Hi! Here are the highlights of industry news from the last week. Sources are in the hyperlinked text after the headline. Enjoy!
Brands and Retailers
- Michael Kors to shut 100-125 stores. Wall Street Journal
- Mickey Drexler to leave J.Crew. Business of Fashion
- Lululemon to close 40 Ivivva Girls stores. Business of Fashion
- How Soho became an experiential retail playground. Glossy
- 12 key takeaways from Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends Report. AdAge
- Alexa Chung launches her own fashion line. Wall Street Journal
- Radio Shack closing 1,000 stores. USA Today
- Amazon fights Wal-Mart for low-income shoppers. Wall Street Journal
- Wal-Mart tries using store workers to deliver online orders. Wall Street Journal
- Canada Goose defies brick-and-mortar gloom. Business of Fashion
- Inside Hasbro’s digital transformation into a modern toymaker and advertiser. AdWeek
- Some of Amazon’s own brands are becoming super popular online. Recode
- Yoox Net-a-Porter group bans fur. Vogue
- Iconic Parisian department store Le Bon Marche and LVMH go digital with 24 Sevres. Forbes
- Amazon’s New York City bookstore is about your favorite things not book discovery. Forbes
- What’s driving the billion-dollar natural beauty movement? Fast Company
- Tommy Hilfiger is taking his see-now, buy-now spectacle to London. Fashionista
- Lululemon gains the most in six months as sales begin to recover. Bloomberg
Marketing and Social Media
- This Gen Z-focused publisher only uses social platforms (10 of them) and doesn’t even have a website. AdWeek
- Pinterest raises $150M at a $12.3B valuation as it makes a full press into visual search. Techcrunch
- Publishers are starting to see money from Facebook’s mid-roll ads. Digiday
- Snapchat acquires location-based data company to ramp up mobile measurement. AdWeek
- Meeker trends report points to mobile add opportunity. SeekingAlpha
- 7 Internet trends from Mary Meeker’s 2017 report that marketers should know about. AdWeek
- Twitter adds new features as it experiments with sponsored live video. AdWeek
- Instagram ads can now link to brands’ messenger accounts, bots. Marketing Land
Startup and Emerging Tech
- Siri, speakers and software: highlights from Apple’s show. New York Times
- HomePod speaker and new iMacs: what we saw at Apple’s WWDC. New York Times
- Apple business chat will bring customer service to the iMessage platform. Techcrunch
- The way forward with Facebook messenger bots. Venture Beat
- The RealReal ropes in $50M in new funding. TechCrunch
- Sakes Fifth Avenue is turning to iMessage to bolster sales. Glossy
- Toyota is aiming to debut a flying car by 2020. Fortune
International
- Luxury fashion brands start to sell on China’s WeChat messaging app. Wall Street Journal
- Aditya Birla fashion plans to trim Forever 21 to turn the label profitable. Economic Times
- Amazon to take on Australian market. Bloomberg
- Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and the UAE have severed ties with Qatar. Fortune
- Alibaba: what you should know about new retail. Seeking Alpha
- Mary Meeker’s focus on China: the key highlights. Recode
