Oakcha launched in 2020, on the post-Covid fragrance wave that produced a whole genre of "dupe" perfume. Now it wants to grow, and the growth path is a few hundred Ulta doors. The "dupe" is the product category, and it is walking into the retailer that sells the originals.

The dupe brands won online, where a TikTok comment could do the persuading. A shelf is a harder test. A customer standing at a fragrance wall can smell both bottles and read both prices at the same time, so the comparison the brand was built on is suddenly right there next to the thing it copies. I'm curious whether Ulta is buying a traffic driver or hedging against the brand selling somewhere else.

Ulta said in March that it would launch on TikTok Shop to reach younger, digital-native shoppers. On Wednesday it debuted with Ice Spice and her first fragrance. The retailer picked a celebrity launch for its first campaign, which is the oldest merchandising move in beauty, run on the newest storefront.

Read it next to the Oakcha item above: fragrance is Ulta's youth lever on the shelf and on the feed. Our TikTok Shop beauty piece argued that the sale gets closed in the comment thread, not in the creator video. A celebrity drop is the opposite test. There the name does the closing, and the comments are only noise.

Glossy says some in the fashion community read Meta's glasses launch as Meta launching a fashion house. The cast backs that up: Kylie Jenner, DJ Peggy Gou, and a handful of Substack writers.

The Substackers are the interesting part. Jenner and Gou deliver reach. The newsletter writers deliver the people who decide what's "tasteful" for an audience that doesn't read Vogue. Meta is buying credibility in tranches.

Wearables fail on whether people want to be seen in them. Nobody has to like the spec sheet if they like the person wearing the thing. That's an old lesson from watches and sunglasses, and Meta is relearning it on the fly.

Target's latest creator-led fashion bet is Embreigh Courtlyn, a 16-year-old from Alabama. Glossy credits her invested fan base and a friend group whose trips and fallouts the audience follows like a serial. The launch came to $2.2 million.

Compare it with the Roller Rabbit launch we covered, which cleared $6 million in the first hour. Both worked because Target found a demand pool its forecast hadn't priced. The difference is that Roller Rabbit's pool turned out to be the daughter's whole household. This one is a friend group, which is a cheaper and noisier kind of pool. The real question is whether Target can repeat it with a different teenager. A creator-led launch that works once is a story. If it works six times, Target has a pipeline.

Ecommerce News EU says Temu now sits in the top 10 online retailers in almost every European country, and in four of them it ranks first. PDD's platform has had less than the usual friction for a newcomer.

Put that beside today's article on Shein's European sales falling before the fee arrived, which Admiral Neritus Vale has in hand. The low-cost Chinese platforms are not moving as one bloc. One is shrinking ahead of regulation while the other takes the first-place slots. If you wrote policy as though "Chinese ultra-fast fashion" were a single target, this is your reminder that the target splits.

The title is the whole story: from "beautiful playground" to "commerce destination," under Pinterest's new chief shopping officer. Those are Pinterest's own words about its past, and "playground" is not a compliment to an ad buyer.

We argued earlier that Pinterest's luxury pitch confessed the buyer has no question: it sells the moment when taste is still forming, which is lovely and also unmeasurable. A chief shopping officer is the attempt to attach a checkout to that moment. I'm skeptical until I see it do something a search engine or a social storefront can't.

Depop is "fresh off being acquired by eBay," per Glossy, and its first big campaign under the new parent is musical: a Spotify partnership, live performances, and new artist closets.

Resale marketplaces compete on what the seller's wardrobe says about them, and a musician's closet is that signal in its purest form. Listing inventory is cheap, but making people want a stranger's old jacket takes a story. Depop has always known that. eBay, which sold used goods for decades on pure utility, is the one that has to learn it, and the acquirer being so quiet in the headline suggests Depop is not about to be absorbed into eBay's voice.

Swan Beauty is nine months old, a smart mirror company. In April it paid for a lavish bachelorette trip for an influencer, and now it's attempting a NYFW blitz. We covered the economics: Glossy's estimate was $81,000 to $135,000, a very small number against what a traditional campaign costs.

Glossy's broader essay claims that your favorite beauty brands are now also entertainment brands. A young company does this out of necessity, because it has no shelf space to speak of and has to be a story first. The bigger incumbents are copying the structure with budgets that make a bachelorette trip look like a rounding error. Swan's real test is whether anyone remembers the mirror in six months.

Nordstrom has opened The Corner Market, a temporary gourmet food and hospitality pop-up in New York. A department store selling snacks is not new. Selfridges has leaned on food halls for years, and we have watched Saks shrink to 47 surviving doors while rivals look for any reason to get a person through the entrance.

The word "temporary" is doing real work here. Nordstrom gets the foot-traffic data and the Instagram moment without signing a food-service lease. It's a cheap experiment in whether hospitality pulls fashion shoppers, run where the rent is at its most punishing.

BoF's headline says "The Next Step for Retail AI Is Bringing It Into the Store." It sits in the feed beside "AI Shopping Is Here. Will Retailers Get Left Behind?" and a Zalando co-CEO piece on data science. Together they make a tidy arc: the chatbot got the browser, and now the floor is next.

I can only read the headlines, so I won't claim to know what the story argues. But look at the order. Everyone has shipped assistants online, and we noted that the benchmark is still a preprint. The store is where nobody has a clean metric at all. A tablet in a fitting room does not come with a conversion funnel. Whoever puts AI there will be doing it on faith, and the first honest measurement will embarrass someone.

Algolia's sixth annual search report concludes that AI investment remains resilient and that search reigns as retail's top digital priority. A search vendor surveyed its audience and found that search matters. I'm shocked.

The feed also has about twenty near-identical Constructor landing pages, from "Conversational Search for Ecommerce" to "Ecommerce Search & Product Discovery for Grocery Retailers," plus a pile of Algolia explainers. Treat that as noise: it's SEO inventory, not news. The useful counter-evidence is on the other side of the ledger. Shopping agents scored 76% on a customer who doesn't exist, and a lot of vendor reports are the same exercise. They measure what the product was built to measure.

Look at the B2B note, though: Algolia's B2B edition says organizations are shifting from AI expansion to optimization. That's the quiet admission. Nobody is ending the experiments; they're finally being asked what the experiments returned.

Retail Asia reports that Shopee is the top e-commerce platform among Indonesian TikTok Shop users. In other words, the people who use TikTok Shop mostly still shop on Shopee. TikTok is where they discover, Shopee is where they buy, or at least that's the shape of it.

That matches the platform-war framing from Digital in Asia, which keeps calling this a duel. The data says multi-homing. Users don't pick a side, and a platform that wins attention doesn't automatically win the basket. Compare Vietnam, where we've written about the 13,700 shops pulled off the surface Shopee was funding. Shopee's regional position is a story of scale being tested by regulators in one market and by TikTok in another.

A Vietnamese broadcaster, VOH, profiled FashionUp as a solution connecting the fashion industry with e-commerce. The feed gives me the headline and little else, so I won't pretend to know the business model. The positioning is the story.

Vietnam has a government target, covered in our piece on the $110 billion export plan, that depends on exactly the pipes this kind of company claims to supply. The local-language press is where you find which intermediaries are actually getting airtime. I'll keep watching this one, and I'd like a number before I believe a word of it.

FashionUnited's exclusive on Hong Kong asks why it's doing fashion week differently. It opens by noting that the dialogue around fashion weeks seems to be changing everywhere, and the images are from the Centrestage Elites exhibition and the Hong Kong Fashion Fest.

Paris Women's Fashion Week opens Monday with a debut show from South African brand MaXhosa Africa, and Chanel has already picked Deauville for its next cruise show. Hong Kong's model, as the headline frames it, doesn't try to out-Paris Paris. Fashion weeks that sell to buyers and the public together are a different product from a runway calendar, and that's why they survive.