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Laura Cantor, VP of Marketing & E-commerce at New York & Company, shares the reality of transforming a legacy retail brand in the age of AI - and why nobody can do it alone.
In this episode:
🚀 Leading digital transformation at a legacy retail brand
🤖 Using AI to find 500+ site issues (and the problems AI creates)
💻 Moving from Shopify Hydrogen to Liquid right before Black Friday
🤝 Why partnerships replaced competition in retail
🧠 AQ (Adaptability Quotient) - the skill that matters most
📱 Building in public and learning together
⚡ The reality of doing more with less in 2025
🎯 Why every problem now has 10 AI solutions (and nobody knows which works)
Key topics:
- The shift from headless back to Liquid (and why simplicity won)
- AI-powered site QA and the translation gap
- Why collaboration beats secrecy in the AI era
- Post-COVID conference culture and community building
- Adaptability and unlearning in real-time
- NRF insights and retail trends for 2025
- The calculus class we're all failing together
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
1:30 - Laura's retail background (Ralph Lauren, J.Crew)
2:10 - New York & Company's digital transformation journey
4:40 - The biggest challenges: doing more with less
8:15 - AI creates problems AND solutions (the QA challenge)
15:50 - Why we moved from Hydrogen to Liquid
21:10 - The post that resonated across the industry
28:30 - Why partnerships matter more than competition now
33:00 - How agile teams adopt AI tools
36:35 - We're all failing calculus together
39:00 - Adaptability Quotient (AQ) - the new essential skill
44:50 - The power of clarity: translating robot to human
52:30 - Why retail is fundamentally a people business
55:45 - Upcoming events (eTail West, ShopTalk, Commerce Next)
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