Best Partnership - Which Collaboration Won 2025? | Fast Five Shorts

Best new partnership of the year.

Chad, who do you have for best new partnership?

First of all, nod to like the first half of the year when didn't it feel like there was some, you know, marketplace partnership that was being announced on a near daily basis.

They were very hot, very strategic.

Ebay and Facebook, a bunch of folks went live with third party marketplaces like Miracle.

You had Best Buy and Ulta and Lowe's like slowed down a little bit in the back half, like correlated with the rise of agentic commerce.

Right.

Where AI can scour on your behalf.

I don't know if that's correlation or causation, but I'm going with, with one of those partnerships that was probably the most unexpected one that I recall from the year because it fundamentally felt different than the others.

And that was Walmart and its rebag program where they had luxury partners like Chanel and Fendi and Louis Vuitt.

Yeah.

Digitally available on Walmart's site.

Right.

And we've all mentioned it now multiple times when discussing McMillan and Walmart and even Aldi.

Right.

Like consumers of all income brackets are going to lower price retailers.

Walmart was able to scale up to higher household income, you know, brackets, you know very, very well Walmart's giving them a great experience and value at a time of need.

Resale, secondhand markets are hot, tends to skew younger.

But with Walmart has the ability to play across age demographics.

Right.

Like Walmart brought in this partnership as a way to expand their reach digitally without any real downside to the core.

So I just thought it was, it was a really cool, innovative, surprising partnership that happened really early in the year.

So I had to go back to remember it.

Yeah.

And who ever thought you'd be searching for Gucci wallet on Walmart.com or getting served up a Walmart.com result in Google when you're searching for, for a Gucci wallet.

All right, Chris, what about you?

Where are you going for this one?

Yeah, 100%.

I mean Walmart, God, Walmart's winning the show already.

Like they've, they've just been an announcement or an award after award after award.

I mean, for me, I'm going with Walmart and Avery Denison, believe it or not.

I think you know, their partnership on inventory tracking and perishables.

I've said it before, I said on a previous podcast, like, that's the holy grail of retailing.

If you can track and understand and limit your spoilage in the perishables area, that's just immediate bottom line money that you're going to get.

And it's going to help the profit line enormously.

And again, like we've talked about already on this show, because Walmart's doing it, other grocers are going to follow suit as well.

So, you know, kudos to them.

Yeah.

I actually also had Walmart and Avery Denison as my first, but I did have a second runner up, so I'll focus on that one.

And that one was the IKEA and Best Buy partnership.

I think this was a really smart use of real estate.

I think if you've gone in and seen these, like, I don't think most people think about ikea.

It's like one of those moments where you're wearing something and people are like, oh, it's from Walmart, and people are shocked.

I think this is happening to people when they go into a Best Buy kitchen, an IKEA kitchen setup, and they see these cabinets and cabinets are a very expensive part of a kitchen remodel.

And I think when you go in and you see, like, oh, these cabinets are actually Ikea, like, it opens up a new customer for Ikea and it feels like it fits in with this Best Buy customer.

So I'm, I'm curious to see how they continue to expand that and, like, what it looks like throughout different times of the year beyond just the first setting.

But, but I really like that.

I thought it was a good play, particularly in the kitchen.

Again, the, the laundry portion, I feel like that's less of a concern.

Maybe that's more of a reason why people would go for IKEA cabinets in their laundry room where it's less visible.

But I thought that was a really slight, smart partnership and good use of real estate and Best Buy for Best Buy.

Wow.

I did not see that one coming at all.

But, you know, gosh.

Well, we've already had that debate on what we think about that topic, so we won't rehash that.

But if you want to listen, if you want to go back and listen to that episode, folks, you can, because, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know if I could get on board with that one.

But, hey, that's why it's a debate show.