Retail Summit Asia 2026: What Malaysia's Top Retail Brands Shared About Loyalty
Retail Summit Asia 2026 brought together some of Malaysia’s most recognisable brand founders and operators for a single day at Menara AFFIN, TRX, under one theme: building retail that lasts.
Eber was in the room for the full day, and the reason was simple. The speaker lineup, from soap makers to lingerie CMOs to chilli pan mee founders, reads like a cross section of the F&B, retail, and beauty and wellness merchants Eber works with every day across Singapore and Malaysia. When brands this size talk openly about what keeps customers coming back, it is worth listening closely.
The day at a glance
The event, organised by EasyStore with Affin Bank as strategic partner, ran nine sessions across keynotes and panels.
| Time | Session | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 10:20 | Unified Commerce keynote | Chong Xian, EasyStore |
| 10:40 | Claire Organics keynote | Louise Chu |
| 11:10 | The Brand Playbook (panel) | Faridah Fadzil, Tara Tan, Foo Chuen Chan |
| 11:50 | Malaysia’s Future Customer (panel) | Sarini Zainal, Hairul Adli, Josh Teo |
| 1:50 | Purpose-Driven AI (panel) | Shermaine Wong and AI/WhatsApp tooling speakers |
| 2:30 | Abbie & Friends success story | Chan Chi Leong |
| 3:00 | Tech For Retail (panel) | Faizal Razali, Michelle Lim, Chai Lee Fong |
| 3:40 | What’s Next (panel) | Boon Kim San, Vanilla Crepe |
| 4:10 | Bayu Somerset keynote | Dania Kamalul |
Three ideas that kept resurfacing
A few themes came up again and again across very different brands and categories, and they line up closely with the work Eber does with its own merchants.
1. Loyalty built on trust outlasts loyalty built on discounts
Louise Chu, founder of Claire Organics, opened the day with a keynote on exactly this. Her argument: discounts train customers to wait for the next sale, not to come back out of genuine preference. The brands that last are the ones that ask “how do we give more value” instead of “how do we make this cheaper.”
2. Owning customer data is not optional anymore
Sarini Zainal of The Pastels Shop spoke candidly about the years her brand spent focused entirely on marketplaces like TikTok Shop and Shopee, only to realise they had no way to identify who their customers actually were. Tanamera’s Faridah Fadzil echoed the same lesson from a very different angle: her brand’s loyalty programme went from paper sign-up cards to a full digital system, but the real shift was learning to act on what the data showed, not just collect it.
3. Online and offline are not competing channels, they are different jobs
Across two separate sessions, XIXILI’s Tara Tan, Book Cafe’s Hairul Adli, and Meet Mee’s Foo Chuen Chan all landed on a version of the same insight: online tends to drive discovery, while offline is where the relationship and repeat purchase actually happen. One brand even shared that customers ordering through its own branded app spent 2.5 times more per order than those buying through its website.
Why this matters for Eber’s merchants
Every one of these threads, discounts versus trust, first-party data, and channel roles, is a conversation Eber has with F&B, retail, and beauty and wellness brands across Singapore and Malaysia on a regular basis. Hearing it validated on stage by founders who have built these brands from scratch, some over a decade or more, is a good reminder that the fundamentals of a loyalty programme have not changed even as the platforms around it keep shifting.
Over the next few weeks, Eber will be publishing a series of deeper dives into some of these individual stories, starting with a closer look at how Claire Organics thinks about loyalty over discounts. If your brand is thinking through the same questions these founders raised on stage, that is exactly the kind of conversation Eber’s team is here to have.
If you’re a retailer or brand thinking about how to build real customer loyalty, we’d like to talk.
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