Retail Talks

How H&M Is Betting on the Future of Fashion Resale

It all started when Darko noticed his daughter carrying several big blue bags out of her room. At first, he thought they were IKEA bags. But they weren't. They belonged to Sellpy, a Swedish secondhand platform backed by fashion giant H&M.

That simple discovery led to a fascinating retail story.

Why is H&M, a company making billions selling new clothes, investing in the resale of used fashion?

How does Sellpy's business model work, and why is profitability still such a challenge despite impressive growth?

In this episode of Retail Talks, we explore Sellpy's unusual beginnings, its expansion across Europe, the role AI could play in making secondhand retail more profitable, and an investigative report that raises uncomfortable questions about sustainability and transparency.

We also discuss a particularly interesting development: Sellpy's move into physical retail through a pop-up store inside H&M Group's Weekday store in Hamburg, Germany.

Could this be the beginning of a new omnichannel strategy for H&M's thousands of stores worldwide?

And perhaps the biggest question of all: Is secondhand fashion really sustainable, or are we simply finding new ways to consume more?

Join us for a fascinating discussion about big blue bags, retail innovation, business models, and the future of fashion.

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#RetailTalks #Sellpy #HM #FashionRetail #SecondhandFashion #Recommerce #RetailInnovation

What if customers could discover, select, and buy products from multiple retailers without ever visiting their websites?

Google's Universal Cart is bringing this vision closer to reality. But behind the convenience lies a much bigger question: Who owns the customer relationship when Google controls the shopping experience?

In this episode of Retail Talks, Kristina and Darko explore how Google's Universal Cart and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) could reshape e-commerce and accelerate the rise of AI-driven shopping.

We discuss:

• How Google's Universal Cart works and what it means for retailers.

• The role of UCP, Shopify, and AI agents in the future of commerce.

• Why retailers should consider preparing for this new shopping channel now.

• What happens to payments, taxation, invoicing, and fiscal compliance when checkout moves beyond the retailer's website.

• Whether retailers risk becoming little more than fulfillment providers as technology platforms take control of customer interactions.

We also share a few personal reflections from the recent Fiscal Solutions Community Day in Belgrade.

The big takeaway: Google's Universal Cart is not the revolution itself. AI is. A new layer is emerging between retailers and consumers, and it could fundamentally change how retail works.

Will retailers remain in control of their customer relationships, or will AI platforms become the new owners of the shopping experience?

Join us for another Retail Talks discussion about the future of retail, technology, and commerce.

🌐 www.retail-talks.com

#RetailTalks #GoogleUniversalCart

Retail Talks: Community Day Special

International POS rollouts bring retailers and technology providers face to face with the same challenge: building a global solution while supporting local fiscal requirements, technologies and business processes.

In this extended episode, Tina is joined by Darko and Fiscal Solutions’ new marketing team lead, Marko Bogdanović, to explore why these challenges need a shared conversation. Ahead of Community Day in Belgrade, they discuss how bringing retailers, solution providers and compliance experts together can help turn experience into practical answers.

The conversation covers:

• What can be standardized globally and what needs to remain local.
• How country-specific requirements affect business processes and international POS rollouts.
• Why fiscalization and e-invoicing need to be considered together while keeping their differences clear.
• Upcoming discussions on the Czech Republic, France and Germany.
• The perspectives Metro, TCS and Fiscal Solutions will bring to the Community Day panel, alongside Avalara’s contribution on e-invoicing.
• Where AI can support compliance work, and why responsibility for decisions remains with people.

Darko also shares the unexpected inspiration behind Community Day, why attendance is limited to 100 guests, and how one-to-one consulting and the Community Day Companion app support a more useful event experience.

The episode closes with a practical suggestion: arrive with one concrete challenge you want to clarify, and keep the conversation going after the event.

Explore Community Day: https://www.communityday2026.com/

What happens when an AI agent chooses your running shoes, compares offers and completes the purchase, while you never visit a retailer’s website?

In this episode of Retail Talks, Tina and Darko discuss Meta’s Muse and what shopping through AI agents could mean for retail. We explore why retailers are getting involved, Amazon’s resistance, and how OpenAI’s Dots adds to the competition for the customer’s shopping journey.

Beyond the hype, we look at what retailers could lose when discovery and purchasing move into an AI interface: opportunities to influence decisions, visibility into customer behaviour and advertising revenue. We also discuss the role of branding, connectors and ease of use in making these agents attractive to consumers.

And then comes compliance. How can retailers verify that an agent-led transaction meets the applicable fiscal and tax requirements when they remain responsible for the sale?

Darko shares the thinking behind Compliance Intelligence, the work to make regulatory knowledge machine-readable and executable, and Fiscal Solutions’ acceptance into the Claude Partner Network.

More episodes at https://www.retail-talks.com

Why Alexandre Arnault May Be Exactly What Nike Needs ?

Five years ago, Darko called Nike a role model for our company. We admired its creativity, flexible organization, storytelling and ability to turn ordinary people into the heroes of its brand.

Today, Nike is a very different company.

In this episode of Retail Talks, Tina and Darko look at what changed, why Nike lost momentum, and whether the company can find its way back.

We discuss Nike’s reduced product innovation, its strong shift toward direct-to-consumer, the consequences of losing wholesale partners and shelf space, and why that may also have weakened one of Nike’s greatest strengths: the ability to multiply its stories through an entire retail ecosystem.

We also look at the appointment of Alexandre Arnault to Nike’s board. His background in LVMH, Rimowa, Tiffany, technology, brand building and luxury makes him a fascinating addition, but it also raises an important question: how much luxury can Nike introduce without losing the connection with the ordinary athletes and consumers who made the brand what it is?

And finally, we answer the question we started with:

Is Nike still a role model for our company today?

A conversation about brand building, retail strategy, wholesale, innovation, culture, luxury and what even the strongest companies can learn when a successful strategy starts to go wrong.

Retail Talks
With Tina and Darko
New episodes every Wednesday.

Lidl CEO Kenneth McGrath recently travelled to China with a delegation, immediately raising an obvious question: is one of Europe’s biggest retailers preparing another attempt to enter the Chinese market?

At first, that seemed like the logical explanation. Aldi is already expanding in China, the hard-discount segment is still developing, and Lidl has previous experience in the market. But the deeper we looked, the more interesting the story became.

In this episode of Retail Talks, Tina and Darko explore Lidl’s history, its hard-discount business model, its previous attempt in China and the rapidly changing Chinese grocery market. But the real focus is on two companies Lidl visited: Dmall and Wumart.

Dmall and Wumart have been experimenting with an AI-powered retail operating model in which AI does more than analyse data. It makes decisions, connects them to store execution, measures the results and continuously learns from them.

For a retailer such as Lidl, whose entire business model is built around operational efficiency, that could be extremely interesting.

So perhaps the real story is not about Lidl bringing its stores to China at all.

Perhaps Lidl went to China to bring something back: technology, knowledge and a new approach to making an already highly efficient retail operation even more efficient.

There has been no official announcement from Lidl, Dmall or Wumart confirming such plans, so our conclusion remains an interpretation of the signals we found.

Listen to the new episode of Retail Talks and decide for yourself: Is Lidl going to China, or is China coming to Lidl?

Anthropic’s Claude for Commerce may not be revolutionary on its own, but it could be a strong signal of where retail technology is heading next.

In this episode of Retail Talks, we look beyond the announcement and discuss what happens when AI agents become part of the actual shopping journey — from product discovery and comparison to shopping carts, payments, customer data and compliance.

Could LLM platforms eventually become a new commerce environment, taking over functions that today belong to e-commerce platforms, POS systems, payment providers and other retail technology vendors? And if more of the customer journey moves into AI environments, who will actually control the customer relationship and the data?

We also look at Anthropic’s work around payments, tax and VAT and what this could mean for companies providing specialized retail technology and compliance solutions.

The biggest challenge for retailers, however, is timing. With Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Shopify and others developing different approaches, investing heavily today could mean betting on a technology or platform that looks very different tomorrow.

Our conclusion: don’t stand still, but don’t rush into big platform bets either. Invest first in the foundations that will matter regardless of which AI ecosystem wins — strong product data, visible inventory, compliance capabilities and, most importantly, a clear strategy.

Because in a market moving this quickly, technology alone is not the strategy.

Rituals has built one of Europe’s most distinctive retail success stories, combining affordable luxury, experiential stores, sustainability and a carefully designed customer journey.

Now the company is taking on an extraordinary challenge: modernising 1,500 stores across 30 countries in just 60 days.

In this episode of Retail Talks, Tina and Darko look beyond the headline and explore what makes Rituals different, how founder Raymond Cloosterman shaped the company’s strategy, why physical stores remain so important to the brand, and how concepts such as refills, Mind Oasis and beauty technology are changing its business model.

Darko also examines a bigger possibility: that this rollout may be about much more than redesigning stores. Could Rituals be using its own retail network to learn how to deploy its new beauty-tech solutions at scale, and ultimately evolve from retailer into technology provider?

And if that is the strategy, is 60 days really realistic?

A discussion about global retail rollouts, experiential retail, beauty tech and what happens when retailers start building products for industries beyond their own stores.

Bilibili is coming West. Western retailers ignored TikTok once. Should they make the same mistake again?

Western retailers were late to TikTok. By the time many understood its potential, the platform was crowded, advertising was more expensive and the advantage of being early was largely gone.

In this episode of Retail Talks, Kristina and Darko look at Bilibili, one of China’s largest video platforms, and ask whether retailers are about to repeat the same mistake.

Bilibili is often described as the “Chinese YouTube,” but that comparison misses an important part of its model. The platform grew from anime, gaming and fandom culture and remains deeply focused on community, long-form content and interaction between creators and viewers. With almost 380 million monthly active users discussed in the episode and users spending around two hours a day on the platform, its scale is already significant.

The discussion explores why Bilibili’s community model could be particularly interesting for retailers, how it differs from TikTok’s fast discovery-and-purchase model, why Western brands may still have an early-mover opportunity, and how Bilibili could become a new door into China.

The episode also looks at what retailers should do now: understand the platform, study its communities, compare it with their own strategy and start experimenting before everybody else arrives.

According to the National Retail Federation’s ranking of the fastest-growing retailers in the U.S., Miniso took the No. 1 spot after growing its U.S. business by 52%.

Even more striking, five of the ten fastest-growing retailers on the list are foreign companies, with Asian retailers playing an unusually strong role.

In this episode of Retail Talks, we look behind Miniso’s growth and examine why its physical-store strategy is working so well. From licensed IP and collectibles to experience-driven stores, impulse-friendly pricing and locations that double as marketing channels, Miniso has built retail around discovery and emotion rather than efficiency alone.

For years, the retail industry has focused on frictionless shopping, self-checkout, apps, loyalty and now AI. Miniso suggests that another factor may matter just as much: making physical retail entertaining again.

This episode explores what Miniso’s rise tells us about the changing U.S. retail market — and what Western retailers can learn from the new generation of Asian retail concepts.