Dove is making butt deodorant. Lynx is after your crotch.

Plus: 3 Middle school boys are blowing up the internet, and Longevity is a $600B market every brand should care about.

Morning,

I’m coming to SF (March 11-15), LA (March 17-19), and NYC (April 1-5). Let’s connect! April 2nd, I’m speaking at Brands & Culture. April 3rd, I’m hosting an NYC tour. What’s on the tour? We’ll hit something in every category of this letter. Culture, Food & Bev, Drugs & Booze…you get it. It will be the best-of-the-best of what’s new and interesting in the city. Everything that’s moving the needle and worth knowing about. RSVP HERE!

If you only read one thing in this letter I recco: BODY ODOR.

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.

Let’s dive in!

CULTURE

NOT GONE BUT FORGOTTEN // Duo’s un-dead. The brand challenged fans with collectively earning 50B ‘ experience points’ to resurrect him. The post did get 1.4M views, but it’s too soon. Had Duo been spotted hiding out in Thailand 8 months from now, and then we worked to lure him out of hiding, it would have given us time to care.

INSTAGRAM PREMIUM // Instagram Reels might be getting spun off. Interesting. More interesting?

Rachel Karten

letter on ‘Instagram Premium’—a delightful term commenters are using for the higher production, more cinematic social videos we’ve been seeing. I’m just giddy about this chapter. Now, enjoy these three posts Rachel shared as recent examples: Tory Burch. Osteria Renata. Kaprica.And adding this Vogue one.

F&B

COCK FIGHTS // McDonald’s has a new campaign in China promotes their Cage-Free Chicken with the acroynm ‘CFC’, picking a fight with KFC. Brands are fighting a lot lately. Cadbury’s and Tony Chocolonely. Hatch and Apple. While it is humorous, I’m much more into the Bobbie x Swehl x Seed gang fights.

FINE FREEZER -> HURS // The freezer aisle is getting a fine dining lens— à la Tinned Fish. Why? Age-old convenience. 15-ingredient TikTok recipes are fun until you have to buy all the bits. And dining out is pricey, but people still want sourdough pizzas.

DRUGS & BOOZE

THROW IN A WATCH -> Feed Me // Timothy Chalamet’s bringing back unabashed ambition and the tiny Cartier watch (Rami Malek has been enlisted too). Cartier, in turn, hosted a poker party for his win at the Chateau Marmont. The ‘bad brands’ era is an epidemic at this point.

SILVERS, ALPHAS & ZS

FOOD BOYZ // Grateful to

Taylor Lorenz

for informing us that the internet has fallen in love with 3 middle school boys’ podcast. The MD Foodie Boyz is “an unintentional parody of what podcasts are. They're like 'what's your favorite pizza,' and then they just talk about pizza." Middle school boys deserve more fans—I’m here for this, it’s cute.

STAR BURST BUBBLE // Starface has launched skincare, and

Ochuko Akpovbovbo

is right: it looks like Bubble. The alpha skincare space is getting crowded, with new brands like this one for teen boys launching daily, but Starface entering the arena might put many out of business. They have an impeccable understanding of what the kids want.

LAME DUCK // It hurts my heart to say this, but I do not like the Golden Goose Jane Fonda ad. I love Jane and casting Silvers, but this ad is so confused. This brand is lost.

RETAIL

SPORTS RACING // Sportswear brands woke up in 2025 and said: Sell, baby, sell. We had Skims x Nike and Adidas soccer last week. On’s Soft Wins the week before. Now, All Birds has woken up to deliver us a new social mini-series where Stanley Tucci hosts dinner parties (I, too, am confused, but the world’s love of Tucci and special guest F1 racer Carlos Sainz has people excited nonetheless). Lululemon started cooking a few weeks ago. Now they’ve enlisted Lewis Hamilton for some high-performance credibility, gone big in London, AND opened a fitness studio in NYC in the same week. Jordan lit up the SF waterfront with drones, gave LA drivers free parking (genius), and showed no mercy. And

Byron Stewart

shared that Nike pulled a very Corteiz-coded ‘trade-in’ stunt to promote the new Air Foamposite One Galaxy. Phew. I’m tired happy brands are alive.

MADE WELL? // “Madewell’s identity crisis exemplifies an eternal retail truth: Brands built on specific generational moments must evolve or risk becoming irrelevant…Madewell either needs to recapture its denim authority through quality and focus or figure out how to appeal to younger buyers.” I have nothing to add,

Sarah Shapiro

.

BUTTER ME UP // Butter Bear is a legend in Asia. Zara took note and made a whole pop-up for their recent collab. The store feels like a yellow Tiny Cottons / Bobo Choses—love.

TECH

BUSINESS PROMPT // Loved

Rex Woodbury

’s letter on the business possibility hidden in people’s favorite ChatGPT prompts. TikTok is obsessed with ChatGPT prompts for things like getting your bloodwork read and it giving you a ‘functional medicine action plan’. Function Health and Superpower are basically “robust productized” prompts. And there are hundreds more examples to build from.

REAL REAL AI -> Puck // The Real Real is getting very real about AI. Their earnings report outlines 4 ways AI is helping the business thrive. 1) Finding consigners and optimizing product sales, resulting in a “15% increase in value generated per sales representative.” 2) They plan to use it for authentication, reducing the time things can’t be sold. 3) Smart pricing. 4) Conversational customer service bots. We’re in the future.

SPORT

BLOOD STAINS // Persil, the detergent brand, teamed up with the Arsenal Women’s to combat the period stains keeping girls out of sports. Knix did a campaign on the same topic last year with Megan Rapinoe. Both are great. But Persil could have gone bolder.

WELLNESS & BEAUTY

BODY ODOR // Dove is promoting a new full-body deodorant, and in comes

Jessica DeFino

with a banger quote: “set to an updated version of “My Neck, My Back” by Khia, which strategically cuts the classic lyrics “my pussy and my crack” to implicitly communicate that this deodorant is, indeed, meant for your pussy and your crack!” Dead. Dove is indeed headed in a new direction. Minutes later, I discovered Lynx’s latest ‘Lower Body Spray’ commercial via

Ideas We Love 💕

(whom I love) and wondered: is crotch deodorant taking off? And has the brands misbehaving trend gone too far?

SUPREME SAKARA -> As Seen On // Sakara’s new supplement campaign is…a religious experience. Like Lemme, they are going hard for the Ozempic dupes, like Metabolism Bites. Skinny is in, plus-size is out, but Sakara is here to save us all.

LONG TERM LONGEVITY // Every brand should be tracking longevity. “40% of aging occurs during biological transitions at 44 and 60, demanding new approaches from the $600B longevity market.” Now, concepts like Saint Haven are eyeing expansion—time to freeze, steam, and bio-hack our way into youthful centenarians.

TRAVEL

FIRST CLASS PJS // Lufthansa collab’ed with ‘Master of the Sky’ Sho Shibuya and Tekla on a set of pajamas for 1st Class passengers. I don’t love Lufthansa, but I do love this. Related: This group, Formia, orchestrates many of these airline/brand partnerships.

FUN FOR THE WEEK

• Love these Murakami MLB trading cards and a line of merch. Need.

• Diptyque opened a jazz club in NYC. They are all in on culture lately.

• E.l.f made a telenovela for Mexican audiences.

• Adoring Parker Posey for GAP.

• Rhode has a lovely, very brown, new store in LA.

• Synchronized skiing will be a campaign soon.

• Tory Burch’s Substack is the one all the brands are copying.

That’s all, folx.

-Chris

If you read this and liked it, that little heart is there for that. The algo and I appreciate it.