Tariffs are shifting. De minimis rules are under pressure. And new enforcement could change how retailers operate overnight. If you sell across borders—through ecommerce, marketplaces, or direct—these changes don’t just impact compliance. They impact your pricing, margins, and conversion rates.

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Q1 looked fine if you only read the top line. Net sales up 4.8% to $41.77B, EPS a hair past consensus. Then you get to the comps: 6% against the 8% analysts wanted, full-year guidance basically flat. For years, management told investors that home equity would fuel a remodeling boom and that boom would fuel Home Depot. It didn't show up. People are tapping their equity, but to consolidate debt, not redo the bathroom.

You can see it in the category mix. Paint and outdoor held up. Lumber, flooring, lighting, and millwork, the stuff that goes into an actual renovation, did not. Paint is therapeutic and cheap. A hundred bucks and a room feels new. Ripping out tile is a different decision, and consumers aren't making it.

So Home Depot is quietly turning toward pros, leaning on the SRS acquisition and a new HVAC business, and chasing a market it pegs at $700B. Translation: What consumer? It's the same retreat we've watched at UPS and FedEx. Cozy up to the businesses that serve the consumer for you, and stop sweating every individual transaction.

$4.4B. Beauty sales up 84% year over year. Roughly one in ten Americans bought a beauty product there. And the part worth your attention: the action isn't in the videos, it's in the comments. About 77% of users see a creator mention something and immediately go search it. The videos that converted best weren't overproduced. Someone standing at a whiteboard, walking through one ingredient at a time.

The lesson for brands is to work backward. Decide the conversation you want happening in the comments, then build the video to spark it. Earned media is getting more valuable, not less, because people are still hunting for something that reads as authentic before the bots fully arrive.

The transparency brand, the one that showed you the factory and broke down the cost of your t-shirt, got bought by the company most associated with hiding all of that. At its peak, Everlane was valued at $550 to $600M. L Catterton put in another $85M to keep it alive. This week, common stockholders got nothing, including early employees who took stock instead of a salary.

Nobody walked $100M up in a Brinks truck. Shein almost certainly paid for inventory and is earning the rest on the come. So what did they buy? A respectable-looking storefront. The deeper story is the same one that took Bonobos, ModCloth, and Brandless: single-channel DTC, too much inventory, too much custom tech, and no real distribution until it's too late.

Fashion is hard. Especially when the wallet is compressed.