Open tabs: MCo Beauty's smarter dupe era, OpenAI goes small business, & your Reels are closing deals
Plus: 8,000 yogurts, one Citi Bike, zero regrets
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.
MCo Beauty turned duping into a business model and runaway success story. Kirbie Johnson 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!
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…
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.
