September 23, 2026

Presented By

Hi. Peloton, which has been attempting a major turnaround, is rolling out three new, lower-priced treadmills, including its most affordable model, which can be folded up. Will the new treadmills run their course or fold under pressure?

In today’s edition:

—Alex Vuocolo, Jeena Sharma, Erin Cabrey

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR & TRENDS

Halloween helper

A pumpkin with a stock chart for a mouth

Francis Scialabba

At some point during the summer—maybe on some sweltering August night when shoppers were still preoccupied with prepping for vacation or going back to school—skeletons, pumpkins, and candy with orange-colored wrappers started appearing on shelves.

This yearly ritual, which often garners a “Can you believe they’re already preparing for Halloween?” reaction, is the quiet kickoff to a shopping season that is getting longer and more significant for retailers.

For a look at how this Halloween season is shaping up, here are some of the key trends and terms informing retailers.

Keep reading here.—AV

Sponsored By Quad

Local growth is focal growth

Rise, a Quad agency, put it best: All media is personal. And all business is local.

It’s not just fresh fruits and veggies from your local farm stand that hit different. Brand growth, when it begins in your neck of the woods, can have a serious impact.

Rise notes that brand growth doesn’t actually happen nationally, even for national brands. It happens market by market, retailer by retailer, household by household. Every sale is made one customer, one store, or one click at a time.

The alternative is becoming increasingly risky. A top-down approach may require less work, but it also involves more broad generalizations and presumptions about your target consumer, which can sever growth before it has a chance to take root.

So, is the future of brand growth local? Rise makes the case.

E-COMMERCE

Hello? Anyone?

graphic of a man moving a scale from frowning faces to smiling faces on a brown background with a few clouds

Getty Images

Retailers often request feedback, but are customers feeling heard?

Per new research from Quantum Metrics, which surveyed 1,500 US and UK consumers, it would seem not so much. The primary issue is “a listening gap” wherein digital brands seem to take customer feedback but “consumers never see action or a response that shows they were heard.”

In fact, 1in 3 consumers report not feeling heard by digital brands and when consumers reached out, they preferred chatting with a person.

Moreover, the study—-that spanned responses from consumers across the US and UK, 750 digital leaders, aggregated and annonymized behavioral data from the Quantum Metrics platform—also found that 37% believe that ChatGPT understands their feedback more than a retailer.

Keep reading here.—JS

Sponsored By Strava

Retail’s on the move. Customers have traditional ad fatigue, and it takes some creative thinking to reengage them. We teamed up with Strava for Business to learn why customers are interacting with motivational, activity-oriented campaigns—and how brands can change up their advertising strategies to match. Learn more.

COMMUNITY

Coworking with Abhi Thanendran

Abhi Thanendran

On Wednesdays, we ~~wear pink~~ spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Abhi Thanendran is founder and CEO at live auction shopping app Tilt.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I run Tilt. It’s a shopping app that started with live commerce: sellers get on a stream, buyers hang out, ask questions, and bid in real-time auctions. We’ve now expanded into C2C with Clips: Users hold up an item, describe it, and AI turns it into a shoppable video in 2.3 seconds, making Tilt the world’s fastest marketplace. For anyone who can’t join a stream at an exact time, Clips lives in an always-on scrollable feed. Together, they’re rebuilding shopping around real people and real products instead of static listings and AI-generated content you can’t trust.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? I’m a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee. My family settled in Canada when I was eight, and I grew up in the inner city. We had very little, but my parents put everything on the line to give my sister and me a better life. That upbringing has shaped how I see the sellers building on Tilt. Many of them started without capital or a degree, but they work relentlessly, and they’re using Tilt to create life-changing opportunities for themselves. A 22-year-old former McDonald’s worker is now running a serious business entirely from their phone. That’s what motivates me.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Clips. It’s the product we’re most excited about at Tilt right now: Hold up something you own to the camera, describe it out loud, and AI turns it into a shoppable video in 2.3 seconds.

Keep reading here.—EC

Sponsored By ACI Worldwide

Consumer insights, hot off the press. Why do 4 in 10 fashion shoppers walk away at checkout? The new ACI Worldwide report has the answer. Backed by fresh 2026 consumer data, it shows what shoppers want from AI, how they move between channels, how payments shape conversion, and much more. Download your copy.

swapping skus

Today’s top retail reads.

Long game: McDonald’s is investing $8.5 billion to pivot the chain beyond a place to grab a cheap meal. (Bloomberg)

Basket case: Instacart is adding Gopuff’s grocery and convenience items to its marketplace and offering Instacart’s retail media tech to the platform. (Supermarket News)

Fill in the Gap: Gap is partnering with boy band Just Your Type to move beyond selling apparel and embed the brand in pop culture. (the Wall Street Journal)

Grow local: Rise, a Quad agency, notes that brand growth doesn’t actually happen nationally, even for national brands. It happens market by market, retailer by retailer, household by household. Is the future of brand growth local? Find out.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

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Written by Alex Vuocolo, Jeena Sharma, and Erin Cabrey

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