IADS Retail Park

In this episode of The I.A.D.S. Retail Park 🎧, Maya and Christine, explore the 2024 IADS Academy’s work on AI decision-making for retailers. A cohort of next-gen executives tackled “machine customers,” built the AIRI readiness framework, and created Lola — a retail-specific AI chatbot. 🤖

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For more insights and updates, follow us on LinkedIn at International Association of Department Stores - IADS, check out our Substack, visit our website at www.iads.org for additional resources, and learn more here!

Every January, retail's biggest names descend on New York for the NRF Big Show 🎙️ — and 2025 was reportedly a record edition: 40,000 attendees, 1,000 exhibitors, and more AI claims than you could count. In this episode, Maya sits down with Selvane, who was on the floor and in the rooms. They cut through the noise together — from agentic AI and "fantailing" to Target's culture strategy, Macy's bold transformation, and what Foot Locker's 50th anniversary says about where retail is actually heading 🌊.

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For more insights and updates, follow us on LinkedIn at International Association of Department Stores - IADS, check out our Substack, visit our website at www.iads.org for additional resources, and learn more here!

Zara has closed 600+ stores since 2019—but total selling space has grown. Their new flagships look like "monobrand department stores" with local architecture, cafés, and luxury-grade design. What can department stores learn from this transformation? Maya and Selvane explore the "fewer, larger, better" strategy, the experience trap, and where Zara's limits create opportunity for department stores. 🏬🌍

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In this episode of IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Selvane, Managing Director of IADS, dissect this week's exclusive on the $10 trillion cost of manager disengagement. Drawing on Gallup's 2025 and 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports, Maya unpacks why $40 billion in enterprise AI investment is producing near-zero returns — and why both failures trace to the same layer.

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For more insights and updates, follow us on LinkedIn at International Association of Department Stores - IADS, check out our Substack, visit our website at www.iads.org for additional resources, and learn more here!

Department stores have run two business models simultaneously for over fifteen years. The result is a financial architecture that punishes omnichannel behaviour from the inside out. In this episode, Maya and Selvane, unpack why the bottleneck was never technological, what a 7–10% ship-from-store cancellation rate reveals about incentive structures, and how the omni-cluster model redefines what the store is actually for 🏛️.

➡️Click here to dive even further into this week’s IADS Exclusive: The Next Chapter of Omnichannel

What does it take to build a retail empire on a single address? Maya and Christine examine the strategic logic behind the world's most iconic single-location department stores. From Royal Navy ship timbers to circus performances after closing hours, this episode explores why singularity can be more defensible than scale—and what La Samaritaine's €750 million lesson reveals about when it fails.🔗 Click here to read the full exclusive!Stay connected: Follow us on LinkedIn · Read our latest on Substack · Explore www.iads.org

Zara has closed 600+ stores since 2019—but total selling space has grown. Their new flagships look like "monobrand department stores" with local architecture, cafés, and luxury-grade design. What can department stores learn from this transformation? Maya and Selvane explore the "fewer, larger, better" strategy, the experience trap, and where Zara's limits create opportunity for department stores. 🏬🌍

👉Click here to read the full exclusive.

45 days. 50% of annual grocery sales. 30-40% of automobile revenue. India’s festival season isn’t a shopping event — it’s an economic restructuring that happens every year. 🪔

This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Anchita examine how Amazon India turned a five-day sale into a month-long phenomenon where 85% of customers now come from non-metro cities. UPI accounts for 78% of digital payments. Luxury brands like Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin are launching Diwali collections. But the North-South gambling divide proves one truth: understanding micro-contexts isn’t optional when a billion consumers are watching.

🎧 In this episode: Why 30-50% of annual sales compress into 45 days 📊. Amazon India scaled to 85% non-metro customers—what tier-2 cities revealed 🏙️. UPI hit 78% of digital payments and changed festival spending 💳. Galeries Lafayette enters Delhi and Mumbai, but one festival strategy won’t work for both 🎯. The Diwali gambling paradox: North vs. South, and what it means for campaigns 🎲.

🔗 Click here to read the full India Festival Economy Exclusive by Anchita Ranka!

For more insights and updates—connect with us on LinkedIn 💼, discover our exclusives on Substack 📰, and explore www.iads.org 🌐 for additional resources.

25 billion Turkish lira in GMV. 18.3 million users. 550 business partners. Hopi isn’t a loyalty program anymore—it’s a B2B2C platform that does loyalty, MarTech, AdTech, and FinTech simultaneously. 💳

This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya and Selvane examine how Boyner Grup turned a department store loyalty program into a multi-merchant coalition serving 300+ partners, including its own competitors.

🎧 In this episode:

* Find out why Boyner’s 1998 credit card experiment shaped Hopi’s FinTech DNA two decades later 🏦.

* Learn how Paracik social sharing converted 1.6 friends per user into active shoppers 👥. The AdTech expansion that brought 100+ brands who never joined the loyalty program 📊.

* What happened when Hopi approved 50%+ of credit applications versus banks’ 30-35% rate 💰.

* Why serving your competitors is the only way platform economics work—and what department stores must unlearn 🔄.

🔗 Click here to read the full Hopi Exclusive by Selvane Mohandas!

For more insights and analysis—connect with us on LinkedIn 💼, discover our exclusives on Substack 📰, and explore www.iads.org 🌐 for additional resources.

Target ended DEI in January 2025—four days after Trump's executive orders. By January 2026, when ICE agents detained US citizens in Minnesota stores, Target said nothing. That silence defines the bind facing US retailers in 2026. 🎯⚖️

This week on IADS Retail Park 🎙️, Maya breaks down the trajectory from George Floyd commitments to Louisiana v. Callais—the late-April Supreme Court ruling that ended sixty years of voting protections. The frameworks that survived: leveling vs. lifting, targeted universalism, and the FAIR approach. The question isn't whether to pursue inclusion—it's how to do it when equity became prosecutable.

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