Trend 1: Convenience as Strategy

Convenience is at the center of retail priorities in 2025. For consumers, it begins with product discovery and extends to a simple trial, purchase, and returns process. These elements drive customer loyalty. Expectations have increased due to the promises that new generation technologies bring. We will explore in Trend 2 why the answer is not in Gen AI, at least this year. Going deeper:

• Product discovery has become critical as shoppers demand better experiences and in-stock products. Retailers implement technologies to create a more human shopping experience, similar to Mom-and-Pop stores, but at scale, sadly we are still far.
  
  
• Returns are another focus, and there has been some progress, Amazon now accepts returns at gas stations, embedding the process into consumer’s daily routines, while El Corte Inglés allows returns from multiple brands and formats at a single location.
  
  
• Predictability across product discovery, purchase and returns is essential. Consumers want to find and buy the right product, confident that buying or exchanging it won’t involve unnecessary effort.
• However, challenges remain, such as constant broken size sets at stores or insufficient information when buying online.

Retailers that prioritize these areas will gain customer retention and repeat purchases in a competitive market, bonus points if the shopping experience has a social element and is fun. At the end of the day, humans are physical and social, and value minimum effort. First principles.

Trend 2: Limits of Emerging Technologies and Gen AI

Trend 3: The Growing Impact of Uncertainty

Fashion retailers constantly search to improve efficiency, selling more with less stock. Over the past five years, the global stock-to-sales ratio has improved by over 10%, with top performers exceeding 20%, according to Nextail data. Technologies like forecasting, automation, and RFID have driven this progress.

The BoF-McKinsey State of Fashion Report 2025 highlights platforms such as o9, Nextail, and Blue Yonder that automate demand forecasting and inventory allocation. However, scaling newer technologies like Gen AI faces hurdles. Adoption has been limited by organizational and technical challenges.

In fact, only 10% of Gen AI projects advanced from prototype to production in 2024, as implementation often requires redesigning operating models. Technically, Gen AI's failures are unpredictable, unlike for instance RFID, where errors were predictable and solvable.

When I worked on RFID trials at Inditex, we faced issues that could be explained by physics, human behavior or economics, once addressed deployment was fast. Today, RFID achieves nearly 99% stock accuracy compared to sub-80% without it. With Gen AI, the current unpredictability of mistakes limits its value in mission-critical areas.

Global uncertainty remains a major challenge. According to the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, uncertainty has now reached historic highs, excluding 2020, driven by factors such as geopolitical instability and trade conflicts. This unpredictability makes planning difficult and leaves retailers vulnerable to sudden disruptions.

Traditional top-down merchandising systems are too rigid, and human-driven decisions too slow due to the large data sets involved, manual operations and consensus requirements. During my work in retail operations, at Zara and other fashion retailers, I’ve seen how being quick to adapt becomes a competitive advantage in uncertain times. When future conditions are unclear, the ability to execute quickly becomes key. This adaptability is vital in avoiding the common problem of overstocked and understocked stores for the same product.

In 2025, retailers that adopt systems that allow for constant reassessment of inventory levels across channels and geographies based on fresh data will outperform those relying on traditional approaches. According to Nextail data, the best-performing retailers using in-season optimization technologies can achieve over 5 percentage points higher sell-through rates, translating to more than 10% gross profit growth for the average fashion retailer.