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

This week on the Watson Weekly, Rick Watson breaks down the biggest stories shaping commerce, technology, and AI infrastructure.

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 14 transformative years that took the company from a $300B market cap to $4 trillion. John Turnis takes the helm September 1st.

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

Anthropic just inked a $100 billion, 10-year infrastructure deal with AWS for 5 gigawatts of compute, while Amazon pours another $5B (potentially $20B more) into the AI lab.

Brad Jacobs strikes again: QXO is acquiring Top Build for ~$17B, his third deal in under a year.

Plus, a tribute to industry leader Jon Panella.

The Investor Minute with 5 items this week from the world of venture capital, acquisitions, and IPOs.

On this weekend edition of The Watson Weekly, Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky break down the biggest stories shaping tech, retail, and AI.

Amazon is doubling down on its Anthropic bet — with a new deal that has Anthropic committing $100B to AWS over the next decade, while Amazon pumps in an additional $5B(with up to $20B more on the table) and locks in guaranteed compute capacity. With over 100K customers already using Claude on Bedrock and Amazon holding a reported 15% stake, this partnership is reshaping the cloud AI landscape.

Home Depot quietly acquired SIMPL Automation, a scrappy robotics startup that had raised just $100K before piloting its warehouse density technology at Home Depot's Locust Grove DC. Rick and Jessica unpack what this signals about the arms race between Home Depot and Lowe's to modernize supply chain and distribution.

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

Plus, the end of an era at Apple: Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO after 15 years to become executive chairman, handing the reins to 25-year Apple veteran John Ternus. Cook leaves behind a company transformed — from a $350B market cap to $4T, and a services business that now tops $100B. What does a hardware-focused CEO mean for Apple's AI strategy and search partnerships?

When Helen Lo founded Lo & Sons at 65, she was solving her own travel problem. Fifteen years later, her family-run DTC brand is navigating one of the toughest environments in consumer goods: a flood of dupes, shrinking development windows, and a rapidly shifting AI landscape.

Rick Watson is joined by Katie Omstead, President at Lo & Sons, and Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead.

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.

In this Watson Weekly interview, we dig into how Lo & Sons compressed its product development cycle from two years to nine months (with four to five months on the horizon), why 90% of the business remains direct-to-consumer, and how AI is reshaping everything from ideation to inventory.

We also preview The Lead, the commerce summit landing in New York on May 20–21, where 3,000 operators and 150 speakers will gather — no vendor spin, just real talk on building brands in 2026.

In this memorial episode of the Watson Weekly, host Rick Watson is joined by Kelly Goetsch, President, Pipe17 Jeff Oh, Growth Leader, Commerce, Publicis Sapient, Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer, Publicis, Giancarlo Anania, Senior Director, Global Strategic Alliances & GTM — Partner & Ecosystem Strategy, and Octavio Delgado, Digital eCommerce Engineering Leader, GM to celebrate the life and legacy of Jon Panella, the Group Vice President at Publicis Sapient and a titan of the retail technology industry.

Over a career spanning more than 30 years, Jon became a cornerstone of the commerce world, known as much for his encyclopedic knowledge as for his role as a super connector and information broker.

The conversation dives into the personal stories that defined Jon, including:

• A Master Mentor: Colleagues share how Jon led by example, always sharing recognition and lifting those around him.
• The "Old-School Gentleman": The panel reflects on Jon’s diplomatic nature, his Socratic method of leadership, and his unique ability to treat competitors with kindness and generosity.
• Industry Presence: From the halls of trade shows to his leadership as Chairman of the MACH Alliance, Jon’s influence was felt globally.
• Life Beyond Commerce: A look at Jon’s deep devotion to his family—particularly his wife, Linda—and his unwavering (and championship-winning) love for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

On May 2, a celebration of the life of Jon Panella will take place in Fort Worth,Texas.

Today on the Watson Weekly: Google treats compute like a moat, Amazon finally figures out groceries, Vinted runs the Amazon playbook in Europe, Apple shows up late to the glasses party — and finally, The Investor Minute with 5 items this week from the world of venture capital, acquisitions, and IPOs.

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

Google's Compute Discipline — Compute isn't just infrastructure anymore, it's the moat.

Amazon's Grocery Crystallizes — The 2025 shareholder letter dropped a $150 billion gross grocery number.

Vinted's Breakout — 47% GMV growth to €10.8 billion.

Apple's Glasses Play: Late but Lethal