Allbirds’ recent fire sale to a licensing firm — $39 million for the shoe brand’s IP and assets, after peaking at a $4 billion market cap on the Nasdaq — marked a new low point in the direct-to-consumer e-commerce canon.

Let’s be clear — this was a disaster. But Allbirds’ failure doesn’t speak for the whole model.

Presented by Shopify

89% of US entrepreneurs would start their business again in 2026. Here’s why. The conventional story about entrepreneurship goes like this: It’s a risk worth taking, but 9–5 employment is the safer bet. New research from Shopify and The Harris Poll says otherwise.

In a survey of US business owners, respondents were more than twice as likely to say owning a business feels more financially secure than holding a traditional job (39% vs. 18%). Most also said starting their business felt less like an escape and more like a move toward something they wanted: Greater control, flexibility, and meaning.

But it’s more than conviction: 89% of US founders say they’d make the same choice again in 2026. The barriers that once made entrepreneurship feel out of reach are coming down. 86% of US founders say e-commerce platforms have made it easier to start a business than a decade ago. 67% say AI tools are making entrepreneurship more accessible, compressing what once required a team into something a solo founder can do alone.

The hard part of building a business used to be getting started. Increasingly, it isn’t. Read the research and hear from the founders bringing this data to life.

Read the research

The truth is that DTC — the concept of brands selling products directly to customers over the internet — is alive and well. It’s just different than what some had hoped it’d become a decade ago, when a lot of smart people made a lot of misplaced assumptions about consumer behavior and economics.

And so when the New York Times, covering the Allbirds sale, makes assertions like “much of that direct-to-consumer luster has been lost,” it highlights a problem: “DTC” still means different things to different people.

Direct-to-consumer has long been, and remains, an important sales channel for many types of brands. But in the 2010s, it also became a shorthand — “DTC brand” — for a certain type of company-building and digital-native brand approach. And then there was the “DTC era,” where venture investors poured money into these sorts of brands, thinking they had an unfair advantage for the next generation of consumers, and would command premium valuations.

Since the Allbirds sale got people talking in recent weeks, I thought now would be a good time to take a look at the state of DTC: What it is, what it isn’t, what it wasn’t, and what it will become. The truth is more complex and nuanced than “DTC brands didn’t work.”

What’s working

It’s actually pretty easy to make a list of brands generating hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue — even more than a billion — in direct-to-consumer e-commerce sales.

Hims & Hers, the online pharmacy that’s almost entirely DTC, reported $2.2 billion in US revenue last year, up 53%. Quince, the fast-growing clothing and accessories brand, said its total revenue passed $1 billion last year. Hungryroot, an online meals and grocery subscription business, announced $700 million in net revenue for 2025. ButcherBox, a DTC meat subscription, generated more than $500 million in sales in 2024. Rhode, the skincare brand, passed $200 million in DTC sales in a yearlong period ahead of its $800 million acquisition by Elf.

Here’s how a broader set of brands performed last year.

This is each brand’s estimated online sales for 2025, as provided by Consumer Edge, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card spending. I’ve indexed Quince to 100, so you can get a sense of how the following brands performed last year, relative to Quince, among Consumer Edge’s card transaction data.

Read more

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer.

What’s on your mind? I’m collecting questions now for a special mailbag issue of The New Consumer. There’s no question too mass or too niche — just shoot me an email at dan@newconsumer.com or add to the comments. Send yours in and I’ll answer the best ones in a future newsletter. Thanks in advance!

Let’s do some spring members Office Hours! I’ve just added some slots to the calendar for next Wednesday, Apr. 22. As always, these 20-minute Zoom sessions are off-the-record by default, and the time is yours — I’m here for advice, ideas, feedback, a quick pitch, whatever is most useful. Become a member or log in here for the link. I look forward to speaking!

Presented by Whatnot

The Live Shopping Update — Snacks are quickly becoming one of live shopping’s most engaging categories. On Whatnot, sellers are turning everything from international snacks to candy into interactive shopping experiences that feel more like visiting a grocery store or specialty shop than browsing online. Buyers can watch tastings, ask questions in real time, and discover new products, just as they would when talking to a shop owner or sampling products in store.

This format is resonating with consumers. Snacks and candy sales on Whatnot have grown roughly 30% month-over-month since July 2025, while transactions have increased 2.5x, signaling strong demand for live shopping in everyday product categories. International snacks have become a particularly strong segment — sales are up 388% since last July — as sellers source hard-to-find products from around the world and introduce them to buyers in real time.

Some of the biggest moments in the category come from limited-edition snack drops and releases, where hundreds of items can sell out in seconds while thousands of viewers watch live. For example, Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia and Whatnot seller (@veefriends), took to Whatnot to sell his special collector’s box of Jolly Rancher’s new “Heat Wave” gummies — all 1,055 units sold out in minutes.

The rising popularity of snacks on live shopping platforms points to a broader shift in retail: Live commerce is taking everyday purchases from simple transactions to interactive, community-driven experiences. Download Whatnot to learn more.

Explore Whatnot

Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications — highly effective, life-changing weight-loss drugs — are among the most important forces shaping consumption today and in the future. Now they’re about to go mass.

In a new research report published last week, Morgan Stanley projected that the number of Americans on GLP-1s will quadruple over the next decade. Specifically, it estimates that 55 million Americans — around 15% of the US population — will be on a GLP-1 medication by 2035, up from around 13 million at the end of 2025.

(One quick note: These numbers are actually much lower than other estimates I’ve seen. For instance, a KFF poll from last November found that 12% of US adults said they were currently taking a GLP-1 drug, implying around 30 million active users — roughly double Morgan Stanley’s estimate. Why the gap? One thought is that Morgan Stanley is undercounting the booming compounded market — people getting GLP-1s through Hims and less reputable online pharmacies. There’s also a lot of churn of people going on and off GLP-1s, and probably some noise in self-reported survey data. So it’s actually somewhat tricky to model an active-user count. And different models are based on different assumptions, making them tough to compare apples-to-apples. My guess is that the real number is somewhere in the middle.)

Either way, most of that growth is forecast to happen in the next few years, driven by lower prices, new pill-based options that are far less invasive than today’s injectables, and expanded Medicare coverage.

CHART OF THE DAY

The key question for The New Consumer has always been how GLP-1s — which cause users to consume fewer calories, and eat and drink differently — will affect consumption and spending. Especially once tens of millions of people are on them.

What’s happening now?

For a while, there were concerns that the food industry could get hit hard if people just stop buying certain products. So far, that hasn’t happened: Hershey’s is still growing, the J.M. Smucker Company is still growing, etc. Part of that is diversification, part is that the GLP-1 population is still relatively small, and part is that people tend to go back to some previous habits when they stop taking GLP-1s.

But people who are on GLP-1s do eat less — that’s the whole point.

Read more

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer.

Last weekend, on March 21, The New Consumer turned seven years old. It’s been a while since I’ve reflected much about the site/newsletter/business itself — who has the time?! But I want to say THANK YOU for supporting my work; for reading and replying; for asking me to speak at your events and offsites; for hiring me on advisory projects; for sharing my slides and charts; for making this whole thing possible.

This continues to be the best job I’ve ever had, and I’m more excited about the year ahead than I have been in a while.

If there’s one thing I’m most proud of from the past few years, it’s the growth of my Consumer Trends research series with Coefficient Capital — easily the most “me” thing I’ve done with The New Consumer, and maybe the most successful thing I’ve created since helping start Business Insider 19 years ago. We plan to publish four main reports again this year, plus a new micro report — stay tuned. And I’m working on making it easier for you to browse the archives and get more use out of all that research and data.

In the meantime, the best way to support my work is to become a member, add colleagues by upgrading to a team plan, or reach out about speaking, consulting, or brand partnerships. Thank you again!

“Cigarettes are back!” the New York Post has declared.

“From trays filled with cigarettes at the Vanity Fair Oscar’s Party to Kylie Jenner smoking on the mag’s latest cover,” Allison Lax wrote last week, “…smoking is well and truly back — Surgeon General’s warnings be damned.”

This has been coming up more in conversation: After all that wellness posturing, are young people really smoking?!

On a mass scale, no.

In mid-2025, 11% of Americans said they had smoked a cigarette in the past week, tied for the lowest percentage ever, and down by nearly half from a decade ago, according to Gallup, which has been conducting this survey for more than 80 years. That percentage has been in decline since the 1950s. And while it moves a little year to year, the overall trendline is that fewer people are smoking, not more.

The smoking rate is even lower among young Americans, both in comparison to young people in the past and to older consumers today, according to Gallup’s polling.

Read more

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. It was great to see a bunch of you at Expo West in Anaheim, and record another fun This Is Taste podcast with Matt Rodbard. We talked about our favorites from the show and the big new Consumer Trends Food & Beverage Special report that I just launched with Coefficient Capital.

Btw, major congrats to my research partners at Coefficient on closing their second fund! I’m proud to be an extension of the team.

Americans — especially younger ones — want to consume more protein: 54% of US consumers, and 65% of Gen. Z and Millennials (ages 15–45), say they consider themselves “someone who is actively trying to get more protein” in their diet, according to our latest Consumer Trends Survey of 3,000 US consumers, conducted last month by Toluna.

The protein boom has been happening for a while, but it’s recently reached a new level. For instance, Google search volume for “protein” set new all-time records in the US and globally last month. In our survey, more than half of the people trying to get more protein in their diet — and nearly two thirds of Gen. Z and Millennials — say they started trying in the past year.

That’s translating to sales: Five of the 10 top-growing categories on Instacart last year were protein-coded, including Greek and Icelandic yogurt, protein bars, and protein drinks, according to exclusive data the grocery delivery giant contributed to our new Consumer Trends Food & Beverage special report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

But where does protein actually belong?

We just asked those 3,000 US consumers to rate 18 food and beverage items — from snack bars and popcorn to coffee and beer — on two dimensions: How much does adding protein to each product feel like a natural or unnatural fit? And how interested would they be in trying a high-protein version?

The results are organized neatly. We’re calling it the Protein Feelings Matrix.

The obvious winners are obvious: There are some products — pasta, cereal, snack bars, and milk — where people, on average, think adding protein makes a lot of sense and are interested in trying high-protein versions. Many of these are established, mature categories for high-protein offerings, and should continue to be successful.

The clearest gimmicks are clear, too. Beer and ready-to-drink cocktails were the two items in our set where people, on average, think adding protein seems especially unnatural, and they’re not interested in trying high-protein versions. These won’t take over the world.

And among our items, there’s nothing really in the “weird but tempting” or “natural but gross” quadrants.

But then there’s a bunch in the middle: Chocolate, ice cream, chips, popcorn, water, coffee. Consumers, in aggregate, rate them near the neutral baseline on both dimensions.

One important distinction: Most of those middle products genuinely land in lukewarm territory, with many people selecting neutral responses for things like protein pretzels and popcorn. But protein water and coffee are more polarizing: They average near zero because people disagree — a near-equal force of very positive and very negative ratings — not because they’re indifferent.

This is where it will be up to food and beverage brands to create their own success: They’ll have to innovate to make high-protein products that actually taste good and are enjoyable to eat or drink. And they’ll have to figure out how to communicate to consumers that these products are worth whatever added cost, textural weirdness, or friction they add for the extra protein. Otherwise, they’ll never make a dent.

The good news, when you slice the data by different consumer groups, is that there are key demographics that are more interested than others in these products.

Younger consumers, for example — Gen. Z and Millennials, ages 15–45 in our survey — think it’s more natural to add protein to more products, and are more interested in trying those products.

Specifically, protein chips, chocolate, water, and coffee all appeal to younger consumers significantly more than they do to older generations.

Read more

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends special(!) report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 68-slide presentation that you can view and download for free on my website, just in time for Expo West. Because you’re a TNC on Substack reader, here’s a direct link to download the report as a PDF. Please feel free to share widely.

It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 16 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

• Topics include: Are we at peak protein? What’s the future of beverage?

• A third of Americans say they’re in “optimization mode.”

• And: Is online grocery experiencing a new inflection point in growth?

• More results from our 15th original Consumer Trends survey of 3,000 US consumers, conducted in February, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll also be exploring many of these topics further for members — join today to receive those and support my work. And we plan to keep this series going. Thanks again for your support.

Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m dan@newconsumer.com.

(One more link to the report!)

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer. It’s The New Consumer. What’s on your mind?

I’ve been deep in the weeds this week, finishing up my next Consumer Trends report with Coefficient Capital, our annual food- and grocery-focused slide deck timed to the Expo West conference. Stay tuned for that next week — and say hi if you’re at the show.

Presented by Whatnot

The Live Shopping Update — Live commerce is redefining how consumers discover and shop, and beauty is emerging as one of its biggest breakout categories.

On Whatnot, beauty sales surged 791% in 2025, now representing one of the platform’s fastest-growing verticals. But what’s fueling this momentum? Real-time discovery and exclusivity, with buyers having access to deals on some of the most popular products on the market. From brands like Dior, Chloé, K18, and more, inventory also includes coveted limited-edition products, driving more excitement and engagement than traditional channels.

Today, buyers are watching more than 570,000 hours of beauty shows weekly and purchasing nearly 4,000 beauty items per hour – a pace comparable to stocking a mid-sized beauty retailer every afternoon.

For sellers, the live commerce opportunity is transformative. Joy Nahmani of Danya Beach, Florida (@beautyfinds) grew her account to 300,000+ followers in under a year, becoming the platform’s most-followed beauty channel. She now runs 3-4 shows per day and has sold 500,000+ units, with live selling now accounting for the majority of her revenue.

What’s happening isn’t just the rise of another digital storefront, but a broader retail evolution where shopping is interactive, community-driven, and built around live moments. Beauty is proving especially well-suited to this format, where sellers can easily combine product education and entertainment. Live commerce will no doubt transform how this industry meaningfully connects with consumers in 2026 and beyond.

Explore Whatnot

Sweetgreen is a company where the product, brand, ambition, and operations have never really worked in concert.

Now the salad chain is in a real rut, as shown by its fourth quarter results, released on Thursday.

In Q4 of 2025, its same-store sales declined 11.5% year over year. Worse, its “traffic and mix” — the number of people eating Sweetgreen, and how much they ordered — declined 13.3%. (This was offset by 1.8% in price increases.) This January was also bad, with comp sales down 11.8%, due in part to bad winter weather. Shares are down more than 75% over the past year, and around 90% since its market debut in late 2021.

CHART OF THE DAY

This shouldn’t be happening. We are a nation that’s obsessed with health, wellness, and looks — or at least thinks it is. Sweetgreen, which is best known for its salads and healthy grain bowls, should be winning, not shrinking.

In our latest Consumer Trends survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, two thirds of Gen. Z and Millennials said they agreed that “being healthy and fit is one of today’s biggest status symbols.” And as GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy become more widespread for weight loss — including less invasive pills entering the market — Sweetgreen was supposed to be the fast-casual chain that benefitted the most.

More than a decade ago, when Sweetgreen first expanded to New York, it was really something special: A higher-end, fast-casual take on the deli salad, with great dressings and superb aesthetics that were easily worth the premium. For a while, it was on the forefront of food culture and synonymous with the aspirational desk salad.

But as it tried to scale across the country — and impress investors after going public — quality declined and innovation stalled. The pandemic reprogrammed its core customer base of coastal-elite knowledge workers, which was an added level of difficulty for every restaurant group. But it seems to have been especially tough for Sweetgreen.

After that early optimism faded, it hasn’t been able to figure out its next great product. Instead, it has fallen out of fashion, as shown by the traffic and mix stats.

The reason is simple yet complex: Sweetgreen isn’t as good as it was, and isn’t as good as it could be.

It knows this, and promises that it’s trying to fix this — with co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman itemizing at least three new change-management projects on its earnings call, each with its own corporate codename. It’s a little sad, and a little corny, for what was once the cool salad brand. But this is the work.

Its latest COO, Jason Cochran, joined last year and seems to have agency: Neman said about two thirds of Sweetgreens are now hitting “great” performance goals; six months ago, two thirds were below standard.

Read more

Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. How are you?

A few quick plugs: How should restaurants think about tweaking their menus and experiences for the GLP-1 era? I spoke with Expedite’s Kristen Hawley about our new Consumer Trends 2026 research and my thoughts for the restaurant business. Also: Sara Wilson interviewed me about our new data on the creator economy for her Community Catalysts newsletter. And you can check me out on a recent episode of the Aboard podcast talking about AI and a bunch more.

David Protein has become one of the fastest-growing food brands in America by pairing an innovative product that’s tuned to the moment — high-protein, zero-sugar, relatively low-calorie bars — with provocative marketing.

Walking around New York a couple of weeks ago, it was hard to miss David’s new billboard campaign, featuring a lounging Julia Fox: “Men disappoint. David satisfies.”

Now the bigger picture is taking shape. After passing $100 million in sales last year — David’s first full year in the market — co-founder and CEO Peter Rahal is expanding the aperture.

The company plans to add more products and brands to the portfolio as soon as this year, under an umbrella brand called Medici, he told me during a recent visit to David’s headquarters in Manhattan.

Like David, these new brands will feature healthier-leaning, protein-forward products built around EPG, the controversial alternative-fat technology that it acquired last year by merging with its supplier, Epogee.

Read more

I’m excited to announce a new collaboration with Whatnot, the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe. Over the next several months, Whatnot will contribute new data to The New Consumer about what’s working in the fast-growing live commerce market.

Live shopping — e-commerce via live video streams, generally in smartphone apps — is finally getting big in the US, around a decade after taking off in China.

On platforms like Whatnot, every minute of the day, consumers are buying items like sports cards, handbags, electronics, beauty products, and even food from live sellers, who act as expert guides, entertainers, and community leaders. It’s a “content to commerce” model that’s actually scaling — something that eluded earlier attempts by Meta, Amazon, and others.

For a sense of size, the live shopping market reached around $22 billion in North America and Europe last year, Whatnot estimates in its new State of Live Selling Report, more than doubling over the previous year. (In China, it’s approaching $1 trillion, representing an estimated 60% of the e-commerce market there.) Whatnot alone generated over $8 billion in live sales last year, more than doubling year over year. You can download Whatnot’s full report here.

On Thanksgiving Day, while many Americans were watching football, I was tuned into Whatnot. In The Collector Crew channel, more than 500 viewers gathered concurrently to watch as users bid on sports cards auctions — one of Whatnot’s earliest categories — including an Aaron Rodgers rookie card. “This is the most quality I’ve ever had in a show,” the host said. “Let’s make history today.”

“People are coming in, finding community, and geeking out on products,” says Armand Wilson, Whatnot’s VP of Categories and Expansion — a longtime employee responsible for growing the platform beyond its collectibles roots.

“They’re definitely transacting as well,” Wilson says. Whatnot shoppers spend a lot of time in the app — 95 minutes per day, globally, according to the State of Live Selling report — and often make multiple purchases per week.

Whatnot’s sellers are individual entrepreneurs and small business owners, typically organized around a category, like sports cards, sneakers and streetwear, women’s fashion, and electronics. Many start as solo operators; some have scaled into the hundreds of millions of dollars in GMV. One in eight now works selling full-time on Whatnot, up 20% from 2024, the company says.

The growth can be dramatic. A Boca Raton card shop says it went from $40,000 in monthly revenue into the millions after adding live selling to its business model, and expanded from two to 39 employees. But most remain small businesses at heart: 99% of sellers on Whatnot have fewer than 50 employees, according to a recent poll.

What drives success? Just like offline, top live sellers have to put great stores together, featuring interesting and unique merchandise, either offered as auctions — these are very fast on Whatnot, at times lasting just seconds — or in larger lots.

Successful sellers tend to be passionate hosts who know how to build fandom, suspense, hype, and intrigue.

Many sports card sellers use segments called “breaks,” where hosts open packs of sports cards live on the air, with the possibility of unearthing super-rare cards worth millions of dollars. Fresh produce sellers have gone live from the farm, picking fruit that they then ship across the country. For some fashion and jewelry sellers, live shows provide the opportunity to demonstrate different customization options, like colors, textures, and hardware.

Those sellers, at their best, build genuine communities, attracting people who want to hang out in an environment tuned to their interests, whether it’s makeup or Legos. Shoppers often join for the products and then stay for that connection (and the entertainment).

Top sellers are also consistent: US sellers who go live daily generate $69,000 per month in sales, on average, according to Whatnot; that’s around 20 times the sales of those who go live once per week.

And while sports cards and trading card games still lead in volume, the fastest growth is coming from lifestyle categories: Beauty sales grew nearly 800% last year, electronics more than 400%, and jewelry and women’s fashion each more than 200%, according to Whatnot’s report. Wilson is eyeing food and drinks as a big category for 2026; he’d someday like to get into the automotive auction game.

Zooming out, the recent success of live shopping in the US reflects the intersection of multiple trends: A generational shift toward digital-native culture and community; social video as a particularly compelling medium to promote and sell products; the transfer of attention share toward individual creators and away from legacy media brands; and growing interest in entrepreneurship via the creator economy.

Each of these continues to grow, and each is concentrated among younger generations — the shoppers and business owners of the future. (More in the Consumer Trends 2026 report I recently published with Coefficient Capital.)

For instance, in our latest Consumer Trends Survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, more than half of Gen. Z and Millennials — 55% — said they felt most like themselves “online” versus “offline.” A greater portion of Gen. Z and Millennials, 62%, said they felt most connected to others “online.” This was even higher — 77% — among our respondents, across all age groups, who said they used Whatnot at least monthly.

Meanwhile, in our survey, 45% of Gen. Z and Millennials said they consider themselves a “content creator,” whether as a profession, as a hobby, or for fun.

And creators have credibility among many young consumers: 42% of Gen. Z and Millennials in our poll said they trust product recommendations from content creators or social media influencers “much more” or “somewhat more” than from traditional advertising.

Younger Americans also tend to value entrepreneurship more than older generations. When we asked our survey panel to choose among a list of things that are important to their definition of success, twice the proportion of Gen. Z and Millennials selected “Owning your own business / working for yourself” as those Gen. X and older.

So it’s no surprise that young entrepreneurs are looking to social commerce platforms to build businesses online.

On Whatnot, many new sellers are coming from a retail or sales background, Wilson tells me; it helps to have experience selling products and a pipeline for obtaining inventory. But now that live shopping marketplaces can reach a critical mass of customers, they can be compelling complements or alternatives to other types of stores, both online and offline.

“If you’re really into comic books and you buy a bunch of products, sign a lease, decorate the store, build it all up, whatever that investment may cost… And you compare that to opening up a Whatnot account… You can get way more foot traffic than if you’d just opened up a shop in your town,” Wilson says.

You also don’t need to be in a huge city to build a successful business online. On Whatnot, Florida’s suburban corridor — Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Largo — generates more GMV relative to population than major metros, the company says. Mid-sized cities like Rochester, Dayton, and Raleigh “out-earn Los Angeles and Chicago on a per-resident basis,” according to the report.

Live shopping’s US success is still far from replicating China’s trajectory — the markets differ in mobile commerce maturity, social platform integration, and consumer habits. But it’s finally working here, as both buyers and sellers spend more time on live shopping marketplaces.

“We think there’s a part of Whatnot that’s expanding the pie of sellers,” Wilson says, “and giving more access to folks that may not have the capital you need to open a big brick-and-mortar store.”

Stay tuned to The New Consumer for more data and trends from the live shopping market over the coming months.

I’ll be back in New York next week, speaking at the big NRF retail show, along with Tecovas, the fast-growing cowboy boot/Western wear brand, and Consumer Edge. If you’re at the show, please join us! It’d be great to see you there — Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 11:30am.

And now, our year-end-ish tradition for the seventh time… “Instead of a holiday gift guide,” I wrote near the end of 2019, “here are some of the things that made me smarter this year.” After 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 editions, let’s keep that going.

The newsletters I read every time

I continue to spend an oversized portion of my attention budget on email newsletters. I’m talking my own book here, but that direct connection to (and investment in) writers still feels special, even as it has become very common.

In addition to my picks from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019, my open rate is around 100% for the following few that I found (or that launched) this year, in no particular order:

For Starters, the practical and inspirational weekly newsletter “for starting the small business of your dreams,” by former Courier and Monocle journalist Danny Giacopelli.

Food Time with Matt Rodbard, a new newsletter from the Taste editor and prolific host of the This Is Taste podcast (our latest episode here).

Elly Truesdell’s New Fare Partners newsletter, offering an early stage investor’s (and longtime former Whole Foods leader’s) take on the latest in food, restaurants, grocery, and cpg. (Our previous conversation here.)

The Stanza, on the business of boutique hotels and hospitality.

No Filter, on social media and brand marketing, by Kendall Dickieson.

Alex Greifeld’s No Best Practices, on e-commerce marketing.

From Billy Parks (Sorry), on investing in creator CEOs, from the longtime Chernin Group operating partner now working with the Slow Ventures Creator Fund.

99% Derisible, smart ideas around startups, tech, and society from Yoni Rechtman, also a partner at Slow.

The Eastside Rag, hyperlocal, hyperniche, and hyperfraiche from the Eastside of LA, by John Fulton. And: Bite Sized, where to eat in LA, by Kate Ludwig, aka kactus dot jpeg.

I’m also excited for The Angel’s relaunch: editor/writer Emily Wilson moved back to New York last fall and has taken her former LA-focused food newsletter bicoastal, starting with her New York in 25 Restaurants.

The best morning of the year

Perhaps my favorite thing about my job — now 20 years into writing about business and tech — is when an entrepreneur at the top of their craft shows me, in extreme detail, how they make the thing they make and what they do all day.

Whether it’s a startup founder, a chef, or a bag designer, seeing and learning about someone’s creative process is still among the most fun, interesting, and inspiring things I get to do.

So it was a special treat to spend some time in the spring at my favorite saké brewery, Terada Honke, in a small town a couple of hours by train outside of Tokyo.

I’d been following the company for a few years after discovering its Daigo No Shizuku, which, after one sip, completely changed my mind about saké. Unlike the sharp, dry stuff I was used to drinking at sushi bars, Daigo is round, complex, and feels alive.

On a rainy morning, I got to taste a few works in progress with 24th-generation owner Masaru Terada, and learn more about the process of brewing Daigo and its other sakés. Then, lunch next door with some of the team, at Café Ufufu, the company’s fermentation-forward canteen.

I’m ever grateful for your support as a member, which allows me to follow my curiosity and learn about craft and innovation around the world. More soon on Daigo No Shizuku and Terada Honke.

One actual gift idea

I’m hoping to squeeze in a couple of new projects and hobbies this year. So I’m trying a new system where I write a list of the week’s important projects and tasks on paper before adding them to any digital trackers or to-do apps. My hope is that the extra step will help me prioritize and allocate my time better. We’ll see!

Anyway, the tool I’m using is the very neat Snap Pad system by Postalco, one of my favorite design studios. It’s a rigid clothbound pad — I’m using the A5 size — that lets you snap in and out a variety of different paper types, including an extra-fine graph print, steno lined paper in a pleasing green, calendar pages, Moon Lists, and a manilla envelope for storing random stuff. (You can also get a standard two-hole punch and make anything Snap Pad-compatible.)

If you’re ordering direct from Postalco, you should also grab a copy of their new book, Viewpoint in the Fog. Founders Mike and Yuri Abelson are so great describing the how and why of their design process — we did an interview about it a few years ago — and this is a special view into some of their work and thinking. As a bonus, it’s a fun and interesting way to read a book: 15 fold-out sections with photos, sketches, and words in English and Japanese. I love it for the binding alone.

Thank you again for your time, attention, and support over the past year! I’m looking forward to spending 2026 with you. Want to work together? Email me about my Advisory, Consulting, Sponsorship, and Speaking availability: dan@newconsumer.com.

Or, if you had a great year, have some extra budget, received outsized value from my work over the past year, or are feeling generous, you’re always welcome to upgrade to a lifetime membership. I have ambitious plans for this year and beyond, and I’d be incredibly grateful for your upfront investment. Thanks for your support!

I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 122-slide presentation that you can view and download for free. Because Substack is a wild land, here’s a direct link to download the report as a PDF. Please feel free to share widely. If you find this useful, please subscribe!

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It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 15 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

• Topics include: The creator economy, from careers and brands to TikTok Shop and OnlyFans. (40% of Gen. Z and Millennials say they’re “extremely” or “very” interested in a career as a professional content creator.)

• A third of Americans say they’re in “optimization mode.” What does that mean?

• GLP-1 users say they feel like a different person — and are shopping like it.

• More results from our 14th original Consumer Trends survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, conducted in November, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll also be exploring many of these topics further for members. And we plan to keep this series going. Thanks again for your support.

Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m dan@newconsumer.com.

(One more link to the report!)

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It was great to see many of you around the city last week, including the excellent New Fare Partners dinner at Una Pizza Napoletana, the Human Ventures / Casa Komos roast for Alex Heath, and Ben Settle’s stylish hang at Undercote. I think I was the first paying Sourmilk yogurt customer at their Happier Grocer retail debut — neat. And as always, major gratitude to my Consumer Trends collaborators at Coefficient Capital for letting me take over their big office table between meetings. We’ll be launching our next big report in a few weeks.

Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have not torpedoed the food and CPG industries the way some had feared. But they do drive meaningful shifts in users’ spending.

I recently watched a new, hourlong presentation from Circana about GLP-1 users’ changing grocery and retail shopping habits, based on its checkout-scanner and omnichannel shopping data (link to full slide deck).

Here are some of the highlights.

The number of Americans taking GLP-1 drugs continues to grow substantially. There’s no official tally, but Circana believes that 23% of US households — about 30 million — had at least one GLP-1 user in September, suggesting there are tens of millions of users. By 2030, five years from now, it expects GLP-1 households to purchase 35% of food sold in the US (measured by units), up from 24% today.

GLP-1 usage continues to shift toward weight loss and cosmetic/aesthetic/casual/microdosing usage, away from diabetes management. As usage has grown, 78% of GLP-1 users now cite weight loss as a motivating factor for using the drugs, up from 37% in 2021. Meanwhile, 43% cite diabetes as a motivating factor today, down from 75% in 2021. Almost half of users are now “weight only,” twice the proportion as two years ago.

Deli meats are a big winner as GLP-1 users shift their grocery spending toward products high in protein and fiber. Protein is a top food trend for many consumers, but especially for GLP-1 users, who need to preserve muscle mass while losing weight.

The top-gaining categories among active GLP-1 users, as tracked by Circana, include prepared deli meats; snack bars and granola; refrigerated lunches, seafood, and yogurt; beverages, including sports drinks; fresh citrus; gum; and dried meat snacks.

Here’s how to read the data on these slides, btw: The “average pre-GLP baseline index” shows how GLP-1 users’ spending compares to the average US household (100) before they started using the medication. So in the case of deli prepared meats, active GLP-1 users were at 106 to begin — roughly 6% bigger shoppers than the average household. Adding another 8.8 points in a year, then, as they did in the case of deli meat, is pretty significant.

Fries — the great equalizer. Balancing sensible foods with treats, weight-loss focused GLP-1 users over-index in eating protein-rich eggs for breakfast (20% of the time) and chicken for lunch.

But they way over-index in eating fries at lunch (12% of the time) and cookies at dinner. Hey, why not — those calories were earned!

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. What’s on your mind?

Congratulations to the Dodgers and my LA neighbors on a spectacular World Series victory. The COGS are high on that team, but winning is a business, and the Dodgers also dominated on this year’s Athletic survey of 100+ MLB players: When asked which organizations have good reputations among players, the Dodgers came in first place by far, receiving twice as many votes as the next-best New York Yankees.

Speaking of which, I’ve just landed in New York for a week of meetings and crispy jacket weather. Somehow I’m still going to miss the long-awaited Meadow Lane grand opening — which is finally, probably, maybe, happening later this month — but please let me know if there are any other neat new shops or life-changing lunch spots that I can’t miss.

When’s the last time a new technology product or experience moved you enough to post about it?

It’s hard to think of many that have reached critical mass over the past decade: Snapchat face filters? Covid vaccines? AirPods?

Waymo, the self-driving taxi service developed by Google, is the latest great example. A “first Waymo ride!” Instagram story feels almost obligatory. And even just seeing them everyday in the wild, driving around sans chauffeur with their funny LIDAR dome, is still a tiny thrill.

My first Waymo trip, earlier this summer, started off more in the spirit of a Curb Your Enthusiasm scene, as I had to chase it around a parking lot before it finally looped back around and let me in. It then took an ill-advised route down one of those one-lane, two-way Venice Beach streets, which created enough of a clusterf— that people started yelling at me (as if I had a say! Larrrrry!).

But after a quick manual override to navigate, the situation vastly improved, and the ride to Beverly Hills in my climate-controlled Jaguar SUV was comfortable, quiet, and felt safe. (My second ride, a few weeks later in San Francisco, was flawless, fwiw.) Aside from a few minor quirks that likely wouldn’t have happened with a human driver, it’s easy to see why consumers generally report positive experiences: The Waymo was much more pleasant than an Uber or Lyft, required zero awkward smalltalk, and was competitively priced.

Well over a decade in the making, Waymo, first known as Google’s self-driving car project, is actually working: It’s doing hundreds of thousands of paid, fully autonomous rides per week in five US markets — LA, the Bay Area, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta — with Miami, DC, Nashville, and London in the works.

And it’s still early, but Waymo is already capturing meaningful market share.

In the Bay Area, Waymo represents about 5% of consumer spending among the rideshare trio of Uber, Lyft, and Waymo, according to Consumer Edge, which tracks credit and debit card spending data.

Chart of the Day

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The cereal executives were FREAKING OUT at the dinner table.

Soon, they feared, their customers would start doing their grocery shopping through an artificial intelligence bot. And suddenly, they’d be eating Amazon-Os instead of their Os.

That was in 2018 — at a corporate dinner in New York, celebrating one of those over-funded YouTube networks — and the AI bot in question was Alexa, the talking Amazon speaker that showed up out of nowhere, became a cult hit, and head-faked a lot of people and businesses.

PRESENTED BY WORK & CO

JW Anderson Redefines Luxury Discovery — JW Anderson launched a new digital storefront at JWAnderson.com that invites shoppers into Jonathan Anderson’s world of play and possibility. The site blurs the line between commerce and culture. Rather than a conventional shop, it feels like an invitation to explore — an experience where discovery, curation, and surprise drive engagement. From colorful typographic tags to ever-shifting, dynamic product grids, the redesign brings fans a new way of shopping.

The design house worked with digital products leader Work & Co and an internal LVMH team on the overhaul. “It’s less about the standard notion of ‘shopping’ and rather more about finding — the joy of encountering something you didn’t know you were looking for, within a world designed to be savored as much as it is shopped,” said Work & Co Design Leader Calvin Teoh.

Learn more at Work & Co

As we all know, that grocery shopping-by-Alexa phenomenon never happened: In terms of an “app store for voice,” Alexa has been a letdown, and Amazon squandered its early lead in consumer AI, if it even had one. Most people who buy Cheerios still buy them the same way they always have — by placing them into a grocery store shopping cart.

But a lot has changed in the past decade — mostly in the past year or two. And thanks to the rise of more powerful AI tools like ChatGPT, AI’s influence on shopping and commerce could drive a profound economic shift in the coming years. We still don’t know how it’s going to work, but key pieces of the puzzle are increasingly coming into view.

But a lot has changed in the past decade — mostly in the past year or two. And thanks to the rise of more powerful AI tools like ChatGPT, AI’s influence on shopping and commerce could drive a profound economic shift in the coming years. We still don’t know how it’s going to work, but key pieces of the puzzle are increasingly coming into view.

This week, Walmart announced that it will soon become integrated into a new feature of ChatGPT called Instant Checkout, which lets ChatGPT users make purchases directly, without having the leave the chat. “Whether planning meals, restocking household essentials, or finding something new, customers can simply chat and buy, and Walmart will handle the rest,” the company said.

Today, humans are still in control of what they buy through ChatGPT and where they buy it from — Instant Checkout is just a time-saving friction reducer, and the merchant still does all the same work as it would for a direct sale.

“When someone asks a shopping question — ‘best running shoes under $100’ or ‘gifts for a ceramics lover’ — ChatGPT shows the most relevant products from across the web,” the company explains. “Product results are organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance to the user.”

When OpenAI announced the Instant Checkout feature a few weeks ago, it initially supported Etsy purchases, with support also coming “soon” for Shopify’s ecosystem. Shopify, of course, includes more than a million merchants, ranging from direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands and retail stores to modern giants like Glossier, Skims, and Vuori.

Adding Walmart to Instant Checkout is an entirely different thing: Walmart is the largest retail chain in the US by revenue, the largest grocery store in the country, and the number-two e-commerce player after Amazon. In addition to all the quotidian items Walmart sells in its stores and on its website, it also runs a giant online marketplace with more than 200,000 sellers and more than half a billion items.

Walmart is not Amazon, but it has spent the past decade catching up, using its website, retail store footprint, and fast delivery to attract wealthier shoppers and become an “everything store” in its own right.

So if you’re imagining that ChatGPT’s user base is too fancy for Walmart, that’s old thinking: Among paying OpenAI customers in the US, 87% have also purchased from Walmart over the past 12 months, according to data from Consumer Edge, which tracks consumer debit and credit card spending. (An even higher portion of those paying OpenAI customers — almost 97% — have shopped at Amazon over that span, for context.)

The point: The amount and variety of things that you’ll soon be able to purchase through ChatGPT with very little friction, thanks to Walmart and Shopify, is vast.

This is a big step for OpenAI as it tries to fashion ChatGPT into a more capable, enjoyable, futuristic shopping experience. There’s still a lot of work to do, and it’s still very early. But its sheer size alone — ChatGPT will likely pass 1 billion active users early next year — stands to make it an important player in driving e-commerce purchases.

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If you look closely at the crowd shots during a Chicago Cubs home game at Wrigley Field, you’ll notice a pattern: Amidst the sea of fans in jerseys and logo merch, people wearing blue shirts with only a sentence of white text.

Perhaps, this week for the playoffs, “MY FAVORITE SPORT IS OCTOBER BASEBALL.” Or a personal favorite — the one I wear to games — “NO WAVE AT WRIGLEY.” Or the all-time best seller, “THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED WAS ON A WEDNESDAY IN CLEVELAND.” — an ode to the Cubs’ World Series victory in 2016, its first championship in 108 years.

These shirts are Obvious Shirts, a t-shirt and merch startup that’s become a special part of Cubs fandom since launching in 2015. What started as a gag for founder Joe Johnson — and then a hobby — quickly turned into a business that’s now doing millions of dollars a year in sales.

It’s a great case study in how to build a modern content-commerce-community business without spending on ads — and why trying to scale it might ruin what makes it work.

Like many beloved consumer brands, Obvious Shirts started by accident and grew through obsession.

Ten years ago, the Cubs were starting to get good again, led by young hitters Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant and star pitcher Jake Arrieta.

Johnson, a lifelong Cubs fan and entrepreneur-type, was working in the sales department of an enterprise software company, trying to make his annual quota by late summer so he could go to as many games as possible — forever the Chicago yuppie dream. (Certainly mine, too, growing up on the North Side and going to high school a couple of Red Line stops away from Wrigley.)

As the story goes, “I went to one of [Arrieta’s] night game starts, got pretty drunk, and came into work late,” Johnson tells me.

“When I walked in, I was the last one on the floor. There’s probably 60 people on my floor — it’s all open-concept. I walk in, and my manager’s like, ‘Um, what do you have to say for yourself?’ And I just said, ‘Jake Arrieta is good at baseball’. I sat down and the floor laughed, and my buddy next to me is like, ‘You should put that on a shirt’.”

So he did — Helvetica font, all caps, left justified in Microsoft Word: “JAKE ARRIETA IS GOOD AT BASEBALL.” Two weeks later, he wore it to a game. “I got up in the third inning to get a beer, and I got bombarded by people being like, ‘That’s so funny’.”

Johnson took down fans’ phone numbers and ordered more. He then sold 100 on Facebook, to family and friends, in a matter of minutes. Then another 400 in less than a week. “And I’m like, ‘Well, shit — I should just keep doing this’.”

His second design, KYLE SCHWARBER CRUSHES BASEBALLS, made it onto TV after a home run — and “that was what really took off, because that went viral on Reddit and social media,” he says.

At that point, he was selling those two shirts on Etsy, and the next morning, “I woke up to, like, 460 shirts sold.”

It also drew a letter from the Major League Baseball Players Association, “being, like, ‘You can’t do that’.” Johnson quickly made peace with the players’ union — they thought what he was doing was unique and creative, he says — and became an official licensee.

Obvious Shirts was in business. First, as a side hustle, and after about a year and a half, as a full-time gig.

And it’s grown since then, now doing $2.5 million to $3 million in sales, Johnson says, with around “four and a half” full-time employees and three part-time. Sales are around 70% direct-to-consumer e-commerce, with some wholesale via partners like Dick’s Sporting Goods, and its own small retail shop near Wrigley Field.

What’s most remarkable is that Obvious Shirts has grown organically without buying online ads (beyond limited experimentation). That’s a major rarity in today’s e-commerce landscape, where most direct-to-consumer brands rely on paying Meta and Google a huge percentage of their sales to drive awareness and growth.

Obvious Shirts can do this organically, thanks to a product that is its own marketing, an engaged social media audience, its email list, and strong word-of-mouth within a massive fan base.

“Words on shirts is an advertisement in itself,” Johnson hypothesized when getting started. “Those are our advertisements. If you do good-enough designs or if you get the right phrase that invokes conversation and people talking, they’re going to ask where you got it.”

There are a few things that make Obvious Shirts unique and special, and, I think, successful.

One is that they’re funny, but in subtle and specific ways: A combination of dry humor, nerd-level fandom, an IYKYK je ne sais quoi, and ultimately, truthfulness — the “obvious” part.

They are smart and a little dumb at the same time, sometimes asking a lot of people — to read a whole sentence of words on a shirt at a baseball game, potentially after a couple of beers.

In today’s era of infinite subcultures, wearing an Obvious Shirt is also a way to express yourself down to your favorite player, especially if they don’t have a lot of merch designed around them. That, too, has helped: Many MLB players, often the non-megastars, have actively embraced Obvious Shirts, such as former Cub Willson Contreras (pictured here, left, with two current Cubs stars, Seiya Suzuki and Pete Crow-Armstrong, right).

“The players that really like it, they’re the ones that get it and latch on,” Johnson says. “This brand’s definitely not for everybody. There’s a lot of people that think it’s stupid, which it is. But I like how stupid it is, and other people might like how stupid it is.”

A decade-plus later, its partnerships list now includes big names like Cubs legend Kerry Wood and Hall of Fame radio broadcaster Pat Hughes, but also @NotGaetti, a hyper-niche, pseudonymous baseball stat fiend on Twitter.

Obvious Shirts also operates in near real-time, which is relatively unique for a clothing brand. Johnson is an active fan and active publisher via the @ObviousShirts account, which has almost 70,000 followers on X/Twitter (after more than 62,000 posts) and another 40K+ on Instagram. Many of these shirts are, effectively, tweets, so the formats play well together.

Johnson is also constantly adding new designs — almost all of which he still makes himself — to the shop: When the Cubs clinched a playoff appearance a few weeks ago, pitcher Shota Imanaga said something funny about champagne. It was quickly a shirt.

Memes go viral because they’re timely and relatable; Obvious Shirts has built the muscle to quickly turn them into shoppable content. (Maybe too much content: Johnson says the storefront — a combination of print-on-demand designs and stocked inventory — has 1,400 products.)

Is this a media company, then, or an apparel brand? That question misses the point: It’s a community that happens to monetize through shirts. And it’s a model that could work for any passionate subculture, from BBQ to credit card points.

Where, then, to take a brand and business like Obvious Shirts?

It is tempting to say “far and wide” — that an Obvious Shirts style merch program should exist for every team in every sport; that the company’s growth goal should be to conquer the whole TAM; and that a big sports media business like ESPN or Fox or even Barstool should be acquiring Obvious Shirts to drive a new era of merch commerce.

The company already offers shirts for fans (and players, working directly) in a handful of cities, including Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. There are also Chicago Bears- and Bulls-inspired shirts and caps, and random other teams. Here are some Detroit Tigers wearing Obvious Shirts.

But by tweets and SKUs alone, you can tell this is still a Cubs business first, or at least a Chicago business. It’s where the content and community have organically built a commerce business. And, talking to Johnson, that’s still where his heart is.

“I don’t know if I have the stamina or the energy to do that again in another market,” he says. “If I did, we’d have to go to paid ads. Because I could make the greatest Philadelphia Phillies shirts ever with the deepest cuts, the ‘if you know, you know’, and the coolest designs. But I don’t have any Philly fans.”

That is solvable if Johnson really wants to. (With a real risk, though, of ruining the magic.)

I happen to have experienced this: When we started Business Insider 18 years ago, then a New York tech blog called Silicon Alley Insider, we initially considered launching regional sites for places like Silicon Valley and Boston. We tossed that idea quickly — our readership was already national, and becoming global.

Instead, we were able to pivot to a broader focus and mission — still keeping the same voice, product, and attitude — and then over time become one of the world’s largest business news publications across many topics. But we had to hire similarly obsessed leaders for the other verticals and create more Twitter accounts. We also had investors with big expectations driving some of the ambition.

The beauty of today’s niche media industry is that you don’t have to do that.

Depth (and control) is more valuable, I’d say, than breadth. In an era of infinite choice and near zero barriers to entry, closeness is the north star. And there are many lines of business that you can build around that beyond “shirts with words,” from memberships and media to events and even physical spaces.

Owning one of the world’s most engaged communities of Chicago Cubs fans, or Chicago sports fans, is way more interesting than owning a national sports merch website that few people truly care about. This is true across verticals and industries, and the media businesses I look up to — from Skift and Business of Fashion to Lenny’s Newsletter and Stratechery — have maintained focus at the expense of “scale for scale’s sake.”

If you can stay locked in, that’s a more certain path to success — and happiness — than swinging for a billion-dollar future that will probably never come.

In Chicago, for instance, there will always be new players, new fans, and new moments that need to be turned into shirts within an hour. And, who knows: If the Cubs keep winning, maybe the “second-greatest game ever played” will command its own line of merch.

Is a credit card with an $800 annual fee worth it? For most people, almost certainly not. But that’s how much Chase is now charging for its flagship Sapphire Reserve Visa card: $795 to be exact — a classic sticker-shock concealer — up $245 from its previous annual fee of $550.

The higher-fee card comes with what Chase describes as “more than $2,700 in annual value.” That’s mostly in the form of rebates for purchases at select merchants, including luxury hotel partners, Lyft, Peloton, DoorDash, and StubHub.

It’s a great example of how card issuers like Chase and American Express are trying to transform their highest spenders from mere points collectors into “members” of a more elaborate lifestyle subscription, increasingly based around a treasure hunt of “value” they unlock through — of course — more spending.

Amex has been driving this movement with its Platinum card for the past several years — now sporting a $900 annual fee (sorry! $895) — including access to a growing network of branded airport lounges, priority restaurant reservations, and its own version of these coupon booklets designed for upwardly mobile Millennials.

If I sound skeptical about the value proposition here, let’s walk through how a few of these rebates work.

Chase, for instance, lists $300 in DoorDash credits as one of the main features of the new Sapphire Reserve.

But to use the full $300 in credits, you have to really do some work, making 36 transactions over the course of a year.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer (on Substack!). What’s on your mind?

Quick plug: It was fun to return to the This Is Taste podcast, speaking with Matt Rodbard about AI and the food business, the fast-casual restaurant slump, and more. Check it out!

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is increasingly part of everything, from digital interfaces to casual conversation. It’s still early, but as it develops, AI has the power to profoundly change many aspects of life.

How are consumers using AI today? And how do they think about it? This was a major topic in our latest Consumer Trends report with Coefficient Capital, which I presented last week in New York at the BRXND AI x Marketing conference.

Today I’m going to unpack key parts of our research, plus some great new data from OpenAI.

The big picture

• AI is something almost everyone knows about, and many people — especially younger consumers — are already using on a regular basis.

• Consumers are mostly using AI today for advice and guidance, writing, and research. There’s no single dominant use case for ChatGPT or other AI tools, but instead many different ones, highlighting their versatility.

• AI tools aren’t the top resource for shopping and commerce recommendations, but they’re increasingly part of the picture, especially for younger consumers.

• In the US, Gen. Z expresses less optimism and more negativity about AI than Millennials, who are the most positive generation in our survey. Older consumers are even more pessimistic.

It’s early, but AI awareness is already as mainstream as it gets

Almost all Americans (98%) have heard of AI, and the vast majority of those (93%) have heard of at least one modern AI tool, such as ChatGPT or Claude, according to our recent Consumer Trends survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, conducted in July by Toluna. For context, that’s higher than the portion of consumers who say they’re aware of TikTok or Doritos.

Perhaps the best snapshot of the rise of AI is this chart, based on new research published by OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT, the most popular AI chat tool — and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In less than three years since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, it has already grown to around 800 million weekly active users globally, and the pace of adoption has accelerated over the past year. This is a spectacular adoption curve, representing around 10% of the global population.

ChatGPT will probably reach 1 billion weekly active users in early 2026, just over three years into its existence. For context, it took Facebook almost a decade to reach that level of popularity, and likely took Instagram eight to nine years.

(Note that these published figures only include users on consumer-grade ChatGPT plans, including Free, Plus, and Pro plans, and exclude users on plans for enterprise teams or education subscriptions. So the total number of active ChatGPT users is probably higher, though not by a giant amount.)

While ChatGPT’s growth and prominence is impressive, it’s still early — and the platform wars are just beginning.

Despite some mockery of Meta’s AI efforts and Google’s stumbling start, our Consumer Trends survey found impressively high consumer awareness of both Meta AI and Google Gemini. This matters because awareness is the first step toward adoption, and both companies are relentlessly pushing AI into apps that most people already use.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer. Bonne rentrée! What’s on your mind?

If you accessed the internet this week, you likely saw that Erewhon, the culty, high-end Los Angeles-based grocery brand, is supposedly opening its first New York City outpost, inside a padel-focused luxury members club called Kith Ivy.

This is, to be clear, not an actual Erewhon grocery store, or anything close to one.

If you look at the floorplan that streetwear tycoon and Kith founder Ronnie Fieg first posted on Instagram — which started the global frenzy — the footprint for the room labeled “Erewhon” is about the same size as a bathroom. That’s enough space for a smoothie bar, maybe a coffee station, and that’s about it. (During a busy lunch shift in a LA store, I recently counted 23 people working in the smoothie bar area alone.)

But I assume that Erewhon, which has been opening a couple locations per year in Southern California, will eventually come East — there’s too much opportunity not to.

(Erewhon, the brand, was created in Boston in the 1960s as a tiny natural foods store. But the current incarnation — celeb smoothies, sea moss wellness, crazy beverage cases, $40 jars of nut butter, Stripes Group cash — fully embodies Instagram-era LA, where it has ten stores with three more coming soon.)

The truth is that New York has been underserved in the high-end grocery market for years.

Whole Foods — which, let’s be fair, still leads in overall prestige, and continues to add new locations under Amazon’s ownership — has not kept up, especially in prepared foods and the hot bar, which feel dated and lacking ambition.

That alone is a huge opportunity for Erewhon, which has a much more modern, high-end, hot bar and café. (The company told Forbes in 2019 that prepared foods drive 40% of its sales.) New Yorkers have an insatiable need for good food that they don’t have to cook, and the Erewhon hot bar gets the job done well, even if it’s $25 per plate.

For groceries, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, there are one-off gourmet shops: The new, heavily-Erewhon-inspired Happier Grocery seems to be doing well, and could expand, but is still tiny. There’s also the inconvenient-to-everywhere Tin Building, the vintage Citarella, Eataly, a few Union Markets, and not much more. (RIP Dean & DeLuca, Foragers, etc.)

The produce at Erewhon isn’t that special, and the grocery selection has a high overlap with Whole Foods. But there’s still a strong discovery element to the stores, and if you don’t look too closely at the prices, Erewhon is genuinely fun to shop.

Data point: The average in-store check size at Erewhon is around $50, and has been trending up, according to transaction data from Consumer Edge, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card spending. For context, it’s around $47 at Whole Foods, and $52 at Trader Joe’s, so it’s similar. What we can’t see is the number of items in each of those baskets — I’d guess it’s smallest at Erewhon.

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Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer after a quick mid-summer break. (Welcome, new members! I’ve topped you up with a few extra weeks.) How’s August looking? Anything interesting on your radar?

If you need a beachy escape, I’ve just been on two podcasts, talking mostly about the big, new Consumer Trends report we published with Coefficient Capital. You can catch me on Day One FM, from the excellent Day One Agency, and on HRN’s Brands for a Better World. Thanks both for having me!

Coming soon, I’ll be presenting again at the BRXND Marketing x AI Conference, this time in NYC on Sept. 18. The event is sold out, but they’re open to adding new sponsors, which, of course, would get you and your brand in the room. Happy to connect you — let me know.

Sweetgreen is the latest fast-casual restaurant group to say that its business has been getting worse this year: Its stock fell 26% yesterday after reporting that same-store sales declined 7.6% year over year in the June quarter, its worst performance since the peak Covid era.

Part of its recovery plan is to heavily lean back onto a seasonal menu of limited-time salads and bowls, which it stopped doing last year while introducing steak to its menu.

Sweetgreen’s current summer specials include a Chicken Caprese bowl with pesto-flecked balls of fresh mozzarella (I enjoyed!), the return of its popular Elote Bowl with roasted corn and peppers, and a new spin on its summer peach salad with goat cheese. Customers are choosing one of these items about 15% of the time, co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman said on the company’s earnings call, and a third of people who’ve tried one have returned within two weeks.

It now plans to launch two more seasonal menus this year and at least eight seasonal or limited-time “moments” next year, Neman said.

I’ll get into Sweetgreen’s Q2 specifics in a bit — some of the weakness there is unique, and it’s blaming some on the broader consumer.

But if you zoom out, it’s a good reminder that newness — a regular cadence of new, appealing product launches — is increasingly important in driving growth for consumer businesses, and even for maintaining stability. People like new things, and they want them all the time. If they’re not getting them from you, they’ll get them from someone else.

Chipotle is discovering this, too.

For decades, the fast-casual Mexican chain has succeeded by barely changing its simple menu, focusing on extreme consistency and value. But its occasional limited-time offerings — developed and tested in a stage-gate process — are often hits, including this summer’s Chipotle Honey Chicken.

Chart of the Day

Last quarter, while same-store sales fell 4%, Chipotle Honey Chicken was a bright spot, included in one of four orders, “the highest incidence rate of all of our limited-time offers,” new CEO Scott Boatwright said on the company’s Q2 call. It will be back. (Hey, sweets make people happy!) And after launching its first new dip in five years, Adobo Ranch, the company sees “more opportunity in sides and dips in the future,” Boatwright said.

This was also one of the more interesting things I learned from Ben McKean, the founder and CEO of Hungryroot, a subscription-based grocery delivery business that is obsessively focused on customer retention.

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I’m excited to share a new Consumer Trends report, my latest collaboration with Coefficient Capital.

This latest Consumer Trends report is a 125-slide presentation that you can view and download for free, on my site. (Here’s also a secret direct link to the PDF — feel free to share widely!)

It’s the latest in our ongoing Consumer Trends series, which has now generated 14 reports. (All of this continues to be inspired, of course, by analyst and investor Mary Meeker’s legendary Internet Trends report.)

• Topics include: How consumers think about artificial intelligence — and how they’re using it — right now.

• New data on longevity: Who is actively trying to live longer? How much would they pay?

• The humanization of pets continues. What are dog and cat owners doing to extend their pets’ lives?

• And how podcasts are winning, as consumers trust the news less.

• More results from our 13th original Consumer Trends survey of more than 3,000 US consumers, in partnership with Toluna.

I’ll also be exploring these topics further here on Substack: Please subscribe now to get future updates and all of my work. And if you find this valuable, please consider becoming a member.

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Questions? Feedback? Want me to present this at your event or to your team? I’m dan@newconsumer.com.

One more link to the report!

It was great to see a bunch of you at the WSJ Global Food Forum, where I presented some of our latest Consumer Trends research on food, health, and MAHA. My slides are here and if you’re a WSJ subscriber, you can watch the video of my talk here.

I’m now booking speaking projects for this fall and beyond. If you’d like me to speak with your team, at your event or conference, or on a private call, please get in touch. I generally customize a presentation of my latest research — topics include food trends, AI x consumer, the macro picture, Gen. Z beauty, TikTok Shop, longevity, wellness, YouTube, etc. — and take questions. (I can also create something entirely new!) It’s high-energy, high-signal, and people tell me they get a lot out of these sessions. Rates range with size, scope, and travel — shoot me an email at dan@newconsumer.com.

One of the many trillion-dollar questions about AI is how it will affect the way people shop.

The internet and e-commerce have given consumers nearly infinite choice — the ability to buy almost anything from anywhere. But finding those items still requires multiple steps and intermediaries, and is hardly perfect.

So expect to see a growing number of startups and products that try to use AI to create better, smarter shopping interfaces that are more personalized, fluid, natural, proactive, and maybe even more fun.

Daydream — a new site that focuses on fashion, clothing, and accessories — is one that you will likely be hearing more about. That’s both because of its founder Julie Bornstein, a longtime retail and e-commerce exec, and its substantial seed round ($50 million, co-led by Forerunner and Index Ventures), which raise the bar and expectations.

Daydream is now available to use in what it’s calling a beta, and I’ve spent time testing the site over the past week.

To get started, you answer some basic questions — your name, which brands you’re wearing right now, how much money you tend to spend per item, your sizes — and it gets to work. Daydream claims to have built “the largest fashion catalog of its kind, with more than 200 retail and brand partners, representing over 8,000 global fashion brands and nearly 2 million products.”

The “home” view is what it calls your “Daily Fashion Edit” — a Pinterest-y collection of clothes, bags, and shoes; supposedly personalized, based on cues it’s picked up about you.

But the real focus is the search feature: “Hi Dan. Tell me, what’s the event, mood, or product that you’re shopping for today?”

This is where, the theory goes, modern AI technology will deliver a better recommendation product than the last generation of search engines. Because it can interpret the meaning of things in a more sophisticated way, it can take on more of the work.

Instead of typing in Google search keywords, Daydream encourages you to type more nuanced things you need or want. Three examples it provides: “Going to a Tulum wedding — help me dress like a Jacquemus ad” and “A crisp button-down for backyard BBQs” and even “A hoodie for startup founders who believe in vibes.”

Anyway, this launch is great timing for me, because I’ve been going through several fashion crises recently.

One is that I need some lightweight, nice-ish pants that aren’t white jeans, to wear to summer meetings here in LA. Another is that the navy oxford shirts I’ve worn for the past decade are not currently in production. I also need something to wear to our Consumer Trends launch event in NYC. And I need some mid-ankle-length gray socks to replace my Uniqlos that are falling apart.

Finally, I am amused with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s all-black look from his recent press tour, and have been hoping to get some details.

I fed each of these into Daydream, and, well — I was not blown away by the results.

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