Memorable Over Measurable: Retail’s Lost Wonders

Taste can’t be manufactured, so brands are hiring the people who have it. Writer and gr8 collab founder Emma Apple Chozick returns to talk with Phillip about her creative process (sans content calendar), building ShopMy’s Signals Substack on proprietary data, and what the long-gone BEST Products showrooms can teach us about designing retail spaces worth remembering.

A Category of OneKey takeaways:

• Brands can’t manufacture taste; they’ve learned to partner with people whose judgment audiences already trust.
• Real editorial starts with an insight, question, or tension. Consumers today can sniff out a product pitch from a mile away — if a brand’s editorial isn’t valuable as standalone content, it’s not worth sharing. 
• BEST Products’ SITE showrooms prove the best retail trades measurability for memory.
• Emma Apple Chozick: “Taste is obviously completely subjective. But when a brand resonates with a particular person’s taste, that’s not replicable. A brand can’t create that on their own. They can try, but it’s never gonna feel authentic.”
• Emma Apple Chozick: “I don’t know if the goal is actually ‘to grow.’ I think the goal is to work on really compelling projects that are aligned with what I’m interested in and can reach new people. But the goal isn’t always reach.”
• Phillip: “I don’t know that any of those [hot new channels] actually reflect culture. I think we bend culture to those things because that’s where we put capital, and an industry likes to talk about them because they’re new. But the people actually define what the culture is around the brand.”

In-Show Mentions:

• Watch Emma’s BEST Products video
• Find Emma Apple Chozick on LinkedIn and Instagram
• Learn more about gr8 collab
• Explore the archive of SITE New York
• Read Signals: A Publication by ShopMy
• Watch Surroundings on YouTube
• Read Emma’s Dwell essay, “The Midcentury House That Raised Me”
• Listen to Emma’s first Future Commerce episode, Creating Credible Content and Community-Building Collabs

Associated Links:

• Read: Member Brief: Return on Experience and the New KPIs of Store Design
• Read: Insiders #188: Architecting Desire: How Retail-Hospitality Hybrids are Changing Consumption
• Read: Substack and Retail’s New Media Era
• Read The Senses: “That’s a Great Collab”
• Listen: Where Culture Happens, Commerce Follows
• VISIONS Summit at MoMA, New York City: Join us on November 3, 2026
• Watch: Future Commerce on YouTube
• Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print
• Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world
• Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce

Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!
 

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