Who knew selling cookie box drops would be a viable biz? Not Matthew Jung—at least not eight months ago when he joined Last Crumb.

The CEO of the Los Angeles–based cookie company wasn’t sure a drop model was the right move, but after selling “hundreds” of boxes—and notching nearly $1 million in sales in the last four months—it proved to be the right strategy.

• A box of a dozen cookies sells for $140, and Jung said the company’s weekly drops sell out in as little as 20 seconds. The company’s waitlist numbers 50,000+.

The company’s cofounders, Derek Jaeger and Alana Arnold, brought Jung on to build “the Rolex of cookies.”

• He previously started his own DTC companies, including men’s self-care brand Sonne, and served as an advisor to DTC medical-scrubs company FITScrubs and apparel retailer Esby.

We spoke to Jung about Last Crumb’s success thus far. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation.

Deciding on the drop model: While Jung was iffy on drops, he said Last Crumb benefitted from not having any preconceived notions around the company’s biz model. They wanted to create an experience selling luxury cookies.

“When people are launching direct-to-consumer things, there’s this misconception that you start with the business model and then everything else works itself out. In our case, it has worked so well because we actually thought about the sales model after we identified all the things that we wanted to be for our customers.”

The social media strategy: Social media has been key to growing Last Crumb, with the company focusing on Instagram and TikTok. The latter, despite finding success now—#LastCrumb has 13.8 million views on TikTok, thanks to being an unboxing fave—was a challenge at first. Both Jung and Last Crumb’s cofounders felt they didn’t have control over the brand.

“What we realized was that, TikTok, the content doesn’t look as good. It’s kind of weird. It has a lot to do with the music that you’re overlaying. It’s like funny videos that people are reposting. From a brand perspective, from my perspective, I feel like this is a total nightmare.”

Landing funding: Jung said Last Crumb was prepared to bootstrap its operation—telling us the company became profitable within three months of hitting the market this year—but ended up raising roughly $1 million in funding earlier this month to grow faster. The money allowed for a much larger kitchen and new hires (it now has 15+ employees).

“For us, we realized that we could build a really cash-flow-positive business, while at the same time, having kind of a slush fund to look to expansion opportunities.”—KM

The resale revolution is coming for your couch. Chairish, the vintage-furniture platform, has just released its first-ever Resale Report, combining internal data with research from Statista to outline the burgeoning secondhand furniture space.

Back in 2018, Chairish’s report noted that fashion led resale, accounting for 49% of the market, while the home-furnishings category only made up 11%. Apparel still dominates, but last year, home goods climbed among the fastest-growing resale categories.

• The resale furnishings category is projected to grow by 54% by 2025, 3.5x faster than traditional retail, per the report.
• Sales for secondhand furniture are on track to hit $16.6 billion over the next five years, a 70% jump from 2018.

“A lot of this is due to habits that were initiated, formed, and developed in the fashion space that are now migrating into the home area,” Chairish cofounder Anna Brockway explained in a presentation ahead of the report’s release.

Staying home: Of course, those habits were accelerated by the pandemic—to the benefit of Chairish, which saw a 60% increase in sales last year, as well as the furniture industry at large.

“Buyers very quickly became more comfortable buying big-ticket sofas [and] home furnishing items [online] because they needed to,” cofounder Gregg Brockway said.

The drivers? As with fashion, younger sustainability-minded shoppers are leading the trend: 31% of millennial and Gen Z shoppers said Covid boosted their interest in online shopping for used or vintage furniture, per a Chairish/Statista survey.

• 44% of millennials have already resold furniture online.

And, and, and: Brockway nodded to how customers might look to resale to avoid the delays caused by supply-chain issues. “Vintage, by definition, is immediately available and ready to ship.”—JG

Move over, Instagram shopping: Albertsons will soon let customers buy groceries via live-streaming on its website.

The details: The new initiative is in partnership with short-form video platform Firework, and will roll out starting October 15.

• Phase one will add short cooking content, while phase two will make the videos shoppable and enable live-streaming.
• Phase three (set for January 2022) will introduce a “retail media component,” allowing other brands to put their social media videos onto the grocery giant’s websites and tap into the technology.

Make it fun: This is Firework’s first-of-its-kind partnership with a grocery retailer, but the platform said it is in talks with other grocery stores (plus fashion and beauty brands) across the US to introduce similar initiatives.

“The retail space is doing a tremendous amount with livestream right now,” Jason Holland, Firework’s president of global business, told Retail Brew. “When we were introduced to Albertsons, they leaned forward super progressively and said, ‘We want to completely reinvent the entire digital consumer experience to be entertainment.’”

Zoom out: Albertsons Companies isn’t the first US grocer to dabble with livestream shoppable content; both Kroger and Walmart have introduced shoppable how-to recipe videos.

Most retailers have tried to make social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram work for them (no surprise, that’s where audiences are), but Firework’s pitch is to “decentralize” the livestream shopping realm. 

• “It’s not being powered into a social app,” Holland noted of the Albertsons’ partnership. “It’s not being powered into a walled garden.”

+1: Albertsons is also piloting DoorDash’s DoubleDash service, which allows customers to add items from multiple merchants for no extra fee.—JS

Today’s top retail reads.

Fluid fashion: Harris Reed is bringing gender-bending fashion design to the mainstream, working with names like Harry Styles and Solange. (the New Yorker)

All in: Nike’s hands-free sneakers were a breakthrough in inclusive, accessible footwear and design tech. But the company knows it still has more to do. (Bloomberg)

For sale: A Swedish company opened what’s maybe the first border/port shop inside a shipping container in Wales, selling duty-free goods to travelers. (Forbes)

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Even before legalization was on Canada’s horizon, Kayleigh Donahue knew she wanted to work in the cannabis space. (She even started her own small biz growing industrial hemp.) Fast forward to 2018, when legalization became a reality, and Donahue got her chance: She joined Kiaro, a Canadian cannabis retailer, as an analyst and is now the company’s VP of business development and licensing. Keep reading for the lowdown.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I find and license physical locations for cannabis retail and look for complementary revenue diversification opportunities.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile: Cannabis retail is a lot like Monopoly—it’s all about leasing the right spaces and trading with other players.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Our public listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2020. It was so satisfying to watch a startup grow from the ground up and complete this rite of passage.

Tell us your favorite retail accounts to follow: Cannabis Retailer Business Magazine, Headset, BDSA, and Business of Cannabis.

Hands down, the best fast food restaurant chain is…A&W. Teen Burger forever!

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• How cannabis companies navigate opening up shop
• Breaking down Amazon’s pandemic hiring spree
• Holiday sales will hit up to $1.3 trillion this year: Deloitte