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You know what’s a world away from ecommerce? Chainsaws. I got my first chainsaw this weekend and went to work on our front yard. God it felt good. However the little cuts and splinters in these precious keyboard fingers have been hell this week. Send moisturiser.

CHEERS, BUSHY

01

Just like my high school sex education teacher said, you can have it safe or you can have it fast. That’s the message from the two biggest ecommerce couriers in Australia this week.

Australia Post reported a 20% lift in parcel locker usage over the past 12 months, with more than two million Aussies now registered and over 5,000 out-of-home collection points nationwide.

Forever New and Cotton On have both rolled it out at checkout, and Cotton On is giving away five $5,000 wardrobes to customers who pick a locker before 30 August (good ol Aus Post marketing bucks). Forever New’s head of digital reckons it has cut their missed deliveries by 12%.

Meanwhile, Amazon has Prime orders landing in as little as five hours in Sydney and Melbourne on anything over $49, across overnight, afternoon and evening same-day windows. Can’t wait for them to add advertisements to our parcels.

02

I’ve held back on commenting on every voluntary administration in ecommerce lately, because it’s not enlightening, positive or helpful. But Proud Poppy hit me this week.

Tara McKeon has been on the podcast this year, has one of our most downloaded episodes, and joined me on a founders panel at Online Retailer. She’d hinted there was some stuff going on.

I wasn’t sad when I read it though. It actually made me smile. In true Tara style, she used it to be open with her community, stay committed to every order, and help others learn from her mistakes.

She put voluntary administration in a whole new light in her post: "Let’s be clear, this is not a business shut down, bankruptcy or closure of the overall business. This is a voluntary restructure, us reaching out to the professionals to help us through the turbulent time we are all feeling at the moment across business, ecommerce and retail."

She even got into the Reddit thread about it, owning the tax catch-up and saying she just didn’t know enough and had to call in experts. All class.

Then there’s Stax, bought out of receivership by the founders of sneaker marketplace PUSHAS. Sandy Li-Truong says "our responsibility now is to earn the trust of the STAX community." Good.

They’ll need to, because the collapse left 12,927 unfulfilled orders worth $1.71 million. On those, co-owner Justin Truong: "Although legal responsibility for orders placed with the previous entity did not transfer to the new ownership, we recognise the impact on affected customers and are actively exploring meaningful ways to support them as the brand relaunches." We’re off to a shaky start.

03

I thought for my final article today I’d write a 6,000-word essay on AI, aka a Zuckerberg. Kidding. I’m not that tone deaf. Or rich.

What is emerging, though, is platforms pushing transparency on AI content, or… if you’re sceptical… putting their fingerprints all over it so they can claim ownership.

Anthropic announced this week it will embed an imperceptible watermark in text plus signed provenance metadata on images, across everything Claude touches, for models launched on or after 2 August. Can you see it here? I hope not. Now I’m paranoid.

It works the other way too. Perplexity started blocking ads secretly baked into TIME magazine’s markdown pages - the version AI agents read and humans never see - calling it deceptive.

The 2 August date aligns with the EU AI Act's transparency rules. This is regulation arriving, not conscience.

04

Only two more vowels and you’ve got the whole set. Target has appointed its first Chief AI Officer (CAIO) which is significant because Target has already been out front among retailers on shipping AI.

Chandhu Nair starts after more than six years at Lowe’s. His remit covers both team-member and customer-facing systems, internal and external - arguably the biggest remit in retail after the CEO.

Nair’s own framing: "The most meaningful AI stories won’t be about what happens in a lab. They’ll be about what happens on the front line." One interesting internal structure dilemma - he reports to the CIO rather than directly into the CEO.

The other role coming to fruition in the US is Head of TikTok Shop, earning its place because it needs quick decisions, going live instantly, and a mix of product curation, entertainment and tech. TikTok Shop is now 2% of US online retail spend, up from 1.2% a year ago.

Meanwhile, down in Melbourne, I was very happy and proud to see Dr Jason Pallant open RMIT’s Marketing Technology Lab, Australia’s first of its kind, featuring a simulated retail store, live data walls, and an immersive igloo, all focused on privacy-first marketing.

I can’t wait to get down there and see it. Apparently if you say the secret code word to Dr J it opens up a hidden basketball court and beer fridge.

05

While most of Europe’s not wearing many clothes at all at the moment, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation came into force at the end of last month, banning the destruction of unsold apparel and footwear. No chucking it into landfill, no torching it at the stake.

It’s live now for large businesses (250+ staff, or over €50m turnover and €43m balance sheet) and hits medium-sized brands in 2030. You’ll need to publish the proportion of product exiting at each rung: sell, donate, prepare for reuse, recycle, recover, dispose.

Before you can bin anything it has to be offered to three social economy entities and refused, or listed publicly for eight weeks with no takers. Customer returns are in scope, as are international operators, including Australians using an EU 3PL.

It is a timely reminder that Thread Together is the most amazing charitable organisation in Australia, helping retailers and brands redistribute excess stock to communities in need. Let me know if I can connect you and get ahead of what will hopefully land here soon.

Meanwhile, Vinted looks like it’s got off to a strong start since quietly launching in Australia with no seller fees, into a market where 91% of us have already bought or sold secondhand. And in the UK Oxfam sold out every single item in its first eBay Live stream, 3,200 viewers and 18,000 likes in an hour.

There’s never been more options and fewer excuses to be responsible with excess stock.

ATC PLAYBOOK #653

You cannot pick the winning ad before it runs, so stop trying to.

When I worked at agencies, making one ad cost anywhere from half a million to a few million dollars. One hero execution, and you’d better be right, because it was a big bet and your only chance.

That world is gone. You can shoot a few hundred ads on an iPhone and let the market tell you which one works. The problem is most teams still run approvals like it’s the old world. Every extra sign-off is another chance for someone to kill the ad that would have worked, because it looked wrong in a meeting.

Mark Broadhead has made around 15,000 ads in four years at The Lad Collective. Fewer than ten of them properly scaled. He’s not precious about it.

Examples from this Playbook

🦄 Mark from The Lad Collective built a 90 second ad in a shopping centre debunking thread count, and didn’t mention the product for the first 45 seconds. Find something everyone thinks is true, then derail it.

🐕 Mike from Scratch ring-fences new creative in separate campaigns from the winners. Leave them together and the algorithm’s bias toward known data means your next unicorn never gets enough air to surface.

⚡ Alice from Ovira sets one guardrail, that an ad can’t be inaccurate or misleading, and lets everything inside that line run. Not a licence to be sloppy, a licence to stop pre-judging on taste.

👟 Dave from Converse funds long shots outside the algorithm, because Meta optimises for the next sale, not your brand priorities. Give them a proper run, then feed the winners back in once they’ve earned it.