has presented to hundreds of thousands of industry peers, leaders, students and entrepreneurs globally through events, conferences and educational forums.

There are 120 more. Brand Stories from Brand Champions collects 121 people writing about the one brand that shaped them. Amazon UK · Amazon US. The full index is at www.davidroth.com/brand-stories/stories/.

The screen was never the asset. The proof is.

28 October 2026

A retailer can hang a screen on every shelf and call itself an advertising business. That works until a brand asks whether any of it sold anything, and how the retailer knows.

Retail media now turns on that question. Osmos published an industry guide to retail media attribution this month, and its definition is plain. Attribution is how a retailer proves to an advertiser that an ad led to a sale. The retailer matches each impression or click to a purchase in its own transaction records. Online it does this through logged-in accounts, and offline through loyalty IDs, payment cards or store data. It uses a window agreed before the campaign starts. A companion piece from SignStream covers the in-store side. It cites a pooled field study of 237 campaigns, which found that digital signage in stores lifts purchase probability by about 8.1 per cent on average. The effect was stronger for novel, low-priced and impulse goods. Read together, the two pieces show that the money is real and the measurement is still not trusted. Whoever closes that gap will lead retail media for the next few years.

Retail media is the most profitable thing in modern retail because the retailer owns both the audience and the till. That margin is on loan until the measurement holds up. The IAB guidelines cited in the Osmos guide warn that a seven-day attribution window and a thirty-day window can produce very different returns for the same campaign. A retailer marking its own homework can therefore report almost any number it likes. Brands know this. They have watched the same screen sell them an 8.1 per cent lift on a category where the real effect was a rounding error, because the average was flattered by the few products where signage works. An average sold as a guarantee is a hope with a decimal point.

For a decade the retailer’s question was how brands ranked on its own shelf. The new question is colder: what does the advertiser’s spreadsheet believe about the retailer? The network that wins will be the one whose numbers a brand’s finance director signs off without flinching, whatever its screen count or the size of its loyalty base. Third-party verification, disclosed lookback windows and honesty about which categories the lift is real in all sound like compliance work. In practice they are what the brand is paying for. Any retailer can sell inventory, and very few can sell a number a brand believes.

The West should look East before congratulating itself. China’s retail media never had room for fuzzy attribution, because the shelf, the payment and the loyalty identity sat inside one account from the start. On Alibaba and JD.com the impression and the purchase land in the same ledger, so the loop closes by default. Western retailers are now spending heavily to join that loop after the fact, stitching card data to loyalty IDs to door counters. The Chinese platforms built the measurement in from day one, and everyone else is retrofitting it.

What to watch for is the first large grocer or retailer to publish its attribution methodology in full, with its windows, its verification partner and its category caveats, and then to sell against it. Once one does, keeping the method private will look like an admission. The laggards will be the retailers who still cannot tell a brand which half of the lift was real.

The Roth Read. If you run a retail media network, stop selling the audience and start selling the audit. Brands are buying a number they can defend to their own board, and the first retailer to show its working will take budget from the ten that hide theirs. The screen is not the asset. The proof is.

The robots went to Seoul looking for work

27 October 2026

A Chinese humanoid went to Seoul this autumn and found work before Korea had a rival of its own to send. That gap is the story.

The Korea Times, in partnership with the South China Morning Post, reports that Chinese makers have moved on from dance routines and showroom poses to factory trials and paying customers. A robot-themed venue in Seoul bought UBTech’s lifelike U1, delivered last month for around 170,000 yuan, roughly 18,000 pounds, according to the company’s Sean Qin. UBTech has also announced a trial on a Korean automotive parts line with local partners. Anyverse Dynamics, a Beijing startup whose founder Zhang Yufeng once worked with SK Telecom and Hyundai, plans café trials in the fourth quarter before moving into manufacturing. On the Chinese customs data cited in the piece, Korea was China’s third-largest export market for intelligent bionic robots in the first nine months of 2026, taking just under 20 million dollars of a 207 million dollar total.

Counterpoint’s Ethan Qi gives the reason plainly: nobody builds humanoids locally at scale, and that has left an opening for Chinese suppliers. Korea makes the world’s robotic arms, ships and chips, but not yet the humanoid. So the most automated manufacturing nation on earth is importing the machine that will automate the next layer of its work, from the one country that learned to build it cheaply and ship it fast.

Why it matters. Seoul has seen this coming. The government has proposed 3.1 trillion won, about 1.75 billion pounds, in physical AI funding for 2027, more than triple this year’s, with a target of 500 AI factories by 2030. Samsung set up a robotics division in July. LG is building a data factory to train robots. Hyundai is putting Boston Dynamics’ Atlas through drills at its Georgia campus ahead of a 2028 line deployment. Korea has the intent and the money. It lacks what the robot runs on today: a supply chain, engineering depth and rapid iteration of the kind that only exists at scale in Shenzhen. Korea can fund the ambition in a single budget, but it cannot buy back the five years of deployment data China gathered while the West debated whether a humanoid needs five fingers or two.

Deployment data decides who wins, because a robot that has served a thousand coffees knows things a prototype never will. Every trial Anyverse runs in a Seoul café and every UBTech unit tested on an AJIN parts line feeds a loop that compounds. Deputy Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon made the same point at a Seoul roundtable: China is deploying more humanoids in the field and collecting the data. He then asked whether Korea’s plans were bold enough. The politics suggest they are not. At a parliamentary audit on 6 October, one lawmaker wheeled in Unitree and AgiBot machines to shame the government, and another accused the Assembly of handing Chinese technology a stage. Both reactions sound like a country discovering it has become a customer when it meant to be a champion.

For retailers and brand owners the lesson reaches well beyond Korea. If you do not make the layer that matters, you do not set the terms on it. You pay the price the maker names, adapt to their certification and wait your turn. Korea is learning this as national industrial strategy. A retailer learns it the day its store robots, fulfilment, shelf scanning and service all arrive on hardware built by a company that also sells to its competitors.

What to watch. Watch whether Korea’s big manufacturers put a humanoid into their own lines before Chinese suppliers take the proof-of-concept slots. Whoever goes first collects the data, the certification path and the reference customer, and those are much harder to win back than a robot.

The Roth Read. No retailer is going to build its own robots. The hardware will come from someone else, most likely from Shenzhen, so the layer a retailer can own is what those machines learn in its stores: which jobs they do well, and where shoppers still want a person. The first retailer to put them to work starts learning first, and competitors have to make up every month of that lead. You can buy the hardware at any time, but you can never buy back the time. Decide this quarter how you will deploy, and write into every contract that the data from each robot in your estate belongs to you. Then put a team and a plan behind it, because owning the data is worth nothing until someone is learning from it.

China / Retail / Retail & Technology / Robotics / Strategy / Technology
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History of Retail in 101 Objects – Object 10: Greek Agora

26 October 2026

Greek Agora · The History of Retail in 101 Objects

600 BC

By about 600 BC all cities in Ancient Greece would have had an agora near their center.

A market place as well as a meeting place, the agora was usually a rectangular space surrounded by buildings and frequented by politicians, traders, aristocrats, scientists and slaves. Along one edge was the 'stoa', a long covered walkway with shops located in it, where more expensive items could be purchased than those found on the traders' stalls.

Farmers brought their produce to the agora and set up stalls selling meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, eggs, honey, and wine. Cattle and grain were also traded, as were more exotic items such as gems, silks, wool, and, of course, slaves. A hive of activity, craftsmen would ply their trade and moneychangers and bankers would carry out their business. 'Shopping' at the agora was conducted by men and their household slaves, not by women.

The agora was also a focus for cultural and community activity. Political debate, theater, and musical performances would draw citizens in as they fraternized with friends and business associates. It also served as a labor exchange as employers mixed with men looking for work. Although it was a predominantly male environment, women were allowed to use the agora's public fountains to collect water.

Contribution to Retail History

Defined as the open place of assembly, the agora was the precursor to the town center and exemplified the social behavior and importance of how societies have always come together for entertainment and commercial activity.

See where this object sits in the sweep of retail history →

This is the fourth edition, the World Retail Hall of Fame edition. The book, and every object published so far →

In Conversation: Neela Montgomery, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize

23 October 2026

The K-shaped consumer, and why growth now lives at the store level

Neela Montgomery, Senior Advisor / Board Director, Alix Partners, Logitech, Ahold Delhaize · recorded at the World Retail Congress, Berlin 2026.

The top 10 percent of American shoppers are now driving half the sales. That is the number Neela Montgomery keeps in front of her boards, and it reframes what growth even means. If you serve the strained consumer, she says, you are “having to trade every transaction.” If you serve the premium end, you are fine. The middle is where the pain lives.

Montgomery sits as a board director and senior advisor across Alix Partners, Logitech and Ahold Delhaize, with a past life running Crate and Barrel and CVS and cutting her teeth at Tesco. She has seen the machinery from the inside.

Her read on where the levers actually sit is the useful part. Not autonomy for store managers, but intelligence pushed out to them: central data ingested by AI, then handed to the furniture seller at Crate and Barrel as a personalised solution so they can do what they are good at, which is selling. On AI itself she is blunt · the experimentation phase is over. One 16-year company veteran, pointed at the customer software with unlimited access to a coding tool, found 280 points of failure and the machine fixed 60 on its own. That is the power: speed to clear historical tech debt.

Then there is GLP-1. Ten to twelve percent of Americans now on the drugs, smaller clothing sizes, less volume through grocery, and a scramble towards protein and fibre. A killer for some categories, a premiumisation story for others.

What matters for you is that every one of these shocks has a shape you can trade against, if you can see your customer at a granular enough level. Most retailers still cannot.

The Roth Read. If half your sales come from a tenth of your shoppers, you do not have a marketing budget problem, you have a targeting problem. Stop spending to acquire people without the spending power, and start pushing your best intelligence to the person on the shop floor. The winners this cycle will be the ones who trade every transaction on purpose.