Future Commerce

It's a birthday After Dark! On this episode, Phillip and Brian work through the current state of consumer trust (it's not looking good). PLUS: Everyone's a critic! The reviews of The Odyssey are in, and Brian thinks Tarantino would have done it better. Air Bud's also making a triumphant(?) return, rocking some Air Jordans, appropriately.

This episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members.  Subscribe to listen at www.futurecommerce.com/plus

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Boll & Branch spent 12 years doing the unfashionable thing: perfecting the product first and figuring out distribution second. Chief Commercial Officer Katia Unlu joins Phillip and Brian on today’s episode to discuss Boll & Branch’s store expansion strategy, an AI-generated damage claim that went viral, and the case for stimulation over substitution. 

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Maveron partner Natalie Dillon joins Brian and Alicia to challenge the consumer-collapse narrative: sentiment sits at post-9/11 lows while spending breaks records. Natalie sheds light on truths of today’s consumer, who is skeptical but continually shopping amid a cultural undertow where AI adoption stays surprisingly shallow, Gen Z turns skeptical, and analog living re-emerges as status. PLUS: Are cults the new future of commerce? 

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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Ben Dietz convenes Casey Lewis (After School), Daisy Alioto (Dirt), and Erica Chen (Media Futures Group, WPP) on the collapse of the wall between editorial and commerce. Publishers are shipping perfume, brands are hiring writers, and the relationship forming in your inbox isn’t human-to-human anymore. 

What happens when the scenic route is quicker? When “wasted” time actually is the relationship? Your total addressable market now includes agents, and those agents are trained on the taste you are curating. After all – what you buy is who you become, but what you read is how you decide. 

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

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The funnel most marketers grew up on – see the ad, click, browse, add to cart, buy – did not gradually erode. It came apart almost overnight, as shoppers got comfortable discovering, deciding, and buying inside social feeds and LLMs, often in a single moment.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this is the close-out conversation for the series, a step back to ask what actually replaces the funnel and what it demands of the brands trying to keep pace.

Alicia Esposito of Future Commerce sits down with Kelsey Capps, who leads Klaviyo's product work across analytics, personalization, and AI, and so has a front-row seat to the change. A shopper can now find a product in a TikTok comment, buy it, and post about it before the marketing team has time to react, which means the advance-planning window marketers relied on has all but vanished.

Kelsey's argument is that brands have to rebalance, away from a roughly 80/20 split of campaigns over automated flows and toward signal-triggered automation that can react in the moment, like a flow that fires when someone arrives from a ChatGPT referral. Underneath the tactics sits a bigger shift: optimizing your site and product data so the machines doing the discovering can actually surface you, and building an operating model around understanding customers rather than merely targeting them.

Her closing note is optimistic. The data advantage that once belonged only to enterprises is now within reach of the smallest brand, and because customer intelligence compounds, the brands that start building the model first are the ones that pull away.

"Customers don't want to be just targeted, they want to be understood." — Kelsey Capps [13:50]

"You can see when someone came to your site from ChatGPT. That's just a UTM source on an event, and a brand could automate a workflow around it." — Kelsey Capps [16:15]

"This conversation used to be confined to the four walls of industry events. Now your family and friends are having the same conversations about how their data is being used." — Alicia Esposito [23:01]

"Even your smallest mom-and-pop shop can take advantage of their first-party data in a way they just never could before." — Kelsey Capps [24:55]

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

"Service is the new storefront" has been a slogan for the better part of a decade, usually followed by a promise to turn a cost center into a profit center that never quite arrived. What changed is not the ambition. It is that the plumbing finally exists.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about what becomes possible when a brand can pull customer data from any channel and hand it, in real time, to a human or an AI agent.

Phillip Jackson sits down with Kelly Thacker of Klaviyo's product marketing team. Her argument is that the prize is democratization: taking the best in-store associate, the person who knows both the products and the customer, and making that experience available on every channel and to every brand, not just the ones who can staff a great team.

Kelly is candid about the failure mode too, the dumb bot that asks a loyal VIP for an email address it should already have. The fix is an agent that knows the business and the customer, with escalation rules the brand sets and widens as trust grows. The number that makes the case is blunt: where is my order is still the most common question to any agent, human or AI, and automating it hands time back to people for the work that actually needs them.

She closes by looking further out, to a world where marketing and service stop being separate departments and brands begin building for agent-to-agent shopping, where a customer's agent transacts with a brand's.

"You could be the most loyal VIP customer, and then a chatbot asks, can you give me your email address, and you think, you should just know me." — Kelly Thacker, Product Marketing, Klaviyo [TK]

"We meet customers where they are. You build for the future, and you help them slowly get comfortable with that change." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

"A poor experience with an agent feels worse than a poor experience with a human, so the human in the loop has to be so important to this." — Phillip Jackson [TK]

"This is the moment where people will either rise to the occasion or they'll be forgotten." — Kelly Thacker [TK]

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For years, the marketer's job ended when the campaign shipped. Hit send, check the numbers, measure growth, repeat. That model is changing, and what replaces it is agentic orchestration, where the system and the journey around a message matter more than a single send.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026, this conversation pairs the person building the AI with an operator running it at real scale. Gilbert Hsu, who leads Marketing AI at Klaviyo, sits down with Alon Turchin, VP of Retention at Particle, a US-manufactured DTC self-care brand for men with a marketing team based in Israel.

That kind of scale brings real complexity, and this is where Composer by Klaviyo brings solutions at scale. Alon describes it today as the brain and the eyes, the thing that finds and frames problems he might not catch manually. His wish list is for it to become the hands too, trusted to edit filters, rules, and content, a trust he says has to be earned through testing first.

Closing advice for teams earlier in their journey: know your audience before you trust anyone's benchmarks, remember that selling is mostly psychological, and test your way to what actually works rather than assuming you already know.

Alon's operating principle: the campaign is not the product, the system is, meaning the journey around a message matters more than the message itself.

Particle scaled from one million to ten million sends a month in a matter of weeks, not months or a year of slow warmup, while revenue doubled, run across more than 150 active flows and 100-plus forms.

Segmentation isn't just more lists, it's urgency based. Recent sign-ups get reached while the brand is still top of mind. Older, colder contacts get reintroduced rather than ignored.

Composer today functions as the brain and the eyes, surfacing problems and opportunities Alon might miss manually. His wish list is for it to become the hands, trusted to edit filters, rules, and content, once testing earns that trust.

Alon's closing advice: don't assume you know your audience or trust someone else's benchmark. Selling is mostly psychological, so test relentlessly until you find what actually works for your own customers.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling with the person living the problem every day.

Brett Bernstein, who came to Klaviyo through its acquisition of Gatsby and now leads its new social product, sits down with Kathleen Loftus, Marketing Director at Sculpted by Aimee, an Irish cosmetics brand with a 350,000-strong Instagram following. Kathleen runs brand, creative, PR, influencer, CRM, and paid under one roof, which is exactly why she can trace a viral moment all the way to revenue.

She walks through a campaign built on a piece of theater: teasing the discontinuation of a beloved cream blush. The stunt ran as a closed loop, from Instagram to the brand's broadcast channel to a website waitlist, and it sold roughly eight weeks of forecast stock in under a week. Brett and Kathleen then dig into the unglamorous problem underneath the fun: attribution, why the brand rebuilt its entire UTM structure this year, and how so many of the people engaging with a brand never actually hit follow.

The payoff is a practical view of what it means to own the social moment: spotting the commenters and lurkers who signal intent, and giving them a reason to move into channels the brand controls.

"Not everything needs a million likes or a million views, but it has to have a purpose to be on our channels." — Kathleen Loftus, Marketing Director, Sculpted by Aimee [~7:05]

"We sold out eight weeks' worth of our forecasted product in less than a week." — Kathleen Loftus [~9:15]

"Instagram is the landlord that keeps raising the rent every month." — Kathleen Loftus [13:23]

"You might think they're no longer an active customer, but then you notice their comments on your content. Those are signals we can now unlock." — Brett Bernstein, Klaviyo [14:36]

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Recommending the wrong whiskey to a loyal customer does not just miss a sale. It breaks trust, and once trust breaks, no amount of personalization copy fixes it.

Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about the thing every brand now has in common. Everyone has access to the same AI tools. So what actually separates the brands winning with them from the ones just using them?

Phillip Jackson sits down with Jake Cohen, VP of Insights at Klaviyo, and Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of Ecommerce at The Bottle Club, a UK multi-brand alcohol retailer carrying roughly 9,500 products. Their answer: memory. Not the AI kind, the brand kind… meaning the stored, structured context a business builds about its own customers and products over time.

Tim explains how one mandatory checkout question, asking whether an order is a gift, for self-consumption, for hosting, or for trade, reshaped his customer insight and exposed why standard RFM and lifetime value metrics break down across different buyer types. Jake widens the lens, arguing that loyalty is better measured through engagement across touchpoints than through money spent, and that the brands seeing real gains from AI are the ones writing customer and product knowledge down as reusable context, what Klaviyo calls "artifacts."

The conversation gets specific fast, down to the exact wrong recommendation that can cost a brand its credibility, and closes with Jake's straightforward plan for putting this into practice over the next 90 days.

"The word of the moment to me is actually context, and that context, if you can store it effectively and leverage it effectively, is the way that you can create a moat, because you can serve more people more personally, more memorably, which will create deeper relationships and, of course, more durable business over time." — Jake Cohen, VP of Insights, Klaviyo [2:08 to 3:04]

"What starts to become very important in the world of AI post LLMs is that the most important thing a brand can do is show up for someone the way that they need when they need it." — Jake Cohen [9:09]

"I genuinely think Klaviyo agent makes the most sense to be the agentic storefront, and that's not just me Klaviyo championing it. It's genuinely got the most context from multiple sources." — Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of Ecommerce, The Bottle Club [18:49 to 19:48]

"The answer should not be, 'Great, here's 10% off, go buy one.' The answer should be, 'How long are you running? Do you have a color you're interested in? Do you have a race coming up?' As you start to collect that information, that helps build the context for that individual, and they become the type of customer that will stay with you for a lifetime." — Jake Cohen [10:26]

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

K:LDN 2026 opened to more than a thousand merchants and set a clear vision with several key product announcements: Klaviyo’s expanding toolset has become powerful enough to let a brand of any size operate at a scale that once required a full team. The promise of personalization, long marketed but rarely delivered, has finally become something all brands can ship.

Phillip Jackson sits down live with Klaviyo CMO Jamie Domenici and IDC research director Roger Beharry Lall to break down the trends that are shaping the future of retail and Klaviyo as an organization: 

the slow collapse of the linear funnel as shoppers move across LLMs, social, and search; the evolution of AI from a disparate chat window to an embedded experience where marketers work; and how the public beta of Klaviyo’s new agent, Composer, is helping marketers create campaigns rooted in data from hundreds of thousands of merchants.

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.