Friday Business No. 12: $10K Dorm Rooms & Live Shopping is Back

Welcome to Friday again, everybody. We made it - shorter newsletter today, hope you enjoy nonetheless and have a good weekend.

headline roundup: key headlines this week

🏙️Lidl US Signs Lease With Affordable Housing Organization in NYC

Low-cost grocery retailer Lidl is expanding its presence in New York City, this time with a new store in the Lower East Side. It‘s part of a strategic plan to win more baskets in New York City. I don’t get the chance to shop much at Lidl living in Seattle, but I give two thumbs up to anybody willing to make groceries more affordable in dense city centers like Manhattan. One less bodega chopped cheese sandwich can’t hurt.

💄‘People think that looking better means you will have a better life’: why gen Z spends so much on beauty

Great article, what to know:

• Less, but better: ”beauty maintenance days” are trending, with the hashtag #beautymaintenance at 112M+ views on TikTok. It’s all about semi-permanent treatments like lash lifts or eyebrow treatments that save you a little time every day.
• Behind-the-scenes: Similarly, the hashtag #highmaintenancetobelowmaintenance has 70M+ views on TikTok. The irony, according to Vogue: “The irony about wearing makeup is that oftentimes, we prefer it to look like we’re not wearing any at all.”
• Spend on influencers keeps rising: Spend on influencer marketing, a $21B industry, is slated to outgrow all other platforms in 2024.
• A direct quote that caught my eye: Hazel Wood, 28, UK: “It makes me feel as if I’m showing up as my best self. When I don’t feel I’ve made myself look very nice, I struggle to feel confident and productive, and I also have a hard time interacting with people.”

👗Nordstrom family group offers $3.8B to go private

Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom looks to link up with Mexican retailer El Puerto de Liverpool to take the retailer private. The $3.8B price tag isn’t much of a premium to what the current share price is, and apparently there’s good reasons: A history of recent underperformance, as well as some unique dynamics with the Nordstrom family might be the cause. Let’s see if the deal is compelling enough to existing shareholders to get it across the line. If it does, I doubt much will change short term.

🏫Tuition: $9,400. Dorm Room Interior Designer: $10,000?

We’re seeing a growing trend of hiring interior designers to outfit student dorm rooms. For somebody who was excited to have air conditioning and a 32-inch television in their dorm, this is wild to me that people would pay thousands to have a room professionally decorated for a nine-month stay. Yet, it appears to jive with two trends that get talked about a lot with Gen Z: Wellbeing (having a comfortable space, meaningful focus on self care) and social virality (trying to make videos that move well on the internet). I think we’re going to see more of this, especially at high-priced institutions like Ole Miss and Baylor.

📺This former reality TV producer is betting on live shopping

It'd be easy to hear "live shopping", think of QVC or Home Shopping Network, and pass it off. You'd be wrong. Social commerce through platforms like Instagram and TikTok have given live shopping a new lease on life, and it's growing rapidly. Brands like Unilever and Estée Lauder are working with a company called Orca to stream live shopping experiences, and it’s working: Orca has been able to boost AOV 30% higher than brands’ DTC sites, and they’re shooting 400 of these videos per month. Not bad for a distribution medium that gets talked about alongside infomercials.

🪒Jean Paul Gaultier Owner Puig Shares Drop After Warning on China Challenges

As a person who once wore Jean Paul Gaultier cologne in my younger days, this caught my eye. After going public in May, their first quarterly filing indicated that while the business was growing, it’s seeing headwinds in China due to a sluggish economy. This guidance is similar to peers like Esteé Lauder and L’Oreal. Asia Pacific represents 9% of their revenue and is expected to remain weak until the end of the year, but there are bright spots: Puig‘s business is more concentrated in fragrance than others, and there are some natural category tailwinds as Gen Z continues to load up on fragrance purchases. I think we’ll continue to see CPG’s and beauty brands discuss headwinds in China for the next 2-3 years, so this likely won’t be the last time we see a filing like this.

That’ll be all for today. Everyone have a good weekend. Let's see if we can keep ourselves above ground and do this same thing again next Friday.