Maveron partner Natalie Dillon joins Brian and Alicia to challenge the consumer-collapse narrative: sentiment sits at post-9/11 lows while spending breaks records. Natalie sheds light on truths of today’s consumer, who is skeptical but continually shopping amid a cultural undertow where AI adoption stays surprisingly shallow, Gen Z turns skeptical, and analog living re-emerges as status. PLUS: Are cults the new future of commerce?

Ben Dietz convenes Casey Lewis (After School), Daisy Alioto (Dirt), and Erica Chen (Media Futures Group, WPP) on the collapse of the wall between editorial and commerce. Publishers are shipping perfume, brands are hiring writers, and the relationship forming in your inbox isn’t human-to-human anymore.

The funnel most marketers grew up on – see the ad, click, browse, add to cart, buy – did not gradually erode. It came apart almost overnight, as shoppers got comfortable discovering, deciding, and buying inside social feeds and LLMs, often in a single moment.

You are a VIP customer, and the bot still asks for your email. Klaviyo's Kelly Thacker on why "service is the new storefront" is finally more than a slogan.

Particle scaled from one million to ten million sends a month in weeks, not years, and doubled revenue. Here's the system behind it.

Social is where discovery happens now, but it is rented land. You can build an audience of hundreds of thousands and still not own the relationship, because the algorithm decides who sees you and the landlord keeps raising the rent. Recorded live at K:LDN 2026 in London, this conversation is about turning borrowed reach into something a brand actually owns. It pairs the person building the tooling with the person living the problem every day.

Jake Cohen, VP of Insights at Klaviyo, and Tim Martin-Harvey, Head of eCommerce at The Bottle Club, sit down with Phillip Jackson at K:LDN to discuss why memory is the new durable advantage. Tim shares how The Bottle Club collected checkout context to better understand unique customer needs and bheavioral nuances to create more impactful campaigns. And Jake unpacks how other brands can apply the same discipline, interpreting engagement (not total spend) as a loyalty measure.

K:LDN 2026 opened to more than a thousand merchants and set a clear vision with several key product announcements: Klaviyo’s expanding toolset has become powerful enough to let a brand of any size operate at a scale that once required a full team. The promise of personalization, long marketed but rarely delivered, has finally become something all brands can ship. Phillip Jackson sits down live with Klaviyo CMO Jamie Domenici and IDC research director Roger Beharry Lall to break down the trends that are shaping the future of retail and Klaviyo as an organization: the slow collapse of the linear funnel as shoppers move across LLMs, social, and search; the evolution of AI from a disparate chat window to an embedded experience where marketers work; and how the public beta of Klaviyo’s new agent, Composer, is helping marketers create campaigns rooted in data from hundreds of thousands of merchants.

On this edition of After Dark: Spielberg's flop(?), GLP-1s are melting nightlife, Midjourney's health pivot, and why this is the Bad Place. this episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members – sign up now at futurecommerce.com/plus.

Phillip and Brian run the docket: why "proof of work" is the new luxury signal, what the AI export-control fight shares with a brand guarding its trade secrets, and how AI is flooding the patent office while quietly favoring incumbents. But perhaps the most profound part of the conversation lies in two trends taking internet culture by storm. "Tasteslop" and Korea's "dopamine sites" appear as distinct ideas, but they’re actually two faces of the same impulse: consumption stripped down to pure signal.