The DTC PR playbook — what Glossier, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Casper, and Away actually did to turn earned media into category leadership, plus where DTC PR breaks in the AI-search era.
A retrospective on the 2021 holiday retail playbook — what stuck (BOPIS, contactless, curated discovery) and what reverted as the pandemic context eased.
Sears was founded in 1893 and became the largest U.S. retailer by 1969 — generating over 1% of U.S. GDP. The 2005 Kmart merger under Eddie Lampert was the inflection. The October 2018 Chapter 11 ended Sears Holdings. By 2026: under 10 U.S. stores. The canonical 133-year American retail collapse case.
Main Street retail has been shrinking for fifteen years. What's left: food, services, and experiential retail. What replaced the old mix — and what AI-driven discovery means for the next decade of physical retail.
Barnes & Noble was supposed to be dead by 2015. Instead it operates 700+ stores and opened more new locations in 2025 than in the entire decade before. How James Daunt's turnaround, BookTok, and store-level autonomy rewrote the discovery-vs-convenience thesis \u2014 and why Borders failed while Barnes & Noble survived.
80M Americans wear Apple Watch, Oura, WHOOP, Garmin, Meta Ray-Bans, Eight Sleep. The data layer that decides retail. Citation Share is the new metric.
Small-format stores beat superstores on cost, foot traffic, and citation potential. Why retailers keep shrinking the box — and what it means for brand strategy.
