🪥 046 - Midweek Mini-Byte: Tuesday, April 7th.

Apr 07, 2026

👋 Hello everyone.

🔗 More about me.

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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.

Retail Brew: Retail sales rose in February ahead of Iran War’s potential spending impact. The delayed Commerce Department report indicated strong spending prior to the war.
TechCrunch: Amazon hits sellers with ‘fuel surcharge’ as Iran war roils global energy markets…
- Just for fun:
  - 🇨🇳 I’ve been watching this takeoff, and it is as fascinating as amusing - Why is everyone in China changing their profile picture to Kris Jenner? RedNote, Weibo, and Douyin are full of users with photos featuring the American ‘momager’: Meet Dr. Kris, Chef Kris, and Lawyer Kris.
  - 🇦🇺 Yolk Eye - fun ceramics made in Melbourne. Their most recent project is focused around Kewpie Mayo [Instagram].

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🧴 Skin / Personal Care:

Mothered Skin - a new peptide rich skincare line [Instagram]. Riot Atelier did the branding and it looks great.
🇦🇷 Brown Bee - a new line of Argentinian based self-tanners [Instagram].
Jovi Rose - skincare for teens & tweens [Instagram].
🇮🇳 The Solved Skin - India based acne focused skincare [Instagram].
Dollar Shave Club launched a women’s line of products including razors and ‘shave aids’ [Instagram].

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👩‍🦱 Haircare:

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👃 Fragrance:

Elorea just rebranded and refocused on their Korean born fragrances [Instagram].
VADA - a new fragrance brand from Brittany Aldean - wife of country music star Jason Aldean [Instagram].
🇫🇷 LOUMARI - premium fragrance - many of the bottle shape / colors remind me of Hermes [Instagram].
🇮🇹 Neus Parfume - an Italian fragrance house [Instagram].

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🧺 Homecare:

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🦷 Oral Care:

Bastét - a beautiful new oral care brand based around nano-hydroxyapatite & xylitol [Instagram].
⭐️ Koppen - a new functional oral care [Instagram].

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💊 Supplements:

FOLLY - hair gummies designed for those experiencing hair loss from GLP-1, post-partum, stress, and menopause. They are calling it a ‘pill strength’ hair gummy [Instagram].

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👩‍🔬 Femtech:

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🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...

PYMNTS: Consumers keep spending even as confidence wavers.
BoF: Nordstrom’s sales return to 2019 levels after deal to go private. The Nordstrom family and Mexican department-store chain El Puerto de Liverpool SAB closed a deal to acquire the company in May in an all-cash transaction valued at about $6.25 billion

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🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...

The Verge: How the Apple Watch defined modern health tech. Digital health screeners weren’t a thing until the Apple Watch. It’s shaped how we think about wearables ever since.

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💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...

TechCrunch: The company behind ClassPass and Mindbody just got a lot bigger with a $7.5B merger.
Beauty Independent: American Pacific Group banks on Dossier’s Dupe business in majority-stake deal.
🇮🇳 BoF: Nykaa in talks to acquire Deepika Padukone’s 82°E. The retailer confirmed negotiations to acquire a majority stake in the clean skincare brand, as it looks to further consolidate its foothold in the booming Indian beauty market.

Nature: Is social media addictive? Why a formal diagnosis is still out of reach. Limited methods and a lack of guidance around diagnostic criteria mean that many scientists are reluctant to use the term addiction.
A new study analyzing 18,701 people across 34 countries has found that where you live ages your brain faster than disease does, linking country-level pollution, inequality, and political instability to accelerated brain aging [Nature Medicine].

ftb.: Beauty’s Lost Generation is a brand problem – not a consumer one.
🇨🇳 Daxue Consulting: Value-for-emotion: The new currency of China’s emotional purchase.
PYMNTS: Financing the Decision - How BNPL and Installments Reshape Merchant Choice. Where shoppers spend their money is increasingly decided at checkout, not in the aisle. Financing options like BNPL can shift the balance to a specific retailer, depending on the type of purchase and whether consumers have used that payment method before.
- More than half of Gen Z (55%) say the availability of installment plans influences where they seek medical and dental care.
- For travel, 62% of millennials say BNPL influences their choice of merchant, compared to 37% of consumers overall and just 5% of baby boomers.

💡 Enjoy,

-Anne

The Juicy Byte