Know Your Customer or Lose Them to Someone Who Does: The Sharpest Lessons From World Retail Congress 2026

World Retail Congress 2026 in Berlin was not short on ambition. Across two days of keynotes, panels, and conversations, one idea kept surfacing with more urgency than any other: knowing your customer is no longer a competitive advantage. It is the price of entry.

From Zalando crediting AI as a driver behind its 24% Q1 revenue growth, to Fressnapf's founder predicting his business will double by 2030, to Primark's partnership with adaptive fashion designer Victoria Jenkins, to a broader reckoning with what AI is doing to retail's talent pipeline, the Congress painted a clear picture of where the industry is heading and what separates the retailers who will lead from those who will follow.

The hidden cost of AI: retail's graduate pipeline is under pressure

Before the opportunities, the warning.

One of the most important conversations at the Congress did not come from a keynote. It came from a headline that landed on the morning of the event: graduate and entry-level jobs are falling, in some cases significantly, as AI takes on the tasks that junior roles have traditionally handled.

For retail, the implications run deeper than headlines suggest. For decades, the industry has been built like a pyramid. Large numbers of entry-level staff form the base, learn the business, develop judgment, and rise into management and leadership roles. As AI compresses that base, fewer people are coming in. In five years, the question will not be whether companies saved money on graduate intake. It will be why there are no middle managers, no institutional knowledge, and no pipeline of future leaders.

The retailers grappling with this honestly are not cutting their way through. They are redesigning roles, creating intentional pathways for junior talent to build experience in an AI-augmented environment, and thinking far more deliberately about how the next generation of retail leaders will actually develop. The challenge is no longer whether AI will change jobs. It is whether businesses are building the structures to ensure those jobs still produce the leaders retail will need.

Zalando's 90% moment: what AI actually looks like when it works

If the workforce question was the sobering signal, Zalando was the proof of what is possible on the other side.

David Schneider, co-founder of Zalando and one of the Congress's opening speakers, did not deal in abstractions. He came with numbers. Approximately 90% of Zalando's marketing content is now generated by AI, a sharp rise from a year ago. Campaigns that used to take eight weeks to produce now take days. The business can react to a trend in real time rather than catching up to it after the moment has passed.

The results showed up in Zalando's first quarter of 2026: revenue up approximately 24% year-over-year, adjusted EBIT up 39%, with AI cited explicitly as a driver of both efficiency and customer engagement. The quarter also included a 97 million euro restructuring charge tied to logistics consolidation and the integration of About You, which Zalando acquired in 2025, with the benefits of that work expected from 2027 onwards.

Schneider's broader point was not about content production. It was about relevance. As consumer expectations accelerate and trend cycles compress, the brands that can stay close to their customers in real time will pull ahead of those still operating on quarterly planning cycles. Zalando is building towards being the lifestyle companion that understands each customer individually, not just a platform that sells fashion. Its AI shopping assistant already has millions of users, and the ambition extends to agentic commerce where the platform acts on a customer's behalf across the broader retail ecosystem.

For retail leaders still asking whether AI delivers commercial results, Zalando in 2026 is the clearest answer available.

Community is the new category: why the fastest-growing brands serve fewer people better

Across multiple sessions at the Congress, a pattern emerged that cuts against a lot of received retail wisdom.

The fastest-growing brands at the event were not the ones trying to serve the broadest possible audience. They were the ones that had chosen a specific community, understood it in extraordinary depth, and built everything around it. Not a demographic. Not a target segment. A community with shared needs, shared values, and a shared identity that the brand had earned the right to represent.

This is a meaningful shift in how retail growth works. For most of its history, the industry has chased scale by widening the aperture: more products, more markets, more customers. The community-led model inverts that logic. Growth comes from depth of relationship, not breadth of reach. From solving a specific problem better than anyone else rather than solving many problems adequately.

The brands demonstrating this most compellingly at WRC 2026 were not the largest names in the room.

Primark and Unhidden: what happens when you actually see your customer

The clearest illustration of community-led retail at the Congress was also the most personal.

Victoria Jenkins, founder of adaptive fashion brand Unhidden, joined Primark on stage to discuss their collaboration bringing adaptive clothing to the high street. Jenkins designs for people living with disabilities and chronic illness, customers who have historically been almost entirely ignored by mainstream fashion despite representing a significant share of the population.

The numbers make the gap visible. Research from Primark found that 24% of people in the UK live with a disability. Of those, 75% find it difficult to get accessible clothing, and 70% spend more on clothing just to meet their needs. Something as straightforward as buying a pair of jeans becomes a logistical challenge for a wheelchair user who needs a different cut, different fastenings, different proportions.

What Primark and Unhidden have done is not complicated. They identified a community that was invisible to most of the industry, understood what that community actually needed, and made it available at a price point that does not punish people for having a disability. The adaptive range launched in January 2025 and continues to expand into new categories.

For retail leaders looking for growth, this is the argument in its simplest form: there are millions of customers whose needs are not being met. The retailers willing to see them will find them extraordinarily loyal.

Torsten Toeller and Fressnapf: a pet retailer with a platform ambition

If Primark illustrated the community model through inclusion, Fressnapf illustrated it through depth.

Torsten Toeller founded Fressnapf in 1990 and more than three decades later is still driving its strategy. At WRC 2026, he was asked where growth would come from by 2030. He did not hesitate. He sees Fressnapf doubling its business within four years, not primarily through new store openings or new markets, though both remain part of the plan, but through building an ecosystem around pet ownership that makes the brand indispensable at every stage of a pet's life.

Fressnapf already operates more than 1,900 stores across 13 European countries. But Toeller's vision extends well beyond the store estate, into services, health, nutrition partnerships, digital touchpoints, and collaborations that go wherever the pet owner goes. The logic is straightforward: pet owners are a community with deep emotional investment, significant spending power, and a genuine need for expertise and trust. A retailer that earns that trust at the store level and then extends it across the entire ecosystem of pet ownership is in an entirely different competitive position from one that simply sells pet food.

Toeller captured his philosophy in a line that landed hard in the room: "Dogs behave the same all over the world. It's just their owners that behave differently." Which is why, for all the ambition of the ecosystem strategy, staying close to the local customer remains the foundation. The product may be universal. The relationship is always local.

The lesson that connected everything

World Retail Congress 2026 covered a lot of ground. But the thread running through every session worth paying attention to was the same one.

The retailers winning right now are the ones closest to their customers. Not closest in a data sense, though data matters. Closest in a genuine, committed, organizational sense. Knowing who their customer is. Knowing what that customer needs. Building everything around that knowledge rather than around internal assumptions, competitive reactions, or short-term metrics.

AI makes that closeness possible at a scale that was not previously achievable. It also makes the consequences of not achieving it more severe, because the brands that get it right will be dramatically more relevant than those that do not.

The question every retailer left Berlin asking was the same one that opened the Congress: how many of your decisions this week were actually driven by your customers?

The honest answer to that question is where the next phase of retail begins.