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Some seven million Americans are now on GLP-1 weight loss drugs, a figure expected to rise to 24 million by 2035. These medications curb users’ appetites for fatty, ultra-processed foods, and grocery stores are noticing: total sold units of doughnuts, cakes, and cookies are down by 10%, 19%, and 13%, respectively, compared to five years ago. With this drop in revenue from junk food, grocery stores need to think about how to make more money from other categories. For Whole Foods, there’s one aisle that brims with potential: supplements. Today, Whole Foods is introducing a new line of Japanese-inspired supplements called Apothékary onto its aisles. The brand is known for its distinct form factor factor: While many supplements are sold as gummies, capsules, or powders, Apothékary sells tinctures, which can be dropped under the tongue, or incorporated into drinks. Apothékary is part of the booming supplements industry, currently valued at $192 billion, and projected to grow to $415 by 2033. The brand has been growing rapidly thanks to its recent expansion into all 350 of Ulta Beauty stores and 400 Sprouts grocery stores. But the move into Whole Foods is its biggest one yet, and offers insight into how consumers are spending their grocery dollars as their food spending goes down. [Photo: Carl Ostberg/Apothékary] Modernizing tradition Shizu Okusa launched Apothékary in 2020. She had previously founded a cold-pressed juice brand called Jrink, which had 14 retail locations and was sold at Whole Foods. In 2019, Okusa sold Jrink to Puree Juice Bar, and began plotting out her next business. This time, she wanted to launch a company that was more deeply connected to her own roots. Okusa’s father grew up in Japan. After dropping out of high school, he decided to take a boat to Canada, where he got a job as a laborer on a dairy farm. Eventually, he decided to start his own farm, one where he could use traditional Japanese techniques, such as space-saving vertical farming. As Okusa grew up in this farming community, she learned about the Japanese approach to health and medicine, which is intimately connected with the land, herbs, and plants. “In Japanese culture, we often talk about nature as medicine,” she says. “I didn’t grow up with a lot of pills. Instead, my family relied on plant-based remedies.” In Japan, there is a herbal medicine tradition called Kampo. It goes back to the Sixth century, when the Empress of Japan sent a group of doctors to China to learn about the medical practices that had evolved there. These doctors brought back the tenets of traditional Chinese medicine to their homeland, then localized them to the ingredients that are abundant in Japan, like seaweed. Today, Kampo continues to be practiced in Japan. Doctors and researchers are now modernizing Kampo practices and performing clinical studies on formulations. There are also hospitals in Japan, such as Tohoku University Hospital and Okayama University Hospital, which integrate both traditional and Western medicine into their treatments. (This is similar to what is happening in China, with traditional Chinese medicine.) Okusa believed that there was an opportunity to bring traditional Kampo formulations to the Western market, particularly as many Americans are embracing other Japanese wellness practices. And she relies on ingredients that are backed by peer-reviewed studies. “There is growing awareness about meditation and even the matcha tea ceremony, which are both Japanese,” she points out. [Photo: Apothékary] The Evolving Supplement Landscape Okusa launched Apothékary with a collection of herbal formulas designed to improve sleep, digestion, and energy. Apothékary’s original formulas came in powders, but Okusa realized that to stand out in the market, she needed to innovate. She had the idea of changing their form factor to tinctures, so she began to make liquid supplements that could be taken under the tongue or in beverages. “The tincture form has been around for a long time, particularly in Eastern medicine traditions, but it wasn’t very common in the U.S.,” she says. “It added novelty and also convenience, because you can just put it directly into your mouth.” This new format was key to driving the brand’s growth. During the pandemic, many people realized they were drinking too much and wanted to curb their alcohol consumption. Apothékary launched a collection of alcohol alternatives, like Wine Down, Take The Edge Off, and Rose-Tinted Glasses, which were tinctures that could be consumed in a mocktail. As little jars of liquid, they looked much more like spirits and they were designed to provide many of the benefits people are looking for in an alcoholic cocktail, like relaxation and better sleep. Apothékary’s unusual approach to delivering the supplement was partly what made Whole Foods bring the brand into its stores. “Whether you take [the tincture] directly or mixed into mocktails, it provides an engaging format,” says Abbey Appel, a Whole Foods merchant who specializes in functional foods and supplements. [Photo: Apothékary] As the pandemic was waning, the next big trend was the rise in GLP-1 drugs, which the FDA approved for weight loss. As adoption of these drugs spiked, people began consuming less junk food and alcohol. Okusa saw a spike in Apothékary’s sales, as people seemed to turn to these tinctures, which are tasty despite being calorie- and sugar-free. “We could not have predicted how GLP-1s would change people’s consumption patterns, but our brand has benefited from this new reality,” she says. “We’re creating an alternative for people who have stopped buying as many chips and cookies, and are more focused on their health.” As GLP-1s increase in popularity and Americans continue to seek out products that promote wellness, grocery stores are introducing new brands into their mix. Whole Foods has been actively seeking out interesting new supplements to bring into their aisles. Appel says that the brand’s non-Western approach to wellness was intriguing. “The founder’s genuine connection to Japanese heritage resonates with our customers,” says Appel. While demand for wellness products continues to grow, the market is also getting more crowded, as new brands pop up. Okusa believes that the key to the brand’s success so far has been it’s ability to be agile and innovative. “Consumer behavior is constantly evolving,” she says. “It’s important to keep evolving too.”
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E-Commerce
As Halloween nears, were seeing the signs of spooky seasonghosts, tombstones, vampires, and suchnot only in the usual yard decorations and party trimmings, but in less-expected places, like logos. Branding and symbols featuring skulls have been in the news lately, with antigovernment Gen Z protesters in Nepal, Indonesia, and elsewhere adopting the One Piece Straw Hat Pirates skull-and-crossbones emblem. Then theres the fight between Liquid Death and Death Wish Coffee, who are embroiled in a legal battle over their similar skull-centric trademarks. [Images: Eiichiro Oda/Shueisha, Toei Animation, Sunil Pradhan/Anadolu/Getty Images] These skulls, though, are only the latest in a decades-long trend that, according to United States Patent and Trademark Office records, saw the rate of skulls and skeletons in American logos increase by a factor of almost seven from the 1980s to the 2010s. Throughout the last decade, skulls and skeletons appeared in nearly one of every 200 new U.S. logos, a number that has dipped only slightly in the 2020s. [Images: Liquid Death, Death Wish Coffee Co.] Logo design guru Bill Gardner is no stranger to skull logos, having cataloged over 2,000 of them in his Logolounge database over the years. And while its easy to assume that most of these symbols are just variations of the familiar skull and crossbones of the Jolly Roger pirate flag, Gardner points out that the ubiquity of that flag in the popular imagination is something of a historical accident. Every pirate had their own symbol on their flag, such as an hourglass, indicating that you were into the final moments of your life, or a skeleton, or a sword, or some combination of these elements, Gardner explains. And one of those flags just happened to be a skull with crossed bones. In 1911, the illustrator N.C. Wyeth was hired to design a cover for a new edition of Treasure Island, and he incorporated that flag because it was easy to understand symbolically. From that point on, the public assumed that all pirate flags featured a skull and crossbones. [Cover Image: Charles Scribner’s Sons/Wiki Commons] The associations with pirates and death meant that, for most of the twentieth century, the use of skulls in logos was limited to outlaws and rebels like motorcycle clubs and rock bands, with the Hells Angels winged skull and the Misfits Crimson Ghost mark among the most prominent. The Grateful Deads Steal Your Face skull emblem still has enough cultural currency that the University of Oregon Ducks, in partnership with Nike, sported an homage to it on their football uniforms last weekend. [Images: Wiki Commons] Its worth noting that the sharp uptick in the use of skulls coincided with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the country assumed a war footing and the number of combat deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq mounted, so did the number of American skull logos. World Intellectual Property Organization data shows that the use of skull logos around the world also increased at this time, but not to the same extent as in the U.S. One could speculate that the specter of death raised by these wars seeped into American culture, eventually being reflected in the popularity of skull logos such as those of dirtbike lifestyle brand Metal Mulisha and Marvel Comics vigilante antihero The Punisher. [Images: Metal Mulisha, Marvel] Yet the meanings of the skull logos we see today seem to be expanding beyond the traditional associations of the symbol. Clearly, it no longer indicates poison when Liquid Death and Death Wish are fighting for the right to put a skull on their coffee. And, as Gardner notes, The majority of skull logos I see are not foreboding, theyre humorous. [Images: Paul Frank, Wiki Commons, Emojipedia] The Straw Hats Pirates emblem, perhaps inspired by predecessors such as Paul Franks Skurvy monkey skull, leans into cuteness and fun, playfully subverting the Jolly Roger. The skull emoji means laughter, not death, and, contrary to its pirate ethos, Death Wish Coffee is Fair Trade certified. The Tennessee specialty license plate with an eyepatched skull and crossbones benefits blindness prevention. In a world where, ironically, being a nonconformist is in style, the pirate identity and its associated skull imagery provide an easy way for brands to try to signal that they are cool, edgy, rebellious, and different. But, as Liquid Death and Death Wish are discovering, it can be a problem when everyone wants to be different in the same way. James I. Bowie is a sociologist at Northern Arizona University who studies trends in logo design and branding. He reports on his research at his website, Emblemetric.com.
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E-Commerce
Step outside your front door on any given day, and say goodbye to money without even trying. Just commuting into the office now sets workers back a whopping $55 a day, data suggests. Thanks to the workforce-wide return-to-office push, many workers are back in the office at least a couple of times a week. With it come the coffee runs, desk salads, and after-work drinks that can quickly add up. Videoconferencing company Owl Labs has done the math and broken down the real cost of physically going into work. When in the office, in-person and hybrid workers spend an average of $55 a day, according to the 2025 State of Hybrid Work report: $15 on commuting, $18 on lunch, $13 on breakfast and coffee and $9 on parking. For those with pets, factor in an additional $10 a day for dog walkers or pet sitters. The total cost dropped from $61 in 2024, but is still up from $51 in 2023. For remote workers, who tend to make meals at home and only need to commute from their bed to their desk, their daily costs are considerably lower, averaging just $18 a day at home. This is also down slightly from $19 in 2024, but up from $15 in 2023. These numbers are depressing. Theyre frustrating. But theyre not surprising. Daily commutes to the office can be both costly and time-consuming, given the elevated price of gas and fare hikes. These days, a large coffee costs the best part of $10 in major cities after accounting for tax and tip, while a limp salad can easily set you back $20. Yes, of course you can bring lunch in with you but who wants to eat last nights leftovers three days in a row? Hybrid workers, on the other hand, save an average of $37 when working from home. Given the price gap, its unsurprising workers are willing to quit their jobs for more flexible work, with 17% quitting in the past year because of changes to their working arrangements. Owl Labs’ findings on the costs of in-person work come as companies including Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, are doubling down on RTO at least three (if not all five) days a week for their workforce. At the same time, workers have been hit where it hurts in the wallet) by years of inflation, rising cost of living, and stagnating wages. As companies plan 2026 budgets and RTO policies, balancing in-office expectations with cost support will be key to keeping employees engaged and loyal, Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, told Fast Company. In fact, 92% of workers said the right incentives could convince them to return to the office; one-third want commuting or parking covered, and another third want free food and drinks. They say theres no such thing as a free lunch. But itd go a long way for workers who have to spend money to simply show up to work.
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E-Commerce
Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar juncture, and there are worrying parallels to the 1920s, including paradigm-shifting technologies, a revolt against immigration, globalism, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, like then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world we live in. Theyre not. Building for a rational universe In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna, much like many of the Silicon Valley digerati today, became enamored with the engineering mindset. By this time, the technologies like the ones that Morgan invested in had begun to reshape the world. Much like Descartes, three centuries before, they thought that logic and rationality should rule human affairs. Their patron saint was Ludwig Wittgenstein, and their bible was his Tractatus, which described a world made up of atomic facts that could be combined to create states of affairs. He concluded, famously, that Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent, meaning that whatever could not be expressed in a logical form must be disregarded. The intellectuals branded their movement logical positivism and based it on the verification principle. Only verifiable propositions would be taken as meaningful. All other statements would be treated as silly talk and gobbledygook. Essentially, if it didnt fit in an algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didnt exist. Unfortunately, and again much like Silicon Valley denizens of today, the exuberant confidence of the logical positivists belied serious trouble beneath the surface. In fact, while the intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a foundational crisis that threatened the entire positivist project. At the root of the crisis was something called Russells Paradox, which created strange, self-contradictory statements, such as The barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself. Assume such a barber exists and youre tied in a knot. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was a crack in the foundation that demanded repair. Broken logic David Hilbert, one of the most prominent mathematicians of the day, proposed a program to solve the foundational crisis. It rested on three pillars. First, mathematics needed to be shown to be complete in that every statement could be shown to be true or false. Second, mathematics needed to be shown to be consistent, no contradictions or paradoxes allowed. Finally, all statements need to be computable, meaning they yielded a clear answer. Hilbert and his colleagues received an answer sooner than most had expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert laid out his program, 25-year-old Kurt Gödel published his incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematical world. Gödel showed that any sufficiently powerful logical system could be either complete or consistent, but not both. Put more simply, Gödel proved that every formal system will eventually break down. It will contain true statements that cannot be proved within the system itself. Logic would remain permanently limited, and the positivists hopes were dashed. You cant engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world would remain a messy place. Yet the implications of the downfall of logic turned out to be far different, and far more strange, than anyone had expected. In 1936, building on Gödels proof, Alan Turing published his own paper on Hilberts computability problem. Much like the Austrian, he found that all problems are not computable, but with a silver lining. As part of his proof, he included a description of a simple machine that could compute every computable number. Ironically, Turings machine would usher in a new era of digital computing. These machines, constructed on the basis that they would all eventually crash, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they areflawed machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to discard our illusions first. Building dwelling thinking Underlying the positivist project was the rationalist assumption that we could overcome the flaws of human nature with pristine, faultless logic. Yet just the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more scientific, only to see the world descend into an abyss of war and genocide. In the aftermath, amidst the rubble and horror, the world needed to be rebuilt. That, in turn, demanded some thought about how and in what image. It was in this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote his essay, Building Dwelling Thinking, in which he argued that to build for the world you need to know what it means to live in it: Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both building and thinking belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice. There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and dwell, and something designed to serve an abstract ideal. You feel it when trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by the constant reminders that the city wasnt designed for living, but for something else. Theres just something dehumanizing about a world built solely for thinking and detached from dwelling. Thats probably why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, that are able to harmonize building, dwelling, and thinking so deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that feels built for us validates us in a profound human way. Careless people In Careless People, former Meta executive Sarah Wynn-Williams describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they had grown out of touch with many of the worlds realities. At one point, during discussion about how much to charge for internet service for refugees, she describes a senior leaders surprise with the realization that the inhabitants of refugee camps dont have jobs. Today, we increasingly live in the world of the visceral abstract, where the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as quantum mechanics and natural selection, that cant be experienced directly. This is especially true for the next generation of technologies, such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and quantum computing. When you design for the physical world by, say, building a bridge, there is natural feedback if the building and thinking are out of harmony with dwelling. People can get to where they want to go or they cant. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful, or it is ugly. We notice flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected. But in the world of the visceral abstract, things arent so concrete. Nation states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can shift our psychology and our genomes can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us being aware of it. As technologies grow more powerful, the potential for good and evil multiply. This requires us to be not only careful, but connectedto not only think and build, but to dwell. We need to be suspicious of those who sell us visions of flawless logic; those visions are not only incomplete, they are inhuman. At some point, something has got to break.
Category:
E-Commerce
Earlier this year, things looked dire for Google. AI search was rapidly eroding the companys market share, as people turned to ChatGPT and dedicated generative apps like Perplexity to search for information. In January, reports showed that the companys search market share had dropped below 90% for the first time in almost a decade. And as the year continued, it seemed like it would keep plummeting. Now new data from search analytics company BrightEdge shows that the bleeding appears to be over. Googles market share has stabilized, and has even begun to tick up. Why? Google is fighting back against the onslaught of AI search. And its winning. Stemming the tide BrightEdge is a massive SEO firm that works with giant clientsincluding a majority of the Fortune 500to rank their websites in search. That gives the company a unique perspective on whats working in SEO at any given moment. And for most of this year, it saw Google floundering. In data that BrightEdge shared with me in advance of publishing the new findings, Google had lost 1.5% of the search market share in 2025. That might not seem like much, but given that people perform around 5 trillion Google searches per year, a loss of 1.5% amounts to billions of queries. As of this month, though, BrightEdge told me that Googles market share increased from 90.54% to 90.71%. I spoke with BrightEdges CEO, Jim Yu, to put that in perspective. Yu acknowledged that while an increase of 0.17% might seem small, given the scale involved, its actually a big deal. We conservatively estimate each percent of search market share equates to between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in ad revenue, Yu told me. That means Googles little uptick is worth a cool $340 million. Winners and losers Google is probably celebrating its market share gain and hundred-million-dollar windfall. But executives will be even happier to know where that market share came from. Yu told me that as Google gained share, newcomers like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Grok lost share for the first time since BrightEdge started tracking such things. Googles market share has been slowly and consistently eroding since December 2024, a pattern that we never saw previously over several years of analysis. In parallel we saw the AI search (ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude) consistently gaining market share over the same period. That pattern was broken recently with Googles market share increasing and at the exact same time decreasing for multiple AI search engines, Yu told me in our interview. The fact that these two happened at the same time points to some people switching back to Google for queries handled by AI, he said. Part of this might be AI fatigue. People may have tried ChatGPT or Perplexity when the tools were cool and new, but ultimately switched back to Google, the old stalwart. And OpenAIs rollout of GPT-5 was a disaster. That flop might have driven people back to Google. But BrightEdge has a different theory. In a statement, the company said, Data suggests the release of Googles AI Mode contributed to this recovery, with specific increases in long-tail querying in Google indicating widespread use of the search engine’s new AI feature helping boost Googles gains. Yu confirmed this to me in our interview. When I asked him if Googles AI Mode helped drive the rebound, he told me: This is a hypothesis strongly supported by the data. Google, in other words, did not take the worlds pivot to AI search lying down but rather aggressively rolled out features like AI Overviews and AI Mode. And based on the data, those AI-powered features are slowly clawing back the users it lost to its AI-powered rivals. What to do So, based on the churn in the AI search space, what are marketers and business owners to do? Dont get distracted, Yu told me. As much as everybody is talking about AI search, it is still a very small fraction of the searches at less than 0.3% by our estimate. Google is still the main channel for driving purchases, leads, viewers, or conversions important to a business. As Google rolls in even more AI features, the distinction between AI-powered and traditional search will likely continue to fade. The contest will gradually become one of Google versus the Groks and Perplexities of the worldnot one of AI search versus traditional methods. Thats a contest Google is likely to win. Its no wonder that in emails with Elon Musk in OpenAIs early days, the company indicated that it feared only one thingnot regulation, the need to raise trillions of dollars in funding, or the specter of runaway AGIbut Google. Yu also told me that marketers should remember the basics. Google has publicly stated that the way to get into AI results is with good SEO, he said. In addition, each major AI engine relies on a traditional search index [ChatGPT uses Bing, Claude uses Brave, Google uses its own index]. For these reasons, CMOs dont want separate teams optimizing for SEO and AI search as this will yield mediocre outcomes for both. Instead, companies should optimize their content for traditional search and AI-driven search at the same time, Yu said. Thats an approach that I advocate in my GEO work as well. The way to rank well in chatbots is to have a strong brand, good technical basics, and amazing content. Those are the same things you need to rank well in traditional search (and to convince actual people to buy your products, by the way!). Overall, BrightEdges data is a reminder not to put too much stock in shiny new things. Yes, its hard to turn a ship as big as Googles. But once that ship has turned, if it happens to encounter a minnow, dont be surprised who gets smushed.
Category:
E-Commerce
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