Not My Circus, Not My Condés
Welcome to 2012, futurists.
Here we go again. Condé is rolling out an influencer storefront platform in early 2026, and the industry is acting like this is a new lane. It is not. It is the same highway, same potholes, same roadkill.
Receipts. The content-to-commerce graveyard is vast and well-documented. Style.com flipped from content to commerce in 2016, then was folded into Farfetch about a year later. Refinery29 tried a marketplace in 2012 and shut it down in 2013.
Thrillist rode JackThreads to scale, then spun it out by 2015, and it collapsed soon after. BuzzFeed launched a headless marketplace in 2022 with just-in-time inventory. It lasted roughly a year.
Different brands, same arc: editorial traffic does not magically turn into reliable GMV.
Why this keeps failing. Publishers excel at taste, audience development, and cultural timing. Retail is an entirely different sport. Returns, fraud, taxes, shipping SLAs, merchandising depth, supplier compliance, customer support.
Margins get thin, reverse logistics eats what is left, and owned checkout cannibalizes a perfectly good affiliate business that already throws off cash. Add channel conflict with advertisers and retail partners? Woof. Plus, editorial incentives always bend in ways that hurts trust and prioritizes the brand over the transaction.
So what is new now? Well, for one, we have better rails and tooling. Shop Pay and native checkouts reduce friction compared to the Magento sites we launched in the aughts and teens. TikTok Shop trained audiences to buy inside content, creator tooling is less janky, and dropship networks can stand up supply fast.
All true.
But Buzzfeed did all of this with Verishop on a headless commerce platform, not even eighteen months ago, and it still didn’t last more than a year.
Cold-start physics do not change. Marketplaces live or die on supply density, delivery predictability, price consistency, and service. You do not shortcut that with a great headline and a carousel of “creator picks,” unfortunately. We tried this in 2012, except instead of the Charli D’Amelio edit, it was Joanna Coles.
How to score Condé’s move. Watch: GMV per session versus historical affiliate RPM, fill rate and cancel rate, repeat purchase inside 90 days, average ship time, refund and return rate, CSAT tied to orders that originated in content. Also, watch whether SKU depth comes from real wholesale relationships or a reseller mesh that pushes risk to customers.
Bottom line. Although content-to-commerce remains a necessary experiment within the ecosystem, neither publishers nor influencers are skilled at retail operations.
If this is a marketing program (and I’m 90% sure it is at least a PR program), it can work because it will be underfunded, lightly staffed, and will not distract the core business. If it were an affiliate program, it would print real money, as most affiliate programs do today.
But if it is a retail business, history is not rhyming…
It is repeating.
— Phillip
Sephora Kids’ American Dream. Teen creator Salish Matter has proved that Gen Alpha’s beauty obsession is more than surface-level; it’s skin-deep. Her new skincare brand, Sincerely Yours, drew more than 80,000 fans to a surprise launch pop-up at New Jersey’s American Dream Mall, breaking attendance records set by MrBeast and Hailey Bieber. Fans camped overnight, merch sold out, Sephora shelves were cleared in less than an hour, and 45,000 TikToks captured the frenzy.
Co-founded with her father, Jordan Matter, and led by CEO Julia Straus (formerly of Sweaty Betty and TULA), the brand is leaning into IRL community-first engagement instead of traditional influencer launches.
With a waitlist already topping 60,000, Sincerely Yours is getting Sephora Kids into stores and becoming a major revenue driver for the beauty retailer.
🔮We covered the “Sephora Kids” trend as a deep-dive essay in LORE.
Fashion Mind F**ck. As hordes of celebrities, influencers, and fashionistas flock to New York Fashion Week events, one is bound to be the bane of everyone’s existence: a claw machine that has a Birkin bag as the only prize. The activation, developed by creative studio Uncommon, is equal parts nostalgic kitsch and commentary. While its intended mission was to evoke an unattainability that “mirrors the everyday pain of living in New York,” we can’t help but see the commerce connection.
Meanwhile, the House of Hermès just scored a major legal victory against consumers challenging their infamous Birkin purchase requirements. A federal judge dismissed the class action lawsuit that argued Hermès' practice of requiring customers to build a purchase history before accessing Birkins constituted illegal tying. The court ruled that plaintiffs failed to prove anticompetitive conduct, effectively validating the brand's gatekeeping strategy. For Hermès, this reinforces their ability to maintain artificial scarcity and premium positioning. For luxury retail, broadly speaking, it's a green light to continue using relationship-based access as a business model.
The claw machine suddenly seems like the more accessible option.
Dickies Doesn’t Measure Up. VF Corp. is shedding more weight from its portfolio. The company has sold the legendary Dickies brand to Bluestar Alliance for $600 million. This is the latest move in CEO Bracken Darrell’s push to cut debt and double down on the company’s most high-potential brands, The North Face, Vans, and Timberland. VF sold off streetwear brand Supreme for $1.5 billion last year and has launched a series of restructures tied to a larger transformation initiative to improve its financial performance.
For Bluestar, which has recently scooped up Off-White, Palm Angels, and Scotch & Soda, Dickies adds a legacy workwear label to its rather luxe fashion-heavy lineup. The sale underscores two diverging strategies: VF tightening its focus, while Bluestar assembles a cross-category brand stable with both utility and street cachet.
Bulk Buying Your Street Cred. Fans of Nike SB Dunks and Costco, set your reminders for holiday 2025: the brands are collaborating on a Kirkland Signature brand shoe design featuring its signature box logo. Priced at $135, the sneakers are a flex for consumers who flock to the warehouse club to get low prices on everything from produce to apparel. Although some laud Kirkland for being an “anti-hype” brand that leans more into value and utility, this is the ultimate fan flex, giving consumers to not just wear their brand love on their sleeve, but on their feet, too.
Gas Station Gourmet. Wawa is eating McDonald’s lunch in the breakfast sector, which is apparently the new revenue battleground. The convenience store chain’s customer base has grown by 11.5% since 2022, while the bases of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s have collectively dwindled. Moreover, Circana data notes that morning meal visits to fast-food chains inched up just 1% in the three months ending July, while “food-forward” c-stores like Wawa, Sheetz, and Casey’s surged 9%.
As gas, tobacco, and lottery ticket sales fall, prepared foods and more expansive beverage options have become a lifeline for convenience retailers. From Casey’s cult-favorite breakfast pizza to 7-Eleven’s fresh food ambitions, including a play to bring Japanese favorites like the viral egg sandwich stateside, c-stores are leaning into variety, quality, and value. For fast-food players, once the disruptors, the morning playbook may now need crib notes from the corner store.
🔮Gas Station Gourmonds, we have a photo spread of gas station stans in our Muses Journal, available on shop.futurecommerce.com
Honeydew's Revenge Arc. The Honey Deuce brought in nearly $17 million at this year’s US Open, a 32% increase from 2024. The cocktail’s laughable price ($23) wasn’t enough to keep the throngs of influencers and celebrities at bay.
Bartenders doled out 738,459 servings (but who’s counting) over the course of the tournament, and despite its bad rap, more than 7,700 cases of honeydew melons were required to make the cutesy liquored-up tennis balls everyone has been fawning over. Talk about a redemption story.
The TikTok Clock Still Ticks. The (briefly) newly minted world’s richest man will now control the world’s most influential propaganda social media platform.
No, I’m not talking about Elon/X, I’m talking about Larry Ellison and TikTok.
TikTok will live on in the US following the creation of a deal framework with China that will spin off TikTok’s American operations into a US-controlled company. ByteDance will retain a nearly 20% stake while the remaining 80% will be owned by a consortium of investors including SIG, General Atlantic, KKR, Andreessen Horowitz, Oracle, and Silver Lake.
The agreement grants the White House a seat on the US board and preserves Oracle’s cloud hosting deal. The resolution, expected to close within 45 days, comes after months of extensions and tariff-driven tensions, with both governments seeking to save face while appeasing TikTok’s 170 million American users. This news puts Oracle’s Larry Ellison and son David Ellison front and center as two of the most powerful players in modern media.
Skydance Media’s recent acquisition of Paramount Global has led to the creation of a new joint company, Paramount Skydance, and is preparing to bid on Warner Bros.
Having TikTok in the Ellison ecosystem doesn't just elevate their influence; it redefines the entire media power structure.
Our Take: The algorithm will still reportedly be controlled by the Chinese authorities, so what have we gained? Oh yes, the ability for the American authorities to have the same level of algorithm access that the CCP has had all along, and the ability to steer and censor.
It also represents a notable shift of the Overton Window on government intervention on social media. Just a decade ago, an Obama-era NSA Project, PRISM, made Edward Snowden (in)famous and created a genuine concern about what the government was doing to spy on its own citizens.
My, how far we’ve come.
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