Moments of great transformation, chaos, and opportunity, as we are in now, require thoughtful and transformational leadership. Now in her 11th year at Danone, Jennifer Angelus has elevated her career from an associate manager of shopper insights to now leading the digital, agentic, and brand.com strategies as the Sr. Director of Digital Shelf, Ecosystems, and Capabilities at Danone. Jenn graciously agreed to share with our community how she inspires cohesion, connection, and scale to serve the consumer and drive growth.

Today, we are diving deep into a topic that is both incredibly massive and frequently misunderstood: the evolution of B2B digital commerce.

If you ask five different people in a B2B manufacturing company to define "e-commerce," you’ll likely get five completely different answers. To some, it’s just Amazon. To others, it’s a customer portal. And to the traditional sales team, it can feel like a learning curve.

Today, we are unpacking what e-commerce actually means in the complex world of wholesale distribution. Our guest, Sarah Kirwen, Director of ecommerce at Oatey, didn’t just inherit a digital strategy—she had to build the glossary, set the boundaries, and educate a legacy industry on why the digital shelf is the ultimate growth engine.

Running the global digital and insights organization at one of the world’s largest and most storied CPG companies takes a combination of data chops, marketing savvy, and collaborative leadership skills. Keith Lehman, Global Director, Digital Commerce Marketing at Colgate-Palmolive has all of that, but in addition he credits his intense curiosity for being the additional element that helps drive the processes to help his internal customers uncover the next best action for growth. Keith joins the podcast to explain how they are building the machine to power Colgate’s next era of growth.

Can you imagine a CPG company with an 87% customer retention rate and a 50% subscribe and save rate on Amazon? Wouldn’t you want to know their secret? Well now you can, thanks to our guest today, Catherine Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Farms, the #1 doctor-recommended plant-based nutrition brand. She recounts the journey that got them where they are today, and explains their tremendous investment in product quality, customer care, and medical research that drives trust and long term customer value.

VP of Marketing & Commerce Sha Atakhanov has been driving growth and innovation at homepathic brand Boiron for almost 17 years. From booking some of the first ads on Amazon to being an inaugural brand running shoppable ads on Samsung TVs, , Sha oversees all the channels and media that touch the consumer, and he approaches new opportunities and tech, especially AI, with a simple rule - it has to generate revenue, save time, and save money. And have some fun while you’re at it.

AI adoption in shopping is growing steadily, though demographic variations in this trend may influence where brands prioritize their investments.That’s why Nielsen IQ and the DSI teamed up on a combined report featuring consumer attitudes about AI in commerce, and brands leaders POV on how it is impacting their work and investments. Jack O’Leary, Director, eCommerce Strategic Insights at NIQ joins with the consumer numbers, and our own Lauren Livak Gilbert shares the brand data for a holistic view of the trajectory of AI in commerce.

Welcome to the very first episode of Unpacking the Digital Shelf: B2B Edition. To kick off this new series, we are joined by industry veteran Jason Hein. Jason brings over a decade of merchandising experience from McMaster-Carr and a foundational role building out Amazon Business's industrial catalog—but more importantly, he brings a fantastic sense of humor and a gift for storytelling that makes complex data actually fun to talk about. Today, he’s unpacking his 5 C’s of Product Data framework, sharing how to translate heavy technical jargon for everyday buyers, and giving us the exact tactical blueprint to build a data model that scales. Let's unpack it.

The digital shelf has been joined by the agentic shelf — with AI agents no longer just tools in our marketing arsenal, they are emerging as a powerful, influential consumer segment actively shaping discovery, evaluation, and purchase decisions.

In this audio version of a keynote from the Digital Shelf Summit, Jason Carmel, Global Creative Data Lead at VML, explains why enterprises need to re-think their marketing strategy to account for consumer machine agents, and how to do so while preserving authentic human connection.

Many brands spend years trying to earn their place on retail shelves. They pitch buyers, fight for space and hope their products will sell once they finally get there.

But what if you flipped that model? What if you built so much demand online that retailers actually came looking for you? That’s exactly what today’s guest has done. Jaimee Vilela is the Managing Director of Cooki Haircare, a fast-growing Australian haircare brand she acquired just a few years ago. At the time, the business was doing just four sales a day. Since then, Jaimee and her team have transformed Cooki into a multi-million-dollar brand powered by a passionate community of customers and a strong digital-first strategy. That demand has translated into retail momentum, with Cooki now ranged across the Go Vita network across Australia.

In this episode, Jaimee shares the unconventional path from small eCommerce acquisition to national retail presence, and what it takes to build a brand that customers and retailers both want.

So it turns out when you survey brand marketers, and then their consumers, you all are not on the same page. But if you get on the same page, if you get past logic and really mine the emotional layer of your consumers, you will strike gold. Sarah Levinson is a behavioral strategist for D2C, B2B, for brands small and large, and she has honed survey strategies and deep data analysis to deeply understand what consumers want, and really don’t want, from your brand. That can turn your total addressable market into your immediate addressable market, and help you build the consumer relationship that meets them where they are at.