Retail Is Breaking Its Old Rules

Hi friends!

This week marks a return to the regular cadence of Sell!Sell!Sell! and boy is it busy 🐝

Commerce is getting pulled in multiple directions at once. Retailers are adjusting to TikTok Shop’s pace, brands are reallocating budget from ads to live moments, and platforms are experimenting with how much trust and community they can carry at scale.

Let’s dig in.

🚨 This Week’s Social Commerce Headlines

(January 13th)

🧠 TikTok Shop Is Reshaping How Retailers Operate

The National Retail Federation (NRF 2026) event took place in New York this week and retailers started to speak more openly about how TikTok Shop is changing the mechanics of selling. Products surface through creator content, move quickly once attention hits, and convert without sending shoppers through a traditional storefront. For many brands, that flow looks nothing like their existing retail playbook.

What’s catching retailers off guard is the pace. Demand spikes are harder to predict, inventory moves faster, and creators often act as the primary point of sale. Some brands are leaning into the model. Others are still trying to map it onto systems built for a very different kind of commerce.

Marketing Dive

🎤 Live Events Are Becoming a Primary Media Channel

Live events are absorbing budgets that once went to ads. As the global live events industry moves toward $1.36 trillion by 2035, brands are using events to concentrate attention, content, and sales into a single moment instead of spreading spend across fragmented placements. The appeal is less about scale and more about focus.

Unlike traditional advertising, live events create shared experiences audiences actively choose to attend and builts community (more on that below). Brands use that presence to demo products, gather feedback, and drive direct response, with content that often continues circulating long after the event ends.

InformaBTL

👥 PacSun Launches a Community Driven Commerce App

PacSun, the Gen Z clothing brand, is introducing a new app built around community participation, content, and shopping in one place. The goal is to give its Gen Z audience a space that blends culture with commerce rather than pushing everything through traditional ecommerce flows.

The app includes creator content, brand storytelling, and product discovery designed to keep users engaged beyond a single purchase. It’s an attempt to build a more persistent relationship with customers who already spend much of their time inside social platforms.

BoF

🧠 Brand Move of the Week

Starbucks Turns a MrBeast Sponsorship Into a Product Moment

Starbucks didn’t just sponsor MrBeast. It showed up with a drink. The brand partnered with Beast Games to launch the Cannon Ball, a limited-time menu item designed to live inside MrBeast’s content cycle rather than orbit around it. This wasn’t a logo flash or a branded bumper. It was a product built to move while attention was already peaking.

@eatsbynat

New Mr. Beast x Starbucks Cannonball Drink! 🍓 @Starbucks #mrbeastgames #starbucksdrinks #cannonball #starbucks #mrbeast

The execution is tight. The Cannon Ball travels through Beast Games promotion and MrBeast’s wider ecosystem, where audiences don’t passively watch. They act. Starbucks isn’t asking viewers to remember a campaign later. It’s giving them something to order now, while the moment is still warm and the feed is still moving.

The Starbucks x MrBeast collaboration shows how marketing, media, and commerce are starting to merge. Instead of treating sponsorship as awareness and retail as a separate step, the brand collapsed the cycle into a single moment. A creator-led spike of attention became the distribution channel, and the product was designed to move within it. It’s not a replacement for ads or retail, but a demonstration of how brands are beginning to capture demand at the exact moment it forms.

📎 Read more

🔭 Trend Watch

Lets break down Community Commerce

Community commerce keeps showing up more and more and gets described as a tactic, but brands using it seriously are treating it more like infrastructure. The idea isn’t new. Bring customers closer. Let them participate. Turn engagement into sales. What’s changed is where that participation lives and how directly it connects to checkout.

Pacsun’s co-creation platform is a good example. Instead of building another transactional app, the brand is creating space for its audience to contribute ideas, content, and feedback that can turn into real products. That mirrors a broader shift. Community is moving from comment sections and Discords into environments where contribution has economic weight.

What’s emerging looks less like loyalty programs and more like shared ownership without equity. Customers help shape what gets made, how it’s marketed, and who it reaches. Commerce becomes a byproduct of participation rather than the stated goal. That’s why these efforts feel slower at first and stickier over time.

Community commerce isn’t about scale on day one. It’s about reducing distance between brands and demand. The brands leaning into it aren’t chasing virality. They’re building places where attention lingers long enough to turn into something durable.

Ok, that’s it for today. See you next week. In the meantime, Sell! Sell! Sell! 🫡