👋 Hey there!

Welcome to mid-week D2C Pulse: A bite-sized newsletter where we cover:

🌎 Exciting products from e-commerce markets of the world

🗞 Developments in online marketplaces globally

📊 Fun facts about the D2C ecosystem

Stick till the end of the newsletter, we come bearing goodies for ya! 🎁

Let’s get to the awesome D2C brands first…

🇫🇷 Global To Local: France

France is a magnificent region, with its centuries-old architecture, châteaux, cobblestone streets, cafés & wines, lavender gardens, and a fantasy travel destination for us all. While keeping the renaissance flame alive, France is budding into an e-commerce economy, with a revenue of USD 114.4 bn in 2020 and expected to reach USD 203.57 bn by 2026. Super!

Here’re our interesting picks from the country of romance:

🕯️ Forever Candles is enlightening you forever through its refillable candles. Just heat the Forever Candle wax flakes, pour it into the candle container, cool it, and light it! With their 100% natural soy wax blend and amazing scents, they are selling big in France. Pour, light et action!

🧼 Imagine if you could eliminate all the plastic bottles from your bathroom? Sounds crazy right, but better to have crazy products than driving our planet crazy! Unbottled is offering all your toiletries in form of a soap bar - shampoo, facial cleanser, body cleaner, etc. and helping you reduce plastic waste with ease. They have a special baby range too.

🍒 We have spent hours deciding what to cook and another one buying groceries to make that dish Jow is taking this task off your head. On Jow’s app, customers get to shop by recipes rather than by shopping aisles. Baskets get filled up with ingredients for fajitas, dahl, and caponata, rather than with vegetables, dairy, etc. This is how it works:

Jow could have saved us that Sunday afternoon we just spent deciding what to cook rather than actually cooking!

🚴‍♀️ Driven by the insight that the French love to cycle and adore fashion, Café du Cycliste produces first-class cyclewear combining performance with modern French elegance. Yup, you gotta be dazzling even while paddling. Check out the collection and compare it to your plain jane Decathalon-T-shirt-and-shorts look for biking.

👖 Hand me downs are big in France- from luxury fashion (Vestiaire, Patatam) to baby apparel and accessories (Beebs)

🗞️ Global Marketplace Updates

1. Amazon is launching its 1st physical fashion store after unmanned grocery stores & hair salons with AR colour. Know why this QR code model is unique!

2. Walmart is not far behind in the Metaverse race.

3. Meta is framing rules for policing Lil’ Miquela and Shudu (virtual influencers).

4. You say Meta. We say NFT! D2C brands are pushing hard to stay relevant in the digital realm. Check out the beginning of the D2C-NFT love story here.

3. Rumour has it Chinese fast fashion retailer Shein is readying its NY listing - 1st major deal by a Chinese company since US regulators increased oversight.

4. Google overhauls its cookie replacement. Cookie apocalypse is nearing.

📊 Graph-iti Of The Day

There are times when we spend a minute to an hour easily zoned out, staring into the wall. Unlike us, data never sleeps. Check out below how much data gets generated (in just a minute) by apps that most of us have on our phones:

Goodies for D2C Pulse Readers 🎁

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That’s all for today!

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