Retail Brew recently had the opportunity to attend eTail Boston, where the four-day conference featured many of the retail industry’s heavy hitters, up-and-comers, and even Boston Red Sox mascot Wally the Green Monster.

ETail is pitched as “the e-commerce and omnichannel conference,” and while those subjects were very much top of mind for attendees and speakers, the event covered much more and underscored many of the challenges facing retailers in 2023.

Here are some of our big takeaways:

Priorities are difficult to balance

The e-commerce retail market is increasingly competitive, and that makes it a challenge to balance things like profitability and growth. Sara Resnick, global head of organic growth and SEO at Shutterstock, said during a keynote panel that it’s valuable for retailers to have “North Star metrics”—a main set of figures that complement each other—to track their growth.

• She said those metrics, particularly in SEO, help the company navigate its priorities and achieve short-term goals in a way that’s realistic. “There’s different metrics for SEO and SEM or email marketing, but how do you kind of bring all of those together so they really complement each other really well?”

Resnick’s fellow panelist, Tony DiPaolo, VP of retail solutions at Manhattan Associates, categorized sustainable growth strategies into two buckets: market expansion strategies and market penetration strategies.

Keep reading here.—KM

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Seemingly no bottom line was safe from shrinkage in the second quarter, per a spate of retail earnings. Still, expectations for the rest of the year are beginning to diverge for some of the country’s biggest retailers.

Dick’s Sporting Goods, for example, was arguably the most downbeat. On top of blaming shrinkage for a third of its declining gross margin, the company lowered its annual profit outlook for 2023 in anticipation of theft continuing to rise in the second half of the year.

Target, on the other hand, hinted that loss rates could soon begin to level off. “So far, we’ve only seen indications that loss rates might soon be reaching a plateau, but have not yet seen evidence that loss rates will begin to come down,” CFO Michael Fiddelke told investors.

While that might not sound like the most optimistic statement, it was one of the only times this earnings season that a major retailer indicated there might be a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to shrinkage.

Keep reading here.—AV

Instacart’s initial public offering is a long time coming: The company shelved IPO plans back in 2022 as soaring inflation, the still-ongoing war in Ukraine, and recession concerns shattered confidence in the global economy—a backdrop which eventually led Instacart to slash its market cap by 40%.

But as online grocery stores flagged, Instacart bolstered its competitive advantage with fresh offerings such as a monthly subscription service.

• “Online grocery is the largest category of e-commerce that Amazon doesn’t currently dominate, which is why they want to use their technological know-how to gain an advantage over traditional grocers,” Instacart CEO Fidji Simo wrote in a 2022 blog post.

Now it’s making another play for market dominance, and it’s putting less emphasis on its gig economy roots and more on the possibilities of cutting-edge technology, such as electronic shelf tags, mobile self-checkout, and AI-powered search.

Keep reading here.—AV

Today’s top retail reads.

Good mill hunting: Why T-shirt maker Buck Mason bought a sewing factory in Pennsylvania. (the New York Times)

Footlonging the bill: The advantages and pitfalls of “reference pricing”—such as Subway’s $5 footlong—that, inevitably, got more expensive. (Marketplace)

Tall order: How Starbucks came up with its nomenclature for drink sizes. (CNN)

At the mall, it’s where band tees are the only tees. In Retail Brew, it’s where we invite readers to weigh in on a trending retail topic.

Stores are already beginning to feature holiday merchandise online and in stores.

You tell us: Is August too early to start marketing holiday merchandise? Cast your vote here.

Circling back: Last week, we noted that there are 86 retail companies in the Fortune 1000, and only 13 had a woman CEO as of July 2023, down from last year, according to Heidrick & Struggles data cited by the New York Times. That means that women, who represent 56.5% of retail workers, according to Census data, represent only 15.1% of CEOs at retail companies.

We asked what you thought about that, and more than seven out of 10 of you (70.6%) said it is unacceptable and that women should represent at least half of CEOs at retail companies. Another 23.8% of you agreed that the current level of representation is unacceptable, but thought that women representing half of CEOs at retail companies seemed like an unrealistic or unachievable standard. Another 5.6% of you didn’t know or weren’t sure.