Rick Watson sits down with Mike Hogenmiller, who has spent more than forty years inside home improvement retail and watched the consumer reinvent themselves at least three times.

Mike was at The Home Depot in 2001 when the company quietly acquired a 4,000-customer wholesale distributor in Baton Rouge, LA called Your Other Warehouse. That distributor was, at the time, Amazon's biggest and most profitable home-improvement supplier. The acquisition (plus a later decision to stop opening new stores and make existing assets more productive instead) is how Home Depot got roughly 15 years ahead of its closest competitor on digital fulfillment without ever calling it e-commerce.

The Watson Weekly interview is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com.

The story Mike tells about then-CEO Craig Menear is the part most people miss. Home Depot wasn't building an e-commerce business. They were building commerce. The customer decided what they bought, when, where, and how it arrived. Everything else followed from that.

We also get into:

• Why Walmart's culture survives and Target's didn't

• The Sprouts problem and what happens when a specialty grocer stops buying with confidence

• Why every "Amazon of [insert vertical]" pitch ignores the customer

• Where CPG brands keep going wrong inside the store

• The advice Mike gives DTC founders thinking about their first physical stores

H&M just listed on a US online marketplace for the first time, and they picked Nordstrom. Rick Watson and Nick Kaplan break down what that signals about both brands, and why marketplaces with no inventory commitment keep working when standalone marketplaces keep dying.

Next up, GLP-1 hits the bridal industry. 10% of couples planning weddings this year are on a GLP-1, and more than half started the medication specifically for the wedding. Some users drop a clothing size every two to three weeks, which is a problem when a wedding dress takes nine months and costs five figures. Bridal shops are now asking buyers to sign waivers. Rick and Nick widen the conversation into plus-size assortments, the longevity boom in CPG, and why protein and creatine are having a moment.

The Watson Weekly Weekend edition is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalaratax.watsonweekly.com

Then the big one: the e-commerce organization of the future. Unilever cut from 3,000 agencies to under 800, saving half a billion dollars. P&G in-housed media for $750M in fee reductions. A retail "season" is now two weeks. Where does the merchant sit in all of this, and is ChatGPT a better buyer than a human? Nick argues the merchant role contracts but never disappears. Rick pushes on whether the 2026 merchant is really just one person editing algorithms instead of product.

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What does B2B digital transformation look like when your end user is an HVAC contractor standing on a rooftop in 95-degree heat? In this episode of The Watson Weekly, we sit down with Lindsay Althouse(Johnstone Supply), Bryan House (Elastic Path), and Lee Trotter (Data Realm) for a candid panel discussion on modernizing legacy B2B businesses without breaking what already works.

Johnstone Supply—a $4 billion HVAC distributor with 450 stores—offers a fascinating case study in real-world transformation. After shifting from a co-op model to an LLC, the company faced a daunting challenge: building a unified digital experience on top of 72 store groups, each running its own ERP system. Lindsay walks us through how a headless commerce architecture made a modern mobile app possible, why deep customer discovery (including interviews with contractors in the field) shaped every design decision, and how a phased alpha-to-beta rollout helped them validate the product with real users.

The conversation also dives into Johnstone's AI assistant rollout, where the stakes go beyond bad recommendations—suggesting the wrong furnace part could cause physical harm. Lindsay explains why they chose a private LLM in a restricted environment, limited to verified product data, to keep trust and safety at the center.

This B2B webinar is sponsored by Avalara , Elastic Path , and Data Realm.

Beyond the case study, the panel unpacks the strategies that separate successful B2B modernization from expensive failures:

• Why customer-centric design beats feature checklists every time
• How commerce platforms can abstract legacy ERP complexity without a rip-and-replace
• Change management tactics for aligning sales teams with digital channels (hint: give reps credit for digital orders)
• Why every project decision should ladder up to a clearly defined goal

Whether you're leading a digital transformation, building B2B products, or just curious about how a 70-year-old distributor competes with Amazon-era expectations, this conversation is packed with practical insight.

#B2BCommerce #DigitalTransformation #HeadlessCommerce #HVAC #UX #AI #WatsonWeekly