Future Commerce

Halloween is now America’s second-largest consumer holiday, surpassing Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day in total spend, especially in categories like home decor. From the high street, the UK is catching up fast due to the rise of community-driven events, third spaces, and niche internet communities.

Melissa Minkow, Global Director of Retail Strategy & Insights at CI&T, joins Phillip and Alicia from London to share what Halloween looks like on the other side of the Atlantic. Melissa explains why UK Halloween is getting “Americanized,” how algorithms shape our real-world rituals, and why fandom keeps stretching the season.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes that turns out to be about every documentary, and every screen we’ve ever trusted. In this After Dark, Phillip and Brian dig up why no one in the film is a reliable narrator — not Holmes, not Billy Evans, not even Fielder — and why that makes it the most memeable movie of the year. What happens when anyone’s story can be told, and sold, faster than the truth catches up?

Stretched wallets are still spending. Deloitte projects up to 4.8% growth in holiday spending this year, driven mostly by price of goods rather than volume of sales.

Shoppers say they feel stretched, yet they keep spending. Brian McCarthy, a principal in Deloitte’s strategy and analytics practice, joins Phillip and Alicia to forecast this year’s holiday spending. Brian explains why behavior outweighs sentiment, how AI shopping agents are changing the way people find products, and why physical stores still bring in most of the new holiday dollars.

Aubrey Horowitz, Merchant of Decorative Holiday at The Home Depot, is on the show to talk about the viral skeleton that set the Halloween decor bar 12 feet high. Aubrey shares a behind-the-curtain look at how Home Depot designs its seasonal assortment for America’s front lawns, shaped by a vocal community of haunters who shop earlier and earlier each year. 

Plus, we walk through Skelly’s ground-up development with suppliers, the future of app-controlled animatronics, the moving target of nostalgia (the ’90s are vintage now, but won’t be for long), and why the best feedback loop in retail is a customer base that never stops posting.

Phillip and Brian sit down with Carlos Gutierrez, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and former chairman and CEO of Kellogg, ahead of the release of his memoir, Sheer Will. Carlos explains how the Commerce Department became one of the most powerful seats in Washington, why America should out-innovate China in the AI race, and why he thinks Americans are reluctant capitalists.

Taste can’t be manufactured, so brands are hiring the people who have it. Writer and gr8 collab founder Emma Apple Chozick returns to talk with Phillip about her creative process (sans content calendar), building ShopMy’s Signals Substack on proprietary data, and what the long-gone BEST Products showrooms can teach us about designing retail spaces worth remembering.

Welcome to Future Commerce Rewind, where we revisit our deepest and most enduring conversations. This week, we're playing back our April 2025 conversation with Andrew McLuhan, grandson of Marshall McLuhan and director of The McLuhan Institute. Andrew joins Phillip and Brian to explain why his grandfather's ideas still hold up: the side effects of a technology tend to become its main effects, and the Global Village was never as idyllic as it sounds. AI has become a companion, an advisor and a shopping assistant. McLuhan's asks the core question: what do our new tools extend, and what do they change about us?

Phillip and Alicia welcome Merciv co-founder and CEO Shaia Erlbaum to the show to talk about how brands can read signals in real time, and verify their relevancy. Shaia argues that data itself is commoditizing, but verification is not. The most honest consumer signal lives too deep for surveys to reach, which is why our Signal Reports are looking deeper than stated behaviors and are telling completely new kinds of retail and culture stories.

A replay from VISIONS Summit: NYC feat. Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios.

Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios took to the VISIONS stage at MoMA last year to enlighten a room of retail executives and brand marketers about the realities of worldbuilding. Their theory: a brand’s final form is decided by the public—and the strategist's job is to navigate that story, not control it. And they use Mercator, Buckminster Fuller, Guy Debord, free public Wi-Fi, and an acne sticker to back up their claims.

Can anyone tell the staged from the real anymore? On today’s After Dark: We’re growing increasingly certain that everything is fake now. Amazon drones delivering your package to the deep end of your backyard pool? Curiosity bait. A bunch of Kindergarten moms actually keeping up in a group thread? A Suno commercial. That behind-the-scenes footage? AI-generated – but you watched it, didn’t you? PLUS: The minds of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have converged to craft what’s anticipated to be one of the most compelling documentaries we’ve ever seen.

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