GROW LAAPR 22, 2026
Directors Guild of America, West Hollywood
Presented by

APPLYNOW!
Complimentary tickets for senior retail leaders. 700 C-Suite, operators & innovators. 1 unmissable day of practical strategies & valuable networking.
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Free ticket
$500 bonus
The connections, strategies & relationships you'll build at GROW are unmatched; we prioritize access for people who are building significant brands, implementing cutting edge strategies & are open to talking and sharing with others.

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Whatyourticket unlocks
HANDS ON SESSIONS
BETTER CONNECTIONS
HIGHLY-RATED TECH
$500 BONUS
Past SPEAKERS
GROW Speakers have been there, done that. During main stage talks, panels & interactive workshops, you’ll hear from senior executives & operators from:


Michelle Carrara
RETENTION PANEL: Turning First-Time Buyers into Lifelong Customers
Acquiring a customer is the beginning, not the win. The brands growing most efficiently today are the ones converting first purchases into second, third, and tenth — through better onboarding, smarter lifecycle programs, and loyalty mechanics that actually change behavior. This panel explores what retention looks like in practice: how to identify high-LTV customers early, what keeps people coming back, and where most brands are leaving money on the table after the first sale.


Samuel Sternberg
Rethinking Reach: Media Mix and Customer Realignment
The channels that drove growth three years ago aren't the channels driving it today. Paid social costs have risen, search behavior is shifting with AI, and brands are being forced to rethink where and how they reach customers — and which customers are actually worth reaching. This panel examines how leading brands are rebalancing their media mix in real time: where budgets are moving, how customer segmentation is evolving, and what a sustainable acquisition strategy looks like when the old playbook no longer applies.


Jill Willard
Is Your Payment Stack Ready for Agentic Commerce?
Description: Agentic commerce is evolving rapidly. New AI shopping assistants, autonomous purchasing agents, emerging protocols, and collaborations between technology providers are reshaping how consumers discover and buy products. With so much innovation happening at once, it can be difficult to know where to start. As AI increasingly becomes part of the purchasing journey, retailers will need to rethink their e-commerce strategies and optimize for agent-driven transactions. But what does that mean practically for payment infrastructure? How can merchants verify that agents are who they claim to be? Who is authorized to make a purchase on a consumer's behalf? And when something goes wrong, where does liability reside? Join your peers and industry thought leaders for an interactive discussion on the evolving agentic commerce landscape. Together, we'll cut through the hype, examine the implications for retail payments, and discuss practical ways merchants can prepare for AI-driven commerce without overhauling their existing payment infrastructure.

Benjamin Hardy
What's Actually Working: A Growth Marketer's Roundtable
An informal conversation for senior growth and marketing leads to compare notes on what's actually working in their partner strategy, and what CTV can learn from it. We'll chat through tradeoffs, blind spots, and the stuff nobody's solved yet.

Eric Hoover
Transform Linear Strategy into an AI Discovery Framework
How to take your traditional Organic roadmap (SEO, Owned Content, 3rd Party Outreach) and transform it into a flywheel Discovery Framework that feeds back into itself for continued iteration and LLM visibility.
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Michael Epstein
Unlocking a new growth & acquisition channel with direct mail
Direct mail is re-emerging as a powerful, measurable growth channel for modern ecommerce brands—but it’s no longer just a one-off campaign. In this session, Eric Lowe, Director of Ecommerce at XCVI, and Michael Epstein, Co-founder & Co-CEO of PostPilot, break down how XCVI has scaled direct mail into an always-on acquisition and retention engine, running 40+ campaigns across winback, retargeting, and prospecting. They’ll share how to structure automated flows, measure true incrementality using holdout groups, and why physical mail is driving performance where digital channels fall short. From 12x iROAS winback flows to AI-powered prospecting, this session will unpack what’s working today—and how to apply it to your own growth strategy.
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Juan Pellerano-Rendón
The Rise of Agentic Commerce
eCommerce is evolving from static websites to agentic storefronts. Instead of clicking through pages, shoppers interact with intelligent agents that guide them from discovery to try-on to checkout in one seamless experience. This isn’t just a new feature - it’s a new interface, built on unified data, global infrastructure, and fully merchant-controlled systems. In this session, we’ll explore why agentic storefronts are emerging now, what performance gains early adopters are seeing, and how this shift has led to the launch of the first agentic storefront.
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Chris Happ
From Strategy to Store Floor: What Radical Alignment Actually Looks Like
The first question was whether AI could unlock growth. Mugsy answered it. Now comes the harder one: can that intelligence reach every corner of the business? Join Chris Happ and Mugsy's Director of Stores & Inventory, Mike McGee, for the next chapter — how BAIO's aligned intelligence moved from the boardroom to the buy floor, turning inventory decisions into a direct expression of company strategy. This is Radical Alignment in practice: where intent and execution are locked together so tightly that your stores, your stock, and your margins all pull in the same direction.
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Alessandro Desantis
Loyalty That Learns: Building Emotional Retention That Compounds
Loyalty programmes aren’t what they used to be. Today’s leaders are testing AI-driven strategies that learn, adapt, and deepen emotional connections with customers in real time. This roundtable will give you a front-row seat to what’s working — and what’s not — in using predictive modelling, dynamic rewards, and behavioural signals to keep customers coming back. If retaining customers is mission-critical for your business, this is where you’ll get unfiltered peer insights, practical frameworks, and real stories of success and failure you can put into play immediately.
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Peter Sloterdyk
Your Budget Can't Buy Distribution in AI Search: How Challenger Brands Win the Answer Anyway
Nearly every channel DTC was built on is an auction of sorts, and the brand with more money won more of it. AI search is built differently. No bid, budget lever, or arbitrage. Then the part nobody discusses: the answer in most categories is built from a small set of documents written before your brand existed. Influencing whether you show up or not is now a function of earned media instead of a media spend. Right now, a nine-figure competitor cannot outspend you into the consideration set. What to do about it, and why your window is closing.
Past SPEAKERS
GROW Speakers have been there, done that. During main stage talks, panels & interactive workshops, you’ll hear from senior executives & operators from:


Michelle Carrara

RETENTION PANEL: Turning First-Time Buyers into Lifelong Customers
Acquiring a customer is the beginning, not the win. The brands growing most efficiently today are the ones converting first purchases into second, third, and tenth — through better onboarding, smarter lifecycle programs, and loyalty mechanics that actually change behavior. This panel explores what retention looks like in practice: how to identify high-LTV customers early, what keeps people coming back, and where most brands are leaving money on the table after the first sale.

Samuel Sternberg

Rethinking Reach: Media Mix and Customer Realignment
The channels that drove growth three years ago aren't the channels driving it today. Paid social costs have risen, search behavior is shifting with AI, and brands are being forced to rethink where and how they reach customers — and which customers are actually worth reaching. This panel examines how leading brands are rebalancing their media mix in real time: where budgets are moving, how customer segmentation is evolving, and what a sustainable acquisition strategy looks like when the old playbook no longer applies.

Jordan Thompson
The Agent Placed the Order. Here's What Happens Next.
AI agents can now discover products, compare options, and complete purchases on behalf of shoppers—but far less attention has been paid to what happens after the transaction. In this fireside chat, ESW explores why the next phase of agentic commerce won't be defined by who owns discovery. The brands that win will be the ones that can stand behind the order after the agent clicks "buy" - with the confidence that it will be fulfilled correctly, delivered as promised, and supported end-to-end.

Mike Krau
Beyond Paid Media: How Brands Are Investing in Organic Growth and AI Search Discovery
As customer acquisition costs rise and consumers both discover and evaluate brands across Google, social platforms, creators, and AI-powered search, organic visibility is becoming a more important part of the growth strategy.This roundtable explores how brands are bringing SEO, content, organic social, digital PR, and AI search together as one connected system. We’ll compare where teams are investing, what is driving meaningful traffic and revenue, and how marketers are measuring channels that do not fit neatly into last-click attribution. Get the real operator perspective: what is working, what is not, how teams are improving their visibility in AI search, and how they are building the internal case for greater organic investment.

Whattoexpectatgrow la

Coffee, breakfast, friendly chats
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Big ideas on stage (no fillers)
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Tons of interactive workshops. No fluff
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New tactics from top brands
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Great food, drinks & snacks all day
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Curated intros + 1-1 meetings
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