“Sexuality is big right now”
Brands know you can handle it 😉
Look how sick the Yamauchi Family Office site is.
Yesterday, Sweetgreen announced a series of collaborations they have lined up this summer, celebrating the return of their peach salad. The first thing a friend who is a chef texted me about it is “those peaches are going to be hard, peak peach season is in August.”
I care less about the peaches than the partners. They’ll figure out how to make the peaches work. I was kind of surprised to see them working with Gohar World (a New York-based lifestyle brand from genius chef Laila Gohar, that is currently selling a $200 baby rattle and a $500 picnic basket) based on the luxury category and niche customer base for the brand. Susan Alexandra charms go for around $40 and I’m sure people will love her imaginitive peach charm, Susan’s products are very sweet. The Wildair donut makes sense, however I must call out that… I did it first in 2021. Ghia makes sense (Nic Jammet, Sweetgreen co-founder, is also an investor there). FINI,
This lineup of collabs sounds expensive and targeted towards a very specific New York City cool girl audience, someone you famously can’t buy the appreciation of. Maybe they’re doing it for fun, maybe they’re trying to give their reputation a boost. I think it would’ve been cool if they just did a doc series about peaches and the people who grow them.
And now, the news:
Thousands of Reddit communities are going dark in protest against the company's plan to charge for access to its data. The subreddits impacted by the protest include r/gaming, which has over 37 million members, and r/music which has over 32 million. Other subreddits dedicated to specific fandoms, such as r/Succession and r/FrankOcean, have also temporarily been made private. In total, 3,489 subreddits are affected by the blackout. I really adore Reddit and it’s one of the few places to find community where people are excited to earnestly connect, and those communities are also self-governed. “Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to keep its platform welcoming and free of objectionable material. It also relies on uncompensated contributors to populate its numerous communities with content,” one moderator wrote on r/Jokes.
If you’re a beauty brand looking to replicate Drunk Elephant’s success (get purchased by Shiseido for $845 million, a valuation of 8.5X sales, in 2019, seven years after it launched)… dream on. In the 2010s and the outset of the 2020s, the beauty industry saw several brands scale quickly and sell at strong multiples. That was a different world. The conditions that enabled new beauty businesses to explode, most notably relatively affordable and effective digital advertising and influencer marketing have gotten trickier, especially in the wake of Apple’s iOS 14 update that decimated the return on investment of digital advertising. Meanwhile, the investment required to achieve success in the beauty specialty channel dominated by Sephora and Ulta Beauty has become greater as competition in it has mounted.
