The Business of Fashion Podcast

Luxury’s best salespeople have always been in demand, but the stakes have changed. As AI automates more of the shopping experience and price hikes strain loyalty, retailers are leaning harder on the one thing a machine can’t replicate: a human salesperson who knows exactly what their clients want. From Nordstrom’s uncapped commissions to Bloomingdale’s dedicated personal shopping suites, the perks on offer for top sellers who can single-handedly move millions of dollars in merchandise show just how valuable the talent has become.

In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by BoF’s retail editor Cathaleen Chen to discuss why luxury’s top salespeople have become some of the industry’s most coveted talent, the lengths retailers are going to attract and retain them and what the high-profile move of stylist Catherine Bloom from Neiman Marcus to Nordstrom reveals about the increasingly competitive market for elite sellers.

Key Insights:
Nordstrom’s recruitment of former Neiman Marcus stylist Catherine Bloom illustrates just how valuable top salespeople have become to luxury retailers. Nordstrom co-chief executive Pete Nordstrom personally courted Bloom, whose longstanding relationships with wealthy clients made her a particularly coveted hire. As Chen notes, retail remains “one of the last industries where you can start at the entry level and work your way up,” with loyalty and long tenure often rewarded.

Saks Global’s financial troubles, which intensified in 2025 following its acquisition of Neiman Marcus, created an opening for competitors looking to recruit top talent from both retailers. With inventory shortages making it harder for stylists to serve their clients, rival department stores spotted an opportunity to lure away established sellers and their valuable customer relationships. “If you’re not giving your clients top tier merchandise, then you really are not fulfilling your duties and serving them as their stylist,” Chen says, adding that several department store executives described the situation as a hiring opportunity.

Retailers typically take two approaches to building a high-performing sales force: developing talent internally or recruiting established sellers from competitors. Butler-Young, citing luxury recruiter Caroline Pill, notes that the essential hard skills are “experience and the client book,” while the soft skills include “charisma ... diligence ... someone that listens maybe more than they speak.”

Even as AI automates more of the shopping experience, the relationships top salespeople build with their clients remain difficult to replicate. “It’s a people business, it’s AI-proof, it’s a relationship business,” Chen says, noting that the value of top sellers lies in “the books that they keep, their Rolodexes.” Some are even invited to their clients’ birthday parties and travel with them.

Top luxury salespeople can command extraordinary perks, including, in Catherine Bloom’s case, a standalone, appointment-only store at Nordstrom. Butler-Young recounts Pete Nordstrom’s enthusiasm for rewarding high performers: “I think it’s great that commission is uncapped, they deserve to make hundreds of [thousands] of dollars.” But Chen questions whether giving star sellers so much preferential treatment risks creating a “shopper monopoly,” with top associates potentially cannibalising sales from their colleagues.

Additional Resources:
Inside the Battle for Luxury’s Million-Dollar Salespeople | BoF
Pete Nordstrom on the Enduring Power of Retail’s ‘Best Mousetrap’ | The BoF Podcast
Olivier Bron on Making Bloomingdale’s Desirable Again | BoF
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This week’s Lagos Fashion Week campaign is a series of portraits drawing on the tradition of African studio photography. They were shot by the creative director Daniel Obasi.

Few people have done more to shape how the world sees Lagos. Louis Vuitton asked Obasi to photograph the city for its Fashion Eye series. Beyoncé’s team brought him in to style the Lagos shoot for Black Is King. His work has run in Vogue Italia and The Face — and last year he joined the BoF 500.

Yet he built his career in a city where many creatives have to find their own way. Lagos, he says, produces remarkably resilient talent, partly because formal training is still hard to come by. Amed sat down with Obasi at his creative studio AMAH in Lagos to talk about how a city with so few easy paths forges so many extraordinary creatives, and what it would take to give the next generation an easier path.

Key Insights:
Obasi traces Nigeria’s missing contemporary visual identity to a culture of leaving. Growing up, he says, there was a constant need to leave the country, which he links to post-independence politics and a civil war that was never properly addressed. “Aspiration became a way to heal as opposed to let us actually sit with the uncomfortable truth about what has happened,” he says.

His work began as an answer to questions he couldn’t find images for. Researching references as a graphic designer, he struggled to find strong imagery of Nigeria. He also questioned why Nigerians equated luxury with foreign brands: “Why does luxury feel so detached for Nigerians?” He says francophone filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène showed it was possible to tell contemporary stories without diluting their culture.

He builds images from words, not mood boards. A copywriting course taught him to cut a paragraph down to a single word or phrase. He says he talks ideas out and sketches them with an illustrator before gathering references. “Before I even touch a mood board, I would write,” he says, adding that mood boards can give him creative block.

Obasi sees Lagos’ resilience as both a strength and a cost. He recalls someone describing Lagos to him as a “creative factory” that builds strong people. The flip side, he says, is that many creatives have to find their own way, though he credits Lagos Fashion Week and Art X Lagos with filling part of the gap. “I know a lot of young designers who haven’t gone to fashion schools, but they’re making clothes at an extremely high standard,” he says, adding that he wishes they had an easier path through established training.

His advice to young Lagos creatives is to keep going and look beyond home for support. Obasi tells them to learn from each mistake and move on. “The support you’re looking for oftentimes might not come from your immediate community,” he says. “It might come from somewhere else. But eventually they will come around.”

Additional Resources:
Worldview | Omoyemi Akerele Takes Lagos Fashion Week to the Next Level | BoF
The Gatekeepers to Nigeria’s Fashion Market | BoF
Daniel Obasi | BoF 500 | The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry
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For years, a coveted pair of Air Jordans could send sneaker fans into a frenzy. But when Nike brought back the black-and-blue Air Jordan 1 Royal this month, the response was muted — days after release, the shoe was still available in several sizes, with some pairs reselling below retail.

BoF correspondent Mike Sykes, who has been reporting on Nike’s search for its next big hit, joins senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young on The Debrief to break down what the tepid reception reveals about the wider company, and whether chief executive Elliott Hill’s pivot toward sport — in women’s basketball, running and recovery — can translate into lasting growth.

Key Insights:

The muted reception to the Air Jordan 1 Royal exposes a deeper problem than one slow-selling shoe. “There is a very obvious downswing that has happened with… the most popular Jordan silhouettes, these retro Jordans that usually work,” Sykes says. “They don’t really know what it is that people want from them right now. The classic retro styles that worked five years ago, ten years ago just don’t work right now.”

Nike is pulling back on Jordan drops to restore exclusivity, but Sykes doesn’t think supply discipline alone fixes the brand. “Scarcity is not the magic pill that will solve all the problems that Jordan Brand has,” he says. Virgil Abloh’s “The Ten” is held up as proof of what real cultural impact looks like — and how hard it is to manufacture on demand: “Nike could use another version of The Ten right now, but you can’t just pull The Ten out of thin air. That’s something that happens over time.”

CEO Elliott Hill’s bet on women’s basketball and running is showing early signs of life. “With Nike basketball on the women’s side specifically, I think there is a lot of energy right now,” Sykes says of signature shoes for A’ja Wilson, Caitlin Clark and Sabrina Ionescu. Running, meanwhile, is up double digits — though far from uncontested: “I would categorise this as one of the bright spots, but there is a lot of competition in the marketplace.”

Products like the Nike Mind 001 clog and Hyperice gear target the booming wellness category, even if the price tags give Sykes pause. “Would you buy a $250 pair of slides? Probably not,” he says. “But I think that every little bit counts for the space that the brand is in right now.”

Asked for the one signal that would show Nike is turning a corner, Sykes points to resale. “The aftermarket shows me how much people actually covet these shoes,” he says. “And I don’t really see people valuing the brand a lot as it is right now.”

Additional Resources:
Has Nike Done Lasting Damage to Jordan Brand? | BoF
Nike Kicks the Can Down the Road Again | BoF
The Debrief | Is Nike Finally Winning With Women? | BoF
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For most of the last 30 years, the American department store has been a story of decline: store closures, bankruptcies, endless discounting and floors packed with racks that looked the same from one store to the next.
Bloomingdale’s is starting to tell a different story. Last quarter, its comparable sales grew more than 11 percent, its second consecutive quarter of double-digit growth, at a moment when much of the luxury industry is struggling to grow at all.
The man behind that turnaround is Olivier Bron, who arrived in New York nearly three years ago to become the CEO of the venerable department store chain that had lost its lustre. Bron believes that Bloomingdale’s can still matter to shoppers and to brands, but only if it gives people a reason to walk in.
This week, Bron joins Imran Amed to talk about how you make a brand every American knows desirable again, and why some of luxury’s biggest brands are wrestling with exactly the same question.
Key Insights:

Art, science and care: Bron’s retail philosophy, distilled from his years at Bain & Company, rests on balancing instinct with data. “The magic is happening when you have this touch of inspiration and point of view that you don’t get with just data,” he says, adding that the second ingredient is simpler: “You need to care for others. You need to like serving others and helping people by bringing joy.”

Execution is essential: Asked about the biggest lesson from turning around Galeries Lafayette’s 70-store network, Bron points not to vision but to delivery. “You can have the best strategy, but if you fail in execution, then your experience will land flat,” he says.

Fewer brands, more space: Bloomingdale’s has deliberately shrunk its brand count to deepen its relationships with the ones that remain. “We probably have 10 percent less brands, but probably expressed in a better way,” Bron says of the store’s luxury renovation.

The US market keeps getting wealthier: Bloomingdale’s wealthiest base of customers is not only expanding but also spending more. “We’re seeing more wealthy people and the already wealthy people have become wealthier,” he says, though he acknowledges the midterm elections and AI-driven market jitters as real risks.

Awareness isn’t desirability: Bron draws a sharp distinction between the two, and applies it as freely to his own brand as to European luxury houses. “Everyone knows about Bloomingdale’s, everyone. In the US, the awareness is very, very strong. But the desirability, the credibility of the brand in this luxury world is not where it should be,” he says. “We were so obsessed about financial returns, about short term performance that you lose ground on this long term perspective.

Top personal shoppers run businesses inside the business: Bron says Bloomingdale's incentive for its personal shoppers is having the brands, inventory, systems and space for them to maximise sales. Home has widened what each associate can sell: “When a customer is spending millions in fashion, I can tell you that these customers are spending millions on their homes as well.”

Additional Resources:
Bloomingdale’s CEO on the Future of American Department Stores | BoF
Luxury Brands Target ‘Desirability First’ — But How to Measure It? | BoF
Pete Nordstrom on the Enduring Power of Retail’s ‘Best Mousetrap’ | The BoF Podcast
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Fashion has long been obsessed with youth, treating young shoppers as both trendsetters and the engine of growth. Yet brands including Evereve, Ulla Johnson, Frances Valentine and Poppy & Peonies are finding opportunities in catering to women in their 40s, 50s and beyond, a demographic with significant spending power and brand loyalty that rarely features prominently in fashion campaigns.

On this week's episode of The Debrief, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young and US editor Diana Pearl examine why brands are still afraid to make the older shopper the face of a campaign, what “multi-generational selling” actually requires, and how founders, sales associates and even a customer’s own social circle can become a brand’s most powerful marketing tool.

Key Insights:

Young consumers may drive fashion’s cultural conversation, but older shoppers wield significant purchasing power. As Pearl puts it: “What [youth] don’t often have is the spending power... there’s so much discussion about how boomers are the wealthiest generation.”

Brands will chase an older customer’s wallet but hesitate to put her face on a billboard. Pearl traces this to “a lot of ingrained misogyny in not just fashion, but in our society,” where women over 40 are seen as less interesting to market to — even though, she argues, “when [we] see older women who are chic, who are beautiful, stylish, who are successful, there’s an aspirational element to that.”

The brands succeeding aren’t just targeting a specific age cohort— they’re building for mothers, daughters and grandmothers at once. “If you can sell to the mother, the daughter, the grandmother... that just gives you access to such a wide swath of consumers,” Pearl says, dubbing it a brand’s “superpower” because it builds “long-term loyalty and deep connection with the brand.”

Long before the creator economy, community tastemakers shaped what women bought — they just weren’t on Instagram. “There’s always been that girl... who always had the best product recommendations, always knew of the hot new cool brands,” says Pearl. Those women, she says, were the nano-influencers of their time — holding “an immense amount of sway over their friends and their communities.”

Many of the brands successfully courting older shoppers are founder-led, with personal connections playing a central role in building customer loyalty. For brands looking to replicate those relationships at scale, store associates can play a critical role. Pearl’s advice: “really educating... store teams, particularly store managers, and empowering them to empower their associates, to build those relationships.”

Additional Resources:
Fashion’s Next Growth Opportunity Isn’t Gen Z | BoF
Fashion Wakes Up to the ‘Silver Generation’ Opportunity | BoF
Why Brands Cast Older Celebrities to Court Younger Consumers | BoF
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