• A look behind the curtain at the 5 brands dominating Reddit right now, and a bit more about their (brilliant) strategies. Ooni and King Arthur are killing it.

• made a brilliant “media diet” with the podcasts, newsletters and voices that any smart strategist should be tuning into.

• Another perfume launch and you’ll never guess what legacy brand it is… NGL, this one actually makes a lot of sense!

• Most new CPG brands never crack $10M, and the ones that rocket there (Poppi, Gruns) started with millions in seed money and a very good Rolodex. For everyone else, James F. Richardson says to prove your growth holds without paid ads before you pour gas on it.

• Amber Pierre on deciding what your brand needs right now before you say yes to the big retail rollout.

• CapCut is bringing its video editor into ChatGPT, so you can go from idea to edited video without leaving the chat… great for founders trying to go viral, terrible for AI slop hitting the algorithm.

• There’s so much focus on the optimization and perfection of everything when it comes to getting your brand on retail shelves, that this was a pleasant reminder to have fun with it whenever you can.

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No new episode this week as we take a break between seasons, but have you checked out some of these favorite episodes from the last year of Commerce is Chaos?

• Feel Good Foods co-founder Vanessa Phillips on mailing Whole Foods dumplings packed in dry ice and turning it into nearly 25,000 stores.

• Dip founder Kate Assaraf on building her own factory after her contract manufacturer went bankrupt.

• Something & Nothing co-founder Olly Dixon on the “Not Pop” campaign that lifted sales 150% in some Whole Foods stores.

• Yucca Fins CEO Sagar Patel on bringing wholesale in-house and beating all of last year’s wholesale sales in six months.

You can catch Commerce is Chaos, out weekly, on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We’ll be back with Season 3 after a short break, but in the mean time, don’t forget to drop us any feedback or guest requests in the comments.

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This week Set Active came clean about what a factory oopsie is actually costing them: where things got messed up operationally, and how they’re changing their business and drop model to adjust to the new operational normal… lucky us and any other nosy people who like to see what brands are doing behind the scenes!

More on that and other juicy consumer news this week, below the jump.

• published an excellent take on Set Active’s founder ’s announcement that the brand’s BFCM drops will not arrive on time and they will be taking a $10M loss in projected revenue by not selling them on pre-order. From now on, Set plans to only sell inventory that has landed at the warehouse and made it through a QC. Check out Sarah’s interesting deep dive on the why and the how!

• Can a founder expect to actually make any of that earn out they’re promised in an acquisition? The pragmatic math on how much you’ll realistically take home…

• says the next big consumer opportunity is in creating products that gives users some friction back.

• More on the brilliant influencer product partnership playbook from Saie and , this time through Hannah’s eyes as an influencer.

• Speaking of product partnerships, here’s why Away and John Summit seem to be setting a bunch of luggage on fire…

• wisely pointed out that Jennifer Lawrence must have gotten on Instagram to promote her new hair care brand in an effort to avoid the fate of Scarlett Johansson’s The Outset.

• Looking for a monster database of family offices to pitch? Here’s a big Google Sheet full of ‘em.

• Substack’s number one voice on all things social (the inimitable ) wisely calls out that if you’re tired of copy paste trends on social, it’s on you/your brand to subvert them.

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No new episode this week as we take a break between seasons, but have you checked out some of these favorite episodes from the last year of Commerce is Chaos?

• Rhino USA CEO Ted Repic on turning a pickup truck and a dream into TikTok Shop’s #1 automotive seller.

• Owl’s Brew co-founder Jennie Ripps on growing 918% in year one without handing out a single free sample.

• GoodPop founder Daniel Goetz on building a $63M popsicle empire from $3,500 and a borrowed kitchen, with zero investors.

• Little Spoon CBO Caryn Wasser on pulling off Target’s biggest food launch ever without a big-brand media budget.

You can catch Commerce is Chaos, out weekly, on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We’ll be back with Season 3 after a short break, but in the mean time, don’t forget to drop us any feedback or guest requests in the comments.

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This week: new launches from some of our most beloved podcast guests, a brilliant take on product partnerships with influencers, and lots of category expansion from a few household names….

• A new launch from Haven’s Kitchen founder : Choulie has officially entered the world. For more of Ali’s great takes on building in CPG, catch her podcast episode with Sam here!

• Are your Black Friday customers actually as unlikely to stick around as you think, or is that fake news? A recent Wayflyer study says… sorta.

• Well, in other news headlines that sound like they could have come from a dream: Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel join Peaky Blinders actor as co-founders of a protein beverage brand… okay…

• Baby brand Frida has expanded into personal care for kids 6-11. Wise move or transparent land grab?

• It’s no secret that everybody loves fragrance: on the heels of Necessaire co-founder and co-host Nick Axelrod-Welk’s Contrapposto launch last month comes Merit’s foray into this very margin-friendly category….

• CPG brands, Sweetgreen wants to hear your pitch for a menu item collab after crushing it with Fishwife and Molly Baz’s Ayoh.

• Master class in product partnerships: influencer Hannah Chody has spent years comparing alternatives to Tom Ford’s now discontinued eyeshadow shade. After publicly begging Tom Ford to make it for years (and with the force of hundreds of thousands of followers behind her, to no avail), Saie Beauty finally stepped in. The result? A product with built-in virality, an existing customer base, and plenty of buzz. Great work, !

• For whatever reason, there appears to be a surge in “modern Jell-O brands” happening at the moment.
  

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No new episode this week as we take a break between seasons, but have you checked out some of these favorite episodes from the last year of Commerce is Chaos?

• Plant People’s Hudson Davis-Ross on bootstrapping his way through a major category pivot.

• Umaimah Sharwani, founder of Paro and ops mind behind Bravo Sierra, Glossier and Jet.com on product development framework to steal.

• Brilliant investor Anna Whiteman of Coefficient Capital on what funders are looking for in founders these days.

• Hanni founder Leslie Tessler on scaling from DTC to Sephora with just 4 people.

You can catch Commerce is Chaos, out weekly, on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We’ll be back with Season 3 after a short break, but in the mean time, don’t forget to drop us any feedback or guest requests in the comments.

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Howdy! With our editor out of office this week, we thought we’d share one of our most-read posts again, adapted and edited slightly for 2026.

This one’s for all the aspiring founders or folks out there with one of those ideas you just can’t seem to get out of your head… these 5 steps will help you cultivate a bias towards action and just start.

We’ll be back next week with more of the usual news from the movers and shakers in the consumer world! Until then, happy building. 💪

When I ran Mvnifest, our way was to start with a great product and let a business plan congeal around that.

This is also how my first business, GIR, was born.

I started with a fantastic product, built from scratch out of my kitchen, and I’ve always had a bias toward action over plan, so I just… went.

It might not have looked like a plan at the time… but if I had to break it out into steps, I can see the path more clearly. It’d look something like:

1. Google your idea first, make sure it doesn’t exist. Take a look at what’s similar, and then ask what’s my differentiator? 

2. Identify your target market. What problem am I trying to solve with this, and who needs it? You don’t want to be everything to everybody, but don’t marry yourself to the idea of a product no one needs. In other words, be committed to the problem you’re looking to solve, be flexible with how you get there. 

3. Then, start making phone calls…

   1. How are you going to get this thing designed and manufactured? Do you know anyone who could share some advice? Call ‘em. Search around the internet for factories or partners that fit your product. Call ‘em. One of my favorite resources here is thomasnet.com—they have hundreds of factories listed, and many of those have sales departments that will take your call and teach you a bunch about a specific product category or material in 10 minutes on the phone. Alibaba is also a great place to see tons of comparable or competitive products and get a sense of what’s out there. You can also go to a more full-stack resource (no shame, my business Mvnifest was one of those!) that can help end-to-end in bringing a product to life. Either way, come prepared to pepper the conversation with questions and learn as much as you can. The folks you talk to will help you set your bearings—and most of them are really delightful and go above and beyond to answer questions before ever asking for a dime.

   2. What are the elements that are super important to you from a features or values perspective? Who can help you think about those values—maybe push you toward or away from prioritizing some of them, or be a sounding board for how to accomplish what you’re trying to make? Try to ask for advice from people that won’t just tell you what you want to hear. Do you have an especially skeptical aunt or cousin? Call ‘em. (But also, don’t let anyone scare you away from pursuing an idea you believe in—you get to pick which advice you follow.)

Everything I did in the early days at GIR was determined through directional gut checks vs. a plan we adhered to closely. And I wouldn’t change that. However, there are a few things I’d recommend you consider:

4. You can and SHOULD plan for what your tolerance is financially. At the bare minimum, you need to think about how much money you’ll use to get started, and level-set expectations. It might make sense to build in some padding or buffer for your own sanity, and to make some more calls to be sure you’re grounding your estimates in something that approaches reality.

5. You need to consider how you’re reaching your customers. A marketing and sales strategy is one of the most important aspects of your entire business. I’m a big believer in an omnichannel sales strategy— it changed everything for us. “Build it and they will come” is really, really, really bad advice. They will not, unless you figure out a really sticky, compelling way to tell them to.

Getting ahead of these will save you a lot of time and money.

For GIR, the “business plan” (or our version of that blueprint) came after the first product, because we knew so much about our product, our customers, and ourselves.

Launching a consumer goods company can be daunting.

I built and scaled an 8-figure brand from my kitchen and we made a ton of mistakes before getting a lot of our wins.

When we talk to other founders, we realize they collectively share many of the same struggles. This is the meat and potatoes of my podcast, Commerce is Chaos! We have many, many episodes from founders who have started everything from medical device to sourdough businesses. There’s a lot you can learn for free just by listening.

But don’t forget that at the end of the day, you’re going to make some mistakes. Right now, the best you can do is, well, the best you can do: start by cultivating a bias for action and learning, and try to just put one foot in front of the other.

Before you know it, you’ll look back at those footsteps and see a— windy! Not always linear! But defined!— path to where you wanted to go.

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While CPG brands seem to be busy just trying to get into Target like everyone else (foreshadowing for today’s news below), beauty brands are dueling, dropping 5 identical products in 5 days, accusing each other of copycatting and forcing each other to rename their products. Whew! Never a dull day! But more on that below…

• Inside the 10 month development timeline that got Nori from prototype to a Target shelf!

• Speaking of luxury fabric care in Target— The Laundress, now Unilever-owned, is making its first foray into Target stores.

• , founder of Dieux, published some interesting thoughts on what appears to be a sudden surge in launches of an identical eye patch product in beauty, from brands like Fenty, Huda Beauty, Glow Recipe and more— only to do some digging and learn that it is actually really a push from a packaging supplier… More from on the same phenomenon and what happens when 5 big Sephora brands all drop the same thing at once.

• writes about what it was like to sponsor a NYFW show as a bootstrapped beauty founder, a cool look behind the scenes for anyone who has ever wondered about how it works.

• People buy based on who they want to be, and not who they are now. So what happens when a brand confuses its muse with its target audience?

• on why oral care is the next burgeoning category in CPG… adding a yet-to-be-launched addition to this lineup with ’s brand Orist, coming in 2027!

• Founder Substack newsletters are here to stay, says the mounting evidence… but how much is too much sharing? And when is it better to build in public vs. craft aspirational content? More from .

• Heartening news for consumer founders looking to fundraise— this VC wants you to know that consumer investing is back and here to stay.

• Klaviyo’s first global brand campaign stars D’Arcy Carden as a ridiculously devoted work bff… what do you think?
  

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Meet Commerce is Chaos’s new podcast producer, Clare Slaughter! Clare has produced podcasts about everything from comedy to Great White Sharks… So she’s seen it all!

Got guest ideas or requests? Drop them in the comments! Now for a little lightning round with Clare...

• Favorite podcast: Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud.

• The brand I always re-order from: The RealReal. I’m not much of a shopper outside of fancy grocery stores or vintage these days, though I'm newly obsessed with Farm to the People…

• Dream guest for Sam to interview: Emma Grede. Co-founder of SKIMS, Good American and a bunch of others, and a fellow multi-hyphenate founder and funder for to geek out with.

You can catch Commerce is Chaos, out weekly, on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We’ll be back with Season 3 after a short break, but in the mean time, don’t forget to drop us any feedback or guest requests in the comments.

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• on why the latest packaging trend is actually making your brand a little harder to read. Huh!

• Brightland’s brilliant founder on how to actually decode investor feedback while fundraising. The “your brand is amazing, but you’re too early, let’s keep in touch” bit is sooooo real. Been there. 💀

• on why it’s time to retire the term “founder-friendly” when it comes to investors…

• All signs seem to be pointing towards fiber being the next protein when it comes to CPG trends.

• What’s in a product name? wrote a great overview of the controversy that bubbled up when Molly Sims took to Instagram to call out Bobbi Brown’s Jones Road Beauty for “copying” her own brand, YISE Beauty, with their newest launch. Can a brand really “own” a product name? And in beauty, a shade name?

• If you’re feeling stuck at work, says to revisit Kidlin’s Law:

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No new episode this week as we take a break between seasons, but have you checked out some of these favorite episodes from the last year of Commerce is Chaos?

• Plant People’s Hudson Davis-Ross on bootstrapping his way through a major category pivot.

• Umaimah Sharwani, founder of Paro and ops mind behind Bravo Sierra, Glossier and Jet.com on product development framework to steal.

• Brilliant investor Anna Whiteman of Coefficient Capital on what funders are looking for in founders these days.

• Hanni founder Leslie Tessler on scaling from DTC to Sephora with just 4 people.

You can catch Commerce is Chaos, out weekly, on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We’ll be back with Season 3 after a short break, but in the mean time, don’t forget to drop us any feedback or guest requests in the comments.

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• 16 brands that are crushing it on TikTok Shop— big and small!— and their stats.

• Well if this isn’t the knights of the beauty brand Round Table… Emma Grede hosts Amy Liu (Tower 28), Danessa Myricks (Danessa Myricks) and (Crown Affair) for a conversation about everything you want to know about the beauty business. It’s a literal round table they are sitting at, so here’s hoping the Arthurian reference really lands.

• Here’s how return policies are changing so far for Q4, with some great data from the team at Loop Returns.

• File under every early stage founder’s absolute dream: this cereal brand is less than 2 months old and it’s somehow already outselling every legacy brand in Target’s cereal aisle…

• Despite what you hear, Gen Z is drinking— and spending big on experiences to boot!

• Well, it was only a matter of time until AI generated UGC morphed into something slightly more insidious: meet the ghost creator… 🫠

• Killer example of some really good OOH in the wild. The best marketing is just great communication in the right place at the right time.

• pulls back the veil on why Gen Z CPG founders are the ones to watch!

• A new beauty brand launch— Carte Blanche— from beauty veterans (and former Saie employees!) and Sarah Tallman.

• In the wake of the big Goodles exit comes some interesting news: yes, another celebrity chef backed brand entering the mac and cheese aisle. But upon further inspection, this new launch from Chef Daniel Humm (of Eleven Madison Park) looks markedly different from the rest of the boxed pasta aisle…

• Home brands are fighting back against dupe culture… here’s how!

We’re taking a quick break between podcast seasons, and the founder’s instinct to seek out a little customer feedback is hard to kick… will you indulge us, pretty please?

This one’s just for the folks who have listened, or who plan to!

If you have more thoughts or opinions for us than a simple poll could possibly absorb, hit reply on this email or the button below to drop a comment. Ever so grateful for your feedback! As you probably know yourself, creating stuff on the internet can feel like shouting into the void, and it’s nice to connect some human feedback or faces to what you are working on.

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No new episode this week as we take a break between seasons, but have you checked out some of these favorite episodes from the last year of Commerce is Chaos?

• Inside building one of the most prolific creator-led CPG brands that has launched in these last few years— Ayoh! co-founder and CEO David McCormick talks building alongside Molly Baz, creator-led commerce, and SKU architecture decision making in a retail-first category.

• Exited Bulletin founder turned ShopMy whisperer joined us to dish about why she bet it all on ShopMy being the must-have new tool for consumer marketers.

• ’s very own husband and co-founder (not just this one time, but a few!), the inimitable Brian Rose, came on.

• Emily Groden, founder of one of CPG’s fastest growing brands, Evergreen, joined us to talk about scaling from a household Vitamix to $9.3 million in retail sales across 8,000+ stores.

• Dude Wipes SVP of Ops, Greg Brown, came on to talk building operational infrastructure to support explosive consumer brand growth…without breaking.

You can catch Commerce is Chaos, out weekly, on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! We’ll be back with Season 3 after a short break, but in the mean time, don’t forget to drop us any feedback or guest requests in the comments.

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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

4 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!