In March of last year, my colleague Marshall Schleifman wrote in this space about the meteoric rising cost of shipping ocean freight – one of the many negative outcomes of disruptions and imbalances in the global supply chain. As tracked by the Global Freightos Baltic Index (below), China/East Asia to North America West Coast container […]
Since the 1980s, retailers have been investing in private brands – brands owned by and thus sold exclusively at a particular retailer. Once considered second-tier products offering cheaper versions of basic merchandise, today’s private brands sit side-by-side with national brands and are merchandized so customers may not realize they are store brands. In some cases, […]
A recent exposé on fast-fashion retailer H&M alleges that the company’s environmental promise is undermined by greenwashing. H&M was using a scorecard system to inform customers about the environmental soundness of each product, but a report by Quartz claims that more than half of the scorecards portrayed products as being better for the environment than […]
In prior issues of the Big Story, Consensus partners Billy Busko, Betsy White and Abigail Hitchcock discussed the emergence of the metaverse as a new channel for brands, with gaming as an on-ramp to a future digital world anchored in blockchain technology. It’s relatively easy to imagine how fashion and lifestyle brands will capitalize on the […]
Coca-Cola’s recent announcement that it will discontinue its Honest Tea brand at the end of 2022 sent shockwaves through the food & beverage industry. Honest Tea was a beloved brand that pioneered the organic, low sugar beverage movement in the early 2000s, and founder Seth Goldman is an industry icon who lives the values of […]