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Endless vs. Edited: What Merchants from Ulta, Wayfair, and Thrive Market Know About Curation

Endless vs. Edited: What Merchants from Ulta, Wayfair, and Thrive Market Know About Curation

At Shoptalk 2025, leaders from Thrive Market, Ulta Beauty, and Wayfair unpacked how modern merchandising is shifting—from endless aisle to intentional edit. Whether through wellness filters, CRM data, or verified picks, each brand is finding its own way to make choice feel effortless.

George Looker
March 26, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Forget the endless aisle. Shoppers want the right aisle—and these three retailers are using data, standards, and storytelling to get there.

At Shoptalk 2025, a new generation of retail merchants made a case for rethinking assortment strategy—not just by shrinking it, but by making it smarter. In a keynote titled Endless Versus Edit, executives from Ulta Beauty, Wayfair, and Thrive Market shared how they’re using data, values, and customer behavior to balance expansive inventories with curated experiences.

If Tony Spring’s famous line—“It’s not the endless aisle, but the best aisle”—sparked a conversation last year, this session showed how to actually build it.

Thrive’s Take: Standards Over Scale

April Lane, Chief Merchandising Officer at Thrive Market, came out strong: “A typical grocery store carries 50,000 SKUs. We carry 7,000.” The company’s entire premise is built on intentional exclusion—a retail model where quality standards filter out 95% of the products submitted for consideration.

The result is not just a smaller catalog, but a smarter one—organized around trust and optimized for efficiency. “We’re here to reduce mental load,” said Lane. “Moms shouldn’t have to decode every peanut butter label to avoid additives. We do that work for them.”

Thrive’s filters—what they call “shopping by values”—are core to the experience. Whether customers are searching by dietary need, allergy, sustainability attribute, or ethical sourcing, the platform guides them to the right products—and cuts everything else.

Ulta Beauty: Scaling Assortment Without Losing the Edit

Josh Friedman, SVP of Ecommerce and Digital at Ulta Beauty, isn’t trying to shrink Ulta’s catalog—but he is trying to curate it. “We meet thousands of brands a year,” he said. “We bring in 40 to 50.”

Even as Ulta prepares to launch its new marketplace platform, the goal isn’t endless inventory—it’s extended curation. The marketplace will be invite-only, with product vetting layered on top of community signals, CRM insights, and category expertise. “It’s not just what we love,” Friedman explained. “It’s what our customers are asking for on social, in stores, and through their loyalty data.”

Ulta’s personalization efforts are expanding in 2025 with new data partners and algorithmic investments, but human instinct still plays a role. “Our category managers use their intuition to ensure the right balance of price points, colorways, and formats,” Friedman said. “Especially when you’re adding more SKUs—you have to know when to say no.”

Wayfair’s Middle Ground: Endless Aisle, Verified

If Thrive stands for rigorous curation and Ulta straddles scale with guardrails, Wayfair walks the line between them. As Liza Lefkowski, Chief Merchant and VP of Stores, put it: “Selection is non-negotiable. It’s part of our brand.”

But when Wayfair opened its first physical store in Illinois, that endless aisle had to become a real one. The result was Wayfair Verified—a program built to help customers cut through duplication and make better choices. “We didn’t want 10 versions of the same couch,” said Lefkowski. “We use data to pick the best expression of each category and price point.”

In-store experiences now loop back into digital. Associates use tablets to help shoppers find alternate versions of verified items, while feedback from store traffic helps the online team rethink product organization and merchandising.

“We overcomplicated some things early on,” Lefkowski admitted. “But we learned. Sometimes the best UX is just: put the product on the floor and let people pick it up.”

Curation is the Strategy—But Feedback is the Loop

Each panelist emphasized that curation isn’t a one-time edit—it’s an ongoing process of cutting, testing, and evolving. Thrive adds and removes SKUs at nearly a 1:1 ratio. Ulta’s CRM data shapes everything from homepage placement to private label strategy. Wayfair feeds store learnings back into online UX decisions.

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“You can’t personalize the experience without editing the assortment,” said Lefkowski. “And you can’t edit well without listening constantly to what customers do with the choices you’ve given them.”

What This Keynote Signals for Merchandising

🧠 The future isn’t endless or edited—it’s selectively expansive
📦 Standards and values are shaping assortment, not just price and trend
🎯 Marketplace models only work when layered with trust and curation
🛍️ Physical retail isn’t dead—it’s where merchants test what matters
📊 Great data is table stakes, but merchant instinct still wins the tie

In a world of near-infinite SKUs, the retailers winning today are those who know when to add—and when to walk away.

Disclaimer: The above podcast episode was generated using AI based on an interview transcript. While the content remains true to the original conversation, the voices, tone, and delivery were synthesized and do not represent actual recordings of the speakers. This AI-generated format is intended to enhance accessibility and provide an alternative way to engage with the discussion.