Unpacking Commerce | April 2026
Emerging trends, analysis, and more.
Hello, it’s Alexandre from Spring Invest, a European investment fund that is shaping the future of commerce. Welcome to the latest edition of Unpacking Commerce, our newsletter about emerging trends in retail, brands, and new commerce.
🏪 The CAC crisis is the best thing that has happened to physical retail
The standard narrative around DTC brands opening stores treats it as a maturation story - digital-native brands “growing up” into omnichannel. That framing misses what’s actually driving the movement, and why it matters now more than it did five years ago.
The real explanation is structural. Digital customer acquisition costs have been compounding upward for the better part of a decade, but something shifted qualitatively over the past two years. Meta CPMs are up. Google search is fragmenting toward AI-driven answer surfaces that don’t send traffic anywhere. TikTok’s content algorithm has decoupled further from its commerce layer. For a generation of DTC founders who built their unit economics on a $15–25 CAC via paid social, the math has quietly broken. The store isn’t a strategy choice anymore - for brands with strong identity and repeat-purchase potential, it’s the cheapest acquisition channel available.
Skims is the cleanest data point. The brand raised $225 million at a $5 billion valuation in November 2025, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with a stated intention to become a “predominantly physical business.” It currently operates 18 stores in the US, with a 12,000 sq. ft. flagship on Regent Street in London slated for summer 2026 - its first standalone European location, beyond existing concessions at Selfridges and Harrods. The trajectory is deliberate: Skims CEO Jens Grede has said explicitly that stores are “probably our single biggest growth lever,” and that the biggest barrier to consumer acquisition is simply not being physically available where people live.
What Skims understood before most is that the store is a media asset, not a retail asset. A flagship in a high-traffic location generates brand impressions at a cost-per-touch that no paid channel can replicate at scale. When Skims opened its Sunset Strip location in Los Angeles in April 2025, it generated press coverage and social amplification that no equivalent budget in Meta ads would have produced. The launch of NikeSkims - a full brand, not a collaboration - deepens this logic. Nike’s own decade-long experiment with digital-first DTC ended in a well-documented correction: digital sales fell 15% in 2025, and new CEO Elliott Hill’s first major move was to rebuild wholesale relationships and reinstate physical distribution. The company that built the DTC thesis is now systematically dismantling it.
Skims isn’t alone. Alo Yoga, FP Movement, Mango, Tecovas, Mejuri - across categories and price points, the pattern repeats: brands that built audiences digitally are converting that attention into physical presence, and finding that stores improve online conversion too, not just add to it. Foot traffic data from PassBy shows Skims doubling in-store footfall year-over-year in 2025, driven by new openings but also by higher repeat visit rates than the DTC-to-store conversion curve would predict.
However, this pivot swaps variable marketing spend for heavy capital expenditure. While a Meta campaign can be paused in minutes, a lease on Regent Street is a decade-long commitment. For brands born in the cloud, the challenge isn't just securing the real estate; it’s mastering the operational grind like hiring, training, and maintaining a human workforce that can consistently deliver the brand’s digital promise on the sales floor. In other words, the “cheapest media” only remains cheap if you can manage the crushing complexity of the medium.
The European dimension is where this gets interesting. The Skims Regent Street flagship opening this summer will be the first real test of whether the DTC-to-physical conversion playbook travels across the Atlantic. The UK is Skims’ largest market outside the US, which provides a demand base - but European retail real estate economics, footfall patterns, and omnichannel infrastructure (POS, clienteling, inventory) differ enough that the same store model doesn’t simply port over. Several other US brands, including Lululemon, have had to materially adapt their physical formats for European markets.
➡️ The store is back because the unit economics left no other choice. Physical retail is now the most efficient media spend in the mix, provided you can handle the structural shift from variable clicks to fixed bricks. In ten years, will we look back at the DTC era as nothing more than a temporary arbitrage window?
🎬 Netflix House and the IP commerce model
Netflix opened its first two permanent venues - 100,000 sq. ft. each in King of Prussia Mall outside Philadelphia and Galleria Dallas - in November and December 2025. Time Magazine named it among the World’s Greatest Places 2026. The format: free entry, paid experiences ($40 per session) built around Stranger Things, Squid Game, Wednesday, and other IP, plus a restaurant and retail shop. A Las Vegas location follows in 2027.
The mainstream read is experiential retail meets fan engagement. The more interesting read is that Netflix has cracked a monetization model that content companies have been searching for since Disney built its first theme park: converting passive subscribers into active commerce participants, without cannibalizing the core subscription. Each Netflix House is simultaneously a retention tool (fans who engage physically renew more reliably), a merchandise channel, and a marketing asset for new content launches.
The structural implication extends well beyond Netflix. What Netflix is doing is establishing that IP - whether from streaming, gaming, sports, or fashion - can generate commerce revenue independently of a traditional retail model. The department store boxes that Netflix is occupying - former Lord & Taylor and Belk locations - aren’t chosen accidentally; they’re the exact format that traditional anchors have abandoned, now repurposed into destination entertainment.
➡️ Netflix House is a further reminder that physical retail was never just about selling: Apple Store runs workshops, Nike started running clubs, Rapha built cafés, Patagonia hosts repairs, Alo Yoga opened meditation studios, Aesop makes every store a design destination, Glossier made the store the product. The transaction is still there, but it's no longer the point. The brands getting this right are building places people want to be in, not just shop at.
📱 TikTok Shop Europe: from impulse to intent
A single data point from Rithum’s February 2026 analysis stopped the social commerce conversation in its tracks: in the UK, products priced above £100 now account for 41% of TikTok Shop revenue. The global average for the same metric is 2.8%. “The era of the TikTok trinket is over,” Rithum’s MD for Europe wrote in the release - and for once, the headline wasn’t hyperbole.
The timing matters. TikTok raised its seller commission from 5% to 9% across Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Ireland in January 2026 - the same rate already in place in the UK. Fee increases at this stage of a platform’s development signal a transition: TikTok has moved from subsidizing merchant adoption to extracting margin from a proven channel. In parallel, it launched local fulfillment infrastructure across European warehouses, enabling faster delivery and unlocking categories - home goods, premium fashion, electronics - where delivery speed matters more than price.
The category shift matters most for brands that dismissed TikTok as a low-AOV impulse channel. A platform where home appliances and premium clothing are outpacing global norms on high-value purchases is a fundamentally different commercial surface than one optimised for £5 accessories. The conversion rates remain structurally higher than traditional e-commerce - TikTok Shop’s live shopping sessions drive 16% of total European platform revenue, with 860 live sessions per day across Europe - but the brand-safety and margin constraints that kept premium brands away are beginning to dissolve as the audience matures.
For European merchants and brands, the operational challenge is no longer whether to be (or not) on TikTok Shop, but how to structure for it: creator economics, content production at the cadence the algorithm requires, and integration between TikTok Shop inventory and existing fulfilment. The 9% commission, layered on typical e-commerce margins, makes product selection and pricing architecture non-trivial - particularly for brands that also sell on Amazon or through their own DTC.
This evolution is particularly critical when viewed through the lens of agentic commerce. As AI agents begin to automate our “low-intent” utility purchases, platforms like TikTok Shop and experiential venues like Netflix House (see above) become the final frontiers for serendipitous discovery. In a world where your AI assistant handles the toothpaste and the detergent, brands must win on the surfaces where consumers still want to be surprised. In a way, TikTok is building a moat against the automation of shopping by remaining the premier destination for human impulse.
➡️ TikTok Shop has successfully transitioned from a low-cost experimental channel to a high-AOV commercial engine that demands professionalized operations. For brands, the channel is no longer the story. The margin stack, the content infrastructure, and the brand positioning on a maturing platform - that's where the work actually now is.
📚 What we’re reading
Skims: From digital darling to physical retail powerhouse - Internet Retailing - The clearest breakdown of how Skims is constructing its omnichannel model, with detail on the UK Regent Street flagship strategy and what it signals for other DTC brands eyeing European physical expansion.
Netflix House: Can Streamers Turn Their IPs into Successful Experiential Retail? - RetailWire - A sober panel discussion on the sustainability questions behind the format: repeat visit dynamics, operational cost structures, and whether the Disney/Universal LBE comparison holds at Netflix’s current scale.
TikTok Shop Europe 2026: Data and Seller Strategy - 10XCREW - Granular breakdown of TikTok Shop’s fee structure, fulfillment expansion, and market-by-market dynamics across the six live European countries. Useful operational reference for brands evaluating entry.
Agentic Commerce Impact Could Reach $385 Billion by 2030 - Morgan Stanley Research - Still the most rigorous structural framing of where agentic commerce intersects with physical retail and social commerce. The question of which channel benefits from AI-driven discovery versus which gets disrupted by it runs through all three topics above.
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About us
Spring Invest is a European investment fund dedicated to companies that are shaping the future of commerce. We champion doers who build innovative companies making commerce better, from enabling technologies to new commerce models and everything in between. More info about our investment thesis 👉 here.
