People from brands, retailers, and industry bodies filled Front Row's Hamburg office on September 10, 2026, for the 14th edition of the DIY E-Commerce & AI Day.
Organized by Front Row together with Herstellerverband Haus & Garten, Industrieverband Garten, and ECC Köln, the day moved fast: ten sessions covering everything from marketplace strategy to AI-driven CRM.
DIY Market in 2027: Consumer Slump and Real AI Traction
Kai Hudetz, founder of ECC Köln and managing director of IFH Köln, opened the day by naming the tension every DIY and garden brand is facing right now: consumer spending in the category has been sluggish, yet artificial intelligence is starting to change how products get discovered and bought. Not in some future scenario but already, in current search and shopping behavior.
His framing set up the rest of the day as speakers moved between two questions: how do brands protect the business in a flat market, and how do they prepare for AI-driven demand at the same time?
Marketplace Control Is Splitting into Two Camps, and Some Customers Are No Longer Shopping at All
Marc Sonnemann of edding walked through the classic marketplace governance question in his session Game of Zones, comparing centralized versus decentralized control of international marketplace operations, a decision that shapes pricing consistency, content quality, and how fast a brand can react market by market.
Valentin Hauß, founder and CEO of COM.Create, followed with a harder question: what future do marketplaces even have once AI systems start making the shopping decisions?
That question got concrete in Ronny Marx's session on agentic commerce, which addressed how brands sell to customers who no longer browse and click themselves, but delegate that task to an AI agent.
Florian Knieß, co-founder and CRO/CMO of Aybee, grounded the discussion in category specifics with a session on the hidden customer journey on Amazon within the DIY and garden business, tracing how impulse turns into purchase in a category that shoppers often browse without a fixed product in mind.
Traditional Manufacturers Are Proving They Can Build Their Own Digital Future
Tamer Memis, managing director of Neudorff ePerformances, presented one of the day's most direct transformation stories, describing how a traditional manufacturer rebuilt itself into an online challenger rather than waiting to be disrupted by one.
Later in the afternoon, Daniel Aldinger and Yannik Weiler of BAUHAUS Deutschland showed the retailer's side of that same shift, explaining how the BAUHAUS marketplace is opening new routes for brands to reach customers directly through an established retail partner instead of only through their own channels.
AI Moved from Buzzword to Toolkit Across Keyword Research, CRM, Production, and Streaming TV
The afternoon sessions were where AI stopped being a talking point and became a set of specific tools. Christopher Lege, senior principal software engineer at Catapult, gave a systematic approach to Amazon keyword research, helping brands separate genuinely relevant search terms from noise and identify real competitors rather than assumed ones.
Rainer Schuller of GRADION challenged an assumption many brands haven't questioned in years, asking whether customer relationships still need a dedicated SaaS platform now that AI can handle much of what CRM systems were built for.
Front Row's very own Janine Hummel and Jan Meißner followed with a session on the path to a D2C shop, focused on how AI-supported production is changing the entry point into digital touchpoints for brands that haven't built direct channels before.
Sascha Jansen of Front Row closed out the toolkit block with a look at streaming TV as an emerging opportunity for the DIY category specifically, a channel most DIY brands have not yet tested at scale.
The Day Closed With a Shared Read on Where the Category Is Headed
Norbert Lindemann, managing director of Herstellerverband Haus & Garten, and René Groll, senior principal business development manager at Front Row, who had opened the day together that morning, returned for the closing session to draw the threads of the day together.
Across ten sessions, the throughline was consistent: DIY and garden brands are navigating a flat consumer market and a genuine shift toward AI-influenced shopping at the same time, and speakers across marketplaces, retail, and technology all found themselves circling the same underlying question, which is how fast a brand can move to meet how customers are starting to shop.
A Day to Remember
Beyond the sessions themselves, what stood out was the room. Getting founders, marketplace managers, consultants, and retail executives from across the DIY and garden industry into one building for a day is not something that happens often, and the conversations that spilled into the coffee breaks and the closing networking hour were, by most accounts, just as valuable as what happened on stage.
It made for a genuinely great event, the kind where the exchange between sessions ends up mattering as much as the sessions themselves.
