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The Retail Razor Show Podcast

The Retail Razor Show Podcast

Di: Ricardo Belmar | Top Retail Expert
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Cutting through the clutter in retail strategy, retail technology, and executive leadership.


Welcome to The Retail Razor Show — your go-to podcast for bold strategic insights and real-world innovation in the retail industry. We spotlight the trends transforming retail, from agentic AI for frontline retail, agentic commerce, and retail media networks, to the human connection that drives exceptional customer experience and maximizes employee satisfaction. Hosted by RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert, Thinkers360 Top Thought Leader and one of NRF’s 2025 Retail Voices, Ricardo Belmar, and RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert, retail tech startup founder, and CI&T North American Leader, Casey Golden.


Episodes feature:


  • Executive leaders from top retail brands
  • Influential industry analysts and retail strategists
  • Startup founders driving innovation in retail technology
  • Case studies of successful retail tech deployments
  • Straight talk on strategy and innovation


Whether you’re a retail executive, frontline store team leader, tech innovator, product junkie, or customer experience champion, this show delivers actionable strategies to help you lead your business and your teams with clarity, adopt emerging AI and media technologies, and stay ahead in a constantly evolving retail industry.


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Now in its sixth season, The Retail Razor Show is part of the Retail Razor Podcast Network.

Stay sharp. Stay human. Stay ahead.


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About your hosts


Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 & a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Retail, a Top 25 AGI & Careers, a Top 50 Agentic AI & Management, & a Top 100 Digital Transformation & Transformation Thought Leader, plus a Top Digital Voice for 2024 & 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformation and the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the director partner marketing for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is, a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and a Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech!

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Episodi
  • Nobody Has Champion in Their Title

    Nobody Has Champion in Their Title
    Oct 6 2026
    Vicki Cantrell and Dave Finnegan on what retailers and retail tech vendors get wrong about each other.Nobody has "champion" in their title. So how do retail tech vendors find the person who will push a project through? Recorded live at RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden talk with Vicki Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Vendors in Partnership, and Dave Finnegan, Operating Partner and Chief Connection Officer at BlackFinn Partners. The two hosted VIP Connect, a three-hour session held right before RetailClub kicked off, where retailers and solution providers sat at the same table to learn how the other side makes decisions. Retailers think they know how retail tech vendors operate. Vendors think they know what selling to retailers takes. This conversation shows how much both sides have been guessing.with.In This Episode, You'll LearnWhy "we do AI" stopped working as an opener for retail tech vendors, and what great marketers lead with.What's happening behind a vendor rep's pitch, and why the budget question keeps coming up.The ROI question that retailers say makes selling to retailers a real conversation.How to find the champion inside a retail organization when nobody's title says it.The one question a former CIO says changes the whole discovery meeting.Why retailers want vendors to challenge their roadmap.If this episode changes how you think about how retail tech vendors sell to retailers, leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods.Subscribe & FollowHow much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utubeThis is the first of eight episodes we recorded live at RetailClub, rolling out across all four shows on the Retail Razor Podcast Network. Subscribe so you catch every one!Featured guestsVicki Cantrell, https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickicantrell/CEO & Co-founder, Vendors in Partnership - https://vendorsinpartnership.comVicki is a retail strategist and community builder, recognized for relationship building and accelerated growth. She founded Vendors in Partnership and the Vendors in Partnership (VIP) Awards, celebrating partnerships between retailers and solution providers and creating a joint community of these industry experts to advance retail innovation and partnerships.Her career includes Retail Transformation Officer for Aptos, NRF’s SVP Communities and Shop.org, COO of Tory Burch, CIO of Giorgio Armani and Gucci Group. Cantrell is a Vice President for the Retail Orphan Initiative (RetailROI), a non-executive director of Tandy Leather Company, and on the Executive Leadership Committee of the Retail AI Council.Dave Finnegan. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davefinnegan/Operating Partner - Chief Connection Officer, BlackFinn Partners. https://www.linkedin.com/company/blackfinn-partners/Dave Finnegan is an award winning retail innovator, brand anthropologist, and storyteller with over 25 years of experience leading customer experience, tech and digital transformation. He helped launch Build-A-Bear Workshop (CIO) and later served as Chief Experience Officer at Orvis, driving the brand’s most successful era. Dave now advises brands and investors through roles at BlackFinn, the NRF, and NewRoad Capital Partners.As a brand anthropologist and a member of the Explorers Club, in 2022 Dave dedicated a year to studying human experience. He traveled to every continent—interviewing indigenous leaders from the Amazon to Africa, scientists from Antarctica to the Galápagos, and some of the most interesting people in the world, including the librarian of the world’s oldest library at the Monastery of St. Catherine. He is currently pursuing a master’s in Anthropology at Harvard which is helping him to continue his journey to better understand human experience.Chapters00:00 Teaser00:52 Show Intro03:46 VIP Connect Recap: Inside the Room Where Retail Deals Get Made04:18 What Is VIP Connect? The Event Bringing Retailers and Vendors Together05:37 Everyone Says They Do AI — Here's Why That's a Problem06:48 How AI Has Completely Changed the Sales Conversation08:38 What's Really Happening Behind the Vendor's Pitch11:40 The Decades-Old Disconnect Between Business and Tech13:03 Forget Titles — Find the Real Champion15:36 People Buy From People: The Power of Just Asking Questions18:16 Stop Asking "What's Your Problem" — Ask This Instead21:56 Show CloseMeet your hostsHelping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for ...
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    23 min
  • The New Thing Gap - Saying No to New

    The New Thing Gap - Saying No to New
    Sep 15 2026
    The New Thing Gap - What retail took away when it took away the friction, with NYT editor Eric Athas.In 1995, buying a pair of sneakers cost you 30 minutes and five miles of driving. Today it takes about four seconds. New York Times editor Eric Athas spent four years reporting on what that trade did to people, and he has a name for the thing retail deleted: the new thing gap. Eric's book, Saying No to New, is out now. He interviewed Ricardo in 2024 for the consumer research behind it, and Ricardo shows up on page 41 explaining why off-price stores keep shipping in fresh inventory to keep shoppers hunting. This episode puts that quote back in front of the industry that inspired it. Ricardo and Casey take Eric through the uncomfortable version of the question. If the gap between wanting something and owning it was where the customer used to think, what happens to shoppers now that frictionless shopping has closed it? And what happens when agentic commerce deletes the last click? Eric's answer about AI shopping assistants is the line that sticks: we may have built the perfect motivated reasoning machine. This is not an anti-retail hour. Eric says plainly that the goal was never to say no to every new thing. He walks through the Iron Man method for deciding what to let in, the case for useful friction, why Ed O'Brien's research shows we are wrong about familiar things in a predictable direction, and the curb cut test that separates real innovation from innovation theater. Casey pushes him on whether there is a business on the other side of this, built on rediscovery instead of replacement. If you are building for agentic commerce this year or defending a frictionless shopping roadmap to someone who signs the checks, this hour will give you better questions than the ones you walked in with.In This Episode, You'll Learn.• Why the distance between seeing something new and owning it collapsed from 30 minutes and five miles to about four seconds, and what the industry removed along with it• Where useful friction belongs, plus the audit Eric uses to find the access points worth slowing down• Who an agentic commerce agent is optimizing for: the shopper, the retailer, or the company that built the agent• Why an AI shopping assistant that agrees with you is the magic pill effect with a bigger engine• The Iron Man method in three steps: name what matters, refuse what conflicts with it, accept what supports it• What Ed O'Brien's repeat-experience research means for brands that want to sell quality instead of replacement• How the Diderot effect turns one new desk into a new dining table, and what retailers owe people on the failure side of a purchase• The curb cut test for telling genuine innovation from innovation theater, and why Eric changed his mind about AI glasses• Ricardo's story about the UK retailer that cut buyer's-remorse returns in half by asking better questions at the shelf, and why frictionless shopping in reverse is the part retail keeps skippingSupport our sponsors.There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival next week.From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment. Late registration is available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.Subscribe & Follow.How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utubeFeatured guest.Eric Athas. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericathas/Deputy Editor, Newsroom Development & Support. The New York Times. https://...
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    1 ora e 13 min
  • The In-Store Retail Media Screens That Out-Earned Walmart.com

    The In-Store Retail Media Screens That Out-Earned Walmart.com
    Sep 1 2026
    The rise, death, and return of in-store retail media as lived by Mike Hiatt.Around 2010, the in-store retail media screens inside Walmart's stores were bringing in more revenue than Walmart.com. By 2015 the network was gone. Mike Hiatt, Founder & President of Dynamic Retailing, built it. He came to Bentonville to take over Walmart TV, which at the time meant 27-inch screens bolted up in the rafters playing audio that fought with Walmart Radio and lost. He rebuilt it as the Smart Network: eye-level screens, category channels, and five media endcaps that sold out every time they went to market. At its peak it had the reach of a Super Bowl each week. It was a retail media network before the industry coined the phrase. Then it came apart. Marketing owned the network, merchants owned the space, and nobody had built a way to cut the merchants in. Walmart pulled it out around 2015. Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden get Mike to walk through what really happened, why in-store retail media is working now when it stalled then, and what his book Timing the Desert says about being right too early. Ricardo spent that same era at Hughes delivering managed digital signage to retailers, so this one gets personal and specific fast.This is a story of what was, what could have been, and the lessons every retail media network leader today should learn from the original in-store media network.In This Episode, You'll Learn· Why a retail media network inside Walmart's stores out-earned Walmart.com and still got deinstalled· How the fight over trade funds, national ad dollars, and shopper marketing budgets stalled in-store retail media for a decade, and what Amazon did to end it· Why DSIQ, an ex-Microsoft team out of Seattle, built an ad server for store screens before the industry had the term, and why the company never scaled past Walmart· The difference between a salesperson and a business development person, and why sending the wrong one into a retailer kills the deal· Mike's five A's of in-store content: accessible, appropriate, adaptable, attractive, assembled· Why he argues for localization over personalization, and what it means to treat 2,000 stores as 2,000 super customers· Who he thinks reaches the in-store retail media cereal moment first· Why in-store retail media will never be as lucrative as online, and why every retail media network is heading there anywaySupport our sponsors.This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Through the Breakthruprogram, you can shape your experience before you even arrive. Request 15-minute, double opt-in meetings with the people you want to meet, join small-group conversations on the biggest questions in AI and retail, choose from more than 100 experiences, and connect over curated networking dinners. Retail and brand leaders can attend free, plus receive up to $1,750 toward travel and hotel. The Breakthru registration deadline has been extended to September 2. Register now at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.Subscribe & Follow.How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utubeFeatured guest.Mike Hiatt. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehiatt/Founder & President of Dynamic Retailing. https://dynamic-retailing.comAuthor. Timing the Desert. https://a.co/d/07IJTQQS.Mike Hiatt is the president of Dynamic Retailing. A retail media consultancy focused on helping technology solutions providers work more effectively with retailers and assisting retailers better execute retail media strategies inside their stores. He is on the advisory boards at Venvee and Blue Zoo; he recently authored the business book Timing the Desert: A Front-Line perspective on Retail...
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    58 min
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