Future Commerce
by Phillip Jackson, Brian Lange
Future Commerce is the culture magazine for Commerce. Hosts Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange help brand and digital marketing leaders see around the next corner by exploring the intersection of Culture and Commerce.Trusted by the world's most recognizable brands to deliver the most insightful, entertaining, and informative weekly podcasts, Future Commerce is the leading new media brand for eCommerce merchants and retail operators.Each week, we explore the cultural implications of what it means to sell or buy products and how commerce and media impact the culture and the world around us, through unique insights and engaging interviews with a dash of futurism.Weekly essays, full transcripts, and quarterly market research reports are available at https://www.futurecommerce.com/plus
Episodes
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DoorDash’s Ads Chief on Planning for Moments Over Audiences
DoorDash shoppers come to the app with a need, not a shopping list, and that makes them unusually loyal and unusually open to discovery. Katie Daleo, General Manager of CPG Ads at DoorDash, joins Phillip and Alicia to talk about how brands can plan for moments instead of audiences, why DoorDash...
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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 high street, the UK is catching up fast due to the rise of community-driven events, third spaces, and niche internet…
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*TEASER* You Can See Everything, If You Speak Fielder
Get ad-free episodes and bonus content, including the full recording of this podcast, by joining Future Commerce Plus at futurecommerce.com/plus 🆕 Access to our newest analysis feature for members, Field Notes, our retail space analysis briefing. Featuring brands like Swatch, Printemps, and…
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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. Shoppers say they feel stretched, yet they keep spending. Brian McCarthy, a principal in Deloitte’s strategy and analytics…
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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 shares a behind-the-curtain look at how Home Depot designs its seasonal assortment for America’s front lawns, shaped by a vocal...
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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. Carlos explains how the Commerce Department became one of the most powerful seats in Washington, why America should...
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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 process (sans content calendar), building ShopMy’s Signals Substack on proprietary data, and what the long-gone BEST Products...
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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 McLuhan, grandson of Marshall McLuhan and director of The McLuhan Institute. Andrew joins Phillip and Brian to explain why his...
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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 Signal Reports, has set out to deliver auditable, defensible, and unified reporting solutions — and it’s redefining what brands...
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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 about the realities of worldbuilding. Their theory: a brand’s final form is decided by the public—and the strategist's job is to...
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*TEASER* The Oreogate Lady Is NOT Real!
Get ad-free episodes and bonus content, including the full recording of this podcast, by joining Future Commerce Plus at futurecommerce.com/plus 🆕 Access to our newest analysis feature for members, Field Notes, our retail space analysis briefing. Featuring brands like Swatch, Printemps, and…
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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 and GM of Dollar General Media Network (DGMN), sits down with Phillip and Alicia to explain why the retailer has doubled down…
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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. What does this mean for brick-and-mortar? Although stores still make up most retail sales, their mission and value have shifted.…
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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 tripled. PLUS: After a summer abroad in London, Phillip reflects on behaviors unique to U.S. shoppers. Get ‘Em While They’re…
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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 hoodie, a Lego set, and a chicken-shaped cutting board. Chief Retail Officer, Jesse Goldstine, joins the show to explain how MoMA...
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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 operational integration, interoperable measurement, and the arrival of the agentic shelf matter more than launching another…
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*TEASER* The Dire State of Consumer Trust In 2026
Get ad-free episodes and bonus content, including the full recording of this podcast, by joining Future Commerce+ at futurecommerce.com/plus 🆕 Access to our newest analysis feature for members, Field Notes, our retail space analysis briefing. Featuring brands like Swatch, Printemps, and Skims....
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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 Phillip and Brian on today’s episode to discuss Boll & Branch’s store expansion strategy, an AI-generated damage claim that went...
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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. Natalie sheds light on truths of today’s consumer, who is skeptical but continually shopping amid a cultural undertow where AI…
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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. Publishers are shipping perfume, brands are hiring writers, and the relationship forming in your inbox isn’t human-to-human...
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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 discovering, deciding, and buying inside social feeds and LLMs, often in a single moment. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in…
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Service Is the New Storefront
"Service is the new storefront" has been a slogan for the better part of a decade, usually followed by a promise to turn a cost center into a profit center that never quite arrived. What changed is not the ambition. It is that the plumbing finally exists. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London…
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From One to Ten Million Sends in One Month: Marketing is Orchestration Now
For years, the marketer's job ended when the campaign shipped. Hit send, check the numbers, measure growth, repeat. That model is changing, and what replaces it is agentic orchestration, where the system and the journey around a message matter more than a single send. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026,...
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Owning the Social Moment
Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is…
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Memory Is the New Competitive Moat
Recommending the wrong whiskey to a loyal customer does not just miss a sale. It breaks trust, and once trust breaks, no amount of personalization copy fixes it. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about the thing every brand now has in common. Everyone has access to the...
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K:LDN 2026: The Architecture of Meaningful Connection
K:LDN 2026 opened to more than a thousand merchants and set a clear vision with several key product announcements: Klaviyo’s expanding toolset has become powerful enough to let a brand of any size operate at a scale that once required a full team. The promise of personalization, long marketed but...
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*TEASER* Was E.T. Slimy or Dry?
Get ad-free episodes and bonus content, including the full recording of this podcast, by joining Future Commerce+ at futurecommerce.com/plus 🆕 Access to our newest analysis feature for members, Field Notes, our retail space analysis briefing. Featuring brands like Swatch, Printemps, and Skims....
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Korean 'Dopamine Sites' Let You Shop Without Shopping
Phillip and Brian run the docket: why "proof of work" is the new luxury signal, what the AI export-control fight shares with a brand guarding its trade secrets, and how AI is flooding the patent office while quietly favoring incumbents. But perhaps the most profound part of the conversation lies…
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Inside Lululemon’s Resale Engine
Resale is forcing brands to rethink product design, pricing, and customer acquisition from the ground up. Ryan Rowe (Archive) and Alison Buchanan (Lululemon) join Brian and Alicia to unpack how lululemon’s Like New evolved from a sustainability pilot into a meaningful commercial channel. We…
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The Machine Ate the Storefront, PayPal Mapped the Collapse
Dr. Mark Grether, SVP and General Manager of PayPal Ads, joins Phillip from PayPal's Manhattan offices to argue that the merchant storefront is migrating off owned websites and into LLMs. This may make the mechanics of customer experience and loyalty a bit murky, but Mark explains how PayPal's...
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Nearly 1B Strong: Snapchat Has Retail’s Most Overlooked Audience
Snap Inc.'s Sid Malhotra makes the case that the platform most brands wrote off as "babies and teens" has quietly grown up. Now, commerce is migrating into these private, conversational spaces where nearly one billion users actually spend their time. We dig into why the traditional funnel no…
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After Dark: "You're Not A Visionary, You're A Vendor"
Get all After Dark releases by joining Future Commerce Plus: www.futurecommerce.com/plus.Future Commerce Plus members get 20% off STRATA: www.futurecommerce.com/strata. An AI agent burns $12 building a fake Android phone nobody asked for. From there: Pope Leo's encyclical, a tick crisis blamed on...
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LIVE @ Google Marketing Live: The Infrastructure Connecting Your Agent to 60 Billion Products
Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip and eCommerce reporter Nicole Silberstein sit down with Ashish Gupta, VP & GM of Merchant Shopping at Google, who is behind the foundational commerce infrastructure powering the Shopping Graph and Universal Commerce Protocol. Gupta breaks down...
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LIVE @ Google Marketing Live: How Google is Taking the 'Drudgery' Out of Shopping
Recorded live at Google Marketing Live 2026, Phillip sits down with Nick Fox, SVP of Knowledge & Information at Google — the executive overseeing Search, Ads, Commerce, and geographic mapping products. Building on the prior day's I/O announcements, Fox unpacks how Gemini is reshaping Google's...
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LIVE @ Google I/O: Universal Cart, Agentic Payments, and the Protocols Powering the Agent-Mediated Economy
At Google I/O 2026, Phillip sits down with Suresh Ganapathy, Senior Director of Product Management for Consumer Shopping at Google, to unpack the day's announcements: Universal Commerce Protocol's expansion into new verticals, agentic payments arriving in Gemini Spark, and the debut of Universal...
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AP x Swatch x Mass Brand Psychosis
The Swatch x AP "Royal Pop" arrived after a week of generative AI fan renders, watch-Twitter speculation, and a 24-hour emotional rollercoaster from disappointment to "actually, this might be iconic." Phillip and Brian sit down with Michael Miraflor to unpack the speedrun spectacle, the high/low...
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The Internet’s Aperture Is Shrinking
Matt Maher, founder of M7 Innovations and the thirty-fifth member of the MIT Media Lab Consortium, joins Phillip and Brian to interrogate what really happens when enterprises leap from "zero to one" to "one to a hundred" with AI. The conversation moves from the productivity paradox (studies…
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POSSIBLE’S Potential: The Hallway Track Leads to the Beach
The funnel’s compressing, content volume is exploding, and everything is quickly descending into AI slop. But the Miami heat and chilled coconut water hit just right, so everything is juuuust fine. We’re unpacking our hot takes fresh out of POSSIBLE, Hyve’s sprawling beachside conference at the...
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Paris Hilton's 11:11 Media is at the intersection of Celebrity, Social Commerce, and Culture
What happens when a cultural figure with 20 years in the limelight decides to become a brand operator? Adam Domian, SVP & Head of Commerce and Audience at 11:11 Media, joins Phillip and Brian to break it down. From Walmart shelves to TikTok lives, Adam shares how Paris Hilton's portfolio balances...
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AI Can Be Your Therapist, But Never Your Partner
People will let AI be their therapist but not their partner, their assistant but not their manager. Gillian Katz of Hannah Grey VC joins Phillip and Brian to unpack the firm's newest Cultural Vibrations journal and the qualitative study behind it: a read on how people are actually negotiating…
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We Already Lost the Power Race to China. Now What?
"There will be a lot fewer people employed doing existing work in not just insurance, but in all business." Phillip reports from the press pool at Semafor World Economy 2026, where 500 CEOs, a quarter of the US Senate, and 20 G20 finance ministers spent two days in Washington DC sketching out the...
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How Furniture.com Repaired Furniture Shopping For Everyone
Furniture.com is a new kind of furniture marketplace: a single platform aggregating more than 3 million SKUs from 80+ retail partners, using standardized data and AI-powered personalization to replace the 15-hour odyssey most shoppers endure. VP of Brand & Creative Olivia Hnatyshin joins Phillip...
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Everything Is Trained On You: Inside the World Model Layer
Evelyn Mora, founder and CEO of VLGE, joins Phillip and Brian to challenge how we think about AI training data, brand identity, and the coming era of individual-first commerce. We move from the mechanics of world modeling to the cultural philosophy of what it means for brands to let go, adapt…
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The Blueprint for Independent Brands with eComFuel
Andrew Youderian joins Phillip and Brian to break down the 2026 eCom Trends Report: a decade in the making, 300 brands surveyed, and a lot of conventional wisdom overturned. The data reveals a diverging landscape where gross margins are climbing but net margins are shrinking, Amazon's dominance…
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LIVE at Shoptalk Spring: Architecting a 360° Wedding Ecosystem with David's Bridal
How does a 76-year-old legacy retailer reinvent itself as a tech-powered ecosystem? Lisa Horton, Chief Communications & Creative Officer at David’s Bridal, dishes on the company’s grand modernization and how they’ve expanded to accommodate the next generation’s Gen-Z-sized aspirations. Here Comes...
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LIVE at Shoptalk Spring: Retail Media Confessions, Hype Cycles, and the Creator Reckoning
Recorded live on the Shoptalk Spring show floor, Phillip and Alicia sit down with Leah Logan, VP of Retail Media Transformation for Inmar Intelligence, and Andrew Lipsman, Founder & Chief Analyst at Media, Ads + Commerce, fresh off a spirited on-stage debate about agentic commerce. We debunk AI...
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LIVE at Shoptalk Spring: Wing’s Heather Rivera on Five-Minute Futures
Recorded live at Shoptalk, Phillip and Brian sit down with Heather Rivera, Chief Business Officer at Wing (an Alphabet company), to talk about how Wing has crafted our five-minute delivery future. Spoiler: the novelty of drones wearing off might be the best thing that ever happened to the…
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*TEASER* Baptist Oreos, Anglican Biscotti
Get ad-free episodes and bonus content, including the full recording of this podcast, by joining Future Commerce+ at futurecommerce.com/plus 🆕 Access to our newest analysis feature for members, Field Notes, our retail space analysis briefing. Featuring brands like Swatch, Printemps, and Skims....
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Shoptalk Spring Recap: STRATA, Snoop Dogg, & the Simulacra
Recording LIVE from the show floor of Shoptalk Spring 2026, the Future Commerce team brings our hottest takes and deepest insights from this year’s event. PLUS: We celebrated the launch of our newest zine, STRATA Vol. 001, with over 150 of our favorite people (including Snoop Dogg?). Get your…
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The Live Commerce Window Is Open Now
Armand Wilson, Chief Revenue Officer at Whatnot, joins Phillip and Brian to unpack why live shopping finally took hold in the West. Drawing from Whatnot’s recent 2026 State of Live Selling Report, we trace the platform's origin from a niche Funko Pop marketplace to an $8B GMV juggernaut after...
About this show
Future Commerce is the culture magazine for Commerce. Hosts Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange help brand and digital marketing leaders see around the next corner by exploring the intersection of Culture and Commerce.Trusted by the world's most recognizable brands to deliver the most insightful, entertaining, and informative weekly podcasts, Future Commerce is the leading new media brand for eCommerce merchants and retail operators.Each week, we explore the cultural implications of what it means to sell or buy products and how commerce and media impact the culture and the world around us, through unique insights and engaging interviews with a dash of futurism.Weekly essays, full transcripts, and quarterly market research reports are available at https://www.futurecommerce.com/plus
Hosted by
Phillip Jackson, Brian Lange
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