Fastest Growing DTC Brands, Spotify Podcasts, Tiktok War, Amazon's Artisanal Sellers, Reinventing Luxury, Future Smart Devices, Why Amazon Acquired Zoox, Pabst Revival
Covering trends in commerce, media, and marketing daily
Trendslates is a free daily email covering trends in commerce, media, and marketing.
💌 If someone forwarded this to you, sign up!
🐦Follow me on Twitter for even more
🗣 Feedback or news tips? Email me here.
Interested in sponsoring Trendslates? Reach out here.
EXCLUSIVE: Here are the 25 fastest-growing DTC brands for Q2, according to growth in digital traffic
The 25 fastest growing direct-to-consumer brands for Q2 include CUUP, Outer, Draper James, and KiwiCo.
Mented Cosmetics is a beauty brand that specializes in products for women of color, such as nude lipsticks and eyeshadows designed to match all skin tones.
In a recent email to The Wall Street Journal , cofounder Connor Swegle said that sales had increased about fivefold since lockdowns began in mid-March.
Spotify is launching podcast charts to help people discover new shows
A trending chart and bigger top chart are coming.
A Spotify spokesperson tells The Verge it has “overlapping systems” in place that’ll monitor fraudulent activity and remove bad actors from the service.
In those cases, the incentive to cheat the system was higher because the scammers were paid per listen, so long as they published and created the music.
For over a decade U.S. services companies have been unilaterally shut out of the China market, even as Chinese alternatives had full reign, running on servers built with U.S. components (and likely using U.S. intellectual property).
They are not fond of the military machines United States Pacific Command has arrayed against them, but what spooks them more than American weapons and soldiers are ideas—hostile ideas they believe America has embedded in the discourse and institutions of the existing global order.
How Amazon Lures ‘Artisanal’ Sellers and Hangs Them Out to Dry
This is Handmade’s tale
Other than a “Handmade” logo in the upper left corner, a small profile picture below the “add to cart” button, and a decal showing in which state the item is made, the listings look like any other product page.
“I feel like not many customers know about Amazon Handmade,” says Courtney Hamill, who sells porcelain vases made in her backyard since shutting down her Atlanta studio due to the Covid-19 crisis.
How Luxury Is Reinventing Itself
Luxury brands must secure a place in the hearts and minds of their customers, their partners and the public.
While letting go of suppliers or terminating dealership contracts may seem an easy way out in response to lower demand, luxury brands must earn the respect of their channel partners, both upstream and downstream.
Along with the brand’s celebrity ambassadors, the CEO posted a video message on Weibo (a Chinese social media platform), cheering on frontline medical workers and encouraging people in lockdown.
Google’s secretive ATAP lab is imagining the future of smart devices
The consumer-electronics research arm has been quiet for years—but it’s also been busy. Its new mission: Make Google hardware as smart as Google software.
Today, for all the success in recent years of gadgetry such as Amazon’s Echo speakers, Sonos sound systems, and Google’s own Nest products, making the elements of a smart home work together can still feel like programming.
Along with the house mouse’s spiritual debt to Doug Engelbart’s rodent-like pointing device, it’s a radical rethinking of the remote control—a gizmo that, in its conventional form, has barely matured since the days when we didn’t use one for much other than switching on a TV, surfing through channels, and adjusting the volume.
Amazon’s new smart shopping cart lets you check out without a cashier
The Dash Cart is Amazon’s latest cashierless tech.
But other than that, Amazon’s Dilip Kumar, the company’s vice president of physical retail and technology, tells The Verge everything else is fair game, including produce and other food items not contained in traditional packaging.
When you finish shopping, Amazon says dedicated Dash Cart lanes let you just exit the store without dealing with payments or waiting in a checkout line.
Using Patent Analytics To See Why Amazon Bought Zoox
Amazon's competitive impact on autonomous vehicles nearly tripled as a result of the acquisition.
Aicha Evans who is the CEO of the self-driving technology development company Zoox, talks about ... [+] autonomous cars during a keynote session at the Amazon Re:MARS conference on robotics and artificial intelligence at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 6, 2019.
PatentSight is based on manually supervised and scientifically developed algorithms trained with best-in-class patent ownership data that meets and exceeds the standards of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Pabst Blue Ribbon’s early-2000’s revival is a phenomenal success story. It skyrocketed from selling less than 1m gallons in 2001 to topping 92m gallons in 2012. And yet not much has been publicised as to the marketing strategy behind its rapid growth. Steve Nilsen AKA Stix spent nine years at Pabst
Mark Barden talks to Nilsen to get a ‘behind the curtain’ understanding of the grassroots strategy at the heart of PBR’s success and how it was implemented on the ground in local markets.
Nilsen talks about the rejection of the big beer brands and the ‘fake’ advertising that led to Pabst’s popularity amongst younger consumers during the recession and explains the localised strategy that provided a deep respect and understanding of local people, cultures, and communities otherwise overlooked by ‘big beer’.
Trendslates is a free daily email covering trends in commerce, media, and marketing.
💌 If someone forwarded this to you, sign up!
🐦Follow me on Twitter for even more
🗣 Feedback or news tips? Email me here.
Interested in sponsoring Trendslates? Reach out here.