Retail Brew // Morning Brew // Update

January 08, 2026

Hello! It’s no secret your hot sauce of choice says a lot about you (looking at you, Tabasco crowd), and it seems America has made its pick. According to Instacart data, Frank’s RedHot beat out brands like Cholula and Texas Pete to become the platform’s most-purchased hot sauce. Frankly, that’s hot.

In today’s edition:

—Andrew Adam Newman, Jeena Sharma, Layla Ilchi

E-COMMERCE

Secondhand news

A person photographs products arrayed on a table, with packing boxes nearby.

Karinsasaki/Getty Images

To say that resale will grow in 2026 is not a prediction so much as stating the obvious. For apparel alone, the global resale market grew from $141 billion in 2021 to an estimated $256 billion in 2025, an 82% increase, according to a report from resale marketplace ThredUp. In 2026, ThredUp estimates the global resale apparel market will grow 12.5% YoY to $288 billion.

But while growth is a near certainty, exactly what will drive that growth is not. So we asked industry insiders to dust off their preloved crystal balls and predict what the future holds for resale in 2026.

AI will continue to transform resale

When eBay launched in 1995, selling used items online took dedication, since in the pre-smartphone era, sellers would need to take photos on a digital camera, transfer the photos to a computer via SD cards or wired connections, and of course have a reliable internet connection, which was far from universal in homes or workplaces.

While smartphones have dramatically streamlined the process, today it is AI that’s transforming re-commerce yet again.

Jake Disraeli, co-founder and CEO of Treet, which partners with retail brands on their resale programs, said 2026 will find more brands and marketplaces develop what he called “AI-powered” listings.

When a seller begins to list an item for sale by posting a photo of it, AI automatically starts to populate the entire listing, Disraeli said, meaning it can determine its SKU, size, condition to suggest a selling price, and even pull original product photos and descriptions.

“Rather than manually entering in ‘There’s a scuff mark on the shoe,’ ‘It’s missing a button,’” just by posting a photo, those resellers increasingly will be “generating the full listing through AI,” Disraeli told Retail Brew.

Keep reading here.—AAN

From The Crew

Your burning questions about work, answered

Is it okay to ask your coworker how much they make? Is Gen Z set up for failure in the workplace? Should you really bring your whole self to work?

Each week on Per My Last Email, Morning Brew’s resident career experts Kaila and Kyle—whose careers have collectively spanned the corporate, government, nonprofit, and startup sectors—debate the trickiest challenges in work life and share insightful (and sometimes hilarious) tactics on how to overcome them. Listen now.

STORES

Not an easy fit

A woman holding shopping bags looks in a window

Sean Justice/Getty Images

The fashion industry had a tough 2025. Tariffs, rising prices, and slowing discretionary spending weighed on the industry, and many of those pressures remain as retailers head into the new year.

“Reflecting on 2025…what it really forced was the entrenchment of this idea that that disruption is no longer episodic, but rather is constant, and is the reality of the ecosystem that all organizations in the fashion space are going to have to operate, navigate,” Joanna Rangarajan, managing director at Alvarez & Marsal’s consumer and retail group, told Retail Brew. “That has created what seems to be a springboard for 2026 where there’s the way we’re thinking about it as a systemwide recalibration.”

So what does that recalibration actually look like in 2026? We asked some experts.

Value is king

A major theme in 2025 was the rise of the value-conscious consumer, and that mindset is likely to carry into the year ahead.

Rangarajan cites Alvarez & Marsal’s internal consumer sentiment survey that found that 34% of shoppers intended to spend less going forward, with 43% of them citing tariffs as a major reason.

This also applies to higher income brackets with 24% of those surveyed saying they will pull back on spending as well, creating a challenge both for affordable and luxury retailers. This doesn’t necessarily mean consumers will be opening their wallets freely, Rangarajan said. Instead, they’ll seek out more value-driven channels, including off-price retailers, outlet stores, and private labels.

Meanwhile, discounting is here to stay as a strategy as brands try to communicate their product value to the customer.

Keep reading here.—JS

MARKETING

Hard (cowboy) core

Tecovas

“Cowboy-core” may have had its pop culture moment recently, but fashion trends aside, it’s an aesthetic that’s as intrinsically linked to American culture as rock and roll, baseball, and apple pie. As such, iconic brands like Wrangler and Stetson built on that image with great success. Today, the western wear sector—everything from hats, boots, jeans, and even bolo ties—is big business far from the ranch (it also makes sayings like “all hat and no cattle” a little less derogatory for those on either side of the Great Plains).

Austin-based western wear brand Tecovas is part of this growth story. In the 10 years since bursting on the scene, it has expanded from a direct-to-consumer boot seller to a bona fide lifestyle brand with over 50 locations across the US.

A brand with an aesthetic rooted in the culture of the American West, it has embraced the AI era to fuel its expansion and help inform major business decisions. Revenue Brew sat down with Krista Dalton, Tecovas’s chief marketing and digital officer, to discuss the meeting point between AI and human intuition.

Keep reading here on Revenue Brew.—LI

SWAPPING SKUS

Today’s top retail reads.

All around: Saks Global is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy, and it has major consequences for some fashion retailers. (WWD)

Brace for it: Why food sales surpassed gift purchases in the UK as retailers brace for a challenging 2026. (Reuters)

Cottage core: Inside L Catterton’s exclusive deal with cottage cheese retailer Good Culture. (the Wall Street Journal)

For dry January-ers: Sip some nonalcoholic wine that still tastes as good as the ABV stuff. With Just Enough Zero, alcohol is gently removed to preserve as much of the original wine’s character. Try it.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

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