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• A look behind the curtain at the beauty operator you may not know— the one behind the launch, growth and 9-figure exits of Phlur, Saltair, and Naturium…

• Meanwhile, Tower 28 founder Amy Liu tells that she doesn't need a billion-dollar exit and would rather fix it than flip it.

• on Vogue wanting a cut of creator commerce. Is this just ShopMy with a masthead?

• Canada's new counter-tariffs by product have perfume and tees in the 50% tier.

• Why brands are moving budget to creators over 35, and what AI has to do with the shift.

• Everyone wants to be a prestige retailer now— but what does that even mean in the age of TikTok Shop and Amazon?

• Sephora hits TikTok Shop September 19 with exclusive drops. For beauty operators who already are active on TikTok Shop, we’d be curious to know… how are you thinking about the Sephora vs. DTC split?

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Is the founder thing a gene? ’s daughter Juliet has recently gone into the pickle biz, so it’s looking like yes. (Anecdotally, Commerce is Chaos contributor is a former founder and child of two serial co-founders, so we suppose the evidence continues to mount…)

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Madalina Defta rolled out Kaizen Food Company’s first pasta in her kitchen with an empty wine bottle, spent three years finding a flour that worked, and built the whole thing to profitability without raising a dollar. She also caught her 3PL overcharging on box sizes and fixed it with a spreadsheet instead of a fight.

The name Kaizen is the Japanese idea of small improvements that compound, which is also how she and husband/co-founder Arash met: in GE’s corporate audit program, absorbing the kind of operational discipline that definitely does not scream “this is a pasta brand.”

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• Target Beauty Studio is coming! The brand list reads like a Sephora aisle: D&G, Sunday Riley, Supergoop — plus Buff Beauty gets a big retail debut.

• Andrea Hernández of caught David protein shakes on shelves pre-launch. Bars, ice cream, and now RTD.

• Tech journalist reports ChatGPT went from citing Reddit 15% of the time to near zero on August 14.

• Rylan Valdez of Luckyscent breaks down fragrance's format explosion. His Q: New customers, or same wallet sliced thinner?

• Seven states charge brands for adding to the recycling stream. Better packaging means a smaller bill, so maybe noodle on that redesign.

• Stop asking your customers what you want— because they really don’t know! A case against customer research from .

• One of fewer than 5% of bootstrapped Sephora brands, Maed went from 80 Sephora doors to 109.

• The teen girl is the household CMO now, finding the brand and making the pitch.

• Poppi founder Allison Ellsworth posted open roles to Instagram and pulled 2,000 resumes for five jobs. LinkedIn, you okay?

• Messi's Mas+ and Alex Cooper's Unwell both shut down, joining Skkn and Gxve in the celeb brand graveyard. Fame’s great, but it won’t get a repeat purchase.

• Instacart's biggest growth bet is software. Is it grocery's new digital landlord?

• of Following Up unpacks ShopMy Spotlights: organic post becomes an ad, creator is paid on what it sells. Some influencers love it, others will leave it.

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Time’s running out to register for the LA DTC Happy Hour in Santa Monica on September 9 from 6-9 p.m. ⏱️ Elevator pitch: let’s hang out in person! If you’re in the area, we’d love to see you. RSVP soon since spots are already filling up.

The question of the hour: what actually makes a customer stick after BFCM?

Sign up here and see you there!

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Olly Dixon started Something & Nothing in 2017 with Rupert Pugsley — basically a side hustle next to the pub he ran and the branding agency he owned. It launched as a “seltzer” in the UK, but between White Claw's hard seltzer invasion and their own boozy spritz line, everyone got confused about what was really in the can. So they renamed the whole thing “premium soda” and killed the alcoholic line for good once the data showed customers were using the product to drink less.

Along the way: exploding cans, a crash course in can printing, a refusal to look at a single competitor while building the brand, and a scrappy “Not Pop” campaign with huge results. Now the U.S. is about 70% of the business and growing 90% a year, right in the middle of the modern soda boom.

There’s more news for founders and operators this week than you can fit into even the most stacked and loaded first-day-of-school lunch box. (With a heart-shaped note that says “Have a great day, sweetie, I’m so proud of your potential to become someone's customer acquisition strategy.”)

Speaking of the biggest seasonal shopping moments of the year, chances are you know someone who’s already talking about Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Besides us. Q4’s just a stone’s throw away, after all. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, scroll down and sign up for the LA DTC networking event where we’ll connect over this tie that binds us all.

Take a gander below for what's working, what's breaking, and the founders presenting to the whole class.

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• Squeaky-clean product data is the new gorgeous PDP imagery, according to a new IDC study. If the agent can't parse it, the customer never sees it.

• ShopMy is accused of getting retailers to stiff rival platforms on commissions. Running affiliate in more than one place? Maybe peek at who's collecting.

• AG1's Kat Cole is blunt about the gummy launch: fewer than 10% of subscribers use them. This acquisition play is the name of the game.

• Target built a simulator for its own supply chain so it can glitch out in the sandbox instead of on the shelf. Think practice runs, but for pallets.

• Wait until you see how many clicks LinkedIn's "seems like AI slop" button got in its first two weeks. Bonus points: Flagged posts take a 40% visibility hit.

• clocked that Starbucks is becoming a CPG launchpad. Floura and Chomps went in this week, joining Khloud, Olipop, Koia, and Perfect Bar.

• That 20%-off perma-badge? Fast Company has a name for it: your actual price. Read this before firming up your Q4 pricing.

• dissected how ex-Rhode CEO Melanie Bender is launching fragrance brand Lore, and the world-building teardown is a masterclass.

• HallPass, the new candy brand from the David Protein founders, launched with typo-ridden AI packaging shots as rage bait.

• Target is putting $994M in banked tariff refunds toward price cuts. Ditto Walmart and BJ’s. Flip side: Amazon’s refunding it directly. Penny for your thoughts?

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Join us at the LA DTC Happy Hour in Santa Monica on September 9 from 6-9 p.m.

Another opportunity to come say hi to us in person, yay! If you're in the area, we'd love to see you — but let us know soon, spots are already filling up.

The question of the hour: what actually makes a customer stick after BFCM?

Sign up here, and see you there.

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Sagar Patel spent 22 years in tech before joining Yucca Fins, the Costa Mesa brand making swim and bodysurf fins that California lifeguards trust in the water. His friends Sean Starky and Mike Marshall started it with one idea: build a better fin than the one the old guard had been stuck with for decades.

We get into what changes when you bring real operating discipline to an industry that, in Sagar’s words, still “runs like a surf shop.” If you’re an enterprise-builder with a passion for threading the needle, this one’s for you.

Happy Wednesday! Last week was in Iceland for the eclipse (alas, it was cloudy!) while and had an awesome coffee shop creative sesh in person. Three cheers for taking long overdue PTO— well, as much “PTO” as an always-on founder can spiritually take— and for meeting your coworkers IRL for the first time.

This week it’s back to business: and there’s a lot of it. We left 15+ commerce stories on the cutting room floor in an effort to bring you the news you might not have seen yet… though that Beis exit to Samsonite, Rhode’s continued success and the shuttering of Unwell were certainly all quite juicy. Read on for ops tips, growth tactics, and inspiration from founders and operators who are crushing it and building in public.

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• FedEx dropped 2026 peak season numbers: ground residential surcharges up 23%, large-shipper fees restructured, EU inbound fee, and surcharges eating 30–50% of some shippers' total cost. Woof.

• L Catterton paid $680M for Thorne in 2023 and P&G just bought it for $3.8B. Fan Bi of In the Money asks: which wellness brand is next?

• A bootstrapped pistachio brand hit $4.5M, landed Costco, took on a million in PO financing, and almost got crushed by the win.

• Which one of ’s three founder archetypes are you: A Problem founder, an Insight founder, or a Vision founder? Knowing will help answer "wtf do I post as founder?"

• Ritual's prenatal line just went chain-wide at Costco. CEO Katerina Schneider's got a great take on the retail “test.”

• Here’s why a stockout this peak season will cost you more customers than it did last year.

• Listicles get a bad rap, but Nik Sharma’s pod episode on how they can out-convert traditional PDPs is incredibly handy.

• Sweetgreen x Fishwife is the Fast Casual meets CPG partnership that dreams are made of.

  
  

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Last week, we took the whole family inside an Icelandic glacier. Ceiling held... which is more than I can say for most Q3 forecasts!

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Vanessa Phillips is the Founder and CEO of Feel Good Foods, the #1 natural frozen snack and appetizer brand in the country. Her dad owned Chinese restaurants in New York City. After a celiac diagnosis pulled her out of the hospitality career she'd she opened Friedman's in Chelsea Market, using the restaurant as a place to figure out which gluten-free foods actually tasted good to a real, paying crowd.

When she was ready to go bigger, she mailed Whole Foods a Ziploc bag of homemade dumplings packed in dry ice, no meeting, no formal packaging, just a lot of belief. They said yes to 27 stores, and she spent the next four months showing up in person twice a day to demo the product herself.

That scrappy start is now a company with 30 SKUs in nearly 25,000 stores nationwide, and about three out of four customers buying Feel Good Foods purely because it tastes good.

(If you’re lost already: it’s a tiny rumor, but a rumor nonetheless, that Shopify might acquire Faire. So yeah, here I go fueling the fire 🔥.)

Ecommerce Times and Online Store News both reported the talks as “advanced.” Faire’s GMV dropped from $5.1 billion in 2023 to $4.2 billion annualized this year, and it cut headcount by 11 percent in January.

Shopify expanding its reach and revenue by buying into brick and mortar makes lots of sense to me.

But then again, I also thought it made sense for them to buy into fulfillment/3PL (RIP Deliverr and 6 River). And imports (RIP Oberlo). And forecasting (RIP Stocky). And inventory management (RIP ChannelApe). And wholesale (RIP Handshake, but… hello Faire?!).

Maybe Shopify got some rad stuff from those acquisitions — and many others — before the platforms were shut down. Talent? Proprietary business logic?? Customers??? But the products themselves were deemed a misfit in the long run. I think their more recent acquisitions around AI talent have clearly made an impact and seem to have stuck, for the most part.

Which is why the Faire thing is confusing. It matches the pattern of Shopify’s unsuccessful acquisitions way more than it matches the successful ones.

If this works, I’m stoked. Because I love specialty retail. I love supporting merchants and tastemakers. And I believe those who can build — and can afford to build — around complex problems (like physical commerce) and distill that complexity into simple and delightful solutions (as Shopify does) are a powerful force for the betterment of consumption. And as I figure it, better consumption is probably a good thing for humanity.

There’s a voice in my head that’s bugging at me right now though. Every time I’ve seen Shopify start to dig into anything that requires deep, relationship-level operational data — supplier terms, lead times, retailer requirements — they bail out. I think it’s because those things don’t compound with their core platform.

From what I can see in the acquisition rearview mirror, everything Shopify has kept alive serves its storefronts. Everything Shopify has killed held heavy records about somebody else — suppliers, warehouses, retailer requirements.

But Faire? Faire is both of those things stapled together. Product discovery is a channel, and Shopify keeps channels. But the retailer and supplier stuff underneath it — terms, lead times, who ships when, who gets extended credit — is the other bit. You know, the bit that they, erm, kill.

So I don’t think Shopify buys Faire and keeps the second half. Because I’ve never once seen them keep the second half, no matter how much it would have helped merchants and their customers.

I hope I’m wrong, though, because specialty retail deserves somebody who wants the second half!

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Back-to-school is a $146.8 billion retail moment, second only to the holidays, yet brands keep showing up in August for a party that kicked off in June. That, friends, is not fashionably late.

Shopping intent is spread almost evenly across June, July, August, and September. Our takeaway? "Season" now comes with quotation marks. Or maybe we call it back-to-school business quarter. Doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way.

So pencils down on the August-only strategy, and enjoy a scroll through this week’s extracurriculars.

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• e.l.f. Beauty and Bubble just dropped a limited-edition skincare-makeup hybrid line. +1 to two brands with overlapping Gen Z fanbases betting that loyalty is contagious just in time for…back-to-school!

• Truff refreshed its label earlier this year to something generated and terrifying, but at least they kept the cap. Mercifully, the smoky pineapple launch returns to the OG design.

• Le Creuset asked employees' kids to color and name its iconic Dutch oven. Positive feedback includes: "I would sell a kidney for Poison Green."

• Figma and Shopify dropped merch (sure). Palantir dropped a tennis skirt (what). A mortgage company dropped $86 leggings (stop). B2B corpcore is officially here.

• of The Retail Advisor has a question for every founder with a sale rack: do you know why those SKUs are there?

• Your brand’s reputation with AI may be cooked. One coworking space was described as noisy with 9-to-5 hours (inaccurate) and lost recommendations.

• Ski brand Yardsale opened a store that doubles as a coffee shop and community hangout, tripled their week-one sales goal, and ran out of milk on day three. Anyone else up for hosting?

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I’m on an Iceland adventure this week with Brian and the kids. The highlight…or maybe the opposite of a highlight? We’re right smack in the path of totality for the 2026 total solar eclipse.

In any specific place on Earth, this kind of eclipse only happens about once every 375 years. And I get to be in this specific place with favorite people on the planet.

The next total solar eclipse is August 2, 2027. If we started a “path of totality” family tradition, where should we see it?

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Kate Assaraf is the founder and CEO of Dip Sustainable Hair Care, a plastic-free shampoo and conditioner bar brand she built after 20 years working inside the beauty industry. She launched Dip in October 2021 out of frustration: the plastic-free hair care that existed was made for the crunchy, all-natural consumer, and completely ignored everyone else who wanted salon-quality performance.

When her contract manufacturer went bankrupt in 2022, she rented a commercial space, put equipment on a credit card, and built a factory. She has grown Dip into a seven-figure business sold through independent surf shops, zero-waste stores, and eco salons. And here’s the kicker: she grew it entirely by word of mouth, with no paid ads, no influencers, no fake UGC, and (wait for it) no Amazon listing.

Kate gets into exactly how she made it all work. And yes, winging it played a part.

Is it just us, or does “Augtober” arrive earlier every year? We’re still clinging for dear life to our emotional support hydration vessels and thinking about shelling out $20 for Erewhon’s magical coconut water as we enter the final stretch of beach reading season. Priorities, is what we’re saying.

That said, we do have great news for PSLs and the people who love them in this week’s scroll.

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• TikTok Shop is an indie beauty gold rush… if you're holding the right end of the shovel. Top five brands captured 50%+ of $500M in annual sales via the creator ecosystem, whereas the rest…

• Researchers secured $1.82M to turn the 40% of sweet potatoes that never reach shelves into dairy-free milk using chia seeds! Reportedly smooth, mildly sweet, and headed for a PSL near you.

• Snif's Notewrks line just landed at Ulta: $74 masstige colognes for teenage fragheads (lol) who argue over base notes on TikTok, then ask mom to pay.

• Shopify surveyed founders across five countries and found 93% of aspiring founders feel ready to start a business… so what’s holding them back!?

• Birchbox co-founder Katia Beauchamp is back with Buff Beauty, a skincare-for-nails brand with one conviction: a bare nail is the look.

• Women's supplement brand Plainspeak is skipping paid ads entirely and mailing free sachets to anyone who DMs them their address. $1 CAC, totally analog.

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Early mornings at SEA-TAC always instill a deep gratitude for the fact that Seattle has killer coffee no matter where you turn. ☕️ 🛫

We had the best time visiting with a bunch of brands we work with. What a fun everyone-knows-everyone community in the consumer world, with so many old friends and familiar faces! We came to support one of our brands with a big retail meeting, awesome vibes all around. Aren't great retail partners the best?

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Adam Hiner has started five companies: catering, restaurants, an acrobatics festival, hard kombucha, and now bread. He built Boochcraft into the nation's first hard kombucha brand, grew it to $15 million, hired himself out of every role he'd created, and went looking for the next thing nobody was doing. What he found: not a single certified organic gluten-free bread existed anywhere in the country. PACHA, which he co-founded with his wife Maddie, makes organic sprouted buckwheat sourdough out of a dedicated allergen-free facility in San Diego.

Their English muffin is the top-selling gluten-free English muffin in the natural channel, and the brand recently joined the Purpose Pledge, a collaborative business commitment framework for values-driven companies (think: Dr. Bronner’s).

What a week! We got to catch up with founders, operators, and builders IRL at the PhillyDTC happy hour last week, and it really filled our cup (both figuratively and literally). More on that below.

Where should we host next? NYC, LA, Austin, Chicago? Drop your vote in and we’ll take it to the party-planning committee.

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• MCo Beauty turned duping into a business model and runaway success story. thinks their smartest move has nothing to do with copying.

• Sephora's 2026 Accelerate cohort has landed: 12 founders, $100K on the table, a WNBA co-founder and a scalp care brand rooted in Korean head spa tradition among them. Watch those shelves like a hawk.

• Cool resource alert: OpenAI just rolled out training programs and pre-built workflows for SMB founders. Data shows attendees save 5+ hours a week, a.k.a. the sweet sound of a free Sunday night.

• Kiki Couchman and Elan Halpern of Sourmilk delivered 8,000 tubs of yogurt by Citi Bike, dubbed it a drug deal, and built a community on IRL chaos (feat. Harry Styles). Follow them for the most entertaining MBA you'll never pay for.

• Reels, deals, all the feels. Founder-led social is becoming a wholesale prerequisite, and the founders crushing it say their unpolished content performs like someone paid for it.

• Is everything an impulse buy now? How AI might be messing with your discoverability and losing you a handful of high intent customers.

• No one was excited to hear about another tariff increase, but reminder that you can bust out our handy tariffs calculator to help figure out how to juggle last week’s surprise 2.5% increase!

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I had the best time at last week’s PhillyDTC summer happy hour! Great drinks and better people.

I get so heads-down in build-mode that sometimes I can forget how much I love a night like this until I'm standing in the middle of one. The PhillyDTC scene is not playing around!

We’re floating a few event ideas in NYC and LA later this year, but scroll up and throw either location a vote if you’d be down for a drink and some shop talk. If you think we’re missing out on a good location we didn’t include in our poll, drop us a line in the comments…

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When Subin Hur's pediatrician told her U.S.-grown rice wasn't safe for her baby, she called her sister Suahn. For most Asian families, rice isn't just an ingredient — it's the first solid food, the thing that's been on the table at every meal across every generation. They could have just switched brands. Instead, the sisters moved their families to Korea and built a new supply chain from scratch. That became BARI, America's first Asian baby food brand.

In this episode, Suahn Hur, co-founder of BARI, walks us through how they built it: organic rice porridges, roasted grain teas, Asian-inspired meal pouches, a 74% reduction in heavy metal levels, and #1 on Amazon in their category. Next, expanding into U.S. retail.

Ever wanted to build something because the existing options weren't good enough? This one's for you.

From where we stand, the product news cycle holds the attention span of someone who just got out of a cold plunge. So naturally, every brand appears to be singing in perfect four-part harmony: where else can we be? 🎤 🎵

The brands grabbing our seven seconds of interest are finding footholds in unexpected territories, and moving so rapidly that no one has time to tell them their ideas are a little weird.

The world’s largest soda company trademarking a word that sounds like a Dad-sneeze, for example. Or shoes and salads carpooling to your place (HOV lane?).

Want to dive deeper into that and so much more? Join us along with fellow founders and operators in Philly tonight! We saved you a seat further down the scroll.

• Would you be strong enough to axe 99% of your assortment and pivot your business to support (and champion!) a single SKU? An interesting look into what happens when you do just that.

• DoorDash just integrated natively into Shopify's App Store, which means any brick-and-mortar Shopify merchant in the US can flip on same-day delivery in about as many clicks as it takes to add a sales channel.

• The 2026 FIFA World Cup was a BIG retail moment, with Bank of America data showing consumer discretionary spending up 6.3% year over year in June and Target moving 2.4x more product in host market stores.

• Brands like P.F. Candle Co. are inviting smaller brands to host pop-ups in its stores, outperforming normal weekends by 34%…A 10% hosting cut doesn't hurt either.

• of Pulse Check walked into Sephora, consulted ChatGPT instead of a store associate, and came home with a big glossy Q for retailers: why are customers talking to their phones instead of your humans?

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The Endless Commerce x Philly DTC Happy Hour is tonight, July 22nd! 🎉

Got a brand? Have questions? Feel like flexing your fluency in EDI? Come on over — no pitches or agendas, just good convos with new friends, drinks, and light bites.

Sign up here, and see you soon!

Chris Kolbe spent 30+ years as a senior executive at Ralph Lauren, J.Crew, Original Penguin, Lands' End, and Kohl's. That means he knows exactly how the industry works, and what it's been getting away with.

After decades of watching apparel shift to petroleum-based synthetics, he left to build HyperNatural: a performance apparel brand made from bio-based materials. The flagship fabric, HyperCool Jade, is built from Supima cotton, jade stone, and crab shells.

If you've ever wondered what it looks like to bet your career on an idea your entire industry has totally ignored, this one's for you.

Anyone else super-attached to their emotional support drink vessel lately? It can’t just be us, so welcome to 💧 HYDRATION WEEK 💧!

If there’s one thing we learned during the FIFA 2026 World Cup, it’s that all 104 matches’ three-minute "hydration breaks" midway through each half were great for everything from advertising to dating to…you know, fending off heat-related illness.

And speaking of worlds and cups, the global electrolyte drinks market alone is valued around $43 billion, and projected to reach $82 billion by 2034. So let’s raise a glass, can, pouch, packet, or your preferred delivery method to hydration breaks of all kinds.

• This summer, we all scream for electrolytes. And who’s cleaning up? Brands selling everything from drinkable IV fluid (“um?” or “yum?”) to our new seltzer: sparkling coconut water.

• And if you think coconut water is played out — Erewhon says no it’s not and also give us a dollar an ounce (coco-WHAT?)

• As an alternative, why not peel open a can of potassium-rich water extracted from heirloom Thai bananas?

• Algae Cooking Club launched a drizzling oil by @MadeByMusashi that’s packed with the essence of charred peak-season tomatoes. Bonus, their signature cooking oil has a higher smoke point than the pavement outside.

• Consumer and social expert dumps a much-needed bucket of ice water over every brand that slapped their logo on that Empire State Building engagement photo.

• French dairy behemoth Danone is guzzling down shake and smoothie brand acquisitions to the tune of $2.7 billion since April. First was UK-based Huel, the DTC-first meal replacement brand. Next came Australian favorite Rokeby Farms Protein Smoothies. Should Chobani be worried?

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Calling all DTC lovers: come join us at the Endless Commerce x Philly DTC Happy Hour next Wednesday, July 22nd. 🎉

We’re throwing a friendly community shindig for e-commerce founders, operators, and partners in the Philadelphia area. No pitches or agendas, just good convos, drinks, and light bites.

Sign up here — and see you there!

Matt Cohen left a decade in finance to co-found pantry staples brand SIMPLi with his wife Sarela Herrada, and if that sounds like a wild pivot, it was. They started with 80 farmers in Peru and have since scaled to 75 products across 13 countries, 2,500+ retail doors including Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Wegmans, and a foodservice business supplying sweetgreen, Daily Harvest, and Splendid Spoon.

Oh, and he won a a NOSH Changemaker of the Year award and a Conservation International investment along the way. Not bad for a guy who used to do derivatives valuations.

Whether you're building a sourcing-first food brand, navigating international supply chain complexity, or figuring out how to make mission and margin work together at retail scale, this conversation is a ground-level look at what it takes to get quinoa from ground to grocer.

Do any other nerds giddily await the release of a new Consumer Trends report from and Coefficient Capital? The 2026 Mid-Year Consumer Trends Report dropped just before 4th of July weekend, ICYMI while eating hot dogs and lighting sparklers.

A few of the learnings to gnaw on:

• If you thought we were at peak protein… we are nowhere near it.

• There’s a new “archetype” of consumer: The Optimizer! They’re wellness, AI, and GLP-1 obsessed.

• Willingness to pay for those expensive optimizations— AI, GLP-1s, and alllllll the added protein— is climbing.

You can read a lot more in the full report, linked below!

The New Consumer (on Substack)

Introducing the Consumer Trends 2026 Mid-Year Report

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital…

Read more

2 months ago · 15 likes · Dan Frommer

• A major CPG brand and a dating app partnering? This might be a first! Breeze and Kraft Heinz collaborated on a new “Marry Me Pasta Sauce,” inspired by the viral recipe.

• From brand builder : Americans are sleeping on Chinese brands, and they’re coming our way. (Plus: a few to get smart on fast!)

• Bath & Body Works and Hilary Duff dropped their new “fruit forward” body care line. Speaking of, here’s a very interesting take on why Bath & Body Works may not be so successful in all their new Ulta doors, from .

• How fun would it be to work on the brand campaign OluKai launched with Hawaiian lifeguards? In addition to shining a spotlight on real Hawaiian lifeguards in their video series, they also provide shoes to all (!) of the lifeguards in the Hawaiian islands.

• Brand founder ’s guide to influencer and affiliate platform ShopMy, and whether or not it’s “worth it” for a brand. (Need more ShopMy takes? Look no further than friend of the pod , who joined us on Commerce is Chaos not so long ago!)

• The LoveShackFancy x Target collab dropped last weekend and apparently Target stores throughout the US were festooned with LoveShackFancy’s signature bows. (Had to take the opportunity to use the word “festooned.”) The partnership expanded to include branded items from Wet Brush, Case-Mate, Wild, and Yoobi. Can’t remember the last time a partnership between a brand and retailer like this expanded to include other brands under its umbrella, can you?

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Happy July European vacation season to all who celebrate! And if you’re planning a more, should we say, American style vacation, allow us to put you on to the most incredible contraption: this laptop shade is light as a feather, folds flat, and is relatively eco-friendly.

Judah Bergman is the Founder and President of Jool Baby, a fully bootstrapped baby gear and child-safety brand he started in 2015 with a single magnetic cabinet lock he designed because no product on the market met his standard.

Since then, he’s grown Jool Baby into an eight-figure Amazon business with distribution across Target, Walmart, Babylist, and TikTok Shop — without a single outside investor or acquisition. (!)

He’s also spent over a decade running a free, vetted seller community now 450+ members strong, with working groups covering Amazon, Walmart, TikTok, warehousing, and tariffs.

Whether you’re building on Amazon, navigating the move into physical retail, or trying to compete on a playing field shaped by tariff volatility, Judah’s frameworks offer a candid, operator-first look at what it actually takes to scale a bootstrapped consumer brand in today’s market.

While we weren’t at Cannes this year (we hear the Croisette doesn’t take Venmo — so we hosted an NYC CPG Cool Down after the Fancy Food show instead!), we’re pretty sure no one in attendance was sipping the electrolyte drink of the summer. That honor belongs to us, courtesy of pickles. For real though, is there anything pickles can’t do? Ditto rocket pops, more on that below…

• Every time we declare “peak pickle,” we end up eating our crunchy, briny words. HOPWTR x Good Girl Snacks launched a limited-edition pickle lemonade. The very notion fills us with electrolytes (and joy). 🍋

• If you thought all supplement gummies were for kids, you clearly haven’t met Grüns…which just rolled out a line of gummies for kids. And before you ask: yes, they come in rocket pop flavor. (As do America’s birthday beans.) 🫘

• Steph Curry signed a $400M deal with Li-Ning, a brand that’s been banned from selling in the US since 2022. The real MVP? 1.4 billion basketball-obsessed Chinese consumers. Did Li-Ning just buy itself a homegrown Jordan Brand? Discuss. ⛹

• Instacart is now its own ad agency — you can find it in the middleman aisle! Brands used to hire an agency, then buy ads, then beg for their own data back. Instacart just rolled all three into one convenient checkout. (Also, AI.) 🥕

• We read on Reddit that Reddit’s data on Redditers indicates fully half of US shoppers validate their AI-recommended CPG purchases on Reddit. So, humans…good? 🤖

• Three ultra-deals this year — Kimberly-Clark buying Kenvue, McCormick scooping up Unilever's foods division, Keurig Dr Pepper nabbing JDE Peet's — added up to $120B. Yup, Ozempic and ingredient panels accomplished what decades of "eat healthier" campaigns couldn't. 📈

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Summer Fancy Food was poppin’ this week! So many samples to eat, so little stomach space… which seems to be the case with almost all the best tradeshows these days.

Ted Repic is the CEO of Rhino USA: the family-owned adventure gear company his sons Cameron and Dylan started in 2015 with a pickup truck and a gap in the market. Cameron was 19. Dylan jumped in with his savings while he was still in high school. Ted came in as CEO to help guide the growth.

A decade later: nine figures in revenue, 300+ products, Walmart, Sam's Club, AutoZone, and one of the most unexpected TikTok Shop success stories out there — the top seller in automotive and motorcycle, with eight figures in platform revenue.

Now they're breaking ground on RhinoWorld, a 182-acre adventure campus outside Austin where the gear gets built, beaten up, and eventually opened to customers, retail partners, and first responders in training.

Ready to shoot videos live in the mud? Cause Ted and the boys are!

Anyway, now that Sam’s back from her delightfully busy Hawaii jaunt, it’s time to bring in the seasonal summer product harvest. In NYC, we’re raising a glass to all things fancy and food.

Sudden thought: the Javits Center probably has killer air conditioning.

• Think beyond the bottle when it comes to sunscreen! Between sun-exposure wearables and derm & doctor formulated supplements to prevent sun damage, this explosive category continues to grow in new and explosive ways.

• The splashiest acquisition of 2026 so far is from an unsexy legacy brand— Breathe Right nasal strips. Unsexy = undervalued in public perception…

• L’Oréal’s collab with OpenAI will give us some interesting signals about what brands can expect from ChatGPT as an ad platform moving forward, starting with Maybelline “try-ons.”

• Would you have guessed that the South is America’s strongest plant-based market? Southern shoppers contribute to 36% of plant-based food nationwide.

• Ulta got in on the TikTok Shop action and beauty brand Polite Society was its first affiliate and co-marketing guinea pig. It’ll be interesting to see how TikTok Shop and affiliate and shopper marketing all coalesce in the coming years.

• Faire has shifted its business model so that non-retail customers can place wholesale orders now — because everything is kind of a shoppy shop these days.

• Crumbl’s new beverage with as much sugar as 19 Krispy Kremes is kinda criminal, yes… but should it actually be illegal, or is it more of a pancreas pandemonium party (enter at your own risk?)

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Calling all New Yorkers! Join us for a happy hour in NYC on Monday night, whether you’re unwinding from a long, delicious day at Summer Fancy Food Show or just looking to meet like-minded geeks, founders, and operators.

Before Jennie Ripps built one of the most talked-about RTD brands in the country, she was convincing Momofuku and Soho House that tea deserved to be taken as seriously as wine. That instinct — that what's actually in your glass matters — became the entire thesis behind Owl's Brew.

She launched it in 2020, right as the world shut down, and grew 918% in year one anyway. No sampling. No playbook. Just a product people actually wanted and a founder who understood her consumer better than most.

In this episode, we pour one out with Jennie, certified tea sommelier, co-author of Wise Cocktails (Rodale), and the person who figured out how to get a clean-ingredient cocktail brand into Disney World, SoFi Stadium, and TD Garden while also landing at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and Total Wine. The brand has 40-plus product awards and counting.

If you’re a fan of tea, lemonade, spiked pop, or Chelsea Handler (yes, that Chelsea Handler), you’re going to love this one. We think it’s one of our best episodes ever!

I still work closely with current founders, wearing a few different hats. Okay, it’s a lot of hats. (Seriously— my team will tell you that I will pick up the phone to help a founder I just met figure out freight forwarding in the middle of our team meeting, much to their chagrin!)

My co-founder and husband Brian and I have been building businesses together since we were in college. After selling GIR and Mvnifest, we founded Hologram Capital, a small PE fund that invests in “special situations” - often distressed consumer brands where Hologram can help them find a new life and a path forward.

Our life’s work is Endless Commerce, the anti-ERP. We are obsessed with sharing the tool that helped us scale our brand, our agency, and our investment portfolio: a supply chain and commerce ops platform that helps big brands manage their chaotic back offices. Agents, battle-tested automations, and a whole bunch of business logic lay the foundation for the modern answer to a traditional tool like an ERP or a messy, distributed tech stack.

Whether you’re a founder or a big brand operator, count us in for helping to solve complex problems with a wink and a smile. We love playing on the giant chessboard.

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There are a few more faces behind the scenes who make this Substack and my podcast, Commerce is Chaos, happen. You’ve met Zoe before, but meet Jess — our new producer and Head of Content! Fun, random fact: both Zoe and Jess worked at Food52 back in the day, though they didn’t know each other.

We love writing about the messy, thorny ops problems that snag so many of my founder and operator friends, but there’s so much going on to keep up with in the brand universe that we thought we’d start sharing a more bite-sized newsletter. Think of it as your lunch reading, hopefully a little inspiration, and at the very least a few links that you can drop into the Slack channel that will make you look very in-the-know.

• The latest trend R&D and marketing teams at beauty brands are focusing on? Longevity. L’Oreal just introduced the concept of “Follicle Biological Age” at the 14th World Congress for Hair Research in Seoul, and apparently made some connections between caring for your hair and anti-aging and mental health… what do you think? Crock of baloney, or does it have legs?

• Protein, but make it savory? This new cheese-forward protein bar brand, Takeaways, boasts 12g of protein and 120 calories with flavors like White Cheddar, Cheese Pizza and Pepper Jack. It’ll be interesting to see if this takes off the way “meat sticks” really have.

• Our buddy wrote a great piece on how to actually gauge AI effectiveness and assess AI spend for your team. This one’s a must-read before you encourage everyone to get AI literate and hand them the keys without much context or training.

• Is Gutter Capital resuscitating the VC accelerator? Because Elbow Grease looks pretty awesome. (Great name, btw.)

• Have tariffs contributed to brands’ growing sustainability fatigue when it comes to packaging? An interesting read on the future of packaging technology.

• DEUX founder ’s 3 tools for getting out of a funk are bookmark-worthy for all founders, especially Tool #1!

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Running a few ventures at once isn’t for the faint of heart. This week it looks like a 4 a.m. start time so I can wrap up meetings early enough to spend time with my family on a trip to see our cousins in Hawaii… maybe not a picture-perfect family vacay, but sometimes the in-between of work and play is as close as we can get! -Sam

Aaron Menitoff and his wife Julie spent over 20 years catering high-end events in South Florida — think Prince Harry and Bruce Springsteen — before the pandemic canceled everything overnight. So they did what any reasonable couple would do, bet the farm and built something entirely new.

The idea was simple: ship fully assembled, catering-quality cheese and charcuterie boards overnight, anywhere in the country. No assembly required. Just open the box.

In their first year, Boarderie shipped 10,000 boards and did $1.7 million in sales. Year two: $65 million. They’ve since landed on Oprah’s Favorite Things list and set a Guinness World Record for the largest charcuterie board ever assembled at 20 by 14 feet and 769 pounds.

In this episode, Aaron pulls back the curtain on how all of it actually works: the assembly line that produces up to 30,000 hand-assembled boards a day, the decision to keep production fully in-house, how they’ve managed explosive growth in a perishable food business, and the employment program that’s become a core part of how they operate.

If you love a great snack board, you’re going to love this one. I think it’s one of the best episodes ever!

There’s a moment on most operations calls where someone goes quiet, opens a tab they were hoping not to open, and reads a number off a spreadsheet. The file is named something like inventory_master_FINAL_v3_USE_THIS. Somebody built it during a stockout in 2022 and it never left. It is now the most load-bearing object in the company.

I think about that spreadsheet constantly, because right now the entire industry is trying to sell the person who maintains it on artificial intelligence.

Open any commerce trend list for this year and you’ll find the same word: enablement. AI enablement, commerce enablement, agentic this, autonomous that. The pitch is seductive and basically identical everywhere. Your operation runs itself. Your forecasts write themselves. Your reorders happen before you’ve noticed you needed them. Demand planning on autopilot, an agent watching your supply chain while you sleep. Wheeeee!

I want it to be true. I also know what’s sitting underneath most of these companies, because I’ve been in the back office, and it’s that spreadsheet.

Here’s the part the enablement crowd skips: every one of those magic capabilities is a function of data you already don’t trust. A forecast based on that garbage is just an over-confident statement about numbers. I see you, you liar. If your on-hand count disagrees with itself across your 3PL, your store POS, and your marketplace listings — and it does, for almost everyone — then the forecast isn’t intelligence, nope nope nope. It’s a very expensive guess, dressed up like a sports official blowing a whistle wearing the number “81” on their jersey (get it, eight-eye? AI?). Ok I’m tired and not at my creative peak, that was a stretch. But the point is:

You can stack the smartest model in the world on top of bad inventory data and all you’ve built is a faster way to be wrong. LOL.

Hear me out. This is a thing operators have always known. AI shillers keep pretending they can get past it. They can’t. Well, I guess they can. But you shouldn’t.

So when people ask me what “commerce enablement” actually means, I’ve stopped giving the brochure answer. Enablement isn’t the AI layer on top. Nope nope nope. Enablement is the boring substrate underneath. One place where your catalog, your inventory, your orders, and your fulfillment agree with each other, in real time, without a human reconciling tabs at 11pm. That’s it. That’s the whole unglamorous miracle. Everything the industry is excited about — forecasting, anomaly detection, agents that route exceptions before they become fires — only works if that foundation is true. Most brands are being sold the roof before anyone’s poured the floor. (That was better than my sports analogy, right?)

You can run the test yourself, and it’s bruuuutal. Pick one SKU. Ask three different people in your company how many units you have right now. If you get three different answers, you are not enabled. You’re hopeful. There’s a difference, and the difference is exactly the gap every shiny tool will faceplant into the second you turn it on.

The good news is that the brands actually pulling ahead this year already figured this out, and they’re not doing anything flashy. They’re not chasing every new agent or channel. They probably simplified. They surely connected the systems that mattered and killed the ones that didn’t. They made sure their numbers were true first, and then the clever stuff started working, because there was finally something solid to be clever about. It’s the least viral strategy in commerce. It also happens to be the one that works.

I think the reason nobody talks about this is that foundation work is unsexy and the AI demo is not. Nobody films a launch video about finally deleting FINAL_v3. But that’s the actual job. The agent doesn’t save you. The clean substrate that lets the agent be trusted with a decision is what saves you. The intelligence is downstream of the plumbing, and it always has been.

So if you’re sitting in budget meetings this year getting pitched enablement, please-for-the-love-of-yourselves push on one question before any of the fun ones: if I asked my own team how much of anything I have, would they agree?

Get that to yes, ok? Then everything else gets easier. And you finally get to close the spreadsheet.

xoxo,
Chaos

A consumer researcher I follow on Substack posted something recently that's been living rent-free in my head:

She’s right. And I’d even go further.

Selling out of a product means you didn't see it coming. Your data wasn't talking to you, or you weren't listening. Either way, someone wanted to give you money and you turned them away. That's a systems problem wearing a muscle suit.

I think about this concept in terms of a fridge.

Stick with me.

A well-managed fridge doesn't have stuff rotting in the back or empty shelves. A great fridge manager (hah!) buys what they'll actually use, rotates it instinctively, and knows what's running low before they're out of eggs on a Sunday morning facing down kids who want pancakes. The goal is the right fridge, with the right things, at the right time.

Your warehouse is your fridge, but bigger and more expensive.

Dead inventory charges you rent every single day: carrying costs, storage fees, opportunity cost. Running out of your hero SKU right when a wholesale account is scaling you up? That's the relationship. Maybe the account.

(I've spent more Sunday nights than I'd like to admit hoping the spreadsheet numbers matched by Monday morning. They often did not.)

Most founders I meet are flying somewhere between those two disasters, adding channels, SKUs, and warehouse locations with gut instinct, a spreadsheet someone made in 2022, and today's vibes. That spreadsheet won't tell you what's committed, what's in transit, or what's not. So you restock reactively instead of intentionally.

It sounds obvious when you say it out loud...but most of the hard operational stuff does.

Here’s the thing: most operators I know aren’t bad fridge managers. They’re actually pretty good ones. They just don’t have a fridge that talks back.

xoxo,
Chaos

Here’s something you learn quickly when you run a CommerceOS company willing to travel with your customers: The actual business is not in the office. It’s in the factory. It’s in the warehouse. It’s in the rental car between the factory and the warehouse. It’s at the diner attached to the hotel attached to the airport.

We’ve been on the road a lot this year. Brian, me, our client teams, whoever else we rope in for a given trip. Factory tours, QC walkthroughs, vendor meetings, the occasional “this was supposed to be a 30-minute stop but now we’re three hours in and someone’s showing us their new line.”

Glamorous? No. Essential? Extremely.

Also, surprisingly fun.

At some point on our last trip (third factory of the day, maybe fourth, I lost count) I looked around and realized the same specific things were happening every single time. Someone pulls out a tape measure. A vendor says “let me be transparent with you” and then says something mildly concerning. A forklift nearly takes out a teammate. We leave with more samples than luggage space.

So I made a bingo card.

Road & Factory Bingo, Field Edition No. 01.

25 squares, point values, house rules (witness required, no backfilling, disputes settled by group vote). A belt for the highest total at trip end.

The team got weirdly into it.

A few hours into the first trip we used it on, people were angling for squares. (I will not name names, but someone absolutely tried to bait a vendor into saying “MOQ” five times on purpose. Respect, though, right?)

By the end of the week we had three contested BINGOs and at least one reversal by group vote...

Here’s the link if you want to play it on your next trip: https://chaos.endlesscommerce.com/road-bingo

Print it. Torture your travel team. Send me your scores.

The larger point, if there has to be one: Operations is chaos. The road is where you see it most honestly. Tape measures, forklifts, handshake deals in parking lots, supplier dinners that turn into product roadmaps. None of it fits in a CRM. All of it matters.

You can’t vibe code the supply chain... but you can make a game of it.

xoxo,
Chaos

If you operate a consumer brand, your real calendar isn’t the one on your wall. It’s the one made of factory pauses, market weeks, freight cycles, and trade shows that decide whether your year sucks or rocks.

I keep two master calendars for myself. I update them regularly. I am sharing them in hopes that they save you so much time and heartache.

🌏 The Global Supply Chain Calendar Chinese New Year, Golden Week, Diwali, Tết, Amazon FBA inbound cutoffs, ocean freight GRI windows — every date that determines whether your inventory lands on time.

🛍️ The Consumer Brand & Trade Show Calendar Expo West, NY Now, Shoppe Object, ASD, IHA, Groceryshop, Magic — every market week and category show that actually moves the industry.

Share with your ops team. Share with your marketing team. Share with whoever keeps asking when Expo is.

Share

Love,
Sam

P.S. These are public Google Calendars — the kind you subscribe to once and forget about. They sit at the top of your calendar, updating themselves while you do other things.

I talk to 8-10 brand founders a week. The conversation almost always starts the same way: “We’re growing fast, things are kind of breaking, and we need to figure out our operations.” Then I ask: “Where does your inventory truth live right now?” And the answer — almost without exception — is some version of: “Well, Shopify has some of it, our 3PL has some of it, we have a spreadsheet that Brian updates every Monday, and the Amazon numbers are FBA so honestly, I’m not sure if they should count or not.”

This is not a failure of the founder. This is a failure of the tools. And it’s so common that I’ve stopped being surprised by it — which, if you think about it, is the wildest part.

Here’s what I’ve learned after building a brand from my kitchen table to local shops to national retail to an exit, and working with hundreds of brands at Mvnifest and Endless Commerce: the operational infrastructure behind your brand matters more than the storefront in front of it. And most founders figure this out too late — right around the time a major retailer sends their first routing guide and the chargeback clock starts ticking.

The Shopify gap

Shopify is genuinely great at what it does. It’s the best storefront on the planet for getting a brand from zero to $3M. No argument. But Shopify is organized around the transaction — the sale, the order, the checkout. The product is secondary. And somewhere between $5M and $15M, that distinction starts to matter a lot.

When you’re doing DTC only, the transaction view is fine. An order comes in, it ships, done. But the moment you add wholesale — a Target PO, a Nordstrom EDI feed, a Williams-Sonoma routing guide — you need a fundamentally different kind of truth. You need to know: what is this product, where is it, how much do we have committed vs. available, and what’s coming in on which purchase order?

Shopify can’t answer that. Not because it’s bad — because it’s not what Shopify was built to do. It’s like asking your car to also be a boat. Technically you could try, but woof.

The spreadsheet era

So what happens? The founder hires an ops person (OMG you guys, I hired my husband for this that’s how desperate I was). The ops person (my husband) builds a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet (thanks Brian!) works for six months. Then it doesn’t — because spreadsheets don’t talk to EDI feeds, don’t reconcile with 3PL warehouse counts, and definitely don’t send ASNs to Target on time.

Then it’s chargebacks. Then it’s compliance penalties buried in deductions. Then it’s a Sunday night spent reconciling three sources of inventory data and hoping the numbers match by Monday morning.

(I’ve lived this. Multiple times. It’s not a good Sunday. Brian and I did not have fun.)

The thing that actually fixes it

The fix is a different architectural foundation entirely — one built around the product record as the source of truth. When the product is your source of truth, everything else becomes a view: orders are a view, fulfillment is a view, demand planning is a view. They’re all looking at the same reality instead of maintaining separate, contradictory versions of it.

Brian made his spreadsheet as rad as it could be, we built an insanely powerful PIM (product information management, look it up it’s interesting), then we graduated to building that into the core feature of actual ops software, because we’re opinionated and generous and have an unignorable itch to share our brainchild with the world.

This is the thesis we built Endless Commerce on — and I’m not going to turn this Saturday reflection into a product pitch, so I’ll just say: if your operational stack is organized around transactions instead of items, you’re going to hit a ceiling. And sure, the timing varies. But there’s a ceiling, somewhere, no matter what.

Anyhow, you’re not doing anything wrong. You’ve just outgrown the tools that got you here. That’s actually a good sign. It means you’re building something real.

The fix isn’t complicated. It just requires making the unsexy infrastructure investment before you have to, instead of after it’s already cost you.

xoxo, Chaos

I’ve got you: here’s a breakdown of how to navigate 2025 domestic holiday shipping, no matter which carrier you prefer!

Carrier cutoff dates for 2025 holiday shipping

USPS (U.S. Postal Service)

• Ground Advantage & First-Class Mail: December 17, 2025

• Priority Mail: December 18, 2025

• Priority Mail Express: December 20, 2025

• Note: For Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and U.S. territories the Ground-Advantage cutoff may be a day earlier.

UPS

• 3 Day Select: December 19, 2025

• 2nd Day Air: December 22, 2025

• Next Day Air (overnight): December 23, 2025

• Ground / Ground-Saver: varies by origin/destination & transit time — use UPS “Time & Cost” tool to check

FedEx

• FedEx Ground Economy: December 15, 2025 (last day for cheapest ground-economy)

• FedEx Express Saver: December 20, 2025

• FedEx 2Day & 2Day AM: December 22, 2025

• FedEx Overnight (First Overnight / Priority Overnight / Standard Overnight / Extra Hours): December 23, 2025

• FedEx SameDay: December 24, 2025 (last-minute same-day shipping)

• FedEx Ground / Home Delivery transit-based ground: depends heavily on origin & destination — check the FedEx transit calculator.

I (and my expert team at Endless Commerce!) recommend…:

• Treat USPS Dec 17–20 as the cutoff window for mail-based shipping.

• For time-sensitive orders (especially slower ground), use UPS or FedEx Express/Overnight up to Dec 22–23.

• Ask customers with remote/distant ZIPs (or Alaska/Hawaii) to place orders at least a week earlier.

• Build in slack — holidays + volume cause delays. If you guarantee “pre-Xmas delivery,” aim to ship a few days before these cutoffs.

There’s still a few days left to get things landed just in the nick of time! Got any peak season questions or ops snafus that you need a little help with? Hit us in the comments or drop me a line here— I can help!

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Lastly, I would so love for you to share this letter— or any of my helpful guides to running a business and getting sh*t done— with a friend who you think could find it helpful. Appreciate you!

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