You run growth at a consumer brand doing $30 million a year. You just landed national distribution at a big-box chain, your Amazon business finally turned profitable, and your agency wants to send a press release with the headline “Brand X Expands Retail Footprint.” You want the story in Modern Retail, because that is what your investors, your buyers and your competitors read.
That press release will not get you there. Modern Retail does not cover expansions. It covers how retail businesses work: why a brand chose wholesale over direct, what Amazon fees did to margins, how a retailer rebuilt its stores around pickup. If you want to know how to get featured in Modern Retail, start by accepting that the publication wants your numbers and your reasoning far more than your news.
What Modern Retail actually covers
Digiday Media launched Modern Retail in June 2019. Founder Nick Friese described the goal at launch as applying the company’s approach to tech-disrupted industries, already used at Digiday for media and Glossy for fashion and beauty, to retail. The launch note named the beats plainly: Amazon’s growing influence, direct-to-consumer startups as they grew up, and traditional players like Walmart and Target retooling to work more like Amazon.
The first editor was Hilary Milnes, who had covered retail at Digiday since 2015, and the founding reporter was Anna Hensel, who is now executive editor. Jill Manoff serves as editor-in-chief across Glossy and Modern Retail. The coverage still runs on those launch beats, with a growing focus on marketplaces, retail media, wholesale strategy and the economics of physical stores.
The publication’s about page states that Modern Retail does not use generative AI for fact-based research and that every editorial story is written by a human. It is a small detail that tells you something useful about the newsroom. Reporters here verify claims themselves. A pitch full of unsupported superlatives will cost you credibility before anyone picks up the phone.
There is also a commercial layer worth understanding. Modern Retail+ is a paid membership that carries exclusive columns, research and briefings. In March 2025 Hensel announced the Brands Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about how modern brands grow. In July 2026 the team added a Big-Box Briefing focused on Target, Walmart and other large chains. Each franchise is another place your story could land, and each reflects what the editors think their paying readers want.
A rename that tells you how the editors think
The clearest guide to Modern Retail’s editorial point of view is a short note Hensel published on March 18, 2025. Since 2020, one of the publication’s core products had been the DTC Briefing, a weekly newsletter for members about direct-to-consumer companies. Hensel retired that name and replaced it with the Brands Briefing.
Her reasoning was specific. When the DTC Briefing launched, she wrote, startups were proud to call themselves DTC brands, and companies like Away and Glossier raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the bet that staying direct would pay off. By 2025, she noted, the most promising startups, naming Vuori and Poppi, were not solely DTC brands. Distribution tactics come in and out of fashion. What connects these companies is that they are modern brands, and the new briefing would cover their growth strategies wherever they sell.
Read that as a pitching instruction. Modern Retail is not interested in which channel you picked. It is interested in why you picked it and what it did to your business. The note also named who curates it: Hensel, with senior reporter Gabriela Barkho covering food and beverage, Melissa Daniels covering home goods and personal care, and Julia Waldow covering footwear and apparel. Check the current masthead before you write, because titles shift, but those beats give you a starting map.
Five pitches that land
Pitch 1: the channel decision, with the math. Tell a reporter why you added wholesale, left Amazon, closed a store or opened one, and show the numbers that drove the choice. Contribution margin by channel, customer acquisition cost before and after, sell-through at the new retailer. You do not need to share everything, but you need to share enough that the story teaches another operator something. “We moved 40% of revenue to wholesale in 18 months and our blended CAC fell by a third” is the opening line of a Modern Retail story. “We are excited to bring our products to more customers” is not.
Pitch 2: the Amazon or marketplace reality. Amazon remains one of the publication’s most covered subjects, along with TikTok Shop, Walmart Marketplace and other platforms. Brands that can describe, in detail, what fee changes, advertising costs or policy shifts did to their business are useful sources. So are agencies and software companies that can share anonymized patterns across many sellers. Be precise about dates and figures. Vague complaints about “rising costs” do not make it past the first read.
Pitch 3: the operator in a big-box chain. The Big-Box Briefing exists because large retailers are changing fast: store formats, private labels, retail media networks, pickup and delivery. If you supply one of these chains or work inside one, you can describe changes that outsiders only guess at. The sourcing has to be careful, and on-the-record executives are rare, so offer what you can stand behind publicly and be clear about what you cannot.
Pitch 4: data from your own platform. Software companies serving retail sit on aggregate data: checkout behavior, return rates, promotion performance, inventory turns. Modern Retail runs its own research, including surveys of brands and retailers, so it values original data that is sound. Send the three most surprising findings with sample size, time frame and method. Offer the full data set. Say plainly what the data cannot show.
Pitch 5: the founder who will talk about a mistake. The Modern Retail Podcast, launched in December 2019 as a weekly show, built its reputation on frank conversations with brand leaders. Its first guest was Haus founder Price Hambrecht, talking about launch and what came next for DTC. Founders who will discuss what failed, from a bad retail partnership to a product line that never sold, make stronger guests and better sources than founders who only want to discuss growth.
The Shelf-Margin-Channel test
Most advice on how to get featured in Modern Retail stops at “have a good story.” This test makes that concrete. Before any Modern Retail pitch goes out, run it through three questions. We call this the Shelf-Margin-Channel test because those three words cover what the publication’s readers care about most.
Shelf asks where the product physically or digitally sits and why. Can you name the retailer, the marketplace or the site, and the decision behind that placement? Margin asks what the move did to your unit economics. Can you put at least one real number in the pitch, such as gross margin, contribution margin, CAC or return rate? Channel asks how the decision changes your mix over time. Is this a one-off, or part of a shift another brand could learn from?
Here is the test applied to a common case. A home goods brand wants coverage of its entry into a national department store. On Shelf, the answer is easy: 220 doors, launching in March. On Margin, the brand can say wholesale gross margin runs about 15 points below its direct business, but marketing costs per order are far lower because the retailer drives the traffic. On Channel, the brand can explain that it plans to keep direct sales near half of revenue and use the retailer to reach customers who never shop online. Put those three answers in a pitch and the story is no longer “brand enters department store.” It is “why a profitable DTC brand chose lower margins for cheaper growth,” which is exactly the kind of decision Modern Retail readers argue about.
If a pitch answers all three, it reads like a Modern Retail story. If it answers only Shelf, it reads like a press release about distribution, and those go unanswered. Most brands can answer Shelf instantly and Margin reluctantly. The reluctance is the problem. Reporters do not need your full P&L, but they need enough truth to write something that helps a reader make a decision. If you cannot share any number at all, wait until you can.
What an interview actually involves
If a reporter bites, expect questions about the parts of your business you would rather not discuss: margins by channel, how much you spend on Amazon advertising, what happened to a product line that disappeared, why a co-founder left. Prepare for those questions before the call. Decide in advance which numbers you will share on the record, which you can share as ranges, and which are off limits, and agree on that with the reporter at the start, not after you have said something you regret.
Put the decision maker on the call. Modern Retail reporters want the founder, the chief executive, the head of growth or the person who ran the retail partnership, not a communications lead reading prepared points. If the right person cannot speak, it is better to delay the interview than to substitute someone who cannot answer follow-ups.
It also helps to know the audio side of the brand. Beyond the weekly Modern Retail Podcast, the publication launched The Modern Retail Rundown in February 2023, a weekly show hosted by senior reporter Gabriela Barkho that reviews the week’s big retail headlines with reporters and editors. Being a useful source for written coverage is often what leads to an invitation to talk on the shows.
Timing, exclusives and the paywall
Retail runs on a calendar, and so does retail coverage. The months before the holiday season are crowded with trend pieces and survey results, which makes it harder for a single brand story to stand out and easier for strong data to get picked up. Earnings seasons for large retailers create windows for expert commentary on Target, Walmart and Amazon results. Plan pitches around those cycles rather than around your own launch dates.
Exclusives carry weight with a newsroom this size. If you have real news, such as a funding round with disclosed metrics, a major retail partnership or a leadership change with a story behind it, offer it to one reporter first with a clear embargo time. Do not shop the same exclusive to several outlets at once. Retail reporters talk to each other, and the reputation damage outlasts the story.
Expect some coverage to land behind the Modern Retail+ paywall. Columns like the Brands Briefing and Big-Box Briefing are member products. That can feel like a downgrade if you were hoping for a public link to share. It is not. The members are disproportionately the operators, buyers and investors you wanted to reach in the first place.
Keep your outreach short. Muck Rack’s 2026 State of Journalism survey found 69% of journalists prefer pitches under 200 words. Name the reporter, reference something specific they wrote, state your finding or decision in the first line, and say who can talk and when. One follow-up after several days is fine. Then let the next idea do the work.
Understanding how to get featured in Modern Retail comes down to one habit: treat the reporter as a fellow operator who wants to understand your business, not as a channel for your announcement. Send the reasoning, the numbers and the person who made the call, and you will find that a brand of almost any size can earn a place in the publication its buyers and investors read first.