CPG is getting into politics
Plus: Lush is wrapping soaps in poetry and “Gen Z aesthetic” is getting an overhaul.
Morning,
We have a few new people here. Welcome! The regular programming will be back next Sunday. For a taste of that, here’s the most recent issue.
But fear not, this will be a fun.
For the first email back I wanted to do something totally different.
One of my 2025 goals is to connect with more people.
I kicked it off in a big way and asked some of my favorite minds for their takes on where brands are going in 2025.
As always, the lens of this letter is a best-of-the-best on culture, trends, marketing, etc. What I’m dropping to friends on Slack or finding useful in meetings with brands. And this edition is no different! It is jam-packed and full of wisdom.
Let’s dive in!
THE CONTRIBUTORS
These folx are people that inform my letters every week. I consider them essential follows and you should too.
OCHUKO AKPOVBOVBO // Ochuko is one of those people that is so tapped in you wonder how they do it. I read her
letters top-to-tail without fail. I also truly think of her as the voice of Gen-Z. If you aren’t reading her, you should be.FRED HART // Fred’s posts on LinkedIn are constantly going viral. He’s one of those people you know really gets the inner workings of an industry. If you want to know about CPG, this is who you follow.
MARIE DOLLÉ // As a futurist,
writes about emerging trends in the consumer space. In Bed With Tech is an essential read. Marie’s posts border on philosophy, she’s truly one of my favorite minds out there. is a retail correspondent at @Puck’s The Line Sheet. I love reading Sarah for two big reasons: 1) She’s follows everything. Every pop-up, every big brand move. 2) She’s a retail insider and truly understands how things actually work.DAVID SKILLING // David writes
, my go-to source for the intersection of sports, fashion, and culture. Like me, David spends his time between Europe/UK, and the US so he’ll help you get out of a US silo too.JENNY EVANS // Jenny is my wellness guru, she writes
. She’s consistently had her finger on the pulse of wellness. She called the microbiome obsession over 5 years ago. She also happens to be Kirsten’s best friend, giving me unlimited access to her wisdom.DANIELLE GREENBERG // I’ve known Danni since I was 15. Danielle’s background in venture capital, marketing, and fintech makes her someone to listen to about a lot of things. But her obsession with AI has made her my go-to source on where this is all going.
SPENCER FRIED // Spencer is the co-founder of one of my fave Silver brands, Remsen. I was curious about what he was looking at. And no surprise, he doesn’t reference a single ‘Silver’ brand. This space is such an opportunity.
GUT TAKE ON 2024?
Pure gut reaction, what’s one trend/topic/brand that you enjoyed watching gain traction in 2024?
OCHUKO AKPOVBOVBO // It’s been really fun to see how literary culture has entered the zeitgeist in the past year—from BookTok to new celebrity book clubs to luxury brands like Saint Laurent and Miu Miu incorporating literature into their campaigns and shows. I think it’s exciting and amazing, indicative of several trends, and I’m eager to see where it goes next year.
FRED HART // I'm fascinated by the rise of influencer brands. In late 2023 I had the opportunity to work with Mr. Beast and his Feastables team to redesign their chocolate brand, which was unveiled on shelves in 2024, and learned a lot about how they use every opportunity to create engagement with their audiences.
Logan Paul (Prime), Alex Cooper (Unwell), Emma Chamberlain (Chamberlain Coffee), Hailey Bieber (Rhode), Kim Kardashian (Skims) and plenty more are all disrupting the faceless brands of Fortune 500 companies that aren’t equipped to compete with these modern story-tellers and reality-tv-esque attention. There’s now a new class of CPG entrepreneurs that are building their brands publicly, sharing the good, the bad and the ugly by giving audiences access to their entrepreneurial journey, examples being Jake Karls and the team at MidDay Squares or Syndey Webb and Toto Cookies.
Social media has transformed audience building, and the larger the audience, the more you’re able to monetize.
MARIE DOLLÉ // Lush. Ever since they left social media, they’ve been ahead of the curve. Their collaboration with The Poetry Pharmacy— bath bombs with verses printed on banana paper—feels both bold and brilliant. In a tech-saturated world, we’re craving poets and philosophers more than ever. With mental health challenges on the rise, I see brands shifting focus: less brand entertainment, more brand enlightenment.
SARAH SHAPIRO // The world of affiliate marketing - all the players involved, the businesses, the creators, how consumers react to the world of "influencing" and affiliate marketing - which is just a form of general marketing - has been really interesting and exciting to me. I'm also always watching collabs and seeing which brands are linking up and the experience. Like Gap x Doen and Skims x North Face and Glossier partnering with the WNBA.
DAVID SKILLING // The WNBA players taking full advantage of the tunnel walk and positioning themselves as cultural movers in the fashion business. It felt like it got more serious and intentional this season and global fashion and culture media gave it serious attention. I can see more brands tapping into this new marketing avenue and it being hugely beneficial to the female athletes from a brand positioning and a financial standpoint. I also see it evolving into athletes developing their own fashion lines once they've established themselves as people truly tapped into the business of fashion.
JENNY EVANS // I’m a wine lover pure and simple. Red, white, rose—I don’t discriminate. But I don’t like to overdo it. During the week I don’t drink. I’ve enjoyed watching some of these amazing N/A brands gain popularity. The link between skin and alcohol consumption will become a bigger topic in 2025. Brands I like in this space: I love Erha. They have 3 different options: stress, allergies, and gut health—the latter is my love language. Other brands I love are Recess and Ghia.
DANIELLE GREENBERG // It’s fair to say that 2024 was the year AI truly hit its stride—just look at how many products slapped “AI” onto their names. But it wasn’t all hype. Breakthroughs in multimodal models made AI smoother. Tools like Ideogram, MidJourney, and Sora empower creativity in anyone and everyone. And AI became a serious problem-solving partner.
SPENCER FRIED // The expansion of the definition of wellness and how it's being interpreted, elaborated, and integrated throughout different product categories.
BIG IN 2025?
What’s going to be big in 2025? The one thing you can’t stop talking about.
MARIE DOLLÉ // Outsmarting-as-a-service. We are being sold the age of agentic: hyper-powerful AI agents, universal tools to do everything, to amplify everything. But the crux lies elsewhere. AI mimics intelligence; humans, on the other hand, know how to be clever. So, what happens when an army of bots is unleashed? Humans retaliate. They build new bots to outwit the first. Daisy, that AI disguised as a clumsy grandmother, has already scammed the scammers. Here’s the key: if machines want to think, humans will teach them to think twice.
JENNY EVANS // Peptides, peptides, peptides! They are nothing new but the recent data is. Think: hormone regulation, immune function, cellular signaling, wound healing, collagen formation, repairing, and capillary growth. Peptides are the building blocks of keratin, so I’m a huge fan of them in skincare. Some polypeptides used topically can mimic the effects of Botox. I expect to see a lot of ‘Argireline’ (acetyl hexapeptide-8) in our feeds. They have them in LeMieux’s TGF-B Booster serum. I also have copper peptide in my latest product, VibrantBoost.
DANIELLE GREENBERG // If 2024 was the year of AI, 2025 will be the year of the AI agent, introducing a new way to get things done. No more juggling multiple apps. Your AI assistant will handle everything seamlessly. AI will shift from being a tool we use to a partner that works for us. It will redefine what we expect from technology, setting a new standard for productivity, efficiency, and ease.
OCHUKO AKPOVBOVBO // There’s going to be a lot of push and pull in wellness and CPG. Food has always been political, but it’s about to become more overtly so. What people choose to eat, where they shop for groceries, and the wellness practices they follow will be more politicized than ever.
DAVID SKILLING // The fusion of fashion and football (soccer) really stepping it up. It's not a new concept but 2024 saw a huge uplift in the amount of team and brand collaborations that are more refined and tell stories. We're talking fashion brands that may have only been familiar to the fashion community stepping into the football arena which gave them great exposure while also making football clubs seem more attached to culture beyond sports. This is going to continue into bigger and more meaningful collaborations.
FRED HART // More brands "misbehaving". Liquid Death, Dude Wipes, Nutter Butter on TikTok, SlimJim and its Long Boi Gang on Instagram, Enron’s odd and meme-ready revival - these are all examples of brands disrupting traditional branding and marketing playbooks with novel approaches. In a world day trading attention (shoutout to Gary V and his book) brand behaviour is paramount to making noise, garnering attention and building audiences that can fuel meteoric growth. Mixing traditional mediums with unconventional content will become even bigger in 2025 as more brands feel the urge to break the mold.
SPENCER FRIED // Analog and/or pared-down tech products will gain more interest. I have a sense there's some exhaustion around tech, speed, and constant information. We'll see some brands react and sympathize with this.
SARAH SHAPIRO // I'm paying attention to TikTok and what happens to that platform. It has been major for shopping/commerce in such a short period of time. Maybe we will stop scrolling TikTok on January 19th, 2025 with a ban enforced. But I can't imagine that happening at the moment. I'm also paying attention to pricing - how expensive products get and how customers react to price increases.
COMING QUICKER THAN WE THINK?
What’s the sleeper hit of the next 2-3 years? The topic you’re obsessed with that most haven’t caught up to.
FRED // The “Gen Z aesthetic” will evolve beyond cliché. The early success of a few Gen Z brands have created a stereotype encapsulated by eclectic, self-expressive, maximalist and driven by digital culture - but the notion that one style can speak for an entire generation is false and dangerous. The more brands buy-in to the approach, the more they’ll all be the same, and thus no different from one another, losing distinctiveness and relevancy. What will be exciting to watch is brand authentically crafting to connect with audiences that isn’t reliant upon a cookie-cutter approach.
MARIE DOLLÉ // Everyone’s saying we’re entering a post-truth era, where trust is broken, reality feels fractured, and no one knows what’s real anymore. But here’s the thing—has reality ever truly existed? Philosophers from Plato to Baudrillard have argued that reality is subjective, a construct shaped by perception. In other words, the truth has always been a slippery thing. So what happens when everything can be faked? Deepfakes, AI-generated content, synthetic identities—you name it. If anything can be fabricated, then everything must be felt. That’s the shift I see coming: a return to intuition, to emotional resonance, to experiences that are too human to fake. We’ll crave what feels real—the imperfect, the raw, the tactile—because in a world of perfect illusion, authenticity isn’t about accuracy anymore. It’s about what moves us, what we feel to be true.
OCHUKO AKPOVBOVBO // Silvers are an overlooked demographic.
JENNY EVANS // NAD+IV drip infusions (specifically for beauty) will get bigger. NAD+ slows the aging process and boosts energy levels and brain function. It comes in supplement form but it’s the subcutaneous injections that are really promising. Now that we’re all in on injectables with Botox and GLP-1s, these will fly.
DAVID SKILLING // Golf becoming cool driven by fashion. Golf has forever been associated by stuffy old men who won't accept change, that's been changing in a huge way in the last few years with a perception shift in popular culture. Brands like Malbon Golf, Manors, and Eastside Golf are telling stories and creating products that resonate with younger people and different demographics making golf feel more inclusive and accessible. This has led to a shift in the coolness of the game and a new wave of enthusiasts are growing the game while feeling accepted and being able to express themselves on the course in the way that they dress. This has had a knock-on effect with even brands like Off-White releasing a golf line this week. Its just the beginning but fashion is the driving force behind shifting a billion-dollar sports industry into a new and positive era.
DANIELLE GREENBERG // It’s hard to pick just one, but AI in education is going to make a big difference. We’re already seeing tools that use AI to create personalized study plans and tutors, which can really help students who don’t have access to great education (e.g., Khan Academy’s AI tutor or UNESCO’s ethical AI initiatives). Of course, making sure these tools are safe and ethical, especially for kids, is super important, but the potential is huge.
Personalization is also going to get bigger. Brands will need to adapt, shifting from group-based strategies to truly individual personalization. AI can understand individual preferences, behaviors, and motivations in a way that’s scalable and dynamic. The brands that succeed will be those that move beyond broad categories and embrace the nuanced, often contradictory, nature of human values.
A BRAND TO WATCH?
If you could observe one brand’s process, who would it be and why?
SARAH SHAPIRO // I'm really impressed with Emma and Jens Grede and how they run Skims, so seeing how they look at the data and make decisions would be really interesting. Lauren Sherman had a great interview with Jens Grede here on Fashion People.
OCHUKO AKPOVBOVBO // Nara Smith—because she’s a brand, isn’t she? I’m impressed by how self-contained and impenetrable she is at such a young age. I guess I’m pretty curious about what’s going on under the hood and where she sees her brand going in the next year and beyond.
DANIELLE GREENBERG // Definitely, Duolingo. They’ve excelled with partnerships like Netflix’s Squid Game, adding cultural relevance to their Korean course. They engage well on TikTok with trending audios, memes, and witty replies that foster community. Some of their strategies are bold and unconventional, yet they execute them brilliantly. It would be fascinating to see how they plan and ideate these concepts to make them so effective.
FRED HART // Jaguar. What they’ve done is equal parts madness and genius. No one was talking about the brand prior, now suddenly everyone's got an opinion. In an attention-based economy, all the eyes, word of mouth and PR (good and bad) has given the brand a fighting chance to survive.
Being a fly on the wall at the company to hear the real story behind the decisions made would be fascinating. Selling in change like that either happens through sheer genius or absolute idiocracy. I’m here for either.
SPENCER FRIED // I've been somewhat privy already because I've had conversations with the respective founders, but I'd love to get more of a look into Canopy, Anastasio Home, and Craighill. I really admire these businesses, their catalogs, and their perspectives.
DAVID SKILLING // KITH. I have been a fan of Ronnie Fieg's work for some years and his story is also admirable. A true creative with a strong vision and execution plan that is second to none. I love the strategy behind KITH's marketing, their creative ideas, collaborations with brands and celebrities that you didn't see coming but seem to hit the nail on the head each time. I'd love to listen in on the ideation of their short terms concepts and long term visions for the brand.
MARIE DOLLÉ // For me, it would have to be Irrational Flames—a brand I recently discovered when buying Christmas gifts. I ended up ordering six lamps from their website, and the whole experience left me genuinely impressed. It starts with the product itself: these lamps are gorgeous, crafted in France with exceptional attention to detail and a real sense of artistry. But what sets them apart isn’t just the craftsmanship—it’s the entire experience they’ve designed around their brand.
From the moment you visit the website, it feels like you’re being guided through something more personal and meaningful. You’re invited to fill out a thoughtful questionnaire, allowing the brand to learn more about you or the recipient. This isn’t just a gimmick—it makes the process feel tailored and intentional. You can customize your order, but not in a superficial way; it feels like the brand genuinely cares about how their product will integrate into someone’s life.
There’s an overall vibe of thoughtfulness and discretion. It’s not pushy or spammy; it doesn’t scream for attention. Instead, it quietly draws you in with its focus on quality, personalization, and care. This is what I look for in a brand. I want to support businesses that are deliberate, considerate, and—above all—human.
JENNY EVANS // Tough question, I’m interested in biotechnology in skin care. It’s exciting to think of the endless possibilities of new peptides, exosomes, growth factors, and stem cell technology used in skin care. A promising brand I’m interested in is Exoceuticals
Note from Chris: If you’re interested in this space, follow Dr. Saranya Wyles (she happens to be a friend but also a leader in this space at the Mayo Clinic).
FUN FOR THE WEEK
OCHUKO AKPOVBOVBO // Okay I don't know if this is capital F Fun, but I really enjoy Viola Davis's Instagram. Very inspiring. Very wholesome.
FRED HART // I just finished my first ever marathon, the Honolulu Marathon, and during my training I started following Wyatt Moss who just completed 50 marathons in 50 states in one year. Takeaway: Start somewhere. Be audacious. Take your idea to the limit.
MARIE DOLLÉ // This is wild.
DAVID SKILLING // Lewis Hamilton, the Formula 1 driver competed in his final race for Mercedes who partnership has been nothing short of a dynasty over the last decade. I wrote an article that speaks about this and his impact beyond sport as a cultural icon Mercedes released this video as a tribute which I thought was great.
JENNY EVANS // I’m lucky to know one of the most inspiring young athletes out there right now: Ezra Frech. He will inspire you beyond.
DANIELLE GREENBERG // I love Information Is Beautiful because it brings data to life in such a creative and visually stunning way, turning data into something engaging and meaningful.
SPENCER FRIED // I love Never Too Small, a YouTube channel that showcases small, but intelligent and beautiful approaches to the design of small spaces all over the world. Their weekly episode is one of the few things that I look forward to each week.
That’s all, folx. I hope this fun edition was inspiring.
I’ll be back with my regular programming next week. I’ve really missed it.
-Chris
If you read this and liked it, that little heart is there for that. The algo and I appreciate it.