Lululemon Slides, Five Below Sizzles & Anthropic Enters Commerce, Plus Guest co-Host Anne Mezzenga Goes Undercover

Michael LeBlanc (0:06)

Welcome to the Remarkable Retail Podcast Episode 311 I'm Michael LeBlanc.

Steve Dennis (0:11)

And I'm Steve Dennis.

Michael LeBlanc (0:13)

On this episode, we are thrilled to welcome a guest host. You know her, you love her, a star of stage and screen in LinkedIn with her expert and in sushi intake on the latest things in retail. Anne Mezzenga, founder and CEO, Retail Field Report joins us today live on the mic and on camera. Welcome, Anne.

Anne Mezzenga (0:31)

What was the word you used? I've never heard that before, Michael. You're going to I'm having you have to explain all these like breakdown the details.

Michael LeBlanc (0:39)

Yes, Insouciant, lively, insightful, all those great things. It's an action word like you. You're an action person.

Anne Mezzenga (0:48)

I'm going to use I'm going to start using Insouciant all weekend long for this weekend. And I want to tell you how many people know what I'm talking about or act like they know what I'm talking about.

Steve Dennis (0:57)

I love it.

Anne Mezzenga (0:58)

I love it. It's so good to be here with you two. You're my favorite people in this industry. You've been such big supporters of me in the last, I don't know, almost decade. We've all been doing this together. So, yeah, I really appreciate you both. And I'm so excited to be with you today.

Michael LeBlanc (1:13)

All right. Fantastic. Well, we're going to ask a bit a little bit more about you in a little bit. But also in this episode for the listeners, we'll be talking about getting Anne's take on a bit of macro news, latest to retail earnings, Five Below, Victoria's Secret, Lemon Kohl's, get all the tea from Anne on her time in the wilds of retail, a bit of AI shopping news, talk about Target a little bit more, their Halloween costume strategy particularly, and otherwise progressions that are going on with Shein. And then we're going to end, as we always do, with what's on our respective radar screens. Now, Anne, for those of them who may be listening and may not know you as well as we do, who are you and what do you do for a living?

Anne Mezzenga (1:52)

Hello, I'm Anne. I've been in this retail circus for about, I don't know, over a decade specifically focused on retail. And prior to that, my background is actually in journalism and advertising, I now run Retail Field Report, which is kind of an evolution of the last several years of Omni Talk Retail, which I built with my co-founder, Chris Walton.

And our whole goal was really to kind of provide perspective on retail technology, how to think about the kind of future of the industry. Just this past March, I created Retail Field Report to go deeper from a more journalistic lens. So less of an analyst perspective and actually getting into the field, working in stores, interviewing executives, walking stores with executives to understand what's actually happening, not what the headlines are saying, but what's actually happening inside of the retail organizations. Now that things like AI, we have supply chain changes, tariffs, all these things are constantly changing the business. So that's really what we're doing here at Retail Field Report, and we're having a whole lot of fun doing it.

Michael LeBlanc (3:00)

Exciting. Where can we find all this insight? Your podcast, I see you on LinkedIn, some socials?

Anne Mezzenga (3:07)

Yeah. It's really video first. So I would say most of my content you can find on LinkedIn. So either connecting with me on LinkedIn, Anne Mezzenga, or going to the Retail Field Report page on LinkedIn. Also on YouTube and then at retailfieldreport.com.

Michael LeBlanc (3:21)

All right.

Steve, you've got some stuff going on in your life, to say the least. Tell us about what's going on. We've been talking to the people about a Placer webinar coming up. You got something else going on? What? Give us the 411

Steve Dennis (3:34)

Well, I am, let's see how this goes. It may have happened by the time most people listen to this because it's coming up Thursday.

I'm doing the opening keynote at the Rise Conference, which is the Retail Innovation Center, at the University of Texas, at Dallas. And I'm debuting a bunch, well, really all new material.

And I only have 20 minutes. So those of you may know that I can tend to ramble a little bit. And usually when I do a keynote, it's more like 35 to 45 minutes. So at the moment, it is not quite done. So we'll see how I land that. And then, yes, the Placer webinar with RJ Hottovy, we'll be doing on September 29th at 1 p.m. Eastern. And you can find the link to register for that. It's free. You can find the link in the show notes as well as on LinkedIn. And we're going to cover, just we're doing some prep for that and we're going to cover a lot of territory in about 45 or 50 minutes.