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On September 29, M&S handed the beauty floor of 100 stores to Sephora. Two days later, reports put Boots on the edge of a sale of around 7 billion pounds to the family behind Loblaw and Shoppers Drug Mart. One is a bet on doors, the other on who owns the biggest set of them.
Four weeks after its Hong Kong debut, Shein reported first-half revenue up 1% and operating profit down by half. Europe fell 14% in the second quarter, and the rules that made ultra-cheap cross-border parcels possible are now the ones pricing them.
The grocery industry met at Mandalay Bay from September 22 to 24. Instacart promised the biggest shift in grocery's history, Kroger talked about trust and data integrity, and retail media stopped being described as advertising.
Third-quarter operating profit reached 6.04 billion kronor on sales up just 1% in local currencies. The margin came from purchasing, costs and a one-time tariff effect, and the answer to flat sales is more buying inside the season, Inditex's home ground.
Next lifted full-year profit guidance by £12m to £1,255m after a half in which international online grew 23.9% and UK stores shrank. In the same report, it cut its UK outlook and spent two pages warning about the British consumer.
CVC is exploring a sale of Dr. Teal's owner Arthea, Belle Brands bought Sephora-exclusive Vegamour, and a16z led 30 million dollars into Highstock, a marketplace for surplus beauty stock. Read together, they map where beauty value sits in 2026.
Sales rose 7.6% to 19.8 billion euros and the gross margin widened to 58.7%. Operating expenses grew 8.3%, transport costs from the Middle East bit, and the shares slipped anyway. The autumn started at 9%.
Revenue fell 4% and comparable sales 9%, and the full-year outlook was cut. A 134.5 million dollar refund of IEEPA tariffs flattered the margins, and it will not repeat.
Ulta Beauty beat estimates and raised its full-year outlook, yet the stock slipped after hours. The gap between total growth and comparable sales says where the quarter came from: a higher ticket, flat traffic, a British acquisition and a second half that slows.
Target beat on comps and traffic and the stock rose. Walmart raised its outlook and fell about 9%. Both quarters carried a large IEEPA tariff refund, and what each company did with it explains most of the gap.
NACDS Total Store Expo closed on August 17. The clearest signal from the show is not a keynote, it is the Product Showcase ballot, where retail buyers picked No7's Future Renew Serum for beauty.
The chain drug industry's annual gathering opens August 15 at the Menino Convention Center. It is not a product show, it is a meetings show, and the first one held since Rite Aid disappeared and Walgreens went private.
Rite Aid is gone, Walgreens is private and CVS absorbed the pieces. What is left is a channel with fewer doors, fewer buyers and a front end that needs beauty to justify its square footage.
NACDS seats the buyer at a table, sends the suppliers walking, and gives each pairing ten minutes with two more to move. More than 5,600 of those meetings happened last year. It is the least glamorous distribution mechanism in beauty and one of the most decisive.
Cosmoprof's trend report picked twenty-three products out of hundreds of exhibitor submissions and sorted them into five directions. Ten of the twenty-three came from Korean exhibitors. Read the report as a supply map rather than a mood board and it says something harder.
A 7.4 billion dollar market heading to 11.8 billion, recombinant collagen grown in yeast rather than harvested from fish, and the same molecule showing up in makeup and body care. Cosmoprof's Colla-Genius trend is a supply chain story wearing a skincare label.
A 10 billion dollar hair styling market where the growth is going to products that style and treat at once. Cosmoprof's Style & Care trend is category convergence arriving at the shelf, and it is bad news for anything that only holds a curl.
A 15.8 billion dollar category growing at 7.3 percent, exosomes in a daily mist, cooling serums sold as a spa ritual, and a demand driver almost nobody says out loud: GLP-1 drugs. The scalp is being rebuilt as skincare, and retail has not decided where to put it.
Prestige sunscreen is outgrowing mass, the scalp has become a sun care target and the innovation is no longer in the filter. Cosmoprof's Haute Sun trend is really an argument about texture, and it moves the category off the seasonal endcap.
The longevity molecule that built a supplement industry is now being formulated into masks, serums and devices. Cosmoprof's trend report made it the first of five directions for 2027, and the delivery question is the one nobody at the showcase wanted to answer.
Cosmoprof North America brought its Buyer Meetings format to Las Vegas and published the list of retailers attending for the first time. Read that list closely and it describes a category where distribution has moved to the front of the product brief.
The most photographed object at Cosmoprof North America was a gift set shaped like a house, built around a Finnish cartoon family. Nostalgia was named one of the show's five trends. On the floor it looked less like a mood and more like a distribution strategy.
Exosomes, PDRN, NAD+ and two decimal places on an acrylic card next to the product. At Cosmoprof North America the clinical vocabulary finished its migration from the clinic to the trade stand, and the number stopped being a differentiator.
Dr.BRID C turned its Cosmoprof booth into a fuselage, complete with windows, a service trolley and an hourly turbulence alert. Behind the set design sits the most crowded positioning in skincare right now: the barrier.
The 23rd Las Vegas edition drew more than 26,500 attendee visits and over 950 exhibitors to Mandalay Bay. More traffic across fewer stands, and a floor where the first question was no longer what is new but what does it actually do.
The Americas' largest B2B beauty show returns to Mandalay Bay July 13-15. The exhibitor mix and the buyer program say more about where beauty retail is heading than any single product launch.
The serum on a prestige shelf and the one at mass are often filled on the same line. As retailer own-brands expand, the contract manufacturer is quietly becoming the most important company in beauty.
Every beauty retailer now offers a virtual try-on or an AI shade finder. The interesting question is not whether they work as demos, but where they measurably move conversion and returns, and where they are theater.
One of the most crowded corners of the Shoptalk Europe floor in Barcelona was a machine blending made-to-measure perfume from an AI conversation. Behind the demo sits a real, and quietly radical, retail model for fragrance.
Consumers now shop beauty with the assumption that a cheaper near-equivalent exists, and they are usually right. That assumption is quietly rewriting how the category is merchandised and priced.
Christian Louboutin CEO Alexis Mourot used his Shoptalk Europe session in Barcelona to lay out something rare in luxury: an actual operating framework for desirability. Notes from the Headliner Stage.
The Estée Lauder Companies' president for Europe, UK & Ireland and Emerging Markets took Shoptalk Europe's Headliner Stage in Barcelona to explain how a 79-year-old beauty house plans to move as fast as its customers. We were in the room.
Célia Megias, visiting Shoptalk Europe in Barcelona, gives us her impressions as Retail to See's fashion and beauty director. Postcards from the main stage, the exhibition halls, and the conversations in between.
After years of gimmicky AR mirrors, AI-powered virtual try-on is reaching the accuracy threshold where it actually reduces returns. The early data is encouraging.
The 39th World of Private Label at Amsterdam's RAI gathered 3,200+ exhibitors from 75 countries as own-brand share across Europe hit 38.8%. Food built the private-label machine. Beauty is what it wants to make next.
From Selfridges to Galeries Lafayette, Europe's grand magasins are cutting floor space and leasing entire wings to mono-brand tenants. The economics behind the retreat.
The post-2024 regulatory tightening on buy-now-pay-later thinned the field. We map where the surviving players added retail value and where they just added friction.
Three years into the post-pandemic correction, returns remain the single biggest hidden cost in direct-to-consumer P&Ls. We look at what's actually working to bring them down.
A practical look at where retailers have replaced human copywriters with LLMs, where they've quietly reverted, and what the unit-economics actually look like.
From beauty to athleisure to grocery, retailers keep shrinking the box. We break down whether the smaller footprint actually moves EBITDA or just trades problems.
Between Inditex pushing up and ultra-fast-fashion pulling down, Europe's mid-priced fashion retailers are running out of room. The consolidation has started.
The first nearshoring rush was about announcements. The second wave, now underway, is about getting the contracts, the labor, and the ports to actually line up.
With the first full CSRD reports landing in early 2026, retailers had to put numbers next to commitments. The first lesson: scope 3 is still mostly an estimate, and everyone knows it.
A handful of merchants are running real stablecoin checkout pilots in 2026. The use cases are narrower than the pitch decks, but the savings on cross-border are not imaginary.
Retail media keeps getting called the highest-margin business in retail. We unpack who's actually capturing those margins and who's spending them on tech that doesn't ship.
As secondhand luxury volumes grow, the technology and cost of verifying that a handbag is real (and not a very good fake) is becoming the bottleneck.
Between FBA increases, referral fee shifts, and the new low-inventory penalty, the all-in cost of selling on Amazon has quietly crept past the breakpoint for several mid-tier brands.
After a decade of self-checkout, grocers are quietly rebuilding the front end. The new design borrows from convenience stores, not airports.
Zara's parent keeps pulling away from the pack on inventory turns and margin. The operational system behind it is now so far ahead that the gap may be structural.
After more than a year of routing around the Horn of Africa, most carriers have settled into a new normal. Retailers are paying for it in inventory carrying cost, not freight.
After a decade of growth, secondhand and resale platforms are facing the same gross-margin reality that retail learned the hard way. The model isn't dead, but it's getting smaller and pickier.
After a year of CV-at-the-shelf pilots, the early data shows shrink reduction is real but inconsistent - and the labor it shifts is more than the labor it removes.
With the EU caps holding firm and the Visa-Mastercard settlement in the US under renewed scrutiny, the cost of card acceptance is diverging between the two markets in ways that matter for global retailers.
The 57th edition drew more than 255,000 professionals and 3,104 exhibitors from 68 countries to BolognaFiere. The word doing the most work on the floor was not clean, not natural, not even AI. It was longevity.
The end of the $800 de minimis window reshuffled the cross-border map. We track who absorbed the cost, who restructured, and who lost the lane entirely.
After five years of venture-backed experimentation, clothing rental has not cracked its cost problem. The survivors are pivoting hard.
Ship-from-store solves a lot, but the labor it consumes inside the four walls is rarely included in the omnichannel ROI story. We tally what's actually getting absorbed.
A turbulent 2024 in Bangladesh, plus tightening compliance regimes in the EU and US, has pushed apparel buyers to fewer, larger vendor relationships. The trade-offs are showing.
Two years into the rip-and-replace MACH wave, several mid-market retailers are re-platforming back to monoliths. Here's the cost they're trying to recover.
The PPWR set the frame, but national EPR schemes still set the price. We compare what retailers are actually paying per kilogram of packaging across five EU markets.
Natural Products Expo West marked its 45th edition in Anaheim with 3,000+ exhibitors and around 60,000 attendees. In the beauty and wellness halls, the category stopped selling an absence of bad ingredients and started selling a presence of function.
Retail closures are running hotter than 2024 but cooler than 2020. We track who's pulling out of which markets and what's replacing them.
We pulled together churn data across replenishment, curation, and content-bundle subscription models. The spread between best and worst quartile is wider than most operators think.
We compared inventory turn velocity across major US and EU retailers' most recent disclosures. The improvements are concentrated in fewer places than the headlines suggest.
Tap-to-pay-on-phone removes the dongle for small merchants and adds optionality for mid-market. We look at adoption, the still-unsettled fee structure, and the categories where it's gaining real ground.
Three years ago, electric delivery vans only penciled out in dense urban routes. In 2026, the operating-cost case has broadened - but the upfront capex and depot retrofit costs still tilt the decision.
Some 20,000 practitioners, 370 exhibitors, and 1,000 speakers gathered at the Palais des Congrès for aesthetic medicine's biggest annual congress. Beauty retailers should read the agenda closely, because its vocabulary lands on their shelves about eighteen months later.
Three editions in, the January show at the Miami Beach Convention Center has stopped being an experiment. With 800+ exhibitors, 19,000 industry professionals, and conspicuously strong Latin American attendance, Miami is settling into a role Las Vegas cannot play.
After the 2024 settlement rejection, the renegotiated version is moving through approval. We translate the latest draft into what it means for merchants' effective interchange.
Agent-based shopping - where AI agents transact on behalf of consumers - is shifting from demo to deployment. Retailers are scrambling to figure out which agents to allow, which to block, and how to price for either.
A record 85,297 visitors from 178 countries and more than 2,500 exhibitors across 22 halls at the Dubai World Trade Centre. The Gulf is now beauty's fastest-growing market, and its trade fair just started acting like it.
The "store of the future" pilots that drew headlines through 2024 are being quietly evaluated. The data on which ones earn a national rollout - and which ones don't - is finally landing.
Walmart and Amazon now compete more directly than at any point in either company's history. We map where their 2025 strategies actually conflict and where they don't.
Eighteen months after the first big nearshoring announcements, the public progress reports are starting to land. We look at who hit timelines, who slipped, and what changed about the financial case.
The 22nd edition at Mandalay Bay drew more than 26,000 attendee visits and 1,000 exhibitors from 44 countries. Under the launch gloss, the two stories that mattered were a 51% jump in Korean participation and a trade floor openly worried about tariffs.
Brands are pulling back from retail media networks that can't survive an honest attribution audit. The 2025 budgets are being repriced - and several mid-tier RMNs are about to feel it.
As Klarna's public listing approaches, retailers offering BNPL at checkout are paying attention to disclosed take rates, default trends, and the leverage shift that comes with a public BNPL provider.
The post-pandemic labor crunch has eased, but minimum wage step-ups, scheduling rules, and tighter shrink controls have pushed effective labor cost above where most operators planned.
The 56th edition drew more than 255,000 attendees from 150 countries and 3,128 exhibitors showing over 10,000 brands. The ingredient on everyone's lips was salmon DNA, and that tells you where the category is headed.
The resale category spent 2024 confronting unit economics. Early 2025 has been about repricing the model. Here's how the timeline played out.
A record 64,000 attendees and 3,000+ brands filled the Anaheim Convention Center, where the show debuted a dedicated Conscious Beauty pavilion. The natural channel is formalizing its beauty ambitions, right as its fringe goes ancestral.
Aesthetic medicine's flagship congress drew some 20,000 practitioners from 140 countries to Paris. Three days of science produced a clear preview of the claims, ingredients, and anxieties heading for the beauty shelf.
A year after its debut, the January show at the Miami Beach Convention Center grew its exhibitor base 28%, to roughly 900 companies from 49 countries. The experiment phase is over: the Americas' beauty trade wants a winter meeting point, and it wants it in Miami.
Top-line numbers said the 2024 holiday season was fine. Margins said something else. We track where the gap shows up in the post-mortem decks operators are circulating internally.
The October port strike was short. The contingency plans were not. We look at the routing changes, inventory cushions, and supplier conversations that stuck after the immediate disruption ended.
With the first CSRD reporting cycle landing in early 2025, retailers are confronting the cost of incomplete supplier data, partial scope-3 coverage, and audit-ready documentation that doesn't exist yet.
A wave of retailers rolled out AI-powered shopping assistants this year. The ones that survived contact with customer behavior look very different from the launch demos.
Spot rates from Asia to North Europe spent the first half of 2024 north of $4,000 per FEU. Shippers are now planning as if those levels are structural, not temporary.
Two Chinese e-commerce platforms reshaped US discretionary spending faster than mid-market retailers could respond. We look at what worked, what didn't, and what the second half of 2024 looks like.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's interpretive rule pulled buy-now-pay-later under credit card protections. Retailers offering BNPL at checkout are quietly recalculating the cost of friction.
Beyond the keynote schedule, the conversations at Shoptalk this March kept coming back to three things: store labor, retail media measurement, and what to do about returns.