# Rhone, Anthropologie, and Crocs Bet Bigger on Brick-and-Mortar While AI Cuts Planning Costs *Major brands report increased store capex heading into 2027 as machine learning reshapes inventory and labor spend.* By **Jenny Huang Goodman MPA MSc MHSA, Principal** — The Stash Edge, Hako Shikin LLC. Published 2026-10-14. Canonical: https://www.pops4.com/stash/articles/retail-brands-rhone-anthropologie-kohls-brunt-crocs-2026-10-14t12-7 Subject: Retail Brands (Rhone, Anthropologie, Kohl's, Brunt, Crocs) Tags: brick-and-mortar, retail media, ai operations, pop-up retail, demand planning, store expansion --- Five major retail brands — Rhone, Anthropologie, Kohl's, Brunt, and Crocs — report increased capital investment in physical stores heading into 2027, according to Modern Retail's Brands Briefing. The move coincides with AI-driven reductions in back-end planning costs, allowing brands to reallocate dollars from merchandising labor and inventory waste into square footage and customer experience. The mechanism is simple: AI tools now handle demand forecasting, assortment planning, and replenishment scheduling that once required large merchandising teams. Brands capture those savings and redirect them to new store builds, renovations, and in-store experience upgrades. Rhone, a men's activewear brand, and Brunt, a work boot company, both cited store expansion as a strategic priority. Anthropologie and Kohl's, with mature store fleets, are renovating existing locations. Crocs continues opening new doors despite its robust digital business. Why this works: Physical stores remain the highest-converting channel for most product categories. Apparel and footwear conversion rates in-store run **three to five times** higher than e-commerce, per industry benchmarks. The cost barrier has always been the operational overhead — inventory precision, labor scheduling, visual merchandising. AI collapses those costs. A brand that spent $500,000 annually on demand planners and excess stock can now run leaner systems and deploy that capital into a store lease, fixtures, and staff. The second driver is retail media. A separate IAB and Grocery TV study released this week found that marketers increasingly view in-store retail media as a full-funnel channel, though **43 percent** say they underutilize it. Brands that own their own stores control the media inventory. They can test promotions, capture first-party purchase data, and iterate without waiting on a retailer partner. The store becomes both a conversion point and a data collection node. The steal for a small physical-product brand: You cannot afford a retail lease, but you can afford a roadshow. Rent a pop-up space in a high-foot-traffic area for a weekend or a week. Use a lightweight AI demand tool — platforms like Inventory Planner or Cogsy start under $200 per month — to model which SKUs to bring and in what quantities. This minimizes dead stock risk. Bring **10 to 15 units per SKU**, not **50**. Staff the pop-up yourself or with one hire. Capture emails at checkout with a simple iPad form or Square terminal integration. Track conversion by hour and day of week. After the pop-up, send a post-purchase email sequence to everyone who bought. Include a product photo, a reorder link, and a referral incentive. Use the foot traffic data and conversion rate to model a longer lease or a second market. If your pop-up converts at **8 percent** and you see **200 visitors per day**, that is **16 transactions**. At a **$40 average order**, you generate **$640 daily revenue**. A week-long pop-up with a **$1,500 rent** and **$500 in labor** costs **$2,000**. You clear **$4,480** in revenue, leaving **$2,480** in gross margin before product cost. Run this in three cities over a quarter, refine your SKU mix each time, and you have a repeatable playbook and a customer file. The broader pattern: Brick-and-mortar is not dying. It is becoming cheaper to operate and more valuable as a data and conversion channel. The brands that survived the digital shift are the ones now expanding physical presence. Small brands can run the same play at micro scale, using pop-ups and AI inventory tools to test markets without signing multi-year leases. The next move is to treat each pop-up as a product launch, capture the customer data, and build a repeat-purchase file before you ever commit to a permanent location. ## The takeaway Use AI demand tools to minimize pop-up inventory risk, capture emails, and test store economics before signing a lease. --- ## Publisher **Hako Shikin LLC** — Virginia Beach, Virginia. Founded 1997. ASI 217876 · DUNS 18-204-6339. Principal and author: **Jenny Huang Goodman MPA MSc MHSA**. - Author: https://www.huanggoodman.com/about - LLM context: https://www.pops4.com/stash/llms.txt - MCP endpoint, for AI agents: https://mcp.pops4.com/mcp - Client dashboard: https://dashboard.pops4.com/ - Catalogue: 70,000+ products, 200+ brands