Steve Dennis

Nearly five years ago I wrote that a Saks/Neiman Marcus merger seemed inevitable .

Discretionary categories like luxury and big ticket home purchases performed disproportionately poorly as inflation remained sticky and interest rates remained high.

In 2018 I started sharing my annual retail predictions. Here is my latest batch of prognostications for the year ahead in retail

Recent earnings reports from the world’s top luxury players have mostly brought bad news.

Saks buying long-term rival Neiman Marcus may create a stronger combined entity but there are many vexing issues to be resolved if and when the deal receives FTC approal.

For remarkable retailers, in-store shopping bounced back quickly, and the notion that physical retail is dead or dying continues to be greatly exaggerated.

As I’ve been saying for awhile now: Shift happens.

More retail predictions for 2024 including on Nordstrom, Apple’s Vision Pro, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Temu, Shein JC Penney, WeWork, the Metaverse.

Once again I reveal my annual list of bold retail predictions 2024, including the future of AI, the growth of DTC, the outlook for luxury department stores, and a reckoning for disruptor brands.

Anyone who follows the machinations of the retail industry will know that many struggling retailers continue to put forth breathless pronouncements of their alleged tr...

As I often say, I only have two problems with the term “omni-channel”: the omni part and the channel part.

As it turns out, physical retail is still not dead.

As much as we may want to dissect how retailers did during the holiday season, the jury is still very much out

While it’s clear that some important shifts did occur during the Covid crisis, it’s also quite apparent that we are now experiencing much more of a “great rebalancing.”

Target is the latest retailer to reveal that it bought too much stuff and will need to take aggressive action to get its inventory levels back into line.

I got a lot of pushback when I wrote a 2018 Forbes piece—and doubled-down in my book—opining that Amazon’s future growth will be increasingly tied to brick-and-mortar retail.

One of the most pervasive retail industry narratives is the belief that e-commerce growth has been massively accelerated by the pandemic. It turns out it’s not true.

Like many things, it’s generally important to follow the money. Which is why how something is ordered is interesting, but understanding how demand is generated and ultimately fulfilled is essential.

As more of these disruptor brands don’t seem to be on a glide-path to profitability, it might be worth considering some lessons from the OG’s of DTC.

At another level, the plan risks being decidedly incremental—what I often call “a slightly better version of mediocre”—rather than moving them boldly toward becoming truly remarkable.