Q&A: How speciality retailers are winning the holiday season with agility and AI (yDr. Tim Sandle, October 28, 2025, Digital Journal)
Stern: Independent retailers plan for the holidays with precision, not prediction. They don’t have the purchasing power or storage space typically needed to pre-purchase on a large scale before the holidays. Their budgets are tighter, which forces smarter buying: every order has to earn its place on the shelf, and business owners have to be flexible to find the right product at the right price.
What’s changed in the past few years is how technology makes that kind of precision possible. AI tools can now surface insights that used to take hours of manual tracking: showing which products are trending, how pricing shifts might affect demand, or when to reorder based on sell-through velocity. For a specialty retailer, that kind of intelligence helps them compete with enterprise retailers that have dedicated analytics teams. This technology gives small retailers the same visibility into market trends and customer behavior that big chains have, but with the speed and context that fits how they actually operate.