The Weekly Consensus™ brings to your inbox every Monday a summary of the major stories that impacted consumer businesses in the prior week.
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 […]
High inflation, soaring gas prices, rising interest rates, and a bear market correction in the stock market are among several factors that currently have consumers (and economists) on edge. These concerns are starting to manifest themselves in the economic data: retail spending posted a surprise 0.3% decline in May, and the University of Michigan’s consumer […]
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 […]