Frontiers in Retailing

Retailing is a large component of a country’s economy and is an extremely dynamic industry as it responds to changing consumer tastes on the one hand and technological advances on the other hand. Especially in the last decade, due to the confluence of a number of societal and technological developments, retailing has seen massive change. Yet, these developments are ongoing, which implies that retailing will continue to be disrupted in the next decade at an accelerating pace. The high-level aims of this course are to develop an understanding of some basic frameworks to analyze retail, identify the broad societal and technological trends that are shaping and enabling retailing and how they fit into the frameworks, and project the trends and their impacts into the future to predict how retailing might evolve. And to take a deep dive into specific trends and topics of high importance to retailing today and in the near future. The course is targeted towards students who will benefit from a high-level understanding of the retail industry and its current and expected future dynamics, specifically, retail industry practitioners, entrepreneurs and investment analysts. We will take a deep dive into each topic, followed by a discussion of relevant prominent and pathbreaking companies. This will be followed by in-person discussions with C-level speakers from prominent companies. In past years, speakers have included the CEOs of Macy’s, Saks, Warby Parker, Rent the Runway, RealReal, Revolve and retail startups.