118 - What I'm Reading: Week of October 27th.
This week: Asthma focused startups coming into focus, teens on tracking, closures / reorgs (Hello Bello, Supergreat, NakedPoppy...), Dollar Shave's next phase, Asia's beauty opportunity & much more.
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
WSJ: Teens want parents to track their phones and monitor their every move — An upbringing filled with anxiety has Gen Z sharing their location via apps.
NYT: Cameo to the moon, and back —A start-up that offers fans a way to buy personalized videos from celebrities was supercharged by pandemic boredom and venture capital. All it had to do was grow forever.
Engadget: New tool lets artists fight AI image bots by hiding corrupt data in plain sight.
⭐️ TechCrunch: Google launches AR beauty ads for lip and eye products.
Beauty Independent: Unilever and Beauty For All Industries close in-house brand incubators…meanwhile FounderSix an influencer led incubator is going all-in on influencer brands raising $12M.
FYI - Mondelez recently closed its brand creation arm as well.
I can only speak to my experience having been part of Unilever’s brand creation group, and big CPG playing startup is a major challenge. The concept of failing fast and hard is always thrown around, but no one wants to ‘take the L’.
Just for fun:
👗 Check out Project Primrose - Adobe’s color/pattern changing dress.
Vox: Why Apple’s weather app is so bad — Your local meteorologist is always going to be more accurate than a weather app.
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
CYKLAR a new circular body care brand from Youtuber, Claudia Sulewski [Instagram].
🇫🇷 Pers a new French beauty brand with four products based on a medical protocol - blending prestige with dermocosmetics [Instagram; WWD].
Derek Chadwick launched a new skincare line called Chaddy. The first product is a matte moisturizing lip plumper, with more skincare products to follow [Instagram; Beauty Independent].
Beauty Independent: New skincare brand Sepia is founded by and assessed to be clinically effective for People of Color [Website; Instagram].
🇮🇳 Khadi Natural’s parent company sets its sights on the premium personal care market with Atulya — Beacon Bio Life Sciences, the makers of Khadi Natural, launched Atulya, an Ayurvedic personal care brand, last year—targeted at consumers who desire premium products to enhance their personal care regimen.
Retail Brew: Two former Google execs debut new inclusivity index for beauty brands.
Beauty Independent: Gwyneth Paltrow sells a $150 serum on Goop. Can she also sell a $39.99 serum at Target? [Instagram].
BoF: How TikTok brought back K-Beauty — While the K-beauty craze of the 2010s has waned in recent years, brands and retailers are seeing renewed interest in the category thanks to TikTok.
👩🦱 Haircare:
🇫🇷 Cair. a French haircare brand active and clean haircare products [Instagram].
Forbes: Meet the CEO using tech to make hair care more accessible.
👃 Fragrance:
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ Cell: Do mammals have menopause? TLDR - yes they do have oopause (not a typo); Another study published in Science, found that Chimps also live beyond their reproductive years [Axios].
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
eMarketer: Social commerce sales are rising faster than the number of social buyers.
SOS partners with Ulta Beauty to pilot next-gen in-store sampling and first-ever digital commerce media program [PR Newswire].
BeautyMatter: Amazon Prime big deal days recap. “Skincare ruled the Prime event kingdom; five of the top-selling 10 brands were skincare powerhouses led by CeraVe, COSRX, and La Roche-Posay. Pimple patch searches drove the most Prime beauty traffic, while TikTok favorite COSRX Snail Mucin came out on top as the #1 selling product during the October Prime event”.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
⭐️ MIT Technology Review: The race to destroy PFAS, the forever chemicals —Scientists are showing these damaging compounds can be beat.
👶 MIT Technology Review: This startup wants to find out if humans can have babies in space.
🇯🇵 The Atlantic: Americans don’t get to have the best new COVID drug — A Japanese antiviral appears to shorten symptoms and protect against chronic disease. Also, it doesn’t taste like soapy grapefruit.
MIT Technology Review: Ketamine is easier to prescribe than ever, and the FDA is not happy about it.
Slate: It uses A.I. It goes on your head. Can it induce lucid dreams?
⭐️ Crunchbase: Aiolos Bio launches with $245M as Asthma-focused funding accelerates.
🐕 CNBC: Amazon considers offering veterinary telehealth as it looks to compete with Walmart.
🇨🇳 👶 Dao Insights: Nestlé to close baby formula factory amid China birth rate slump.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
TechCrunch: Why 42 states came together to sue Meta over kids’ mental health —In a settlement, Meta could agree to changes for Instagram and Facebook.
⭐️ NYT: Face search engine PimEyes blocks searches of children’s faces — The change came in response to worries that the service could be used nefariously by a stranger.
Wired: Inside a TikTok talent factory for misfit stars -The creator economy is fragmented and chaotic. This guy can (almost) make sense of it.
Reuters: Elon Musk's X to launch premium subscriptions soon.
Daxue Consulting: Lemon8 — From lifestyle sensation to social media struggles.
⭐️ The New Yorker: How social media abdicated responsibility for the news.
The Verge: The poster’s guide to the internet of the future — The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.
The Verge: Zuckerberg says Threads has almost 100 million monthly users.
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable Design
Supply Chain Dive: Amazon outlines push to ‘eliminate packaging altogether’.
As the company looks to remove added packaging from more orders in 2024, its packaging innovation director explains how items are slotted into the Ships in Product Packaging program.
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
⭐️ Hello Bello - celebrity founded baby / family care company (founded by Kristen Bell & Dax Shepard) filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy…I like how the press release spins this as a strategic move.
⭐️ Beauty Independent: AI-Powered clean beauty E-Commerce company NakedPoppy to shutter online store.
⭐️ Supergreat is shuttering [Beauty Independent].
⭐️ Retail Dive: Unilever to sell majority stake in Dollar Shave Club — Private equity firm Nexus Capital Management will acquire the brand, though Unilever will keep a minority shareholder stake (35%).
MedCity News: Weight loss startup Calibrate is changing hands…restructuring and selling to PE.
Miss this one - SmileDirectClub filed for bankruptcy.
BoF: Francisco Costa plans to buy back Costa Brazil. The bid came in a filing tied to bankruptcy proceedings for Amyris, which closed the brand in August.
🇮🇳 YourStory: Mamaearth parent Honasa Consumer eyes IPO on Oct 31 at Rs 10,500 CR valuation — Report while Honasa Consumer's IPO is reportedly scheduled for October 31 to November 2, the anchor portion will open on October 30.
🇮🇳 Mamaearth parent logs Rs 151 CR loss in FY23 ahead of public lising [YourStory].
BoF: Why beauty’s biggest conglomerates are selling off their brands.
As strategics like Unilever and L’Oréal divest from once-core lines, a more selective approach to M&A is underway.
Glossy: The unseen legal turmoil driving beauty brands to shutter in 2023 (Lawsuits stemming from Prop 65).
🔬RESEARCH
Science Alert: In a huge first, scientists transfer Alzheimer's to healthy young animals [Brain].
⭐️ A new study highlights the strong connection between inner ear damage (vestibular loss ‘aka your balance center’) and dementia [Nature Scientific Reports].
⭐️ In last week’s newsletter I reported on a study linking low serotonin levels to long COVID (reported in Cell), this week a study published in Nature Immunology, points to a fungal gut imbalance as contributing to the persisting inflammation as a key culprit of long-COVID. It would not be surprising if these are all linked, but all of these findings are laddering up to potential therapies for those still suffering from this issue.
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ 🌏 💄 Kearney: Unlocking hyper-growth in Asia’s luxury beauty landscape.
STAT: Wunderkinds 2023.
⭐️ dcdx: From Digital Natives to Digital Captives — How the Internet Changed Gen Z.
BeautyMatter: Amazon Q3 2023 - Top 25 Beauty & Personal Care Products.
Vogue Business: The Vogue Business Beauty Index — The Ordinary, Charlotte Tilbury and Kiehl’s top the leaderboard.
⭐️ Time: The best inventions of 2023 — 200 innovations changing how we live (lots of great tech in the beauty, wellness, and digital health spaces).
CB Insights: State of Digital Health Global — Q3 2023: Global data and analysis on dealmaking, funding, and exits by private market digital health companies
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne