Key takeaways
Shoptalk Luxe opened its doors for the first time on 27 January 2026 at the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental in Abu Dhabi, a three-day expansion of the Shoptalk retail conference series into luxury and premium commerce.
It brought senior leaders from across global luxury retail into one room in the GCC for the first time at this scale, and Klaviyo was there among them, represented on the ground by Fabrik, a Klaviyo Master Partner working across the region's fashion, footwear and retail sectors.
What is Shoptalk Luxe?
Shoptalk Luxe is the luxury-focused offshoot of Shoptalk, the retail conference series better known for its flagship Las Vegas event covering the wider retail and ecommerce industry.
The inaugural Abu Dhabi edition positioned itself as a compass for luxury retail's next decade, gathering names from across fashion, beauty, jewellery and hospitality under one roof for three days of agenda-setting conversation.
The calibre of the room reflected that ambition: brand and retail leadership from across the LVMH and Kering houses, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Cartier, Ralph Lauren and Chalhoub Group were among the names in the building, alongside department store and marketplace leadership from the likes of Harrods, Selfridges, Mytheresa and Ounass.
For a first-ever event, it landed with the weight of an established one, and the choice of venue said as much about ambition as the guest list did.
Why Emirates Palace, and why Abu Dhabi
Hosting the inaugural edition at the Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental was a deliberate statement rather than a convenient booking.
Abu Dhabi has spent the past few years positioning itself as a genuine luxury retail and hospitality capital in its own right, not simply a stop on the way to Dubai, and a summit of this calibre choosing the emirate as its launch city is part of that positioning.
For brands and platforms operating across the region, it reinforced a point Fabrik makes to UK and EU clients regularly: the GCC luxury conversation increasingly runs through Abu Dhabi and Riyadh as much as Dubai, and a regional strategy that only accounts for one emirate is already out of date.
Klaviyo's presence, represented by Fabrik
Klaviyo's own regional presence in the GCC is still young, and Fabrik, as a Klaviyo Master Partner, put its own people on the ground to represent the platform directly rather than waiting for Klaviyo to build out a dedicated regional team first.
Jason West and Dean spent the three days effectively wearing Klaviyo caps: staffing conversations, running the platform narrative, and speaking to what Klaviyo does for a luxury brand or retailer, as well as pitching Fabrik's own complimentary services.
It is an unusual role for an agency to play at a conference like this, representing a technology partner as well as itself, but it reflects how closely Fabrik and Klaviyo already work together across the region, and how much trust sits behind that Master Partner status.
Educating a new sector on what modern CRM looks like
Luxury retail has historically been slower than DTC fashion to invest in owned marketing channels. Many of the brands in the room built their businesses on heritage, wholesale relationships and in-store clienteling rather than first-party data and always-on email or SMS programmes, and several of the conversations across the three days started from that gap.
A recurring theme was demystifying what a platform like Klaviyo actually does for a brand operating at that level: how personalisation and segmentation can run at scale without diluting a luxury brand's tone, how owned data reduces reliance on paid acquisition and marketplace algorithms that a heritage house has little control over, and how a clienteling-style, one-to-one feel, the kind a flagship store's best sales associate delivers in person, can be replicated programmatically for a much larger customer base than any single store team could ever manage by hand.
For brands used to measuring success in footfall and in-store relationships, that reframing takes real conversation, not a slide deck.
Recruiting partners, not just customers
Part of the brief for Fabrik at Shoptalk Luxe was recruitment as much as education, identifying which retailers, department stores and marketplaces in the room could become genuine Klaviyo partners in the region, not just individual brand customers.
GCC retail is still relatively concentrated around a small number of major department store and ecommerce groups, from Chalhoub-affiliated retail to platforms like Ounass, so a handful of the right relationships in that room carry disproportionate weight for how quickly a platform like Klaviyo can become the regional standard for luxury CRM.
Recruiting the right partners now, while the category is still forming in the region, matters more than any single brand deal closed in the room.
Klaviyo and Shopify, working together in the room
Fabrik's Klaviyo Master Partner status doesn't sit in isolation from the rest of its stack, and that showed up in conversations at Shoptalk Luxe too.
As a Shopify Plus Partner already building storefronts for fashion and footwear brands across the region, Fabrik was well placed to talk through Klaviyo and Shopify as a combined foundation, rather than two separate purchases a luxury brand has to stitch together itself.
For brands weighing up a first serious investment in ecommerce infrastructure, being able to see the CRM and the storefront as one connected decision, backed by a single partner who already runs both day to day, simplified a conversation that can otherwise turn into a long list of vendors and integrations.
Three days, real relationships
Beyond new introductions, the three-day format gave Fabrik time with people it already knew.
Existing clients and regional partners were in the room across the event, and a conference of this scale and calibre, held once, in one place, over three days, is a rare chance to catch up with an entire network in person rather than over email across a quarter.
That density of relationship-building, as much as any single meeting, is what made the event valuable, and it is the same logic behind Fabrik's Paris Fashion Week showroom presence: put the right people in the right room for long enough, and the relationships do the rest.
Why this matters for fashion and footwear brands
The wider signal from Shoptalk Luxe is that luxury retail is starting to close the gap with DTC fashion on owned marketing infrastructure, and the brands that move first on CRM and email will have a real advantage over those that wait for the rest of the sector to catch up.
For fashion and footwear brands operating in or expanding into the GCC, that is a live opportunity: the region's luxury retail leadership is actively looking for the platforms and partners that can help them build the kind of first-party relationships DTC brands have had for years, without losing the elevated, considered tone their customers expect.
Getting ahead of that shift now, before it becomes standard practice across the region, is where the real advantage sits, and it applies just as much to a growing DTC brand as it does to a heritage luxury house.
Fabrik's position representing Klaviyo at an event like this is a direct extension of its Klaviyo Master Partner status and its day-to-day work building CRM and email programmes for fashion and footwear clients across the UK, EU and GCC, the same discipline, applied at conference scale, and a sign of how much further that partnership has to run across the region in the years ahead.
