Omnichannel Strategies Podcast: Why Is Western Retail Playing The Wrong Game?
Why do Western retailers still look almost exclusively to the US for new ideas? I joined Philipp Labkovskiy on the Omnichannel Strategies Podcast to talk about what Western retail can learn from Digital China:
During our conversation, we talked about what Temu's next move tells us about the future of marketplaces, and why the real AI threat isn't job losses — it's competitors who actually scale what we only pilot.
Key topics:
The blind spot. Conference agendas are 99% US-focused. We're not surprised by China because it's unpredictable — we're surprised because we're not looking.
What "Chinese" actually means. Marco Polo didn't travel to China for cheap goods. Our "cheap plastic" association covers 50 years out of 2,000; quality at fair prices is the historical norm China is returning to.
Why China doesn't have our inflation problem. Not communism vs. capitalism — market economy. Real competition erodes margins and passes value to consumers. In Western tech, competition has largely stopped doing that.
Temu's Costco moment. Pinduoduo appears to be combining its supply-chain command with Temu's reach to build a Kirkland-style own brand. If executed well, it puts the entire mid-tier marketplace business under pressure — leaving two segments: supply-chain-powered volume brands and genuinely authentic premium ones. The end of prestige theater.
All-domain commerce beats omnichannel. Omnichannel connects online and offline. All-domain commerce merges four things into one system: physical retail, online, public traffic (paid reach), and private traffic (owned relationships). Shein and Temu didn't buy conversions — they bought app installs and then owned the relationship.
The empty middle of the funnel. We invest in awareness and conversion and leave the middle — trust, context, service, relationships — as a cost line. That's where most of the interesting work in China happens. Meanwhile our CRM sends newsletters from no-reply@.
Love brands became burnout brands. When a major brand got delisted over price hikes, nobody switched stores. They just bought something else. We've unlearned how to build real brand relationships.
Community is the open goal. Shopping with friends is completely normal offline and essentially impossible online — no shop has built it, despite it being technically trivial. Brands that host communities instead of broadcasting at them (see LeMieux in equestrian) get engagement no media strategy can buy.
AI: efficiency is the wrong question. Three years in, what has AI actually changed? Mostly it makes existing processes marginally cheaper. Shein is an AI-first company because it asked what AI makes possible — reinventing the fashion supply chain — not how to do the old thing faster.
AI that stays social. Xiaohongshu's AI search surfaces human-written posts and their authors instead of generating answers — using AI to create instant brand communities rather than replacing the people in them.
Agentic AI at scale, already. Alibaba's Accio turns a prompt into a supply chain: market research, product imagery, supplier matching, contract negotiation. Its agent products launched in beta in spring and reportedly have 250,000 sellers.
The innovation theater cycle. Hype arrives, consultants create FOMO, pilots succeed, scaling dies on legacy systems and internal politics — but the press release goes out anyway, and then we move on to the next acronym. Chinese companies skip this step and scale. That's the actual competitive threat.
