Culture Is a Lead Indicator of Revenue. Sarah Engel Has the Numbers to Prove It.

Sarah Engel has spent more than two decades in marketing. As President of January Digital, she leads the marketing leadership company and media agency of record for clients like Carhartt, amika, Interstate Batteries, and Steve Madden.

She also serves as a Strategic Advisor to Shoptalk Spring 2026 – the conference landing in Las Vegas next week – and has helped shape its agenda and bring diverse speakers to the stage for years.

ClickZ’s Lee Arthur sat down with Engel ahead of Shoptalk Spring 2026. We covered a lot of ground: the hard financials hiding inside soft culture metrics, what DTC brands need to do right now to stay visible in an agentic world, and the single quality she hunts for in a hire that no CV will ever reveal.

The Business Case for Culture (It’s Not What You Think)

Culture tends to be treated as the soft stuff. The nice-to-have. The thing discussed in all-hands meetings and deprioritised in quarterly reviews.

Engel pushes back on this, firmly, and with data.

“When you look at the cost of hiring a new employee, intense turnover, the cost of institutional knowledge walking out the door – from a financial perspective, it is in your best interest to create a culture where people can thrive,” she says.

Her argument isn’t simply that happy employees are pleasant to have. Culture connects directly to brand authenticity. And today’s consumers, particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha, are forensically good at detecting the difference.

“Consumers know the difference now. They are so educated. If you have people internally who are living and breathing the brand, they can bring that forward.”

The practical implication is clear. A quarterly check-in on your high performers is a growth strategy. Not every top performer wants money or a new title. The leaders who figure out what actually motivates them are the ones who keep them.

“Your A players are setting the standard. Other people who come into the organization have to either level up to that level, or they don’t make it.”

AI Agents Are Coming. The Answer Is Counterintuitive.

One of the sharpest debates at Shoptalk Spring 2026 will be about agentic commerce. This is the world where AI agents do the shopping, the filtering, and increasingly the purchasing on behalf of consumers. It’s on the formal agenda. It will also dominate plenty of hallway conversations.

For DTC brands watching nervously as customer relationships get mediated by algorithms, Engel’s answer might surprise them.

“The answer to creating emotional resonance with your customers through an agentic experience is almost counterintuitive,” she says. “The actual answer is the data. You need to train that agent on tone, on the way you treat customers, on every piece of data that tells you how personalized this experience should be.”

This reframes the agentic era as a data problem, not a brand problem. The brand that trains its agents well – on tone, on customer history, on what friction to remove at what moment – survives the transition.

She points to True Fit’s recently launched shopping agent as a practical example. It intercepts a customer before they hit a fit issue. It personalizes the experience in the moment, and it removes the friction that leads to returns. Agentic, yes – but in service of a better human outcome.

“We’re not just talking about Claude and ChatGPT,” she adds. “We’re talking about how we use agents at various points in the shopping process to make it a more authentic experience.”

“The data set is what will allow you to create a more authentic experience by way of an agent.”

Living the Questions: Strategy at Pace

Engel is known for a philosophy she calls “living the questions.” She borrowed it from the poet Rilke. She has made it central to how she leads.

Right now, leaders face enormous pressure to have instant answers on AI, on channel strategy, on the future of the organization. She argues this philosophy is more valuable than ever.

Her practical framework is deceptively simple. Before acting, ask: is this a two-day problem, a two-week problem, or a two-year problem? The stakes determine the process.

“If the stakes are low, keep moving. Things are moving so quickly right now. But if it has a deep impact on your customers or your employee base — that’s a more thoughtful decision, where we need different data input.”

Where AI creates space for better thinking

There’s a leadership dimension here that matters for Shoptalk week. Ten thousand retail leaders will be bombarded with new tools and competing imperatives. Engel’s point is that the best use of AI isn’t answering every question faster. It’s creating time and headspace to think better about the questions that actually matter.

“If you take ten hours of somebody’s work away and give it to AI, what do we want them to do with that time?” she asks. “It’s our responsibility as leaders to upskill them, reskill them, determine what they’re going to be doing next. AI gives you the opportunity to be more strategic, more creative — if you’re thoughtful about that time.”

The Promotional Drug, and the Leadership Required to Break the Habit

“I would definitively say it’s a leadership change,” she says. “If responsibility sits only in the marketing department or the ecomm team, it is almost impossible.”

She describes an organizational alignment problem, not a merchandising one. Moving from 200 promotional days a year to 100 requires commitment from every function — merchants, buyers, finance, marketing, and leadership — all pointing in the same direction at the same time.

She’s seen it work. It takes about 18 months. The long-term payoff is customers who respect the brand at full price.

Hiring for Soul: The One Thing a CV Will Never Show You

Ask Engel what quality she looks for in a 2026 hire that a résumé will never surface.

“Intellectual curiosity. The people bringing new AI capabilities forward fastest, finding creative new solves for clients, they have one thing in common. They are thinkers and tinkerers. Super curious about what comes next. They want to play with it, break it, try it again.”

It’s not about tool familiarity. It’s about disposition. The willingness to be uncertain and try anyway. The inability to leave a problem alone. Some in venture circles call it high agency: people who can’t help themselves but pick something up and do something with it.

She pairs that with one other must-have: genuine data understanding. Not the ability to clean data, but the ability to look at a dataset and know what action to take. Together, that’s the profile she believes is built for what’s ahead.

What to Expect at Shoptalk Spring 2026

Engel knows Shoptalk well. She has been part of its advisory structure for years and appears on stage regularly. Her read on this year’s show reflects everything above.

“It’s going to be a great show, a lot of AI conversation, but also a lot of store conversations, a lot of new technologies,” she says.

That tension runs through everything she talks about. On one side: the scale of AI possibility. On the other: the irreducibly human desire for real connection, real experience, and real community.

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ClickZ is covering Shoptalk Spring 2026 live from the floor at Mandalay Bay, March 24–26. Catch our on-site video interviews, session recaps, and daily insights at ClickZ.com and across our social channels.

Brand leaders, if you’re attending and want to share your perspective on what’s shaping retail in 2026, apply to be interviewed here or reach out at editorial@clickz.com.