Loyalty Gives You Options

There are probably at least two ways to define loyalty.

• Customer Purchases At High Rates, Repeatedly.
• Customer Pays Attention To You.

I can't even believe I'm typing the second bullet point. But 2026 is not 1996. Or 2006. Or 2016. Times change. Attention matters. In my website visitation models, each visit adds to future value, regardless whether the customer purchases anything or not. Which means each time the customer reads your Instagram Post or watches your YouTube Video or actually bothers to look at your Email Campaign, the "attention" is adding long-term value. 

I've measured it.

Loyalty gives you options.

Want an example?

Do you know which post I wrote in 2025 that attracted the most eyeballs?

Are you ready?

It's this one.

I mean, are you kidding?

When your customer pays attention to you, you are able to steer your customer in interesting directions.

What are the four topics I write about that generate the most email communications from you to me?

1. Headphones, In-Ear Monitors in Particular.
2. Politics ... I don't generally write about politics, but some of you will somehow connect a topic to either "Trump is God" or "Trump is Satan".
3. The impact of "paper" in marketing. Just a stunning thought given it is 2026 and it has been 30 years since paper mattered.
4. Pickleball!

Almost none of the topics have anything to do with what pays the bills.

At least directly.

It's hard to ascertain what talking about Headphones and Pickleball does for business. It can't hurt. Someday I'll expand into another hobby (weather), and we'll see what happens.

Loyalty gives you options. You get to step outside of "TODAY 60% OFF PLUS 85% OFF CLEARANCE!" In 2026, we need to step outside of our standard messaging and start relating to our customer base.

 

Months to Loyalty

When you know how likely a customer is to repurchase in any given month, you can also derive a fun metric that I call "Months to Loyalty".

• Months to Loyalty = How Many Months It Takes, On Average, For a First-Time Buyer To Achieve A Fifth Purchase.

Mind you, few customers ever achieve loyalty status, so the metric applies to the vast minority of customers who ever become loyal. The metric informs us of the long process the customer must go through to ever become highly profitable.

I reshaped yesterday's data, so I could calculate Months to Loyalty.

At the bottom of the table you see two metrics.

• Months to 5x = Average # of Months Until the Customer Buys for the 5th Time.
• Months to 10x = Average # of Months Until the Customer Buys for the 10th Time.

In this case, Months to Loyalty is 28.6 ... it takes the average customer who becomes loyal 28.6 months to get there ... about 2.5 years.

28.6 months. In this case, it means you have a lot of work to do for several years to nudge the customer to loyal (5x) status ... realizing of course that very few customers will make it there.

The more months required to generate loyal status (i.e. a fifth order), the more you focus actually needs to be on new customers. When the metric is lower (i.e. 12 months) you can leverage all of those wonderful loyalty tactics you've been craving to implement.

A Beautiful Retention Table

This table shows the conditional probability of a customer repurchasing, given that the customer in the frequency band has not repurchased in the previous "x" months. Look at this beautiful retention table!

The secrets of your business are outlined in this table.

For instance, you've heard me harp incessantly about the first three months following a first order being critically important in the development of a customer. That fact reveals itself in this table ... look down the "1x Buyer" column ... in this example, the customer has a 14.0% chance of buying again in the first month, then 7.8% in month two (conditional on the fact that the customer did not purchase again in month one), then 4.9% in month three. From there, the customer slowly fades away.

If you knew you had three months to make a difference with new buyers, would you do anything differently? If the answer is "yes", would the company you work for allow you to do anything differently? The answer is frequently "no", and that's why ecommerce (outside of marketplaces) is so darn hard ... customers churn too often, mostly due to a failure to imagine an experience for the new customer within three months of acquisition.

The Score

You probably don't want to read three hundred plus pages, so if that's you, Pablo Torre has a podcast interview with the author that is fabulous (click here). And if an hour of you time is too big a commitment, here is a couple of minutes (click here).

But if you want all of the details at a nominal cost, buy the book.

Last week a long-time friend sent me one of my posts from 2009. He said "It is incredible to see how much has not changed since 2009." Well, one of the reasons things don't change is that the way we keep score has not changed.

In email marketing, it is open rates, click-through rates, and occasionally conversion rates. This is how most email marketers keep score. If I suggest that the email marketer keep score via profit generated, I'm speaking a bizarre language that does not fit within their scoring/ranking system. Once the scoring system is set, it is incredibly difficult to make changes.

In search or paid social, it is ROAS ... return on ad spend. Amazingly, the digital marketing folks figured out how to create something unique albeit indifferent from the past ... they took the inverse of the old-school "ad-to-sales ratio" ... and converted it to ROAS.

• ROAS = 1 / (ad-to-sales ratio).

Once ROAS became entrenched as the scoring system for digital marketing, you're crazy to suggest that the marketer rank activities by profitability. You have one simplified metric that works across industries and the professionals who work within those industries.

In old-school catalog marketing, the ranking score was "dollars per book". Two generations of catalog marketers used either "dollars per book" or a version of "dollars per book" fueled by matchback analytics. Regardless, there was a way to keep score, to rank segments/customers, and if you ever suggested anything different (i.e. applying the organic percentage to each segment) you were viewed as being insane. Ask any catalog agency, vendor, or paper-centric professional if a catalog brand should work with me and you'll get a hearty "noooooooo" from the individual/organization. You'll get a "no" because I use a different scoring mechanism than they use.

I had the unfortunate experience of rating pickleball players at my club of 1,800+ members. I computerized the process ... your rating (2.0 - 5.0) was based on whether you won matches. If you won a match against somebody you should beat, your rating increased from 3.50 to 3.51. If you won a match against somebody you should never beat, your rating increased from 3.50 to 3.59. The same dynamic happened in reverse if you lost. People HATED the system. HATED IT!!! I essentially changed the scoring/ranking process from a human saying "you're good, the other player isn't good" to a scoring/ranking process based on winning. Shouldn't the better player win more often? That was a fact that many players simply couldn't accept. They wanted a different ranking system.

Our scoring/ranking systems influence our flexibility with change. When business conditions change, do we change with business conditions, or do we try to fit the change within our scoring/ranking system?

Remember Subscriptions?

There was a time (pre-COVID) when we were told we had to have subscription-based ecommerce business models.

Netflix is a great subscription model ... you don't own anything, you are constantly paying them. You need a new supply of money each month (i.e. your salary), they need a constant supply of fresh content each month. Everybody wins ... especially Netflix.

Of course, you sell widgets. The customer only needs a new widget every two-hundred days, which limits your subscription opportunities to an annual basis.

There's a reason commerce always devolves into a marketplace/mall.

• If you sell everything, then the customer needs you every day.

And if the customer needs you every day, then you can get away with an annual subscription of pre-paid shipping (fused with content, obviously). The rest of us either get to have a sunglasses stand in the mall or we're on our own. There are countless advantages to being on our own, but the work is a lot harder.

Then You Finally Get There!

The customer works really hard ... buying stuff at 40% off, earning rewards, doing the hard work.

I mean, you keep giving the customer points and the customer redeems the points and the machine keeps rolling along. Shouldn't there be an end and a new beginning? Remember Elaine on Seinfeld and her sub card ... each 23 subs and you get a ... 

... and then you start over.

One of the things I learned back in the 2005ish timeframe at Nordstrom was the power of having a "Super Bowl" for the loyal customer. The customer did all this hard work during the year, and if the customer spent $750 the customer was invited to the Anniversary Pre-Sale. It was our Super Bowl, and the customer got to pre-select merchandise, waltz into the store on day one of the event while the commoners were fighting for whatever we had on the sale floor, pick up her order, and walk out of the store while the commoners were shopping.

I remember quantifying something like a $20,000,000 lift that came from this tactic. Just a stupid amount of sales and profit, and it cost us nothing. It probably cost us less than the free subs that Elaine's sub brand had to pay for.

Your loyal customers deserve an annual Super Bowl, an event that "rewards" the customer for having a great year.

You are a smart marketer ... you aren't some wonky Lemonhead giving double and triple points that can be redeemed for 50% off instead of 40% off. Be creative. What is your Super Bowl at your brand? Please don't say it is Cyber Monday.

Culture

Spend a few minutes on LinkedIn and you'll read plenty of thought leadership pieces about corporate culture ... often from individuals who never played a role in creating corporate culture.

Enough about that.

The marketer sets the culture with the customer. The marketer is the one who speaks with the customer or prospect. You'll hear the term "relationship", but it isn't really a relationship, is it? One side has a megaphone and merchandise, the other side is silent, purchasing every 200 days if you are lucky.

What you do between purchase events is "set the culture".

Want an example?

Here is the discount level that one company communicated to me last week Monday - Friday.

• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 50% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off
• 40% Off

That's sixteen communications in five days. They've set the culture. They have NOTHING to say. NOTHING. You're given this gift of setting the culture, and you squander it.

Do you love what you sell? The answer should be an enthusiastic YES! You'd think you couldn't help but scream about your best-selling products or your new creations.

Your customer notices. Your customer knows the culture you promote.

There are professionals who might suggest that this is your "brand". I'm not sold on that. "Brand" is bigger than culture. Culture leads to brand, yes. Amazon can have a ruthless culture and be a brand you purchase from daily.

You likely have hundreds / thousands of employees, but fewer than a dozen actually get to have a relationship with the customer ... get to set the culture with the customer. Be wise about who you assign this precious task to. And if the answer is "C-Level Executives constantly make changes and tell us what to do, that's why we are 40% off three or four times a day", then you work for a company with an intolerably poor culture.

Not The Right Offer

Sometimes we're not aligned with our customer.

I have no idea why AI added the text "Mt. Loyalty" to ... Mt. Loyalty.

Our poor friend, the Lemonhead, he's experiencing what we do. He's exhausted, and we offer him 30% off a tent with a port-a-potty when he needs a Buc-ee's.

Now, if you work at Starbucks, you know exactly what the customer wants ... a sugary and addictive drink to somehow make it through another day. Because the customer purchases something 200 times a year at $7 a pop, yeah, your loyalty efforts are going to work. You can easily make the "right offer" and the "right time". The job is ... too easy.

Your job?

Endlessly hard.

You're forced to sell that stupid tent (above) or a port-a-potty. The customer doesn't want a stupid tent or a port-a-potty.

I recently analyzed a business where the average purchase frequency interval was about 200 days. Might it be a better idea to wait for the customer and find another customer actively interested in buying a tent right now?

Let the customer recharge before forcing the customer back up Mt. Loyalty.

Mt. Loyalty

Oh, it's quite a climb.

I don't know what you've learned about Mt. Loyalty, but that mountain is full of challenges. Did you know that most climbers never even make it to the base camp at 1,000 feet on fictional Mt. Loyalty?

A few years ago I was connected somehow to an EVP of Marketing. This guy was fascinating. He believed he could do the entire marketing function by himself ... no employees. He said his goal was to outsource every function of marketing. His job? Create the discounts and promotions that would be used. He told me that is the only aspect of marketing that adds value. He then said something interesting (paraphrased below).

• "I can sell anything. It does not matter what my company sells a customer. All I need to know is where in the customer lifecycle the customer is and then I create an appropriate promotion to convert the buyer. Merchandise is meaningless."

As you might expect, I believe in the exact opposite thesis.

• It is not easy to climb Mt. Loyalty. What the customer previously purchased and is likely to purchase again in the future, coupled with key inflection points, dictate whether the customer ever becomes loyal.

It's January. You'd think those Cyber Monday customers would be busting down the door to buy from you right now. They're not. That's a timing issue, it's an issue of what the customer previously purchased and is likely to purchase again in the future. The Cyber Monday customer is an out-of-shape customer unable to make the climb up Mt. Loyalty.

Customer Loyalty

Customer Retention and Customer Loyalty are cousins.

1. You can have low retention rates and high loyalty ... if you buy a product that you only need every 3-4 years, you might come back and buy from the company every 3-4 years but you'll come back to the company immediately because you love/trust their products (the iPhone comes to mind).
2. You can have high retention rates and low loyalty ... you might get gas at the local Chevron but also get gas at three other area gas stations.

Most of the ecommerce brands you support have customers with a +/- 25% to 35% annual retention rate. For you, it's terribly hard to generate loyal buyers, and worse, creating a silly loyalty program doesn't move the needle because your merchandise assortment is too limited (small) to foster the number of purchases required to harvest loyal buyers.

If you had the data to graph the relationship, you'd see that loyal buyers grow exponentially as rebuy/retention rates increase linearly. By having an assortment that fosters multiple purchases per year, you accelerate the number of customers who become "loyal".

For my clients, I use a predicted 60% rebuy rate as my level for a customer being "loyal". At that point, the customer prints money for your brand ... the customer is very profitable!

On average, it takes about five (5) purchases before a customer becomes "loyal" across my e-commerce clients. Generate 100 new customers and after 2-3 years you might be lucky to have five of the cohort become loyal ... and most of 'em won't stay loyal.

As I've previously stated, if you want loyal customers, acquire a lot of customers. After you acquire a lot of customers, develop the customers in the first three months following a first purchase. The three-month window after a first purchase is far more important at generating loyal buyers than trying to get a 60% loyal rebuy-rate buyer to increase to 65%.

Money is wasted on loyalty efforts (at low rebuy rate brands) when the money could easily be spent on acquisition and the first three months following a first purchase. But you already knew that.

Customer Retention

You've heard me say this many times before ... Customer Retention is a function of your Merchandise Assortment.

This doesn't mean you cannot impact rebuy rates ... you can!

But you can only do so much.

In the early 90s at Lands' End we retained about 55% of prior year twelve-month buyers. That's a very high rate. We sold mens/womens casual, mens/womens tailored, kids, home merchandise.

In the late 90s at Eddie Bauer we retained about 45% of prior year twelve-month buyers, even though we had catalogs and e-commerce and stores. Our customers didn't really like us, even though we were a direct competitor to Lands' End.

In other words, similar companies had 45% - 55% rebuy rates. The difference was due to marketing effectiveness and customer trust.

In the first half of the 00s at Nordstrom we retained about 74% of prior year twelve-month buyers. Not only did our customers trust us, but with more skus than people living in Milwaukee we had a breadth of merchandise to allow customers to continually purchase all year long.

I have gift-centric clients with rebuy rates around, say, 20%. Those brands might be brilliant marketers, but with a limited assortment for nine months of the year rebuy rates will be suppressed.

Starbucks operates a whole 'nuther business model. When you sell a product that can be purchased daily (or more often), you'll retain even more customers on an annual basis ... maybe 90%. Thought Leaders will tell you to emulate what Starbucks does in an effort to create your own loyal customer base, but unless you sell an addictive product that can be purchased daily, nothing that Starbucks does applies to your business. Nothing.

If you sell products that are needed often (like Starbucks), your retention rates will be high.

If you sell products that are not needed often (i.e. a Lexus SUV), your retention rates are incredibly low.

Customer Retention is a function of what you sell. There is no right/wrong rebuy rate, given that rates are dependent on how often customers need what you sell and the depth of your merchandise assortment. Rates can vary based on marketing effectiveness ... +/- 5% off of a baseline is common ... if a company has a 30% rebuy rate, the good marketer will hit 35%, the bad marketer will hit 25%.

Unlocking Customer Value: Merchandise

Much of the "unlocking customer value" thesis surrounds customer service and discounts / promotions / loyalty programs.

The concept behind a marketplace or a mall is to aggregate all merchandise interests in one place, thereby capturing more customer spend.

Your business isn't fundamentally different. Smaller, sure. A much more limited assortment? Yes. But the concepts are similar. Zappos sells socks. If you buy shoes, you might need socks. If you convince the customer to buy socks, you get multiple benefits. Cash you wouldn't have otherwise generated. Multiple-category purchases that increase long-term customer value. The possibility of between-cycle purchases that wouldn't otherwise exist. Yes, you just unlocked customer value.

In one of my hobbies (headphones), there is an iem guru named Crinacle. He reviewed iems, he sold iems, then he began to sell his own iems (no small endeavor). He began with a limited run (something like a thousand) of his own creation, called Project Meta. That thing sold out in an hour.

• Lesson:  Unlock customer value by offering something that won't be available later today.

From there, he released his next model, the Daybreak. V-shaped to Neutral sounding, good value.

Recently, he released his Diablo and Divine iems, planar drivers. The Diablo is bassy!

And then? He released a headphone "dongle", a device that works between your iPhone and your iem, a portable dac/amp, the Protocol Max. There we go ... a new category ... he's unlocking customer value, isn't he? Now the customer can spend additional money not otherwise generated via iems.

It's an old playbook.

Back in the early 90s at Lands' End we sprung up specialty businesses like weeds! A $70,000,000 specialty business was generally (on average) 70% incremental ... meaning $49,000,000 was "unlocked customer value" and $21,000,000 was cannibalized from the core business.

And that's where things get tricky. You have to run a p&l not on the $70,000,000 but instead on on the $49,000,000 of unlocked customer value. The expense structure for a $70,000,000 business is matched up with just $49,000,000 of revenue. If the p&l works, you've truly unlocked customer value. If it doesn't work? Try something else.

Yeah, I know, that's a lot of hard work.

There's a reason people default to loyalty points and customer service topics ... they're infinitely easier to implement. The problem, of course, is that you are selling the same merchandise assortment, so your ability to leverage these tools is limited. But there are tools. For example, Headphones.com offers 365 day returns on your headphone purchases. I mean, if you can't figure out if you like your headphones after 365 days, well, that's not the fault of the brand now is it? They're taking on enormous expenses, but they are also taking away all customer risk ... that unlocks customer value, it's hard to say how much, obviously.

When somebody suggests that Sears didn't "unlock customer value", woo-boy, that's a whopper. What were Sears Craftsman Tools? Tax preparation services? Sears Automotive? They went out of their way to find ways to serve their customers. You might not have liked the presentation of merchandise in stores, you might have thought their stores were dingy and old-fashioned, you might have found their departments under-staffed. Likely all true. All of those topics are operational in nature, obviously, those are all things we should be doing every single day to keep the wheels on the bus.

Unlocking customer value is something very different.

Which brings us to tomorrow's topic:  Customer Retention.

Unlocking Customer Value, It Is INCREDIBLY HARD And Likely Doesn't Work

Have you ever walked the vendor hall at a trade show? You get an immediate view into the mindset of trade journalists and vendors when it comes to unlocking customer value.

• "Connect with us on LinkedIn and you get a free pen!"
• "Download our white paper on customer relationship marketing and we'll enter you into a drawing for a free iPad."
• "Spin the wheel to discover the discount you earn on our AI-based email segmentation solution."

Yes, technically those are all elements of the "unlocking customer value" playbook. They're mindless and ineffective methods. But they are in the playbook.

It is INCREDIBLY HARD to unlock customer value ... which is why vendors and trade organizations default to free pens and drawings for a free iPad.

I recently analyzed a brand that had the following dynamics:

2015:

• 35% rebuy rate, $200 spend per repurchaser, $70.00 customer value. Average price per item purchased = $40.00.

2025:

• 35% rebuy rate, $265 spend per repurchaser, $92.75 customer value. Average price per item purchased = $53.00.

Did this brand "unlock customer value"? On the surface, yes! In reality, no. This company just raised prices by 2.9% per year for ten years ... approximately at the rate of inflation. The company discontinued old items, then introduced "new" items that were comparable but were more expensive.

Just for kicks and giggles, I asked Google to share with me what it means to "unlock customer value".

My goodness, is this a tired list. Relevant and efficient personalized shopping experiences? Reducing friction? Offering exclusive discounts? BOPIS? That's what Sears should have focused on?

Google AI continues.

Optimizing inventory is unlocking customer value? Is it any wonder we're in trouble?

AI wouldn't come up with this nonsense unless is scraped the internet to learn from Thought Leaders.

A brand that did a reasonably good job of unlocking customer value over time was Nordstrom. They were taken private last year. What happened to their stock price prior to being taken private?

Look at the 2015 - 2025 timeframe ... this is a retail brand that unlocked customer value as well as anybody ... they lost 69% of their market value over that time ... if you adjust for inflation the story is much worse.

So ... it's clear we really don't know what we're talking about when we talk about Unlocking Customer Value.

Tomorrow, we'll start exploring ideas for increasing retention, potentially loyalty, and profitability.

Unlocking Customer Value

Over on LinkedIn a Trade Journalist (#thoughtleader) assembled a white board argument illustrating the demise of Sears. The individual concluded that Sears focused on Real Estate when they should have focused on Unlocking Customer Value.

A former Sears employee chimed in that the company focused on unlocking customer value every single day.

I worked at Lands' End in the early 90s ... that company was likely the best I'd seen at "unlocking customer value" during that era.

I worked at Eddie Bauer in the late 90s ... a company that didn't perform well. That company worked every single day to "unlock customer value" via marketing tactics.

I worked at Nordstrom in the first two-thirds of the 00s ... a company that performed incredibly well. That company worked every single day to "unlock customer value" via merchandising strategy. Hint - you can unlock a crap-ton of customer value when customers love your merchandise and your merchandise is expensive.

I've worked with 300+ clients since founding my consultancy. I've yet to see a client fail to "unlock customer value". They're all trying. Hard. Of course these "brands" fail, everybody fails. But it's not for a lack of effort. The dumbest of companies still work hard to unlock customer value.

"Unlocking Customer Value" is something that outsiders say. Trade Journalists. Consultants. Agencies. Professors. They'll point to Starbucks or Target or Apple ... which only further demonstrates their inexperience with actual work at an actual brand. The rules for Starbucks, Target, and Apple are fundamentally different than are the rules at Wally's Widgets.

Retail is HARD WORK. And newsflash ... the people working in retail are not mindless zombies who somehow haven't conceived the idea of "Unlocking Customer Value".

There are two situations where "Unlocking Customer Value" becomes incredibly hard.

1. When merchandise productivity is in decline.
2. When your industry is being structurally disrupted.

Both situations are ugly. 

1. When customers don't like what you sell (think Lands' End in 2015-2016 when, as the kids say, "things happened"), "unlocking customer value" is terribly difficult. If anything, your customer base "unlocks value" by purchasing overstocked liquidation junk at 70% off, bailing you out of a catastrophic inventory dilemma. 
2. When you are being structurally disrupted (as retailers and catalogers were in the past quarter century), you are "unlocking customer value" by pushing customers online. The problem is that there are consequences. As you (smartly) pushed your customers online, you emptied out the store. Once the store is emptied out, why is it there? It shouldn't be there, it's unprofitable! That's the point in time when Real Estate has value. You can slow-play that one for decades if you like, you can potentially go bankrupt, restructure everything, and move forward. You can just slog through for a half-decade or decade and not be terribly profitable. You can find a buyer, go private, and do the hard work in secret. Either way, there are consequences. There are always consequences. Same thing in catalog marketing. You (smartly) move your customers online, then the variable cost of the catalog becomes an encumbrance to your profit and loss statement. You either cut the cord, you slow-play it for ten or fifteen years and contract, or you ride it into the sunset. There are always consequences.

If you "observe" or "write" about the industry, you don't have to "deal" with actual challenges. This means you get to assign blame, but you're never in a situation where you are assigned accountability.

We can argue "how" well "brands" managed structural disruption.

It's quite another thing to suggest that "brands" didn't "unlock customer value". 

Handing Off The Baton

That final scene in Stranger Things, where the baton was handed off from the kids who became adults to the next generation of kids, that's some good stuff.

I've watched my new subscribers and unsubs post-COVID. There are more unsubs than new subscribers. Not a big shift, but more. I recognize many of the unsubs ... some have been reading this blog for two decades. There's a clear trend.

1. Many (most) unsubs are people either no longer working at catalog brands or are people who have likely retired from catalog brands.
2. New subs largely represent a new generation of marketers, and their interests are "different" ... which is reflected in the different direction I've taken my writing post-COVID.

The baton is being handed off.

In track and field, when the baton is handed off, the next runner gets to run that leg. The influence of the prior runner is only reflected by the position the new runner possesses in relation to other competitors.

A year ago (ish) a catalog professional reached out to me, commenting on how this person wanted the "new generation" to "embrace catalogs". This professional mentioned that he was trying to teach younger professionals about the art and science of catalog marketing, but "they just don't seem to care".

Correct. They don't care. They don't care about merge/purge theory. The don't care about wrongly matching social orders to a catalog. They don't care about co-ops/lists. They don't think that #printisback. They don't care about the "fact" that 77% of Gen-Z prefers print. They don't care about postal discounts. They don't care about postal advocacy in politics. They don't care about order curves. They don't care about QR codes printed on page 128. They don't care about page 128. They don't care about remails. They don't care about RFM segmentation.  

They don't care. You handed the baton off to them. It's their race now. You can cheer them on. You can't tell them how to run. It's out of your control. 

And I get it, for many readers that is frustrating. But it was that way when you were young. When you were a young professional, you played a role in shifting retail from downtowns to suburban malls ... you played a role in moving catalogs from big books to monthly small books. Somebody wanted you to embrace tradition. You didn't care. They handed the baton off to you, you ran with it. You ran your own race.

In 2026, we're increasingly handing off the baton. It's a good thing!

More important - over the next five years, the ecommerce generation hands the baton off to the AI generation. That's gonna be something to watch.