What Pulse eCommerce Summit 2026 Made Clear: Conviction Beats Complexity

The brands on stage at Pulse eCommerce Summit 2026 are performing. What was striking, across two days in London, was how consistently the explanations had nothing to do with new channels, new platforms, or new tools. Speaker after speaker returned to a simpler question: do you know what your business actually is, and are your decisions protecting that or quietly eroding it?

The sessions covered everything from first-party data capture to enterprise platform migration to founder identity. What connected them was less a shared conclusion than a shared pressure: the temptation to add complexity as a proxy for progress.

Channels Are a Means; Brand Experience Is the End

Lynda Carnal Theard, Digital Director EMEA at Dr. Martens, was asked about channel investment priorities on the day one fashion panel and focused on something more fundamental:

“One of the biggest opportunities right now is operational excellence across channels. What I’m seeing is that consumers don’t think in channel anymore. They really want connection with a brand, and they want experience. The brands that are really right now are the ones delivering the best experience to the customers, who have been consistent across touch points, and also deliver great service. It’s not just about channels anymore.”

Ian Mackey at Percival gave that argument its clearest commercial proof point. The brand had spent years treating discounting as a default trade lever, and the cost had compounded quietly. “At the beginning, we were so reliant on discounting strategy, and I feel like it was always just a knee-jerk reaction to go into sale based on trade. A big learning for me is I should have pushed back on that a lot further when I first joined the business, because ultimately that would have just protected greater profit in the long run. We’re seeing the payoff now, after completely pivoting the brand away from discounting, and just the overall perception of the brand, overall conversion for the brand, I think is so much stronger now.”

The Sportsshoes session sharpened this further. Sian Wells, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at the brand, described moving from blanket offers to serving discounts only to customers showing genuine purchase hesitation. “Someone’s coming on site and they’re hesitating, or they’re showing signs of comparing prices across other retailers. Those are the people you want to reach with a discount. Other people are going to come on and they’re going to purchase, and there’s going to be no hesitation. So let’s not get this out in front of you, because you don’t need it.” Suppressing offers to people who would have converted without one saved Sportsshoes roughly £25,000 in a single campaign window, money that was then redirected into acquisition spending.

The Checkout Consent Box Is a Revenue Decision, Not a Legal One

Most ecommerce teams treat the marketing consent checkbox at checkout as a compliance formality. The session featuring Hoodrich and Loop Earplugs made the case that it is one of the most consequential revenue decisions a brand makes, and that most brands are getting it badly wrong by default.

Natalie Tobias, Head of Ecommerce at Hoodrich, described the old approach: “We just used it as a compliance tool. It’s got to be there. Most people, particularly in the demographic for Hoodrich, would probably opt out of that conversation, because people don’t want to be spammed. And we never really considered it as a growth engine tool.” When the brand changed its approach, email consent moved from 44% to 72% in three to four weeks. SMS opt-in went from 6% to 52% over three months, unlocking nearly 30,000 incremental marketable subscribers.

Bruna Skof, CRM and Loyalty Lead at Loop Earplugs, added the global dimension. Loop runs multiple Shopify stores across markets with different consent requirements, and the default Shopify widget handles none of that nuance. “If we’re not optimizing for consent capture, we’re essentially missing the opportunity to build long-term relationships. We kind of viewed consent capture as a legal requirement, and since working on this, we see that by simply using the default feature by Shopify we were missing a lot of marketable profiles and therefore revenue.”

Tobias’s framing of who these subscribers are is the part worth sitting with.

“Those are people who’ve already bought into your brand. You’ve spent money through your paid media channels. The point at which they’re checking out is the point at which they’ve already bought into your brand. And for us, it made sense to understand that that first-party data gives us a much cleaner understanding of who we’re talking to.”

The paid media budget that drove the visit is wasted if consent is not captured at the point of purchase.

Adding Channels Is Easy; Making Them Work Is Where the Pain Lives

The Beyond DTC panel was the most operationally candid conversation of the summit. Chris Perrins at Gymshark, Lawrence Montgomery at Rough Trade, and Tom Clements at Mint Velvet compared notes on what goes wrong when brands expand into retail or wholesale without properly stress-testing the back office.

Montgomery described Rough Trade’s migration of 600,000 SKUs from three separate catalogs into a single global system as a crisis that was entirely preventable. The root cause was not technical: “The root cause of the problem was that we tried to grow in channels without the proper infrastructure set up, and that was stupid. We should have waited. We should have been patient.” His practical lesson:

“Sometimes we bundle too many problems into one problem. Really, what we should have done is taken each of those problems piecemeal and tackled them one by one, which would have then allowed the next challenge to be easier to accomplish.”

Perrins’ Gymshark story had the same shape. The Regent Street flagship launched with a distribution-centre-style inventory model: bin locations, unit-level tracking, granular scanning. It collapsed within six months because retail has high staff turnover and the system required too much training and maintenance to survive it. “You can’t go and put a mini DC in the store no matter how many units. You have to keep it simple.”

Clements was direct about where warnings get ignored: “Every single channel is different. And whilst it might be super simple to just click the Add App button in the Shopify marketplace, actually the downstream part of that becomes really complex.” His advice to anyone planning a channel expansion was to involve finance and operations at the hypothesis stage, not after go-live.

On omnichannel as an aspiration, the panel landed somewhere pragmatic. Montgomery: “Full omnichannel, you’re shooting for the moon. You need to choose what flavor of that is right for your business. For us, click and collect is extremely important and works really well. Shipping from store to customers with the types of baskets we have is an operational impossibility.” Pick the version that fits your actual infrastructure, not the version that sounds most ambitious.

The Brands That Drifted All Drifted the Same Way

Three sessions across the two days covered founders talking about their businesses, and a pattern emerged: every brand that had lost ground described the same sequence. External pressure, usually from investors, wholesalers, or well-credentialled hires, caused them to move away from the founding instinct. The recovery, in each case, required going back to it.

Albin Johansson, Co-Founder of Axel Arigato, put the diagnosis bluntly. After nearly 12 years building the brand, he described a period where “we did become a kind of lost teenager. We did think a bit too highly about ourselves.” When the business started scaling and bringing in experienced leaders from larger organisations, the original identity got diluted. “What I realized is that my hire people might have a really good experience, great know-how, intelligent, etc. They have, at least so far, never proven to be better at Axel Arigato than us. You cannot just white-label an idea or a feeling or anything. You need to get into what is it here that we should be doing.” The recovery required building a 65-page brand platform before anything else: not a product plan, not a growth strategy, but a dense articulation of who the brand actually is.

Louis Tinsley of ThruDark described a version of the same challenge specific to heritage-credentialled brands trying to grow beyond their original audience. The brand came from a Special Forces background, and that origin story is both its strongest asset and its tightest constraint. “It comes down to uniqueness in the product, being more durable, sticking to that story, and then also having another story within that, which is our endeavour-through-adversity motto that resonates through everybody. Everybody’s got their own form of suffering in some way.” The answer was to find the human truth inside the military identity that a broader audience could share, rather than softening the identity itself.

Marcus Fairfax Fountaine of Fairfax and Favor offered a structurally different version of staying close to the customer: a 126,000-member Facebook group where customers buy, sell, praise, and criticise in real time. “There is always someone who doesn’t like something, but you’ve got to filter that out. It made us so much more customer-centric business, because I get messaged myself personally if we don’t do something well. Returns policies, every sort of experience, has to be rock solid. You’ll know about it on the group.”

Owning the Data Is Not Enough; You Have to Own the Relationship It Comes From

Hamza Waheed, Director of Growth and Product at Healf, gave the most forward-looking talk of the summit. The brand started as a premium supplement retailer and is now building what Waheed calls “wellbeing intelligence”: a system that connects blood biomarkers, wearable data, purchase history, and product records to give customers personalised guidance about what they should be putting into their bodies.

Competing companies are approaching the same problem from the measurement layer, building wearables or diagnostics platforms. The issue is that the measurement layer sits upstream from where customers actually take action. “Customers trust us because we’re a curator. We don’t own any of these products that we stock. We simply focus on putting the best things in front of them, so they trust our judgment, our taste, our expertise in this domain. And you can only get this level of trust by being objectively neutral.” The data is only valuable because the trust was built first.

The P&L Is Everyone’s Job, Whether They Know It or Not

The day two CEO panel brought together Mark Wright at JoJo Maman Bébé, Mo White at Refy Beauty, and Ailish Yorke-Long at Oka. The businesses are navigating genuinely different pressures: falling birth rates in kidswear, secondhand platforms eating into premium margins, beauty brands under constant promotion pressure, luxury homeware competing against a market democratised by ecommerce.

Wright’s point about financial literacy across teams was direct: “I’m astounded whenever I sit in individual team meetings and teams only think about their team’s contribution to the business. Margin is the most important metric in a retail business for me, certainly. Everybody needs to understand how top-line growth translates to the bottom line.”

White described the founder-brand tension with precision. At Refy, the founder’s identity and the brand’s identity are tightly fused, which makes commercial decisions harder to make without risking the authenticity that drives growth. Her approach: “You look at the founder attributes, you look at the business attributes, you do a little Venn diagram and work out where the communalities are, and you accelerate the communalities and level up your growth on top of that.”

Wright also offered a leadership anchor that was more personal than strategic. He described stopping during a run in mid-March 2020 to write five notes into his phone: be human, lead, listen, manage energy, think about time. “Time is the interesting one I keep referring back to. Time pressure can really help in your decision-making, because it can force you to take an action, but if you really think it through, how you use that time carefully, it really helps.” He has used those notes as a reference in every difficult period since.

What the Two Days Actually Said

Anya Hindmarch, speaking about her decision to close 65 stores and rebuild around a single experiential cluster in Chelsea, put the broader argument plainly: “If retail is to exist in a digital world, there needs to be a reason to visit.” Emma Bridgewater, closing the summit, gave it a longer time horizon: “There are no rules. Break the rules if they don’t suit you.”

The brands performing at Pulse eCommerce Summit 2026 had built systems to protect what makes them distinct, and they had resisted the accumulation of complexity that makes that question progressively harder to answer. That discipline, unglamorous and hard to measure, was the actual differentiator in the room.