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Predicting Consumer Behavior to Make Retail Smarter

Retail has always been a gamble. What if it didn’t have to be a risk? Retailers are eager to understand consumer behavior and desires before committing to inventory. As expectations for environmentally conscious business practices, retailers are steering away from waste. First Insight helps businesses reach sustainability goals and accurately forecast consumer behavior. How exactly?…

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Retail has always been a gamble. What if it didn’t have to be a risk? Retailers are eager to understand consumer behavior and desires before committing to inventory. As expectations for environmentally conscious business practices, retailers are steering away from waste.

First Insight helps businesses reach sustainability goals and accurately forecast consumer behavior. How exactly? With product testing in the early design stages, First Insight helps retailers refine inventory.

On this episode of “What Just Happened?”, hosted by Christine Russo, Greg Petro, CEO of First Insight, discusses the revolutionary consultations provided by the company. Petro breaks down the complex layers between retail, wholesaler, and manufacturer, where the product development process is disjointed, and biases are implemented.

Russo and Petro discuss…

●Test in design, from sketches to CAD, and samples to obtain the information.

●The First Insight process, on both the B2B and B2C side.

●The gaps between design, manufacturing, and selling -all with separate views of what the customer wants.

“Ultimately, the consumer is going to decide whether we were right,” said Petro. The First Insight process obtains the customer’s opinion from design, providing them with what they want so that their dollars go further in the retail setting.

Greg Petro received his undergrad and master’s degrees from the University of Pittsburg. He started working with First Insight in 2007 and serves on the board for FIT.

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Deloitte: Holiday e-commerce to reach up to $319B in 2026–27

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  • 01Last season's total holiday sales grew 4.1% by Census Bureau count, above the 2.9% to 3.4% range Deloitte had forecast in fall 2025.
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  • 03Adobe's and Salesforce's holiday projections landed in late September and October last year, so the next two to six weeks should bring corroborating or conflicting numbers to plan against.

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  • 01Meta designed its Meta Lab pop-ups around dwell time and photo-taking, with coffee stations and full-length mirrors; its creative director told The Wall Street Journal the company wants visitors to bring friends and stay a while rather than move through quickly.
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