040 - What I'm Reading: Week of April 22nd
👋 Hello everyone.
🔗 Links in this newsletter route back to my blog or directly to the original content.
⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
💰 = My portfolio
💭 This week features an exciting Gen-Z brand launch, a look at deepfakes in the metaverse, some questionable metaverse medical/wellness startups, a crustacean based sustainable styrofoam, a new unicorn, electrified chopsticks to reduce your salt intake, and plenty more.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
🥸 Sifted looks at deep fakes in the metaverse, and what is being done to establish a code of ethics.
☠️ NYT - PFAS: The ‘Forever Chemicals’ You Couldn’t Escape if You Tried.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
⭐️ 💰 Congratulations Lisa Guerrera on the official launch of EXPERIMENT. I met Lisa back in the Clubhouse days 😵💫, and immediately knew her approach to science, sustainability, and highly visual Gen Z beauty were where its at. Far more is in store beyond the viral and reusable Avant Guard mask.
🇨🇳 🧒 A look at the growth of cosmetics targeted to kids born in the 2010s in China.
Personalized:
Waldencast’s Revea, a precision personalized skincare startup, raised $6M in seed II funding. The model is like Ioma, for those familiar with the precision skin space, where they are offering in-store consultations, with the intention to build out its web-app with stronger analysis capabilities to offer personalized formulas.
⭐️ Beauty by Me or Blank Beauty is launching soon with the ability to mix personalized nail polish. The startup, based out of Tennessee specializes in single batch cosmetics. Their customization device is powered by a smartphone providing color matching, and can make liquid foundation, nail polish, and lip gloss.
💊 Supplements:
theHerbtender - a new adaptogenic supplement line with seven different formulas focusing on different needs related to anxiety, sleep, immunity and physical performance.
April is a new supplement brand from the Gen Z Swedish razor brand Estrid, products are manufactured in the UK. The brand offers three vegan supplements: Multi-Me, Glow Service, and Club Calm.
🇮🇳 YourStory profiles Gladful, a Jaipur based nutrition startup focused on delivering high quality protein to kids.
🇮🇳 Dear Me, an Indian, Ayurvedic skin and supplement company.
🐶 Reggie, supplements for dogs.
Space Goods, wants to be a next-gen wellness company. The brand founded by Matthew Kelly is based out of the UK. Its first product Rainbow Dust is a mushroom based chocolate powder beverage meant to help with focus, energy, & calm - for better creative work. The brand is hoping to expand
into sleep & sex.
🛍 Retail:
⭐️ Retail Brew on the rapid delivery & beauty product opportunity.
✋ Amazon is rolling out palm payments.
⭐️ 🇨🇳 Meet Taibang, a new Chinese social commerce app.
🇨🇴 Morado, a B2B beauty marketplace, is reinventing the beauty supply chain in Colombia, offering a digitized experience along with same day delivery.
⭐️ Vogue Business looks at how Farfetch is taking on beauty, using learnings from Farfetch acquired companies Browns, Violet Grey, and Off-White alluding to their ability to curate, create community, tap into the metaverse, and leverage social commerce. An excerpt from the article, provides insight into their hopes for the community.
“A global beauty community platform is also being launched, enabling potential customers to create a profile with their age, location and a custom biography detailing skin type, hair texture, skin and hair concerns and makeup and fragrance preferences.”
♻️ Sustainable Design:
⭐️ 🦐 🦞 Cruz Foam, is innovating sustainable packaging made from chitin, shellfish waste. They recently raised $3.4M to scale their styrofoam alternative.
Crunchbase, on the rise of climate software investments, after-all if everyone is trying to improve their sustainability, it needs to be measured to make real change.
⭐️ 💰 🦄 UPSIDE Foods, the cultured meats startup, announced they raised $400M in Series C funding, they recently acquired Cultured Decadence, who I have had the joy to work with and support since early days, and am very excited to see the growth.
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ Andrea Ippolito, founder of Simplifed, on the need for more R&D in women’s health.
Hello.Me, best known for their hormone balancing supplements, launched an oral spray for hot flash relief.
⭐️ Canopie founded by Anne Wanlund and Ann Don Bosco, is an app addressing mental health challenges around pregnancy and childbirth.
Salignostics, an Israeli saliva diagnostics startup, raised $8M to scale its rapid diagnostics saliva test-kits that can detect pregnancy, COVID-19, cardiac risk, & malaria.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and More...
🥢 ⚡️Kirin, the brewery out of Japan, developed electrical chopsticks which can mimic the perception of saltiness to reduce sodium intake. ***I have a soft-spot for electric taste. Back story, I worked in a lab studying electrical taste at Cornell, hooking myself and anyone who would volunteer up to an electrogustometer.***
Singapore based telehealth startup Ordinary Folk, raised $5M in Series A funding, to expand its offering to Hong Kong. Ordinary Folk has three brands on its platform: Noah - for men’s health, Zoey - a women’s health platform, and Cyrus a platform for fast prescription delivery.
😧 Over the past week I came across two of NFT/Web3 driven medical/wellness platforms, each questionable in terms of execution, ethics, and benefit to the consumer:
🔬RESEARCH
⭐️ 🦟 Oxitex published findings in Nature from the first pilot study using genetically modified mosquitoes. The genetically modified male mosquitoes were able to slow the production of disease spreading / biting female mosquitoes by passing a deadly gene on to the female mosquitoes, causing them to die before reproducing.
Chanel published a patent for peel off cosmetics, as described in the patent, these cosmetics (an eye shadow) or treatment mask could be peeled off in a single sheet.
⭐️ A newly published study shows strong links between telomere attrition & accelerated epigenetic aging in patients who suffered from severe COVID-19.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ GWI: Entertainment Annual Report.
CB Insights: 224 of the biggest, costliest startup failures of all time.
💅Beauty:
⭐️ 🇨🇳 Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book): 2022 Beauty Trends Report.
🇨🇳 Daxue Consulting: How Pechoin, China’s oldest skincare brand, remains a top beauty player after nearly 100 year.
BeautyMatter: Amazon Q1 2022: Top 25 Beauty & Personal Care Products.
IRI on mass beauty recovery.
eMarketer: Private label brands move beyond grocery. A look at category interest and growth in the private label space including personal care, home care, and beauty.
♻️ Sustainability:
⭐️ 🇨🇳 ♻️ Daxue Consulting: Green Guilt - Sustainable Consumption in China. A survey of consumers across China looking at views on beauty, F&B, fashion, and the hypotheses driving them.
💡Enjoy,
-Anne