Kickoff┃Commerce Unboxed Weekly Newsletter

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June 11, 2026

The World Cup kicks off, the Knicks are back in the Finals, and Apple and Google are suddenly tech mates. Welcome to Commerce Unboxed!

Weekly News Roundup

Game On

Tech Mates

Going Public, Everywhere

RETAIL

Game On

The 2026 FIFA World Cup opens today across 16 host cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Brands are expected to pour an estimated $10.5 billion in additional global ad spend into Q2 on the back of it. LEGO put Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé, and Vinícius Jr. around a table building a trophy and generated 314 million views across players’ Instagram accounts within 24 hours. No voiceover, no product demo, just four people and a set of bricks. Adidas has already moved $292 million in World Cup products this year. Over half the official sponsors have still not released anything, which means the brands who moved early have already defined how the tournament feels before the first whistle.

Meanwhile in New York, the Knicks are hosting their first NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden since 1999, and the city has lost its mind in the best way. Two courtside seats for Game 3 sold for $1 million at charity auction. The cheapest upper-deck ticket on secondary markets was over $6,000. Timothée Chalamet, Tracy Morgan, and Spike Lee are regulars at courtside. And when a city is this invested in a moment, the brands showing up in and around that energy are not buying advertising, they are buying belonging.

Two different sports, the same lesson: Fandom does not just fill seats, it moves product. Read More ➜

TECH

Tech Mates

Apple and Google spent the better part of a decade in a cold war over the phone in your pocket. So it landed a little funny this week when Apple quietly confirmed that the rebuilt Siri AI, its biggest product bet of the year, runs on Google’s Gemini models. The two companies that once competed for every pixel of mobile real estate are now, effectively, co-building the assistant that will sit between a billion users and the rest of the internet.

It is a pragmatic move by both parties, and that is exactly what makes it worth paying attention to. Apple’s previous AI rollout was widely criticized for missing deadlines and underdelivering on features. Google has the models but not the hardware distribution. The partnership fills both gaps. Likewise, the flagship Siri AI model runs on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs hosted in Google Cloud, making this a three-way infrastructure bet between the world’s most valuable hardware company, its largest software rival, and the GPU manufacturer that powers most of modern AI. Apple, Google, and Nvidia all in the same stack, for the same product, at the same time.

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Kickoff┃Commerce Unboxed Weekly Newsletter

stord.com · newsletter

Explore this email design and adapt it to your own brand. Review the copy, links, and offer before sending.

Email content

HERO_byStord-1

View in browser

June 11, 2026

The World Cup kicks off, the Knicks are back in the Finals, and Apple and Google are suddenly tech mates. Welcome to Commerce Unboxed!

Weekly News Roundup

Game On

Tech Mates

Going Public, Everywhere

RETAIL

Game On

The 2026 FIFA World Cup opens today across 16 host cities in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Brands are expected to pour an estimated $10.5 billion in additional global ad spend into Q2 on the back of it. LEGO put Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé, and Vinícius Jr. around a table building a trophy and generated 314 million views across players’ Instagram accounts within 24 hours. No voiceover, no product demo, just four people and a set of bricks. Adidas has already moved $292 million in World Cup products this year. Over half the official sponsors have still not released anything, which means the brands who moved early have already defined how the tournament feels before the first whistle.

Meanwhile in New York, the Knicks are hosting their first NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden since 1999, and the city has lost its mind in the best way. Two courtside seats for Game 3 sold for $1 million at charity auction. The cheapest upper-deck ticket on secondary markets was over $6,000. Timothée Chalamet, Tracy Morgan, and Spike Lee are regulars at courtside. And when a city is this invested in a moment, the brands showing up in and around that energy are not buying advertising, they are buying belonging.

Two different sports, the same lesson: Fandom does not just fill seats, it moves product. Read More ➜

TECH

Tech Mates

Apple and Google spent the better part of a decade in a cold war over the phone in your pocket. So it landed a little funny this week when Apple quietly confirmed that the rebuilt Siri AI, its biggest product bet of the year, runs on Google’s Gemini models. The two companies that once competed for every pixel of mobile real estate are now, effectively, co-building the assistant that will sit between a billion users and the rest of the internet.

It is a pragmatic move by both parties, and that is exactly what makes it worth paying attention to. Apple’s previous AI rollout was widely criticized for missing deadlines and underdelivering on features. Google has the models but not the hardware distribution. The partnership fills both gaps. Likewise, the flagship Siri AI model runs on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs hosted in Google Cloud, making this a three-way infrastructure bet between the world’s most valuable hardware company, its largest software rival, and the GPU manufacturer that powers most of modern AI. Apple, Google, and Nvidia all in the same stack, for the same product, at the same time.

What it all does is accelerate the timeline for a world where AI assistants are native to the operating system, not an app you open, but the layer everything else runs through. With 64% of consumers already planning to use AI for shopping in 2026, that layer is becoming a commerce surface faster than most brands have planned for. The companies that spent years competing to own the platform just decided to build one together. The brands still waiting to figure out their AI strategy might want to take the hint. Read More ➜

AI & ECONOMY

Going Public, Everywhere

Within the span of a few weeks, three of the most consequential private companies in modern technology announced they are heading to public markets. Anthropic filed confidentially at a $965 billion valuation. OpenAI followed a week later, targeting above $1 trillion. And SpaceX, which lists on Nasdaq on June 12, is already four times oversubscribed at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Together, these three listings are expected to exceed the entire US IPO market's proceeds from 2025.

The numbers may make headlines, but what matters more is what going public actually means for the companies building the tools your business runs on. Quarterly earnings calls, analyst scrutiny, and pressure to convert AI capability into measurable revenue on a schedule that does not care about your implementation timeline. The era of unlimited runway and relationship-priced access is ending. Public AI companies get commercially focused fast, and the roadmap priorities shift to whoever is generating the most billable hours.

For brands running AI in pilot mode, this is the narrowing window. The tools that have been flexible and experimental are about to get very grown-up very fast. Pricing models, SLA terms, and product prioritization will all be shaped by what plays well in an earnings call. The AI infrastructure your business depends on is about to have a stock ticker and a shareholder to answer to. It is worth knowing what you are actually buying before someone else sets the terms. Read More ➜

Spending Spree

7.19%

That’s the retail sales growth year-over-year in May, up from 5.73% in April and tracked against actual card purchases, not survey guesses. Consumer sentiment says one thing. The spending data says another. Read More ➜

TOTB_full-1

The New York Fed’s latest reading confirmed what every operator already knew from their freight invoices. Global pressure stayed elevated in May, holding near levels last seen in mid-2022. Diesel costs are up, ocean rates keep climbing, and 11 major retailers flagged rising oil costs hitting their networks this week alone. The question for most brands is no longer when conditions will normalize, but how well they can operate while conditions refuse to.

The instinct under this kind of pressure is to spend. Amazon just committed $11.6 billion to its European fulfillment network, complete with robots that take verbal instructions. Most brands cannot match that, and the quieter truth is they may not need to. A 2026 industry survey found that only 42% of operations leaders have real-time visibility into their networks. Read that again. The majority of brands discover a disruption only after the customer promise is already broken. The expensive problem was never the fuel surcharge. It was finding out about the delay too late.

This is where the Stord approach earns its keep. When fulfillment software, the warehouse network, and transportation all run on one connected system, a fuel spike or a stuck trailer arrives as a signal with time still on the clock. Orders shift to a closer facility, carrier mixes adjust, and the delivery date the customer saw at checkout survives the chaos behind it.

A volatile spring has made the lesson plain. Resilience was never about predicting the next shock, because nobody predicted this one either. It comes down to how much of your network you can actually see, and how fast you move when it speaks up. The brands still hitting their delivery promises this summer are not the luckiest ones. They are the ones who built the ability to act before they needed it.