GYG retreats, Alo invades, and Amazon goes full agentic

The week the market said "thanks for staying focused." Guzman & Gomez quietly closed its eight Chicago stores and the share price jumped 20%. Skin Candy pulled off the first properly successful retail ASX listing of the year. And Alo Yoga planted a flag directly opposite Lululemon at Chatswood Chase — a brand move with a price tag and a clear message.

The deep dive everyone needs to sit with: Amazon's new Rufus + Alexa agentic shopping assistant is live in the US, and Mal's been using it. It is, in his words, "weirdly like the future." Meanwhile Shopify has quietly opted every store into its agentic storefront — so if you haven't started optimising your product feed for LLM discovery, you're already behind. We close on the AI layoffs wave (Meta, Microsoft, Intuit, Upwork all swinging the axe) and what Klarna's quiet customer-service backflip tells us about where the real line sits.

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• Guzman & Gomez pulls out of the US — eight Chicago stores shuttered, share price up 20%, and the market just rewarded focus over a vanity expansion.
• 2,000 Rebel Sport managers launch a class action — Super Retail Group in the firing line again over unpaid pre/post-shift hours and through-break work.
• Heaps Normal's Marrickville Health Club named one of the top 10 global retail experiences alongside Zara, Rolex and Erewhon — four months after opening.
• Alo Yoga's first AU sanctuary opens at Chatswood Chase, literally opposite Lululemon, with four more sites locked in by year-end.
• Amazon's new agentic shopping assistant merges Rufus and Alexa — Mal road-tested it in the US and it changes the discovery game, while Shopify quietly opted every store into its agentic storefront.
• Skin Candy's ASX debut — the first genuinely successful retail listing of the year at $245m cap, up 5% on day one, proving the service + product hybrid model still pulls capital.
• The AI layoff wave hits 200k+ globally — Meta, Cloudflare, Upwork, Microsoft and Intuit all cut deep, but Klarna's quiet rehiring of customer service staff says the limits are real.