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At first glance, Clove’s collaboration strategy may seem a little wacky. Why, you might ask, is a startup that makes sneakers for healthcare workers partnering with Land O’Lakes butter, Levain cookies, and Olipop prebiotic sodas? It’s a good question, but there’s method to the madness. Clove’s team members spend their days studying the lives of doctors and nurses, and they’ve discovered that food is a rare source of pleasure and joy in a very stressful workplace. “I watch nurses get ready with me videos as a form of ethnographic research,” says Jordyn Amoroso, Clove’s co-founder and chief brand officer. “You see nurses pack their lunches with a baked good, or a healthy soda, because it might be the only happy moment in a difficult shift.” Clove’s partnerships offer a fascinating glimpse into the wild world of food collabs that have exploded over the last three years. They’ve ranged from blockbusters like Rhode makeup’s partnership with Krispy Kreme to the absurd, like Arby’s collaboration with Old Spice. Still, brands say that smart food collaborations are now an important tool to standing out in the increasingly competitive grocery aisle and becoming lifestyle brands. Tapping into collaborations is a radical move for a company in healthcarean industry that isn’t known for being fashion-forward or trendyhelping it stand out from more established players like Nurse Mates and Alegria. Earlier this year, Clove dropped a butter-yellow sneaker in partnership with Land O’Lakes in a collaboration that went viral in the healthcare community, with more than 100 million impressions and thousands of butter-colored sneaker sold. And today, Clove is dropping a new collab with Olipop for socks that are emblazoned with the soda’s iconic fruit symbols. [Photo: Courtesy of Clove] A Fashionable Healthcare Brand Joe Ammon founded Clove as a love letter to his wife, a nurse who spent 12-hour shifts in the ugly, uncomfortable shoes. Healthcare workers are required to wear special shoes that are slip-resistant and waterproof because they’re exposed to bodily fluids; many hospitals also have a dress code requiring them to be black or white. Ammon felt that nursing shoe companies weren’t putting much care into how shoes looked or felt. In 2019, he launched Clove with a line of shoes that met all the functional requirements, but also had a much cushier insole and also looked more like a cool sneaker. The concept was a hit: The brand has now sold more than a million pairs. [Photo: Courtesy of Clove] Amoroso believes that Clove’s success comes, in part, by tuning into the worlds of doctors and nurses. For instance, the brand’s name does not refer to the spice, but is rather a play on medical lingo: Doctors use a line over the letter “c” as a shorthand for the word “with” so the brand’s name means “with love.” Each pair of shoes comes with a pen that says “for borrowing only,” since people notoriously steal nurse’s pens. As Amoroso has spent time with healthcare workers, she’s seen that they care just as much about fashion and trends as other people, but the industry doesn’t treat them like other consumers. On social media, she’s seen nurses and doctors get excited about say, Rhode’s partnership with Krispy Kreme donuts or Studs’ partnership with Van Leeuwan ice cream. “Food collabs are everywhere now, and some are really cool,” she says. “Why shouldn’t healthcare workers get things that are fun and trendy? The industry seems to assume they are content with boring products.” Clove’s first big food collab launched in September, when it partnered with Land O’ Lakes butter to launch a butter themed sneaker. Earlier in the year, another butter brand, Kerrygold, had gone viral on TikTok after it had taken influencers to Ireland, where they created swoony-worthy content of landscapes and food. [Photo: Courtesy of Clove] Land O’ Lakes and Clove attempted to create an equally fun moment by delivering influencers enormous yellow boxes that looked like sticks of butter, filled with everything from butter hair clips and tote bags, to butter yellow sneakers and socks, and cooler bags filled with butter. In some cases, they sent a butter butler to nurse’s homes to deliver sneakers on a silver tray. The collab was a success, generating upwards of 100 million impressions, and selling thousands of butter yellow sneakers. Another collab with Levain came out of an insight that cookies were often a go-to treat after a long shift. “In a 12-hour shift, a nurse has seen people be born and die,” says Paula Belatti, Clove’s co-founder and COO. “Sharing a cookie with a co-worker is a brief moment of self-care.” Clove partnered with Levain bakeries near hospitals in Boston and Philadelphia to give healthcare workers coffee, cookies, and compression socks when they left their shift. And today, just in time for the holiday season, Clove is launching its next big food partnership with Olipop, a brand that is well known for its viral marketing, from creating immersive hotel rooms inspired by its flavors to collaborating with a swimwear brand Kulani Kinis on soda-inspired bikinis. Clove customers will be able to buy a set of three socks for $40 that feature fruit icons. “They’re very nostalgic,” says Amoroso. “They’re inspired by ‘day-of-the-week’ underwear and socks millennials had when we were growing up in the 90s.” Why Are Food Brands Obsessed with Collabs Over the past three years, food brands have gone all in on collabs. Some have made sense, like when olive oil brand Graza partnered with Areaware to launch a ‘drizzle and drip’ serving set, or when the buzzy food brands Fishwife and Fly By Jing created cans of spicy smoked salmon. Others created buzz and cute products, like when Studs created ice-cream inspired earring charms with Van Leeuwen. Steven Vigilante, Olipop’s director of strategic partnerships, says that collaborations have been a feature of the fashion industry for more than 15 years, when brands realized they had a powerful opportunity to tap into each others’ audiences, especially as the cost of marketing on social media has gone up. But over the past five years, as the food industry has been flooded with new players, brands have needed to get more creative. “It’s not enough to focus on the food itself,” Vigilante says. “We want to become a lifestyle brand. Collaborations allow us to partner with likeminded brands to create an emotional connection with customers, so they choose us over the competition.” But as food collabs became commonplace, some brands have needed get more bizarre and extreme in order to get any media attention. There was the time when luxury brands like Balenciaga partnered with Lay’s on a clutch that looked like a bag of chips or Kate Spade partnered with Heinz on ketchup themed accessories. Crocs created a clog that looked like a KFC bucket that came with an accessory that smelled like fried chicken. Arby’s created an deodorant with Old Spice supposedly designed tackle the sweats diners get after a meat-heavy meal. E.l.f. cosmetics dropped an eyeshadow palette inspired by Chipotle ingredients. “In some cases, the partnerships don’t seem to make any sense,” Vigilante says. “They’re just kind of a cash grab, and it might put off the customer.” Brands appear to be pulling back from the more absurd collabs, and focusing instead on partnerships that are authentic and logical. Olipop for instance, positions itself as a better-for-you soda, with low sugar and prebiotics, and it has been working to make inroads with hospitals. “Hospital kitchens and cafeteria offer regular soda, which doctors actively dissuade patients from drinking,” says Vigilante. “We’re offering a healthier alternative.” Land O’Lakes, for its part, tends to attract older customers who have been using the product for years, but the brand has been trying to win over younger consumers. The Clove partnership made sense because the brand skews younger, and butter-colored products were having a viral moment on social media. “This collab was an opportunity to put ourselves in front of a new generation, and tell a story about how we’re not just their grandmother’s butter,” says Catherine Fox, Land O’Lakes’ VP of central marketing. Clove and Olipop both have a pipeline of other collabs in the works for 2026, and they believe partnerships are a valuable tool in the arsenal for building a modern brand. “Collaborations don’t need to be surprising or outlandish to work,” says Vigilante. “It’s about giving your customers something fun to look forward to and telling a story about what your brand stands for.”
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E-Commerce
When Vlad Drguin founded his mid-century inspired toy car company, Candylab, in 2013, he had a Kickstarter page and a dream. His goal was to create wooden model cars inspired by hot rods and classic American car designs; toys that would be both durable enough for play and sleek enough for display. As it turns out, theres a major growing market for that kind of thingand Candylab just rebranded to capture it. Since its founding, Candylab has secured retail placement in stores like Londons Design Museum, MoMa, the Guggenheim, Barnes & Noble, and the cult favorite apparel brand Kith. Its also notched major brand collabs including with Saint Laurent, Zara Kids, Criterion Collection, The New York Times, and, most recently, Netflixs Stranger Things. [Photo: Courtesy of Candylab] In recent years, Candylab has expanded its product offerings into two categories: one is its original line of premium, heftier cars, designed with collectibility in mind, and the second is a new line of smaller, less expensive, more lightweight cars engineered for play. Candylabs toys naturally fit into an increasingly bifurcated toy industry that, over the past few years, has begun targeting two different audiences: kids who want to play with toys, and adults who want to collect them (and maybe play a bit, too). The companys issue, according to Johnny Selman, founder of the design agency Selman, was that Candylabs branding didnt draw a clear distinction between its core products, making it difficult for customers to understand its offerings. So, his team worked with Candylab to create a new logo, brand positioning, product names, and visual identity that streamline it for a future where toys are meant for every kind of customer. [Photo: Courtesy of Candylab] What’s a ‘kidult,’ anyway? Candylabs products are a prime example of items beloved by a niche that some might refer to as the kidult segment, or an emerging consumer base of adults who are investing in toys of their own. According to a 2024 Circana report, adults accounted for more toy sales than preschoolers, with 43% purchasing a toy for themselves in the previous year. Companies like Lego and Mattel have increasingly begun tapping into this trend with new, nostalgia-driven items specifically designed for an adult audience. John Paul Chirdon, a creative director at Selman, says Drguins goal has always been to make nice, design-forward toys for kidsand adults interest in the product naturally comes alongside that. As an adult, you dont really punch down to make something attractive for kids, you just make something really good for kids, Chirdon says. Selmans challenge, then, was to design a brand architecture that was both really awesome for kids and really premium for adults. [Photo: Courtesy of Candylab] Designing a new brand for Candylab When Selman began brainstorming a new brand identity for Candylab, the core problem quickly became clear. Because the company had been built piece-by-piece over time by a small team, it was overflowing with great retro imagery and branding concepts, but lacked a consistent overarching brand story. Across some of the packaging, Johnny says, his team found at least six different versions of the Candylab logo. [Photo: Courtesy of Candylab] Selman streamlined the broader branding using past iterations of the Candylab logowhich themselves pulled inspiration from chrome typography on vintage carsto create one retro-yet-legible wordmark that represents the company. From there, it also identified a core color palette for the brand and narrowed its font options to just one type family called Space Grotesk. This simplification process opened the door for Selman to address the fact that, online, customers had trouble distinguishing between the brands more kid-centric line of cars (then called Candycars) and its more premium, adult-focused large cars (then called Midcentury Americana). Online, that branding didn’t exist, Chirdon says. The Americana and Candycar lines weren’t visually distinguished from each other or the overarching Candylab brand, leaving consumers confused about the difference between all three. Ultimately, Chirdon adds, we were like, You’re one brandCandylab. Now let’s deal with just making all the products clear. Looking ahead to new kinds of cars To start, the team decided to fully rename the premium car line Mints, while the smaller cars are still called Candycars. Now, though, the two lines look entirely distinct on shelves and online. Mints are universally displayed against an white background, both in packaging and digitally, to keep a cleaner look. Meanwhile, Candycars are packaged and edited onto colorful backgrounds in hues like pastel blue, tangerine, and teal. Mints and Candycars also have their own dedicated logos, each inspired by different eras of car typography. What we tried to do was push that a little more whimsical for the Candycar line and then push it a little bit more classic grown-up with the Mints line, Johnny says. [Photo: Courtesy of Candylab] Candylabs new identity has already appeared online, and it will start rolling out on packaging as new cars debut over time. More importantly, Johnny and Chirdon say, this brand architecture means that Candylab can start introducing new product lines without confusing customerslike an accessory pack of toy roads called Roadworks and a fresh car design called Toons, both of which are part of Candylabs current fundraiser on Kickstarter. We helped them create the platform to keep going with clarity, Chirdon says.
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E-Commerce
Three months ago, I fired up ChatGPT and asked it to design a highly aggressive, short-term investment portfolio, selecting five stocks that were most likely to make me fabulously wealthy in six months time. Then, I threw good sense to the wind, transferred $500 of my actual money into a Robinhood account, and bought the stocks that ChatGPT had pitched. Since then, its been a wild ride. My portfolio has flown to new heights, giving me serious FOMO about the fact that I didnt put all my money into ChatGPTs picks. Then, it singed its wings, falling Icarus-style to lows that had me almost ready to bail on the whole thing and redirect the charred remains of my money to the kind of boring stuff (car payments, dental work) that I probably should have used it for in the first place. Were halfway through my six-month experiment. Lets dig deeper into how things have gone. First, a disclaimer. Nothing here should be considered investment advice. As youll see, stocks picked by chatbots are incredibly volatile, and theres a solid chance I could lose most of my investment. Always consult a professional before making your own financial decisions. A Crazy Strong Start When I asked ChatGPT to pick a portfolio of five high-growth stocks back in September, it spent almost 10 minutes doing research before returning its picks. The five it chose were Palantir, AppLovin, MicroStrategy, Agios Pharmaceuticals, and Hut 8. The bot felt that Palantir and AppLovin had strong, AI-powered businesses that would continue to dominate their markets and grow. Agios Pharma, the bot reported, was awaiting the results of an FDA trial for a new drug. If the trial was successful, ChatGPT felt its value would soar. And finally, Hut 8 and MicroStrategy were essentially leveraged Bitcoin plays. Both companies held a lot of Bitcoins on their balance sheets, and so their valuations should swing along with the value of those coinsonly on steroids, because of the effects of leverage. I hadnt heard of many of those companies. Still, I decided to blindly trust ChatGPTs advice and sink $500 into them, dividing the money evenly across ChatGPTs picks as it suggested. At first, things went well enough. In the first three weeks of my experiment, my portfolio climbed by about 12%. That was promising. Then, all of a sudden, things started going very well. In October, my portfolio took off. Each morning when I opened the Robinhood app, I was greeted by a delightful swirl of green numbers, climbing ever higher. By the beginning of November, my portfolio was worth $652a gain of almost 1/3 in just two months time. Extrapolating that out to the full year, my gains would have been 180%+ if the momentum continued. And at the time, it wasnt just continuing. It was accelerating. I started quietly wondering whether I had been too cautious with this experiment. Maybe I should have put $1,000 into ChatGPTs picks instead of $500. Maybe I should take out a second mortgage and put that money into the bots picks, too. Or maybe I had discovered a whole new way of investing, and soon every quant fund would be knocking down my door, offering me a $900,000 per year salary (before bonus, of course) to teach them my Thomas Smith AI Stock Investing Method. And an Equally Crazy Fall Then, all of a sudden, everything went horribly wrong. Just as October had been a sea of green, November was nothing but blood-red numbers each time I fired up Robinhood. By the 20th of the month, my portfolio had plummeted from its peak of $652 to only $451. Thats a 30% decline in about 3 weeksa spectacular fall. It was also the first time I was genuinely in the red, and had actually lost my own money (on paper, anyway) through my AI investing experiment. And the losses seemed to be piling on, accelerating just as fast as the gains had done before. That was unsettling, and not something I relished explaining to my accountant at the end of next tax year. I could imagine the conversation: So Tom, you have a $500 loss attributed to Misc Investments here. Tell me about that. Well, I asked ChatGPT to invest money for me, and then blindly followed its exact recommendations. And then I didnt cut my losses when it started going poorly, because I was afraid my readers would yell at me. **long pause** I see How Will it All End? As I write this in early December, my portfolio has stabilized a bit, and Im back in the black, with a total gain of $14. Theres still three months left in my experiment, so its possible that my portfolio will rise from the ashes and fly again. But Lambo money is looking increasingly unlikely. What went wrong? On a basic level, ChatGPTs picks were bad. Bitcoins value has plummeted over the last few months, and the bots portfolio isby designvery exposed to Bitcoin. ChatGPT also bet on Agios Pharma getting positive results from its clinical trials. In fact, those results were mixed. The stock duly dropped. AppLovin was likewise doing great, until the SEC launched a probe into its data gathering practices. Bad picks arent necessarily the real problem, though. Human investment managers mis-call the market or make bad picks all the time. Risk is part of investing. The real issue is how confidently ChatGPT backed up its picks with bold, assertive language. Overall, the portfolio aims for explosive upside rather than stability. Each stock has recent momentum o an upcoming catalyst, so this mix could significantly outperform if trends continue, the bot told me when it selected its portfolio. The whole thing was tilted for maximal growth the bot assured me, bolded text and all. About Agios, it said A positive FDA outcome or even renewed optimism could spark a significant rally, and about MicroStrategy it insisted Analysts project that a BTC surge to $150K could yield ~6570% stock gains. Even its disclaimer (Actual outcomes depend on market moves but all are supported by the cited fundamental and market trends.) isnt really a disclaimer. The bot essentially interrupts itself mid-sentence to further reassure me that its making good choices, and invalidate any sense of caution it may have inadvertently introduced. Chatbots overconfidence is a well-documented issue. In many cases, the certainty with which bots deliver their responses is annoying, but not damaging. ChatGPT recently swore to one of my family members that Philadelphias 44 Bus doesnt run on weekends. It was Saturday. As it was telling her this, the bus passed by on the street outside. That makes for a funny story about bots failability. But when chatbots are performing mission-critical functions related to our health and money, their baked-in overconfidence is way riskier. I knew what I was getting myself into with my investing experiment. But a naive investor might not read a chatbots stock advice critically. Believing its confident language, they could lose serious money by trusting the bot too much. As for me, Ive still got my $500 invested, for better or worse. Perhaps ChatGPT will ultimately prove prescient, and a late-stage Bitcoin rally will save my dreams of unbridled wealth. Or, maybe the rest of my half-grand will evaporate. In another three months, Ill know!
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E-Commerce
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