ShopTalk Fall is the “smaller” ShopTalk only in square footage. In signal-to-noise, it punches above its weight. Chicago pulled in a tight crowd of Midwest retailers and brands who showed up to talk real problems: margins, merchandising, and how to stop shipping generic experiences that convert like beige wallpaper.
Theme this year: Retail Alchemy - turning messy catalogs, fragmented data, and fickle intent into something customers actually want. Less wand-waving, more working systems.
We co-hosted The Merch Mixer with MerchKit (Vancouver-based, back-end merchandising automation). Their pipeline handles the mechanical orchestration; PSYKHE AI brought the taste brain—psychographic embeddings that rank for fit, not just filters. Microsoft Shopping dropped in, along with a solid roster of local brands who cared less about buzzwords and more about whether uplift holds outside a demo.
What we showed
- How a psychographic layer calibrates relevance on cold starts (new visitors, new SKUs, new channels).
- “Preset Edits” as a bridge: mood-led discovery that’s operationally simple but still grounded in taste vectors.
- Where automation stops and merchandising judgment starts—and how to encode more of that judgment over time.
What we heard
- Midwest pragmatism: “If it doesn’t move the category P&L, it’s theatre.”
- Appetite for cross-domain personalization: “If you can learn my customer’s taste in apparel, help us place bets in home, beauty, and gifts.”
Net-net
A concentrated show is a good forcing function. Fewer aisles, more depth. The alchemy metaphor works: you need both the furnace (MerchMixer’s workflow engine) and the formula (our psychographic model) to turn inventory into intent.
Oh and there was a Timbaland concert at the House of Blues, which the audience, heavily millennial-leaning, loved.
If you’re a retailer who’s done the “personalization” tour and still feels blind to taste, we’ll show you the simplest path from demo to dollars—no wands required.
