IADS Exclusive: 2025 IADS Academy - The Experience Architect: redefining merchant excellence
From merchants to Experience Architects: aligning intuition, data and customer purpose
The IADS Academy programme, a 30-year-old tailor-made mentoring workshop open only to our members’ high potentials, promotes cooperation and future orientation. Over the years, the IADS Academy has trained 200+ executives from 29 companies in 22 countries, some of whom reached top positions in member and non-member companies (for IADS member companies alone, 4 CEOs).
Every year since 2020, IADS member CEOs have defined the question they want the Academy cohort to work on. In 2020, the Academy group examined the COVID-19’s consequences. In 2021, the topic was about the definition of an omnichannel P&L. In 2022, the cohort focused on improving the profitability of Private Labels. In 2023, the topic was about the skills of the future. In 2024, the group addressed the question of an AI decision-making tool for department stores. Finally, the 2025 topic was: How to become better merchants: from intuition to data-driven decisions.
For more than a century, the department store merchant has been defined by mastery of numbers and product: margin discipline, inventory velocity, vendor leverage. Those skills built retail empires. Today, they no longer guarantee relevance.
This IADS Exclusive outlines the insights the Academy cohort studied, considered, and developed throughout the journey to their final presentation. The Academy examined the paradox at the heart of contemporary department stores: organisations rich in data, experience and infrastructure, yet constrained by misalignment, inertia and outdated success metrics. As traditional optimisation logic collides with 21st-century uncertainty, the role of the merchant is being quietly but fundamentally rewritten. From curator of product to Experience Architects, from data accumulation to decision clarity, the next era of merchant excellence demands a redefinition of skills, scope and accountability, to learn when to trust data, when to trust intuition, and how to orchestrate both in service of the customer.
