Speed Is the New Scale: What IKEA, Estée Lauder, and Tendam Said About Surviving to 2030

"What we have in front of us is not a big wave. It is a massive tsunami. And we have to surf it."

That was Jaume Miquel, Chairman and CEO of Tendam, summing up the moment retail is in. He was not being dramatic for effect. He was describing, with unusual candour, what three of Europe's most experienced retail leaders all agreed on during a wide-ranging panel at the [World Retail Congress](/article/world-retail-congress-2026-customer-lessons): the industry is not navigating a temporary disruption. It is learning to operate inside permanent uncertainty, and the brands that survive to 2030 will not be the biggest. They will be the fastest, the most consumer-obsessed, and the most willing to rebuild their operating models from the ground up.

Joining Miquel on stage were [Nadine Graf](/article/estee-lauder-nadine-graf-beauty-reimagined-speed-consumer), President EMEA, UK&I and Emerging Markets at The Estée Lauder Companies, and Parag Parekh, Chief Digital Officer at Ingka Group, the largest IKEA retailer. Between them, they covered everything from AI-powered room design and beauty content studios to the death of the traditional retail funnel and why fashion has been solving the wrong problem for decades.

The Operating Environment Has Changed Permanently

Parag Parekh opened with a observation that set the tone for everything that followed. The forecasting models retailers have relied on for decades are no longer working.

"Historically, we used to have a sense that the home furnishing market is growing at one or two percent, the country GDP is going at two or three percent, and you would forecast what growth looks like," he said. "No longer the case."

Consumer wallets are thinning across Europe, [Asia Pacific](/article/nrf-asia-pacific-trade-show-award-global-retail-shift), and the US simultaneously. For IKEA, whose core promise is affordability, that creates a specific tension: how do you continue making long-term investments to lower prices and drive sustainability while also responding to the pressures of the here and now?

Graf described the same environment through a different lens. Power, she argued, has shifted decisively to the consumer, and that shift is structural, not cyclical. "Consumers are not thinking in channels," she said. "They're not thinking in funnel. They really think in experiences." Today's shoppers are more informed, less loyal, and will move on immediately if a brand fails to meet them where they are.

Her conclusion was direct: scale and size are no longer what will make you win. Speed is. "If you can really move at the speed of the consumer, you can manage everything around it."

Miquel framed the challenge in fashion terms, but the logic applies across retail. "Business as usual has changed," he said. "Business as usual is about disruption, and conflicts everywhere, and problems in supply chains. You have to accept it and fix it, but not spend too much time on it. The opportunity is in looking at what the environment is also bringing."

Consumers [No Longer](/article/agentic-commerce-shopify-nvidia-google-cloud-shoptalk-europe-2026) Shop in Funnels

Graf offered one of the clearest descriptions of how consumer behaviour has already changed.

Discovery, experience, transaction, and community sharing are no longer sequential steps. They are happening simultaneously, in the same place, at the speed of a social media scroll. MAC's TikTok Shop launch in the UK illustrated the point exactly. A consumer discovers a product on TikTok, tries it in a MAC store, purchases it online, and shares it with their community, all within the same moment and ecosystem.

To meet that reality, Estée Lauder has transformed MAC locations into live content creation studios. Makeup artists are now creators, engaging audiences and selling in real time. The store is no longer just a point of sale. It is a production environment.

But Graf was equally insistent that technology without emotional connection is not enough. The brands winning in this environment are the ones combining platform speed with deep cultural relevance. Estée Lauder's approach to India's wedding season, with bespoke Bobbi Brown bridal journeys tailored specifically to that moment, and its Ramadan campaigns, which saw Jo Malone London develop fragrances with locally sourced ingredients and build content specifically for the festive season, are not marketing activations. They are expressions of a brand that has done the work to understand what a moment means to a specific consumer in a specific place.

"This is what really makes the difference and what connects the brand with the consumer emotionally," Graf said. "What ultimately drives authentic storytelling."

Parekh made the same point from IKEA's perspective. The shift he is seeing is consumers moving away from transactional relationships toward asking brands to solve problems. "It is no longer about selling a bed," he said. "It is more about, how do I help you with better sleep? It is no longer about selling a sofa. It is about, this is my home, can you help redesign this?"

AI Is Powerful. It Is Not the Strategy.

All three panellists were enthusiastic about AI. None of them treated it as a strategy in itself.

Miquel offered the most vivid framing. "Twenty years ago, digital transformation moved at the speed of an elephant, the physical world, heavy and slow. AI brings speed on top of a Ferrari. The level of transformation we will see is the difference between a big wave and a tsunami."

But he was equally direct about the risk of investing in the wrong kind of AI. "Invest not in the commodity side," he said. "Invest where you are making a real difference. Invest in what helps to enhance your distinctive elements."

His four predictions for what consumers will demand by 2030 were stark: truth, because fake content will make authenticity a scarce and valuable commodity; a genuinely upgraded omnichannel experience, because what exists today is, in his words, "like a kid's way" compared to what consumers will expect; lower prices, always, because "the only element that unifies all consumers is they want to pay less, that is mathematics"; and AI embedded beneath all of it, not as a feature but as infrastructure.

Graf noted that brands which have moved too fast to strip out the human element in favour of AI-generated content have found consumers pushing back, forcing them to rebuild those human touchpoints. Emotional connection is not a soft consideration. It is a competitive necessity.

At IKEA, AI is delivering results that are practical and measurable. Room planning, which used to take a co-worker eight to nine hours to complete for a single room, now takes around 30 minutes with AI assistance. Customers can also access similar capability directly on their phones, using LIDAR scanning to map their space and receive AI-generated layout options based on budget, mood, and lifestyle.

Getting the workforce ready for that shift is its own project. IKEA has now enabled 40,000 of its 160,000 co-workers through its AI literacy programme, with the full workforce as the target. The approach is not passive. Co-workers are invited to identify the most frustrating, repetitive parts of their roles, and small AI tools are built around those specific pain points. "All of a sudden there is a penny drop moment," Parekh said. "This is working, and this is helping me in my day to day."

Fashion Has Been Solving the Wrong Problem

Miquel was candid about an industry-wide blind spot.

"In fashion, we offer too much fashion," he said. "All shirts are part of the same family. Everyone has a good season and a bad season. What makes the difference is understanding your client and working on a strategy. Fashion needs less fashion and more strategy."

His argument is that the industry has historically poured energy into creativity, speed to market, and fashionability, while underinvesting in understanding the consumer and building distinctive business models. "What consumers wanted was experience, technology, and to be understood," he said. "We were focused on other things."

The resilience he argues for is built on three foundations: knowing your specific consumer and not trying to be everything to everyone; building a business model that is genuinely distinctive rather than just competitive; and using AI to accelerate the gap between your business and the rest, not as a cost-cutting tool but as a differentiation engine.

What 2030 Actually Looks Like

The panellists were asked what the audience should be learning about now to be ready for 2030.

Parekh pointed to two things. First, immersive physical retail experiences, which have cycled in and out of retail conversation for years, will finally arrive consistently, linked to the trust-building that brands will need in an AI-mediated world. Second, he posed the question of productivity as something still genuinely open. "Will the discussions around a four-day work week become reality by 2030?" he asked. "Will AI productivity mean business goals, or will it mean giving us more time for life?" He did not offer an answer. He offered it as the question retailers should be sitting with.

Miquel's prediction was that the winners will be the retailers who have built genuinely interconnected ecosystems, where discovery, experience, and purchase happen in one single moment, and who have earned consumer trust by standing for truth in a landscape full of noise.

Graf's closing argument was about operating model, not technology. Consumer centricity as a strategy is no longer enough. It has to be embedded in how decisions are made every day, at every level. "That will differentiate the winners from the rest," she said.

The panel's overall message was not complicated. The technology is available to almost everyone. The data is available to almost everyone. What is not equally distributed is the willingness to build organisations that move at the speed of the consumer, stay genuinely close to what people need, and treat that proximity as the real competitive advantage.

That, the three of them agreed, is what will separate retail's winners from its casualties by 2030.