Introduction

Coresight Research is a research partner of Shoptalk Fall 2026, taking place September 29–October 1 at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee. In this report, we present highlights from the morning sessions of Day 3, covering three themes.

1. David’s Bridal and Equinox Sell Past the Core Product—A bridal retailer and a gym operator add planning, health and hospitality services around their core business.
2. Crocs and Kenneth Cole Market Through Entertainment—Micro-dramas, a mascot, a TV channel and a celebrity music video used as marketing.
3. Claire’s and The Children’s Place Check AI Against the Store—Two chief merchandising officers on AI guardrails, consistent pricing and hiring.

SHOPTALK FALL 2026, DAY 3 MORNING

1. David’s Bridal and Equinox Sell Past the Core Product

From the dress to the wedding plan

For 75 years David’s Bridal sold the dress, which is one of 300 steps in a wedding, Kelly Cook, CEO at David’s Bridal, said. The company has since packed four years of innovation into 18 months to build its business model around the whole planning process, and a bride buys 15 or more outfits in the 18 months before her wedding.

Pearl, the company’s planning tool, starts from the bride’s stress rather than from a product. Elina Vilk, President and Chief Business Officer at David’s Bridal, said a newly engaged 26-year-old faces more than 300 tasks over 18 months to plan a $50K event that will be photographed and judged. Pearl builds a vision board, shows venues and sets out the plan week by week. It also connects the bride with florists, with Shutterfly and with save-the-date cards, and the company has built advertising tools for the next stage, when the couple moves in together and the bride decides on everything from toothpaste to furniture. Vilk said AI is a technical solution, not the way the company solves the problem, and urged the audience to go deep into the customer’s problem and solve it.

The store fleet is changing with the model. David’s Bridal used to build 15K-square-foot stores and is moving to an asset-light, more profitable estate, Cook said. It will size down stores, opened 40 outlets in three weeks after finding the US middle market collapsing and is expanding a shop-in-shop it tested with Liverpool in Mexico. Its competition has changed too: the company owns a joint venture that designs and makes gowns in 40 factories around the world and sells wholesale to the boutiques that were once its rivals. Cook summed up the confidence the changes take: “Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a row boat and taking tartar sauce with you.”

Tying the Knot Between Tradition and Transformation: Elina Vilk and Kelly Cook of David’s Bridal, moderated by Chris Walton of Omni Talk
Source: Shoptalk Fall

From the gym to the hotel

Equinox, which has 118 clubs and opens its 119th in Playa Vista next week, calls itself a high-performance luxury lifestyle company built on movement, nutrition, recovery and community. Marc Mastronardi, President at Equinox, said the company wants to be part of members’ daily lives, from diagnosis to delivery, inside the club, the community and the hotel. It opened its first hotel, with a sleep lab, in Hudson Yards in 2019. It has since launched Optimized, a $40K-a-year program for managing health, and Arc, a women’s health program run by trained coaches with an advisory board of doctors.

Left to right: Marc Mastronardi, President of Equinox and Kendra Bracken-Ferguson of BrainTrust
Source: Shoptalk Fall

The data side is still young. Equinox records every machine and class, and members can connect a ring or a watch so the app can recommend a program for the day based on sleep and health cycle, a feature Mastronardi put in its early stages. The core offer remains people: Equinox sells the skill of its trainers and hires the top 1% of group fitness instructors.

We believe David’s Bridal and Equinox are both turning a single purchase into a longer relationship, from wedding planning to setting up a home at David’s Bridal and from workouts to sleep and health data at Equinox.

2. Crocs and Kenneth Cole Market Through Entertainment

Shows in place of ads

David’s Bridal has carried the same customer focus into marketing. The company said brides watch eight to 10 hours of video a week, and it bought Love Stories TV and built a TV show on the idea that weddings no longer have rules. According to David’s Bridal, 90% of brides now reach its ecosystem and the aim is to keep them there.

Kenneth Cole Productions took its name from a piece of staging. With no money for space at a shoe show, Kenneth Cole got a city permit, of the kind issued for utilities or film shoots, to park a trailer on 5th Avenue. He renamed the company and sold footwear to Saks and Bloomingdale’s. “Content for us is everything,” said Jed Berger, CEO at Kenneth Cole Productions.

 

The company launched Inspire last Wednesday, its first fragrance launch since 2017, with Joe Jonas as global ambassador for a fragrance business of $50M. Jonas pitched the campaign in a video text, according to Berger: “Let’s do a campaign that makes fun of fragrance campaigns, and I guarantee you we’ll sell more that way.” The campaign includes a co-written song called Inspire and a music video. The launch, exclusive to Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack, outsold the year to date in a single day last week, the company reported. Every campaign starts with the business objective. An in-house production team and an organization cut from three teams with separate reporting lines to fewer layers let the company move fast, as when Bravo filmed KJ Dillard over four days for a February season.

Micro-dramas and a mascot

Moving all of its marketing to digital in 2016 let Crocs run global campaigns at scale and laid the base for its growth since 2018, said Carly Gomez, Chief Marketing Officer at Crocs. Its micro-dramas are episodes of 60 to 90 seconds that end on a cliffhanger: one launched on Valentine’s Day this year, and the third season comes out in December. Anne Mehlman, Brand President at Crocs, said the episodes run in the TikTok feed alongside creators, influencers and the brand’s TikTok Shop live streams. For David’s Bridal, TikTok Shop does not work, although a bride can order its wedding dresses on DoorDash, with Las Vegas the top city.

The Cult of Crocs: Customization, Creativity, and Collaborations: Anne Mehlman and Carly Gomez of Crocs, moderated by Sheena Butler-Young of Business of Fashion
Source: Shoptalk Fall

Crocs has also turned its mascot into intellectual property. Niles the Crocodile sits on the rivet on the side of the clog, has more than 35K followers and is working on the 2027 campaign. Mehlman said brands need to mean something, and Niles builds an emotional connection beyond the product. Crocs treats each collaboration as a way to bring in new customers and picks partners that add something and share its values, including LEGO this year, KFC and Post Malone. Gomez said collaborations succeed when they feel authentic to a brand that does not take itself too seriously.

Personalization ties the marketing to the store. Crocs has about 3,000 mono-brand stores with Jibbitz bars, where people spend 45 minutes, and a new store format in China built around personalization. According to Crocs, customers who connect with the brand in a physical store have a higher lifetime value.

We believe entertainment is becoming part of how these brands find customers, but the sales channel differs, as Crocs links its shows to TikTok Shop and David’s Bridal runs its own TV channel.

3. Claire’s and The Children’s Place Check AI Against the Store

The data informs, the merchant decides

Stores were also the test at the noon merchandising session, which ended by calling AI an accelerant, not an answer. For the chief merchants of Claire’s and The Children’s Place, data and AI should cut noise and free up merchants’ time, while the merchant stays accountable for decisions grounded in what the customer sees in the store. Jillian Cueff, Chief Merchandising Officer at Claire’s, said AI can take over “the 80% of the job that we didn’t get into this to do,” leaving merchants time to be creative and visit stores, while the merchant stays responsible for the assortment and whether it sells. Cueff’s rule for the team: “It’s okay to use it, it’s not okay to let it use you.” At Claire’s the stores are the data, so understanding the customer means watching Gen Alpha shoppers handle and discover products in the store.

The Children’s Place said the volume of data can cause “analysis paralysis,” with data often pointing to lower prices, which can cost margin and sometimes customers, or to more SKUs. Its sales split about 50/50 between e-commerce and stores, so stores still matter. Graphic T-shirts are a large business whose average unit retail has fallen, and the company’s AI agents advised buying more SKUs. Kiera Ganann, Chief Merchandising Officer at The Children’s Place, took her executive team into a store, where stacks of shirts on the tables made the range hard to see. The company is now carrying fewer graphic T-shirt styles, for more pricing power and margin dollars while it stays competitive.

Pricing judged from the shopper’s side

The Children’s Place changes prices every week and is testing dynamic pricing by channel from a grid that is automated and then refined. Ganann said that when she shops, the grid can produce confusing prices and too many coupon emails, so the company is now looking at execution as well as analysis. Claire’s has run promotions such as “buy three, get three” for years and wants to show the real value of its merchandise and cut back everyday promotion over time, helped by upgraded loyalty programs. Cueff said piercing is the draw and price is not the main reason people choose where to be pierced, with merchandise “in service of that piercing experience.” Falling birth rates mean Claire’s has to get more from each visit, she added.

Comfort with chaos still matters to both merchants, and the amount of data has made it matter more. Cueff’s first test in hiring is curiosity, a trait she said no one can teach.

David’s Bridal puts curiosity first too: Cook said the company looks for “maniacal curiosity about the world” in every hire, along with passion for the business and selflessness.

We believe the way to manage AI and human interactions in merchandising is to let tools process volume and keep human judgment at the point of customer experience. Retailers should set explicit guardrails stating that AI recommendations (such as SKU counts) are inputs and that a named merchant owns the final decision. They should validate data-driven assortment and pricing decisions in stores and online, from the customer’s point of view, before and after rollout. They should review dynamic pricing and promotion for consistency of customer experience, not only margin. They should also hire and develop merchants for curiosity, resilience and cross-functional awareness (planning, sourcing, regulation, demographics).