Retail to See spent all three days on the ground at Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona, June 9 through 11. Célia Megias, the publication's fashion and beauty director, walked the floor and shares her impressions here alongside editor-in-chief Martin Duch: some of what we saw, heard, and photographed between the keynotes and the coffee lines.

The welcome entrance to Shoptalk Europe 2026 in Barcelona
Arriving at Shoptalk Europe, billed this year as the festival of retail.

The main stage

The headline sessions leaned hard on AI in retail operations, the next act for European retail media, and cross-border commerce after the de minimis changes. Those were the themes we came to watch, and the stage mostly delivered candid, off-the-cuff assessments rather than vendor gloss.

Rows of seats facing the main Shoptalk stage before a session
The main stage fills in ahead of a keynote session.

Some of the most useful moments came in the fireside format, where an operator and an interviewer could get past the slideware and into what actually shipped, what stalled, and why.

Two speakers in a fireside chat on the main Shoptalk stage
A fireside chat on the main stage, one of dozens of conversations across the three days.

The floor

If the stage was where people said what they think, the exhibition floor was where they showed it. The stands were more hands-on this year, with working demos in place of the usual slide decks.

The Braze stand at Shoptalk Europe, with signage reading real-time retail runs on Braze AI
Visiting the Braze stand, where the pitch was real-time retail running on AI.
Attendees at the Optimizely stand watching a machine personalize perfume
The stands were interactive this year. Optimizely ran a live demo that personalized perfume with AI.
The pink Omni stand on the Shoptalk exhibition floor
Visiting the Omni stand on the exhibition floor.

Beyond the keynotes

Barcelona spread the program across several stages and lounges, which made for a lot of ground to cover and plenty of hallway conversations in between.

The Canopy Stage at Shoptalk Europe, a secondary session venue
The Canopy Stage, one of several session venues spread across the show floor.

What stayed with us

The through line, more than any single keynote, was AI moving from the pitch to the operations. A year ago the floor was full of promise. This year the better conversations were about what is actually in production, what it costs to run, and where it quietly does not work yet. Retail media kept maturing into a real margin story, and the payments plumbing under all of it got its share of attention too.

We have been unpacking several of these threads in the pieces that followed: Nadine Graf's twenty minutes on Estée Lauder and the speed of the consumer, Christian Louboutin CEO Alexis Mourot's framework for desirability, and the AI perfume machine that pulled the biggest crowds on the floor. If you were there and we missed you, or want to compare notes, reach us at martin@retailtosee.com or celia@retailtosee.com.