This week’s questions for founders
- Now that wellness is mainstream enough for a department store, what keeps your customers buying direct from you?
- How much of your demand moves with things you don't control - and does your forecast know?
- Are AI assistants starting to show up anywhere in your traffic or sales?
A department store's move into wellness, July's retail sales in a heatwave, and Shopify's second quarter, with our read on what each means for a founder-led brand.
John Lewis takes its £800m programme into sports and wellness
When a mainstream department store commits floorspace to recovery kit and wearables, it confirms the demand health-optimisation brands are built on, and starts competing for the same customer.
John Lewis opened the first of four Sports & Wellness departments at its Oxford Street store this month, announced on 3 August: around 5,000 sq ft bringing sportswear, footwear, wearable technology, recovery products, AI-powered fitness equipment and expert services into one department, with Liverpool following on 19 August, Cheadle on 26 August and an entirely new department in Glasgow in late September. The investment sits inside the retailer’s £800m transformation programme, and the company’s own numbers explain the timing: sales of fitness trackers up almost 30% year on year, connected home fitness equipment up 27%, and searches on johnlewis.com up more than 250% for Therabody massage guns and 380% for red light therapy.
Two things in the announcement matter more than the shopfit. The first is the demand signal: a mainstream retailer has looked at fitness and recovery and committed multi-million-pound floorspace to it, citing forecasts of a wellness market reaching £141bn by 2034. That is the clearest confirmation yet that the behaviours this sector was built on, training around a goal, tracking, recovery, have crossed into the mainstream customer base. The second is the framing: John Lewis says customers now “shop around a goal rather than a traditional retail category”, and has arranged the departments by activity, running, training, outdoor, rather than by product type. That is how good direct-to-consumer brands in this sector already think, now adopted by a retailer with 36 shops.
The competitive read depends on where you sit. On hardware, wearables, recovery tech and home fitness, a premium generalist with national reach and in-store services is now part of the consideration set. For supplement and nutrition brands the overlap is smaller, but the direction matters: as wellness spend consolidates into mainstream baskets, the case for buying direct, depth, specialist credibility, community, subscription economics, has to be made deliberately rather than assumed.
Questions worth revisiting
- Now that wellness is mainstream enough for a department store, what keeps your customers buying direct from you?
Worth a conversation if your plan assumes the category stays specialist.
Retail sales grow 1.3% in July as the heat moves demand online
A hot month did not remove demand; it moved it. The channel detail in July’s figures matters more than the headline.
UK total retail sales rose 1.3% year on year in July, against 2.5% growth a year earlier and below the 12-month average of 1.8%, in the BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor covering the four weeks to 1 August, released on 11 August. Food rose 3.8%, boosted by the final week of the World Cup; non-food fell 0.7% as footfall dropped in the heat. The channel split did the interesting work: in-store non-food sales fell 1.9% while online rose 1.3%, taking online penetration to 35.9% of non-food purchases from 35.4% a year earlier. The BRC’s Helen Dickinson noted that shoppers prioritised “smaller indulgences such as beauty products” while delaying bigger-ticket purchases.
Retail sales data has featured in recent editions, June’s official figures and July’s shop prices among them, and the July monitor adds the sharpest channel detail yet. When conditions turned against stores, online carried the growth. For brands selling online-first, a hot month arrives as a tailwind; for anyone with wholesale or retail exposure, it is a reminder that a season can move a channel’s economics without warning. The IGD’s Sarah Bradbury added the forward look: supply chain pressures from the conflict in the Middle East and the hot weather itself are building toward higher food costs into the autumn.
The founder discipline is knowing which of these swings reach your own P&L. Weather, sport and season move demand between channels and categories on a scale most monthly plans never model. The fix is not a better weather forecast; it is a plan that knows its sensitivities: which weeks are exposed, which channels pick up the slack, and what the margin difference is when they do.
Questions worth revisiting
- How much of your demand moves with things you don't control - and does your forecast know?
- When demand shifts between your channels, do you know what it does to your margin?
Phoenix can help you build the channel-level view of revenue and margin that makes those swings visible.
Shopify grows revenue 34% as orders from AI assistants start to register
The platform under most founder-led e-commerce keeps compounding. The new information in this quarter is where its next channel is forming.
Shopify reported second-quarter results on 5 August, covering the three months to 30 June: revenue up 34% year on year, 33% at constant currency, with gross merchandise volume (GMV, the total value of goods sold across its merchants’ stores), gross profit and free cash flow all growing more than 30%, and a free cash flow margin of 18%. Guidance for the third quarter is for revenue growth at a low-thirties percentage rate. Chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister described GMV growth accelerating with “solid results across all merchant sizes, channels, and geographies”.
After Amazon’s results in last week’s edition, this is the second platform-side reading in a row, and it completes the picture: the infrastructure under founder-led e-commerce is not just healthy but accelerating. The detail worth a founder’s attention sits in the earnings call rather than the headline numbers. Coverage of the call reports AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores roughly tripling year on year, with orders from new buyers arriving through AI channels at nearly twice the rate of other channels. The absolute numbers are still small; the direction is not. Product discovery is starting to happen inside assistants rather than search results, and the platform is wiring itself for it.
For a brand, this is one to watch rather than one to act on yet. Measurement of AI-referred traffic is still early and imperfect, and most brands will see very little of it in their numbers today. The useful discipline is simply awareness: knowing the channel exists and glancing at whether it is starting to show up for you, so its growth does not arrive unnoticed. This sector learned on social what it costs to spot a channel late.
Questions worth revisiting
- Are AI assistants starting to show up anywhere in your traffic or sales?
Sources: Shopify, Q2 2026 financial results: 30%+ growth across GMV, revenue, gross profit and free cash flow, 5 August 2026; Yahoo Finance, Shopify Q2 2026 earnings beat revenue estimates, 5 August 2026
A first win, four years in the making
Mădălina Florea’s Sierre-Zinal victory looks like a breakthrough. It reads more accurately as the visible end of four seasons of base-building.
The 53rd Sierre-Zinal, run on Saturday 8 August, sends a field of the world’s best mountain runners 31 kilometres from Sierre to Zinal through Switzerland’s Valais Alps, climbing 2,200 metres on the way. Romania’s Mădălina Florea won the women’s race in 2:55:46, ahead of last year’s winner Caroline Kimutai, with the UK’s Morven Goodrum third after leading for much of the race; Jacob Adkin, also of the UK, was fourth in the men’s field. It was Florea’s first win here, and the sequence behind it is the story: seventh in 2023, third in 2024, twelfth in 2025, and now the win, despite two falls on the way, her fourth straight victory in a season that has included Broken Arrow, the Quebec Mega Trail and Pitz Alpine.
Nothing about this year’s run was sudden. Sierre-Zinal punishes runners who have not learned it: 1,350 metres of climbing in the first 7.5 kilometres, altitude through the middle, and a long final descent that often decides the race. Florea’s three previous attempts were not failures on the way to a win; they were the price of knowing the course well enough to win on it. The result became visible this year. The work was done in the years the results didn’t show.
Founder-led businesses compound the same way. The year a business visibly breaks through, when the customers arrive, the margin holds and the numbers turn, is rarely built in that year. It is built in the ones before it, when capability was being laid down and the scoreboard did not yet say so. The danger in those years is concluding from the scoreboard that the work isn’t working. What that judgement needs is a measure of progress that is not this month’s result: capability built, base widened, unit economics improving under the surface. Phoenix works with founders on exactly that longer view, with numbers that show the base building before the results arrive.
Sources: iRunFar, 2026 Sierre-Zinal Results: Mădălina Florea Wins, Philemon Kiriago Repeats Victory, 8 August 2026; Golden Trail World Series, Sierre-Zinal Crowns Florea and Kiriago in a Fast and Furious Golden Trail World Series Battle, August 2026
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