154 - What I'm Reading: Week of July 19th.
Lab-grown meat for pets, a skin serum for workouts, a new hair brand for Family Dollar, a new longevity unlock, Dossier is expanding beyond dupes, China's sampling economy, menopause & EDS, & more...
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⭐️ = What excites me most this week.
🗞 NEWS & PRODUCTS
TechCrunch: Female-founded startups have raised $15.5 billion so far this year, but that’s not really good news.
TechCrunch: Amazon AI chatbot Rufus is now live for all U.S. customers.
🐕 The inescapable news of the week - Lab-grown meat set to be sold in UK pet food - so even if countries (Italy) and states (Florida & Alabama) are opposed to it - pets will get a taste sooner.
Just for fun:
If you ever wanted one of those urine recycling suits from Dune - it could be yours…one day. If things ever get that dire…I am out.
👩🎤 Celebrity Brands:
🧴 Skin / Personal Care:
🥵 Nine Glow - skincare designed to be worn while you sweat. Their first product is a serum, to be worn during workouts. For the last few years there has been a trend of using a hair mask at the gym, so this tracks [Instagram].
Abé & Mason - a new botanical skincare brand that came from the co-founder’s Abe’s Japanese background and her struggles with eczema [Beauty Independent; Instagram].
Rodan & Fields is moving away from its MLM model. I hope it goes more smoothly than it did for BeautyCounter.
🇮🇳 The CapTable: Clensta’s cash crunch and the perils of offline expansion
🇰🇪 Nairobi based skincare brand, Uncover, is planning to expand to DRC, offering affordable skincare solutions [Beauty Independent; Instagram].
🇨🇳 Jing Daily: Building trust in skincare for China’s Gen Alpha. Born between 2010 and 2024, Gen Alpha is digitally immersed from birth, yet faces beauty misinformation online.
Ugh - since mouth taping has become quite a wellness trend there is a brand - mostly appealing to men called ‘Hostage Tape’…just no for so many reasons…[Instagram].
👩🦱 Haircare:
Crown Hair Society - a new haircare brand for Family Dollar by Innovative Beauty Group (IBG) [Instagram]. The line includes shampoos, conditioners, a bonding oil, a leave-in treatment, and anti-frizz spray.
🦷 Oral Care:
👃 Fragrance:
Can ‘dupe’ fragrance brands make the real thing? Dossier, a brand known for its affordable imitations (known as ‘dupes’) has branched out to offer its own original scents. Making them as popular as its core offering could be a stretch
I think they can - and since a lot of their business is DTC they have a great opportunity to seed these fragrances as samples. I also doubt their entire base is only buying the fragrances because they are dupes.
👩🔬 Femtech:
⭐️ Women’s Health: The surprising menopause side effect everyone needs to know about. Midlife eating disorders are under-researched and often overlooked.
⭐️ Axios: Women are more likely to die from cancer in the southern U.S.
🛍 Retail: DTC, Brick + Mortar, Social Commerce, and more...
eMarketer: Retail and dining foot traffic is up.
Modern Retail: After rejecting buyout offer, Macy’s is rolling out more private brands to boost its business.
Amazon Prime Day drives US online sales up 11% to $14.2 Billion. The e-commerce giant captures about 60 percent of all online spending on Prime Day, compared with 40 percent on a typical day.
🩺 Digital Health: Wearables, Smart Devices, and more...
Healthcare Brew: Boston University used AI to detect Alzheimer’s in patients up to 6 years in advance. With new medications for Alzheimer’s on the table, detecting the disease is crucial.
NBC: Scientists say they have identified a root cause of lupus — one that could pave the way for new treatments. An imbalance of T cells, which play a key role in the body’s immune response, could explain most cases of the disease, according to new research.
🫀 The Hustle: Your heart’s digital twin may save your life.
💉 VOA: Second malaria vaccine launched in Ivory Coast marks new milestone.
🔋 The Examination: ‘Forever chemical’ polluters land hefty contracts to meet electric vehicle battery demand. Chemical suppliers for lithium-ion batteries have been accused of misleading regulators, hiding information and contaminating communities while making related products.
🗣 Social Media: News about TikTok, Meta, BeReal, Snapchat, X...
Retail Brew: Pinterest’s VP of retail talks shoppable content and its growing Gen Z audience.
🇰🇪 Rest of World: Kenya’s biggest protest in recent history played out on a walkie-talkie app. More than 40,000 Kenyans have downloaded Zello since protests began against the government’s plan to raise taxes.
♻️ Sustainability: Sustainable DesignThe Guardian: Shell quietly backs away from pledge to increase ‘advanced recycling’ of plastics. Energy giant promised to turn 1m tonnes of plastic waste into oil each year, but now says goal is unfeasible…just another big company shifting away from what were ‘lofty’ goals…
Crunchbase: Sustainability-focused startup equity funding fell in H1 2024.
💸 M&A, IPOs, SPACs, Bankruptcies, Closings...
🔬RESEARCH
Researchers are finally learning the mechanism behind why pancreatic cancer is so deadly. A new study involved analysis of healthy and cancerous pancreatic tissue, identifying a process called DNA methylation that switches off the beneficial HNF4A gene. The suppression of the HNF4A gene by pancreatic cancer lead to the disease's rapid growth and aggressiveness [Gastro Hep Advances].
There is new hope for individuals suffering from Lupus. New findings suggest that there may be a pathways to slow the production of overactive T-cells. Researchers identified that the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) is insufficiently activated in patients with Lupus. This imbalance is driven by type I interferon, leading to excessive autoantibodies that attack the body's own cells [Nature].
🐭 Nature: Mice live longer when inflammation-boosting protein is blocked. Humans also have the protein, called IL-11, offering hope for a future longevity treatment.
🍄 A new study examined the impact of psilocybin on neural networks. Although the scale of the study is very small (7 people) the learnings are quite interesting. While on the drug, the brain’s neural networks changed so dramatically they did not resemble the brain pre-drug. Most networks returned to their normal state as soon as the drug wore off. However, a part of the brain called the anterior hippocampus responsible for sense of space, time and self showed changes for weeks post-use [Nature].
🧐 REPORTS
⭐️ 🇨🇳 Daxue Consulting: China’s Samples Economy.
♀ Gallup: Majority of U.S. Women Struggle to Prioritize Health. Younger women overwhelmed and say mental health, time, money and work are barriers when caring for health overall
McKinsey: The ‘evergreen economy’ — Harnessing the power of healthy longevity.
Mintel: The role of innovation in the future of the CPG Industry. With genuine innovation at an all-time low globally, the time to innovate is now. Mintel consumer and category experts explore the decline in innovation, uncover the key drivers behind this trend and reveal the threat to big brands as they predict a coming wave of innovation competition.
🇨🇳 McKinsey: 2024 China Consumer Report - Getting Granular: In Search of Pockets of Growth in China.
McKinsey: Technology Trends Outlook 2024
💡 Enjoy,
-Anne