Before I jump into the dates and events that are happening in November, can we talk a bit about MahJong?! It’s popularity is growing by leaps and bounds! Here are some facts to get your attention:

“…everywhere you look, there’s something mahjong,” Megan Trottier, the founder of Oh My Mahjong told Modern Retail this week.

Yelp data shows searches for mahjong clubs has surged by nearly 4,500% recently. Some are estimating that the MahJong trend (also referred to the MahJong “industry” but I don’t think that encompasses all the merch that’s being produced) will reach about $4 billion in 2027.

“Lots of people will have three, four, five mats,” Trottier told Modern Retail. “Some of our teachers have 20 tile [sets]. … And depending on what [events] they host, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s fall. I’m going to get out my fall mat with my fall tiles.'”

People are playing at libraries and community centers, high end resorts and spas. Anthropologie is offering a very nice MahJong set , as well as a chic MahJong tee, and MahJong themed candle.

I point these ancillary items out to demonstrate that you don’t need to manufacture MahJong sets in order to get in on this growing trend - find items that support and celebrate the spirit of the game. There are many nuances that I haven’t quite figured out, such as the American version is often spelled Mah Jongg; and people who play often call it Mahj.

Note: Don’t miss the calendar download at the bottom. ⬇️

November PR and editorial priorities

• Gift guide follow-up: Those editors that you’ve been cultivating relationships with over the past few months will need a few pleasantly persistent followups this month. Keep developing and pitching gifting angles so that you’re top of mind when last minute opportunities arise.

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• Local media: Local newspapers are always game to find out about events brands and retailers in their area might be hosting; locally made products that are selling out; and plans that you have for your brand in 2027. Local magazines are a wonderful way to get your toes wet in the process of pitching yourself (as a subject) and being profiled that way → check editorial calendars to see if there’s a thematic fit planned in coming months.

• January pitching: While everyone is talking about Christmas and New Years, writers, editors and publishers are putting together their Valentine’s Day gift guides. It’s lucky that the color themes usually overlap pretty well. Get your ideas together and take some lifestyle shots that drive home the heart shaped vibe of February.

All November

No Shave November - a broadly focused Cancer awareness fundraising effort.

Movember - monthlong fundraising for Men’s Health Month.

World Vegan Month - a great time to promote your vegan products, and share ways that people can incorporate your brand into their vegan lifestyle.

Novel Writing Month - this may sound confusing, so please bear with me. The original NaNoWriMo which stood for National Novel Writing Month was dissolved last year, but the faithful are still working independently to continue the legacy. If you have a novel in you, or at least a fictional short story, November is a great time to start it → especially if you’ve been eyeing Substack but didn’t know what to do with it. On social media, episodic videos are getting lots of views → which sounds like a lot of work for a small brand, especially over the holidays. But what about episodic posting? It can be a phenomenal way to counteract stress without resorting to alcohol, and it could be a good way to promote your products in a very creative way. Here’s a list of fiction substacks to inspire you.

Native American Heritage Month: Perhaps spotlight Native-owned makers, artists, founders, or organizations with specificity.

November 2026 Days of Note

Nov. 1 Clocks Fall back Sunday Night: You can have a great time making reels of things falling back into things like pillows, piles of leaves, big vats of leftover Halloween candy - and my favorite, a big pile of cash. 😉 (Here’s hoping).

November 4th Stress Awareness Day: create relaxing rituals and suggest ways that your followers and customers can cope with stress over the holidays.

November 5th National Redhead Day: a lighthearted way to highlight your favorite redheads from history or today!

Nov 11 Singles’ Day: oh my, imagine the self care kits, special emails and discounts you can offer on this day! It was started in the 1990s as a celebration of single life (represented by the four "1"s in 11/11), and while not that well known here is in the US, has grown into the largest shopping day in the rest of world, eclipsing both Black Friday and Cyber Monday in sales figures.

Nov 11 Angel Day: In numerology, the number 11 is considered a "master number" linked to intuition and enlightenment. So, it stands to reason that having double 11’s is extra empowering. This is a good day to visualize and manifest goals for 2027. Mystical brands can have a social media field day on the 11th.

Friday the 13th! Nov 13: I’ve written about this pretty extensively, along with a list of famous people who are obsessed with the date.

related reading:

Nov. 13 World Kindness Day: The goal of this day is to highlight positivity and kindness → to bridge global divides, and champion the notion that small, compassionate acts can create a positive ripple across the world (the butterfly effect in action). Get some ideas on InspireKindness.com.

Nov. 23–25 Gird your loins, this is the Black Friday preview window - let the madness begin! You should tease special offers and unique product bundles to your email list and on social media. Also test that your checkout page is working without glitching, and contains all the information you want to include on it → including your shipping deadlines.

Nov. 26 Thanksgiving: you know what to do!

Nov. 27 Black Friday: Design artwork and messaging so that your holiday deals are easy to digest for customers who may be on the receiving end of hundreds of similar pitches. IMO while the philosophy behind this day is to grab consumer buying power early - there’s a lot to be said for sitting back and letting the Amazons and Walmarts of the world do loss-leader battle on Black Friday. I think it’s difficult for smaller brands to compete with this madness. You can wait a week or two until Christmas is looming to roll out amazing sets and deals that will seem fresh and irresistible.

Nov. 28 Small Business Saturday: This is the independent-brand moment. Celebrate your entrepreneurial spirit on this day and highlight as many makers and founders as you can.

Nov. 30 Cyber Monday: I’m sort of surprised that in 2026 “Cyber Monday” is still a thing now that everyone has a phone in their pocket - but think of it as an extension of Black Friday.

Here’s a handy pdf download with calendar and tasks for the month of November 2026:

November Calendar 2026

8.65MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Dates and highlights for social media, PR pitching and marketing tasks for the month of Novemberm

Download

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

If you’ve been posting on Instagram lately you’ve probably noticed a decided drop-off in engagement over the past few months - ditto for TikTok.

LinkedIn is still pretty good if you’re in a B2B situation, but many brands also sell to consumers, making the appeal of the professionally focused platform somewhat limiting.

One platform that so many smaller brands overlook? Substack. If you’re reading this you’re most likely familiar with it 😉 but while you might have a profile here, you may or may not have set up your own actual page (yet).

» If you’re anything like most of my clients, the reasons you’re not big into writing run along the lines of:

• you don’t have time;

• you hate social media and rarely engage on any platform;

• you’re not a writer, and from what you understand, Substack is a writer’s platform;

• you’re not really clear on how creating a page here helps your brand visibility;

• you can’t think of anything to say.

Buuuuttttt … guess what!? There are a good number of really successful pages here on Substack that are highly focused but aren’t overly wordy.

And here’s a secret I’ve discovered through my own writing here on Substack: a great post doesn’t need to be a long one. Readers are looking for clear recommendations, well-chosen images, or an answer to a particular questions. Getting to the point can be your secret weapon on this platform.

First let’s talk about why you, as a small brand with limited time, should take the trouble to launch your own Substack page.

• Substack is growing. The platform grew from 20 million active users in 2025 to up to about 35 million active users in 2026. That’s a huge lift and it keeps on growing. Engagement on this platform is remarkably deep→ opening an email newsletter requires dedicated, high-intent focus compared to endless swiping on other social media.

• You own your audience. Every reader who clicks the subscribe button is an engaged human with an email address. Your following on other platforms is rented, and their algorithm decides who sees your posts. Your Substack list is yours, and the emails you create and send land in an a real person’s inbox.

• Very low setup and maintenance. I’ve tried out quite a few email and blogging platforms and Substack is by far the easiest to get up and running with quickly.

• One home for every format. There are a lot of tools here on Substack: Written posts, podcasts, videos, and live streams are all easy to create and publish from your dashboard.

• Higher-intent engagement. When someone clicks that subscribe button they’re far more likely to buy from you than a passive follower looking to be entertained.

• Greater Visibility. But taking the time to create a Substack brand identity and regularly keeping it updated, you’re positioning yourself as a distinctive and accessible voice in your category.

8 Types of Posts on Substack that Don’t Require a lot of Writing

Read more

Maybe you’ve been getting them - I know I have, not only for this newsletter, but for my native blog on my agency website.

Weirdly misdirected, but highly detailed media pitches are flooding my email inbox daily. Asks for interviews from people that have nothing to do with marketing or PR, product pitches, and event coverage.

The pitches seem like they’re from someone who’s read The Latest, a blog focused on growth for founder led and small team lifestyle brands (that’s exactly what they always say word for word in the first line). But judging from the pitches, they clearly have not.

Each has a decided template:

1. A line telling me how much they enjoy my newsletter as referenced above;

2. A quick cut-to-the-chase appeal such as “My company Acme creates rocket skates, jet propelled pogo sticks, and giant rubber bands. I think a profile of our company in [ name ] would be a great read for your subscribers”.

3. You can reach me at [email address] should you require further info.

Bang! No other information about how this would interesting to my readers.

And I want to note that these pitches, 9 times out of 10, are coming straight from brand founders → clearly not from publicists or other professional media types.

So if I’m getting this flurry, imagine the onslaught mainlining into the inboxes of editors of Allure, Oprah Daily, Vogue, Brit + Co, Marie Claire, US Weekly, ect?

Guess what they are, and many of them are returning to accepting only phone, and mailed pitches going forward. Others, like the Michigan Quarterly, and the New Yorker are moving to platforms like Submittable that require more checks before an email is sent.

PR pitching platforms fueled by AI send scrapers out to harvest the contact info and highlight details for thousands of writers. They then market this access to small businesses who don’t know any better - usually for about the same amount it would cost to hire a boutique PR firm. Customers then use AI to generate “quick” pitches and spew them out to hundreds of writers at a time.

To be fair, most large PR firms use services like Meltwater and Cision to do basically the same thing, but on a more directed scale and with a much more compelling list of reasons why Acme would be a fit for a marketing blog.

According to Media Industry Journalist Simon Owens, “Survey data suggests there are six PR reps for every one journalist, and for years they’ve been leveraging mass-spamming platforms to automate their pitches and cast as wide a net as possible. For any working journalist, it’s basically trench warfare, and the problem is only getting worse.”

» Note: Because my industry focus is narrowly trained on lifestyle writers and editors from beauty, decor, baby, and food, I’ve always created my own in house media lists and maintained relationships with writers for just this reason.

Related:

Many writers don’t bother to even read pitches, they look at the summary and subject line and if it dovetails with a subject they have coming up; are particularly intrigued by an ingredient or a product; and/or they know the sender, they’ll save it - otherwise it gets trashed within seconds.

So if sending pitches via email has turned into an exercise in futility maybe you should try mailing hard copy press kits and cover letter pitches instead.

For years at Boxwood Co we did just that. Yes - you heard that right, I started doing PR before email was a thing. In fact, I’d been in business for about 4 years before sending even one email pitch. I remember that while most were fine with emails in the beginning, many, even back in the late 1990’s, were concerned that their digital inboxes would overflow. (Fast forward 20 years - and yikes!)

But now I wonder if the death knell for emailed pitches is ringing, and those that understand the signs realize that it’s time to change tactics.

Cherry picking a few prime editors that are perfectly aligned with a story or product - then creating a beautiful paper press kit with a hand signed cover letter may seem quaint to many, but I think the time to return to that process has come.

Especially now, with the flurry of holiday pitches already flying around - one way to truly stand out is to be more than just a digital blur.

» Note: This advise is meant for true earned media pitches, not commerce listicles and other affiliate style marketing, which is best served through email.

An Easy 6 Point Guide for Using Hard Copy Press Kits and Pitches

Read more

With all this talk about witchcraft in the office and autumn latte flavor trends it’s easy to forget that the runway for holiday marketing is getting much much shorter by the day.

» Side Note to beauty brands: Today is the deadline to enter the Good Housekeeping Beauty Awards, and there are 6 other beauty award programs with deadlines in the next two weeks. «

We started on our 100 Says of Christmas Marketing 30 days ago with an introduction to why you should start early and an overview of our plan.

Over these past 30 days we’ve talked about laying down the foundation: choosing the right products to feature, outlining your holiday customer stories, and working out core campaign details in an effort to make your holiday plan more workable, controlled, and using tools you probably haven’t tried before.

If you haven’t been following along, you can still get started. You may just need to do a few more of the tasks laid out in the first 30 days in a bunch so you can catch up. The downloadable calendar and daily guide can be downloaded here (scroll to the bottom).

As we get further into our planning we’re going to hit the gas on our marketing engine. Are you ready?

In this next segment we’ll turn plans into real world action. We’ll work on creating more accessible and understandable shopping experiences for both B2B and B2C offerings. You’ll strengthen your retail relationships, and devise new opportunities for all of your customers well before the holiday rush gets underway.

We’ll be:

• Sending postcards and thoughtful holiday mail

• Creating holiday video content

• Following up with editors and expanding media outreach

• Pitching local television, podcasts, and regional press

• Developing retailer toolkits

• Planning special gifts for important stockists

• Building complementary brand collaborations

• Creating email and social content that carries your campaign story

• Approaching companies about workplace and client gifting

• Improving package inserts, thank you notes, and referral materials

• Stress testing your customer buying experience before they do it for you

In this next phase small details will pay off in an enormous way: Retailer-facing holiday assets, thoughtful package inserts, well-timed follow-ups, and simple collaborations are all on our list.

100 Days of Holiday Marketing Calendar Days 31-60

1.47MB ∙ PDF file

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Download the Days 31–60 holiday marketing calendar here.

Download

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

I’m always intrigued when I scroll my social feeds and a fun ritual pops up - it seems to happen much more often than ever before, but perhaps that’s just my algorithm.

The ritual I see a lot lately involves sprinkling cinnamon around the front door and placing a coin on the right side of the doormat to conjure abundance. A variation of this is the Feng Shui practice of blowing cinnamon through the front door → the idea draws from the historical element of cinnamon being a spice primarily reserved for the wealthy, and the front door being the primary energetic portal of your home.

What brought this subject to mind is, of course the Halloween season → but also a number of founders and trusted advisers speaking passionately about the pitfalls of clinging to “data” for every decision. How do these two thoughts wrap together? Let’s discuss:

The Downfall of Data

“You want to do something? Let's run a test. Let's A/B test it. Let's thread it through the system. Can we [get a cohort] and do do a study on it?” Poppi soda founder Allison Ellsworth told Fortune Magazine recently in a discussion about the role of data in corporate marketing departments. PepsiCo paid $1.95 billion to acquire the prebiotic soda brand last year in an apparent move to reach younger generations. This move alone is contrary to recent data that shows Gen X and Boomers outspend Gen Z.

“And you're just like, okay, well that was a trend two weeks ago. It's not a trend anymore. I don't know what to tell you, but like we've moved on, and like three days is the cycle,” Ellsworth continued. “I feel like within a media cycle, or a social cycle, or a trending cycle, it's three days. If you can't hit within that three days or be the first to move at the speed of culture, like, what are you doing? And big corporations cannot move that quickly, and they need every reason to get in their own way.”

Santiago Duran, a clinical psychologist and founder of The Honest Catapault writes: “One of the most dangerous tendencies in modern marketing is over-reliance on what’s easy to measure. Click-through rates, engagement, CAC—they’re useful, yes, but incomplete. They provide performance snapshots, not strategic guidance.”

So if we’re no longer relying solely on data, what is taking it’s place?

For Ellsworth, Duran and other well informed marketing gurus, following media trends and trusting your intuition is more closely aligned with modern brand building strategy.

GOOP recently wrote about workplace witchcraft → writer Laura Norkin talked with Rebecca Szymczak who advises executives seeking guidance on their careers, creativity and next business moves. Szymczak’s Executive Witch advisory combines intuitive practices with brand strategy, creative direction, and introductions.

And there’s been a significant rise in the reach of Witch Influencing with some accounts like Lilly Statham’s Mystic Primrose attracting more than 1.3 million followers, The Hedge Witch with 725K following, and Lindsay Squire’s The Witch of the Forest drawing in more than 525K on Instagram alone.

Over the past few months, #WitchTok has drawn more than 64.8 billion views on TikTok, Etsy is offering more than 500,000 products tagged “witch”, and the US psychic services industry was valued at $3.2billion. « Oh wait, that’s all data! So maybe data isn’t as dead as some of us are making it out to be. 😊 »

Much of the advise that witch influencers give involves self actualization through mantras, candle rituals, numerology and manifesting. But does it work?

First, what kind of witches are we talking about?

Around this time of year, aka the Season of the Witch, everyone seems to want to get into the act. Pointy hats, black capes, crystals and herbs are everywhere.

In media, witches range from the delightfully deranged Sanderson sisters and the Wicked Witch of the West, to the misunderstood women of Practical Magic. All characters with less than influential pedigrees.

Then there’s the intuitive, nature-connected Cassie Nightingale in the Hallmark Channel’s Good Witch → someone regarded as a caring friend and local guru within her charming town of Middleton, Illinois.

Most of the influential, self defined witches on social media are more Cassie Nightingale than the ladies of Hocus Pocus. Often incorporating meditation, numerology, herbalism, tarot, and positive manifestation into their practices, their focus is on reaching for the good in life → rather than spinning up curses against your competitors.

Does Your Marketing Need a Spell?

Lifestyle brands have plenty of room for imagination within their storytelling, and charging crystals under a full moon can only help fuel that creativity.

Many of the self care brands that I’ve worked with over the years have aligned their product design with various concepts of mysticism - so it’s certainly nothing new.

But turning away from traditional, narrowly defined “data” and focusing more intently on developing the flow of intuition probably is.

“Spells, spoken words, candles, anointing oils, crystals, written intentions, song, music, art can all work in combination,” Helen Beckman, founder of The Argyle Oracle, told Vogue Australia recently. “What separates practice from a product launch, is rhythm. Witchcraft is the celebration of the natural world and its many cycles through the seasons [marked with flora and fauna and sacred words that] give meaning and validation to the way in which our evolving lives are experienced.”

In her essay, The Crones Will Take Back the Night, Prudence Gibson sees the rise of witchcraft in the workplace as a bid for control, comfort, and a semblance of hope. Gibson depicts witches (or crones as she sometimes calls them) as powerful figures of active resistance who are confronting modern challenges. “The spell … is a powerful force,” she writes.

Trust your experience. Then give the hunch a test.

Marketing direction and manufacturing decisions aren’t a choice between a data set and a tarot deck.

After nearly three decades in lifestyle PR and marketing, I’ve learned to trust my gut over aligning too heavily with data. A story angle might click, clients all suddenly ask the same questions, and an early opportunity is spellbindingly intriguing.

Research by Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein (Conditions for Intuitive Expertise) describes how skilled intuition can develop through learning patterns and receiving feedback. But it also cautions that confidence and positive thinking doesn’t establish accuracy.

Just as we saw in the first section above, data, even when focused on metaphysical subject matter, is still relevant.

But your own experience of a marketing issue should outweigh what numbers say. Market studies can be weighted to have a particular outcome that flatters the one funding the endeavor. (For example a social media platform may present data that shows huge returns on advertising that just don’t materialize when you place your own ads).

I’m not suggesting that all studies are wrong, but you should always examine who commissioned them, what they have measured, and mainly whether their findings apply to your customers and your business.

For you as a smaller brand, try turning a hunch into a researchable option. If you suspect customers want a fragrance-free cleanser or a raspberry scented candle, check recent requests, talk to buyers and store owners, and then do a smaller run before committing to a larger production effort. Consider what the results from your test marketing justify before expanding it.

While absolute certainty isn’t essential, you should at least be able to learn from a possible mistake.

Keep rituals in proportion

In my Friday the 13th post from last Autumn, I explored the rituals and superstitions associated with successful people. The next question is what those habits cost.

If two launch dates work equally well and one has a number you love, go with that one. However if steadfastly securing that date turns into missing a retailer deadline or confused customers - reconsider.

The same applies to an interview or simple zoom call.

For years I had a very luck suit that I wore to important meetings - it served me well by giving me an added spark of confidence. I also have a lapis lazuli ring that I wear when I need extra clarity and protection - and I believe it works. Magical or not, many of us have lucky socks, tees, and tea blends that we believe help us through difficulty.

But before letting a belief steer larger business decisions ask yourself:

• Can I skip this without feeling that I’ve doomed the outcome?

• What does following it cost in time, money or missed opportunities?

• What evidence would make me change course?

My advise? Set the intention, burn the sage, and wear your lucky shirt, but keep rituals in proportion. The moment an enjoyable practice starts to feel like just another obligation then it looses it’s creative value and just turns into a drag on your time.

Helpful reference books to keep on hand:

^» Pocket Book of Witches by Joel Levy (September 2026) A compact guide packed with the finest historical artwork, fascinating folklore, and essential traditions relating to witchcraft. Levy takes us between cultures and continents to explore the origins, history, practices, powers, and perceptions of witches.

» Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities by Amy Stewart (May 2009) “A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war.” Learn above more than 200 of Mother Nature’s most toxic plants.

» The Green Witch: Your Complete Guide to the Natural Magic of Herbs, Flowers, Essential Oils, and More by Arin Murphy-Hiscock (September 2017). You’ll learn how to use plants for everyday healing, and crystals, gems, stones, to help you find balance.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

Consistent learning is what will always be a small business owner’s advantage over the competition - Knowledge is power! Getting quick tips on social media for marketing insight is good, but will only give you a small slice of what you need to know to make the most of your brand.

Tomorrow kicks off Amazon Prime Big Deal Days (October 6-7) and right now there’s no better time to stock up on tools that will help your business grow! Here are:

• 5 great business books released in just the past few months

• 4 great business books from the 20’s

• 1 oldie but goodie lifestyle industry focused read

Best Business Marketing Books of 2026 - Especially for Small Lifestyle Brands (that think big!)

The Future of Shopping: Using Digital, Data and AI to Win with Customers by Miya Knights

Shoppers may discover a product on TikTok, research it with Gemini, and scope it out in a store or two before buying. In The Future of Shopping: Using Digital, Data and AI to Win with Customers, retail expert Miya Knights explores how businesses can connect those experiences, anticipate customer needs, and balance new technology with personal service. For independent lifestyle brands and retailers, the book offers a wider view of how shopping is evolving and examine how to make their brand easier to discover and purchase. Published September 29, 2026

Culture Stores: Redefining the Shopping Space through Connection to Community by Ibrahim Ibrahim and Koral Ibrahim

What makes someone visit a store when they could buy the same product from the comfort of their couch and their beloved phone? Culture Stores by Ibrahim Ibrahim and Koral Ibrahim gives insight into the way retail spaces are destinations for connection, community, and shared interests. A store gives customers reasons to return beyond their next purchase. For independent retailers and lifestyle brands, its appeal is the invitation to think about what people can participate in, discover, and feel when they encounter your business. Published August 25, 2026

Take Breaks, Work Better by John Briggs

Are you trying to juggle every task in your small business and burning out in the process? Take Breaks, Work Better by John Briggs is written for you. With small business owners in mind, this book will help you build breaks into your work week that will help recharge and balance you. This book helps guide the way for solopreneurs and small business owners to protect their energy and run a highly productive, profitable business. (Published August 25, 2026)

Bootstrap Empire: The Bala Blueprint for Building a $100M Brand from the Ground Up by Natalie Holloway

Having a fabulous product is great, but the real work lies in getting people to notice it, want it, and buy it! In Bootstrap Empire: The Bala Blueprint for Building a $100M Brand from the Ground Up, Bala co-founder Natalie Holloway gives us insight into how she built a distinctive brand, and marketed it with limited resources. For small business owners, especially those selling lifestyle products in crowded categories, Bootstrap Empire offers practical guidance from someone who has navigated those decisions herself. (Published March 3, 2026)

Guru, Inc.: Win in the Creator Economy, Build an Iconic Brand, and Become the Go-To Authority in Your Niche

You can know your industry inside out and still be the person nobody thinks to call. Guru, Inc. by AJ Kumar explores how to close that gap by making your expertise recognizable. It also will help guide your social media framework and creative process. For small business owners, particularly founders whose knowledge and perspective are part of what makes their company distinctive, it offers a useful framework for becoming associated with a specific niche. It’s especially relevant if you want your visibility to support consulting, speaking, digital products, or your existing business. (Published February 24, 2026)

Recent and Relevant Business Marketing Reads

Exit Rich: The 6 P Method to Sell Your Business for Huge Profit

You may be years away from selling your business, but Exit Rich: The 6 P Method to Sell Your Business for Huge Profit by Michelle Seiler Tucker and Sharon Lechter makes the case for preparing long before you’re ready to hand over the keys.

The book introduces frameworks for evaluating your company through a buyer’s eyes, setting exit goals, and identifying what could strengthen its value. For small business owners, that perspective offers a useful question to carry into everyday decisions: Am I building something someone else would want to own? Whether selling is a distant possibility or an approaching priority, this book encourages you to treat your business as an asset your future self will be able to leverage. (Published June 2, 2021)

The Science of Scaling: Grow Your Business Bigger and Faster Than You Think Possible by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson

If growing your business always seems to mean adding more work to your own plate, The Science of Scaling by Dr. Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson offers a useful reason to rethink your approach. This book discusses ways in which ambitious goals help identify what needs to change. You’ll learn what activities are limiting your growth, and how to build systems that allow your business to expand. For small business owners, its appeal is the opportunity to examine whether your current products, processes, and priorities can support the company you want to build. (Published July 29, 2025)

Lean Marketing: More leads. More profit. Less marketing.

When you’re running a small business, every new marketing trend can feel like another assignment you don’t have time to finish. Lean Marketing: More Leads. More Profit. Less Marketing. by Allan Dib offers a framework for simplifying that workload, cutting wasteful activities, and building a structured marketing system that helps turn interest into action. Its value for independent business owners is the emphasis on making deliberate choices about where time, money, and effort go, especially when all three are limited. If your marketing consists of scattered posts, occasional promotions, and a growing collection of tools, this book offers a useful starting point for bringing those efforts together and giving each one a clear business purpose. (Published May 7, 2024)

Lifestyle Business Insights from a Few Years Ago

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost It’s Luster by Dana Thomas (2008)

When I first read this book back in 2008 I was struck by how spot-on Dana Thomas was in describing the decline of “luxury brands”. For small business owners building a premium brand, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster offers a compelling reason to think carefully about what makes a product worth its price. Thomas traces luxury’s transformation from a world rooted in craftsmanship, tradition, and personal service into a global industry driven by expansion, advertising, and profit.

For independent lifestyle brands in 2026, that history raises important questions: Which qualities make your business special? It’s a thought-provoking read for founders who want to build desirability while protecting the quality, character, and customer experience that earned them attention in the first place.

On the flip side of this is a book that came out last Autumn (2025) called Bag Man: The Story Behind the Improbable Rise of Coach by Lew Frankfort. In this book Frankfort, who served as CEO of Coach for 29 years, outlines how Coach started as a unique bespoke business making iconic bags. Later, after the original owners sold out, the main focus of the Coach went from making great bags to growth at (just about) any cost.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

Pitch to Media:

• Pitch Thanksgiving Style Stories

• Holiday Gift Guides

• Black Friday Deals

• Small Business Saturday

• Giving Tuesday

• January Renewal

• Winter Hygge

Retailer relations:

Send a useful holiday asset package now to the retailers you work with: include silo’d and lifestyle product shots, SKU sheets, your shipping deadlines, and a thank you gift or special discount.

Here are more dates for social media and blog posts:

October 1 (Thursday) - World Coffee Day

October 2 (Friday) Peanuts Day … the Peanuts debuted on this day in 1950

October 3 (Saturday) Mean Girls Day - The date comes from a scene where Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan’s character) says in a voiceover, "On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was," and she tells him "It's October 3rd”.

October 4 (Sunday) Saturn at Opposition - Saturn sits directly opposite the Sun and will shine at its brightest and closest for the entire year. You’ll be able to see it throughout the night as a golden point of light. Viewing it with a telescope reveals its famous rings. It’s serene colors can be the inspiration for a jewelry collection post, or you can explore the influence that Saturn has on us earthlings.

Monday October 5 World Architecture Day - the theme “Housing is a Human Right. Build It.”

October 6-7 (Tues-Wed) Amazon Prime Big Deal Days - Even brands not on Amazon can offer an early-access gift if they shop on your site instead. Also you can produce a shop early email, create unique bundles, or offer a modest incentive to your retailers. Amazon explicitly positions the event around fall entertaining, Halloween, beauty, and early holiday gifting.

Not on Amazon? Here’s a post about the pros and cons of the platform.

October 6 (Tuesday) Mad Hatter Day - references the "10/6" price tag on the Mad Hatter's hat in Sir John Tenniel's classic illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

October 6 (Tuesday) Jupiter is occulted! The waning moon passes near Mars and moves to eclipse, or occult, Jupiter.

October 7 (Wednesday) National Inner Beauty Day - encourages people to look beyond physical appearance and recognize self confidence and resilience.

October 8 (Thursday) World Octopus Day - Celebrates the intelligence, biology, and diversity of octopuses while raising awareness about conservation issues like marine pollution and octopus farming.

October 10 (Saturday) World Mental Health Day - this year the day focuses on the theme "Lived Experiences Heard: Real Voices, Real Change”.

October 15 (Thursday) National Esthetician Day - Honors skincare professionals in spas, salons, and medical clinics.

October 16 (Friday) National Mammography Day

October 26 (Monday) Hunter’s Moon (Full Moon) at 12:12 a.m

October 27 (Tuesday) - Pegasus and the Seven Sisters! Look high for Pegasus, the winged horse rising first, then a bit later look for the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades star cluster) rising behind it …. this has a marketing angle - In Japan, the Pleisdes star cluster is known as Subaru (meaning “gathered together”). The car company named itself after the cluster and uses its stars in its corporate logo.

October 29 (Thursday) National Cat Day - meant to bring awareness to the number of cats in shelters needing rescue and encourages adoption over buying from breeders or pet stores.

October 31 (Saturday) Halloween - you know what to do :-)

October Monthlong Observances:

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

This is a complicated event that just gets more complex every year. Between pink-washing and pharmaceutical cancer patient funnels, it takes a very deft and educated hand to guide a brand through the BCA minefield.

October is Mental Health Awareness Month

• All Month: National Depression and Mental Health Screening Month / ADHD Awareness Month

• First Full Week of October: Mental Illness Awareness Week (focusing on education and reducing stigma)

• October 10: World Mental Health Day and National Depression Screening Day

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

While Hollywood’s big award season is still warming up, beauty and lifestyle brands are already in the thick of theirs.

Autumn is the time when a lot of the self care industry’s most coveted beauty, wellness, fragrance and household product awards begin accepting entries for the year ahead.

Every week I get emails announcing enticing award programs - most of them beauty and self care. I thought I’d share a few of them here.

The award programs below are great for skincare, cosmetics, self care, wellness, fragrance, candles + home fragrance, haircare, dental and oral care, and even (in some cases) household items that are beautifully scented.

Here are the most prestigious beauty and fragrance awards for 2027 with deadlines coming up, sorted by date:

Read more

In Hamlet, Shakespeare presents us with a prince who’s paralyzed by an existential choice - endure the pain of staying alive or risk the terrifying unknowns of death. In today’s marketplace retailers seem to be facing their own existential drama: should they lean fully into the muddled and somewhat distressing analog experience → or surrender to a terrifying machine that seems to be taking over everything?

A couple weeks ago Glossy and Modern Retail co-hosted a Brand Leaders dinner. On the surface, the fashion and beauty execs in attendance exuded enthusiasm, while an undercurrent of anxiety flowed beneath the smiles.

Operating under Chatham House rules, the specific identities of the attending brand founders and marketing executives were kept anonymous.

Read more

I posted a preview of this on my social media yesterday and a number of the comments were: wait, what? Like wow where did the year go? Guess what? It slipped by like a gentle summer breeze, and now we’re knee deep in the holiday season.

So put on a cozy sweater, grab a Banana Bread Latte, and get ready for 100 days of Christmas marketing.

Why start 100 days before Christmas?

Every year I get calls starting around mid November from desperate boutique and gift shop owners who invested heavily in holiday goods to stock in their stores → created beautiful window displays to draw street traffic in → but forgot all about starting their marketing early enough to make much of an impact.

Great marketing isn’t a switch you flip on November 1 and then flip off on January 2nd. It’s a focused program that you work all year long, everyday. When holiday season starts the flavor of the marketing is transitioned to all things warm and fuzzy, but that’s just a continuation of what you should have been doing starting last year.

I get it, budgets are tight … but guess what? Your imagination is not. So let’s get going!

The Basis of Your Holiday Marketing Theme

Before you launch into creator mode, let’s talk basics.

Step 1: What’s your goal?

Let me guess … making money! Yay - confetti toss! But, sadly “making money” is a lovely wish. Planning to sell $40K per day which translates into profit of $20K per day is a goal.

So let’s drill down on what setting a goal looks like for your brand. What is your specific income number drawing from your revenue sheets that calculate product cost, overhead, and other customer acquisition expenses.

How many times does the cash register need to ring to reach that goal of $40K each day? What is your customer’s average purchase amount? Divide that $40K by that purchase amount and you’ll get a number that gives you the number of paying customers you need to get in the door.

FYI - here, I’m describing a retail store, but the same equation works for any B2C or B2B brand.

Step 2: Find your holiday heroes

Lots of advisors will tell you to pick one hero - but that’s not terribly realistic in this day and age of enhanced individualization.

Most gift guides are looking for items that can be given to someone with specific hobbies, tastes, and roles in the family, ie: Gifts for Your Niece who Loves to Garden.

If you do a little reverse engineering you can glean that editors aren’t creating these super specific lists by the 10s-of-thousands to be cute - they’re responding to studies, trend reports, and historical data within their organization that show that this is how people shop these days.

So picking one hero and trying to sell it to the public as though it’s great for a shopper’s Granddad, and their teen daughter is going to make your job much more arduous. Case in point:

• Granddad: Values utility. He wants things that last long, work well, and serve a practical purpose. He appreciates tradition, comfort, and items that remind him of family.

• Teen daughter: Values identity. She wants items that help her express who she is and help her fit in with her peers. She appreciates novelty, aesthetics, and whatever is currently viral.

So while promoting a plethora of products is an invitation to chaos, try to boil down your core customers holiday shopping needs (remember they’re not necessarily shopping for themselves, they’re shopping for granddad and teen daughter) and select a small array of items that would great for a wider array of recipients than your normal customer.

Step 3. Your Customer

As we discussed in step 2, your customer isn’t necessarily the person standing in front of your with a credit card in their hand.

For our exercise, your customer is now their shopping list. While this can make selecting a hero product or two tricky, it’s also why Christmas is such a particularly important time of year for your brand.

You may sell skincare, and while the Granddad types aren’t your usual customer, if you sell a moisturizing SPF that an older gentleman can wear outside while mowing the lawn and his granddaughter gives it to him - he just may become a customer for life.

Think hard about the customers you’ve built relationships with. Who will they be buying for? Create a hero product eco system around your core customers that will work like an ultra exclusive influencer program throughout the holidays.

You’ll also encounter customers who normally would never shop from you - this is a wonderful opportunity to think outside of the Christmas Gift box and into Spring when things are slower.

Step 4: Highlight Your Giftable Advantage

You might consider this step 3.2 since it really relates to what I talked above above. Your product competes with hundreds of customers on a daily basis, but at Christmas these customers all sort of morph into personal shoppers.

Why should these time-strapped, over extended (financially and emotionally) shoppers pick your product over any other brand?

Complete this sentence:

This is the ideal gift for __________ because __________.

Here are a few ideas going back to our Graddad and Teen Daughter example:

Skincare + Beauty

• The Granddad: Keeps a minimal, no-nonsense routine focusing on basic function and unscented or classic, old-school scents. May need more skincare support but doesn’t know how to get it. "This is the ideal gift for grandpa because it delivers time-tested, multi-use utility that skips the fuss and gets straight to work on his daily routine."

• The Teen daughter: Follows multi-step, clean beauty routines focusing on viral skincare balms, misting sprays, niche fragrances, and colorful artisan bath products. "This is the ideal gift for the teenage daughter because it transforms her daily skincare routine into a viral, aesthetic-forward ritual that she can proudly display on her vanity."

Style + Wardrobe

• The Granddad: Values structured, predictable comfort, neutral tones, and traditional fits. "This is the ideal gift for the practical traditionalist because it prioritizes lifelong brand loyalty, heavy-duty durability, and predictable comfort over passing fads."

• The Teen daughter: Embraces bold fashion choices, like oversized wide-leg pants, romantic statement dresses, structural denim, and bright seasonal colors. "This is the ideal gift for a teen girl because it captures a highly specific internet aesthetic—like 'poet-core' or 'clean girl'—making her feel plugged into the cultural moment."

Personalized Leisure + Hobbies

• Grandpa: Enjoys slow-paced activities. Good gifts include gardening tools, history books, crossword puzzles, grilling accessories, or a comfortable rocking chair. "This is the ideal gift for the analog-loving grandpa because it features straightforward, physical controls and high visibility without any frustrating digital clutter."

• Teenage Girl: Enjoys social and visual activities. Good gifts include skincare routines, room decor like LED strip lights, concert tickets, or specialized water bottles. "This is the ideal gift for the digitally native teen because it seamlessly blends high-tech functionality with cute, customizable self-expression."

Step Five: Consider your Primary Marketing Engines.

Core Engines

Social Media

I know so many brands that never post on social media until the day before Black Friday. It feels a little as though someone tapped them on the shoulder and reminded them that they still have an Instagram account. If that’s you, the time to build up your account was during the Summer, but you can still get some traction now (like RIGHT NOW) if you start filming reels that can be posted on both Instagram and TikTok that feature someone speaking to the camera and discussing something relevant to your store. Dispense with little dances, and following every goofy trend → your job is to educate the public in an entertaining way about your brand.

Do you have an email list established?

So many of the brands I talk to do but they are seemingly bashful about sending emails to them. Don’t be - if they unsubscribe after one or two emails they’re doing you a favor - the last thing you want to is to spend money reaching out to someone who signed up for a 15% discount but has no real interest in your brand. Also, clean through your list and delete anyone who hasn’t opened an email in awhile. We’ll get into how emails land in junk files down the line in our 100 day program, but phantom email recipients is one of them. Email is perhaps the best sales engine across the board, and particularly during the holidays.

Press and Local Media Outreach

Gift guides are great, but even better are interviews you might do with local or niche press (podcasts, magazines, blogs, newspapers). A great media campaign gets people talking across all platforms and can be the genesis of a holiday campaign that continues delivering far into 2027.

Secondary Engines

Events

Crafts are huge, Pinterest told us about that a few weeks ago → crafts that you can organize in your store, a retail partner’s store, or even a pretty cafe are a wonderful way to get customers to really sink into the vibe of your brand. We talked about dedcool, which is a fragrance brand, creating a coffee themed popup in NYC for FashionWeek yesterday; and earlier in the year how British influencer Molly-Mae created a barista truck so she could get to know her fans and generate press. There’s no reason your brand cannot do the same thing.

Direct Mail

Much as email is a great sales driver, direct mail, when done right delivers a piece of hard copy most recipients are probably not getting in droves like other forms of marketing. Beautiful postcards that have a holiday theme, but are pretty enough to display on a vision board can hang around for years to come.

Blogs

I’m a big believer in blogging, obviously - and if you have the time to create thoughtful posts that are search engine and AI friendly you’ll be far ahead of most brands that can talk about little other than their products.

The 100-day plan

I’m breaking down our 100 days into monthly segments and releasing them to you that way. Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

Phase One: Plan It

Days 1 through 30 (9/16 - 10/15)

We’re starting out by building a solid foundation upon which your gingerbread house of marketing will rest.

We’ll drill down on the engines of marketing including: goals, hero products, gift categories, email campaigns, and media outreach - that we talked about above.

We’ll get into the nitty-gritty of assets you need to support your campaign. They include:

• Photography and filters

• Product descriptions that make everyone happy

• Press and media outreach collateral

• Social media campaign ideas and trends

• Direct Mail

• Event Ideas

Phase Two: Promote It

Days 31 through 60 (10/16 - 11/14)

We’ll shift into action mode by taking all that we established and hitting the gas on our marketing engine,

We’ll be:

• Sending postcards

• Creating holiday videos

• Following up with editors

• Pitching local television and podcasts

• Developing retailer toolkits

• Planning special gifts for important stockists

• Building complementary brand collaborations

• Creating email and social content

• Approaching companies about workplace and client gifting

• Improving packaging inserts and referral materials

• Testing the online buying experience

Phase Three: We’ll hear the joyous ringing of cash registers (or that cute chime that Apple Pay makes).

Days 61 through 100 (11/15 through 12/24)

We’ll cover:

• Retailer support

• Product demonstrations

• Black Friday

• Small Business Saturday

• Cyber Monday

• Giving Tuesday

• Local shopping

• Gift concierge services

• Customer stories

• Shipping deadlines

• Last-minute publicity

• Digital and no-shipping gifts

• Customer and partner appreciation

Here’s How this will work

For the first couple weeks I’ll post everyday on a subscriber-only chat here on Substack explaining that day’s goals and how to complete it. I’ll post it and send it via email so you can keep up with any missed days - and you can also chat amongst yourselves which I think helps to promote ideas within our subscriber group.

»»» Subscribers can find the chat here «««

Download the companion pdf calendar from the link below:

100 Days Of Christmas Marketing with Boxwood Co

1.45MB ∙ PDF file

Download

The first of 3 calendar guides covering day 1 - 30 of marketing ideas and a workable guide.

Download

The remaining calendars will be released on:

• October 15: Calendar Two, covering Days 31–60

• Friday, November 13: Calendar Three, covering Days 61–100 (oooh lucky Friday the 13th)

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

With that said, tomorrow (Wednesday) will be exactly 100 days till Christmas - yep we’re in that heart stopping, nervous break-down inducing countdown.

(Oh, and if somehow you didn’t know it yet, Beauty Advent Calendars are already selling out.)

So with that, I’ve created a Christmas countdown just for you. It’s a 100-day practical and highly actionable holiday marketing plan that incorporates PR, press, social media, email - all things you probably have been thinking about since last holiday season, PLUS IRL marketing suggestions including mailers (yeah - those things you put postage on); in store events; creating incentives for selling; and a lot, lot, lot more → one manageable assignment at a time.

I’ll send you the first free 30-day calendar on Wednesday, along with details about how you can get daily guidance and check-ins from me to help you put the whole concept into action.

Other than that, here’s what’s top of mind this week:

• College Marketing Outreach

• Nano > Macro

• Mall of America has a thing for TikTok

• DedCool has a cafe in the works

• Bluesign intros bluepass

• Study shows holiday spending better than expected

Back-to-school has had different connotations for beauty companies who’ve seen the new school year as a way to get in front of Gen Z IRL. This isn’t anything new, I’ve helped clients for over a decade reach out to students on college campuses.

If you’re interested, HerCampus, through it’s network of media brands has helped streamline the process for quite some time now. Other platforms are CampusCommandos, and The Yard.

So, what’s new this year for beauty brands like Bubble and Flutterhabit is an upshift from simple campus sampling programs to embedded ecosystems. Bubble, for example, built a network of more than 18,000 college ambassadors across several campuses; FlutterHabit created a Campus Club that communicates it’s brand message through sororities and other student organizations.

And e.l.f. is taking the concept to a whole other level. At UC Berkeley it’s created a 12-week DeCal course tied to its corporate-board representation initiative.

The strategy is to find a group whose members talk to one another, then make your brand genuinely useful or compelling inside that group. If sending unsolicited samples to 18,000 uni girls who may or may not try them doesn’t appeal to you, think about a similar concept engineered on a smaller scale:

• A skincare brand might consider esthetician schools, oncology-aesthetics groups, or yoga studios.

• Jewelry and accessory companies could work with art schools or alumni organizations.

• Home fragrance and self-care companies can partner with boutique hotels, interior designers or realtors.

Think outside of follower count

Last week Vogue Business reported that successful brand collabs are increasingly aligning with audience relationships, creativity, and cultural niche over follower count.

This is particularly true for skincare brands. I’ve helped source creators for brands over the years, and a nano influencer who will post several times and actually try out a product are often more influential than a mega influencer who may mention a product in passing on one post (for a sizable fee).

Want to open a store in The Mall of America? You better up your TikTok game asap.

I thought this was a bit cheeky of Mall of America: the property is actively courting retailers with fat social media accounts → particularly on TikTok. When I read about this I was picturing images of Northgate Mall in Northern California, and the once thriving Crystal Mall in New London Connecticut being torn down and redeveloped.

While struggling malls across the country continue to close or reinvent themselves, Mall of America is courting retailers that reverse the old mall equation: instead of the space drawing customers into a store → the stores themselves should draw in customers yearning to visit them. FYI - this is the same formula that drives most gift guide decisions.

Axios cites one 12-year-old who convinced her family to add Mall of America to their vacation plans after seeing its Pop Mart on social media.

Interesting fact: 18-to-24-year-olds buy significantly more in IRL stores (60%) compared to adults aged 25+ who buy about 50% at IRL stores.

Livin' la vida mocha

DedCool fresh off its drinkable collab with Erewhon is putting on a 3-day pop-up opening next week (September 18 in New York) to celebrate its new fragrance, Mocha Magic. DedCool Café is a shoppable event serving free coffee (I’m guessing Mocha Magic lattes) alongside purchasable fragrance inventory and DedCool Cafe exclusive merchandise.

Staying on the food/fragrance theme, Flamingo Estate launched a luscious Croquembouche Candle last week and has created a decadent page to bring the scent to life online. The special candles were originally a bespoke scent created for a friend’s wedding in Italy, but the result was so delicious that they’ve added them to the Flamingo Estate lineup, at least temporarily.

Want to capture some of that Mocha “Magic” for your own brand? Borrow DedCool’s inspiration, but make it local (FYI you can charge a fee for these events):

• A candle called Winter Spice that inspires a drinkable coffee that you collab on at a local cafe.

• A peony themed fragrance could blossom into a series of wreath making events at a local florist.

• A jewelry brand hosts a bespoke make-you-own jewelry party at a local boutique.

Tired of Greenwashing? The Bluepass label may help.

Bluesign, a Swiss textile certification company, has announced a new Bluepass label system. For products that are approved, the Bluepass logo and a QR code will appear on corresponding marketing pages and garment hangtags.

The Unseen Process, a global awareness project produced by Bluesign, will launch on September 20 at the start of New York Climate Week.

While Bluesign is indeed European, quite a few US-based brands and textile manufacturers such as Madewell work with Bluesign as official system partners.

In addition to apparel, Bluesign certifies:

• Bedding & Linens: Sheets, pillowcases, and duvet covers.

• Living Room Textiles: Blankets, throws, and cushion covers.

• Window Treatments: Curtains and drapes.

• Floor Coverings: Woven rugs and fabric mats.

When a product earns a bluepass label, it ensures it was made with the strict oversight of the environment and consumer safety:

• Safe Chemistry: Dyes and finishes used on the fabric are free from dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals, formaldehyde, and harmful substances.

• Resource Savings: Factories that weave and dye pieces manage water and energy footprint responsibly.

• Pollution Control: Factories must safely treat wastewater and exhaust air before discharging them back into nature.

Holiday Sales will (probably) be better than expected

Updated PwC holiday research reports that:

“Holiday gift spending is projected to dip just 2% from last year, even as consumer confidence fell 18.5% YoY, according to the University of Michigan’s index (from 60.7 in June 2025 to 49.5 in June 2026 when the survey was fielded). On average, consumers expect to spend $708 on gifts this year.”

Households with kids will probably spend up to $875, as opposed to households sans children who’ll spend about $635.

Rather than planning a series of price cuts, think about illustrating exactly why your products deserve to be the gift:

• how does it fit the recipient?

• is the price a good value?

• is the craftsmanship unique?

• what are the product’s uses?

• is there added emotional value?

In an earlier post I talked about making your product pages AI friendly (even if you don’t want to) - the PwC report tells us that about 29% of consumers expect to use AI during holiday shopping as a research tool. Optimize your pages now so that your product information surfaces correctly when you need it the most.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

I know AI news has gotten boring, but here’s an issue where brand managers should really pay extra attention because this is a problem that’s going to get worse:

I’ll say up front that I’m soooo sick of hearing about AI screwups - whether you know if or not, you’ve probably been a victim of some AI executed meltdown. I’ll just pause my mini-rant here and talk to you about these AI powered “review” sites that are proliferating like mushrooms in rainy season.

As a brand, you’re not only competing against other products for search engine priority - you’re up against machine fueled interpretations of your products - and they can go disastrously wrong.

Recently I was checking around the web for mentions of one of my skincare clients. I opened old fashioned Google, typed my client’s name in the search bar, and wella … a bunch of results popped up. Lot’s of sponsored shopping page listings and - here’s the good part - even before some of the bigger beauty sites came a review page (I won’t mention the name) belonging to a pretty new looking site specializing in skincare.

The site is not very different in spirit than Environmental Working Group in that it appears to readers to be ranking various skincare products based on ingredients and ranking each one on a scale that they’d created.

Anyone searching for information about my client’s products would see the website listed right there on the first page and think - “aha! let’s see if these products are really what they say”.

The site, we’ll just call it “Bot Site” - or BS for short - offers it’s readers an efficacy score that readers not interested in plowing through all the details can glance at, an irritation risk score, an acne rating, AND a list of active ingredients with concentration ranges that they allegedly derived from the actual formula - which NOT ONE beauty brand I know of would post anywhere that these people could legitimately reference it.

It looks impressively thorough. It’s also spectacularly wrong.

BS lists many ingredients my client’s products don’t contain including mineral oil, petrolatum, fragrance and more. In fact, and here’s the source of the problem, the erroneous ingredients are listed on my client’s page under section that states in bold type: 100% Free Of.

Our overly-friendly scrape engine had hoovered through the page, sucking up what it thought were keywords, and spit everything back out in a pile of misinformation.

But it only gets worse. The actual product page ingredient list contains common names in parenthesis and INCI names for the same ingredient so that consumers without advanced degrees in chemistry can figure out what’s inside the tube. An example: Helianthus Annus (Sunflower) Seed Oil

However BS treats the common names and INCI names for the same ingredient as two separate ingredients. It lists hydroquinone twice and assigned it two different estimated concentration ranges, even though there was no hydroquinone in the product at all. Then, this malformed ingredient salad was used to characterize the product as presenting a high risk of irritation.

I contacted the website with a detailed account of the errors, links to the brand’s official ingredient information and a request that it either correct the analysis or temporarily remove it. I received no reply. Shortly afterward, the brand’s products disappeared from the website’s visible brand directory for a day, then returned.

So we battle on…. but the larger question for you is what happens when a scrape happy bot grabs random words from your product page, publishes this jumble as an authoritative review and ranks conspicuously high in search results?

This morning I was scanning around looking for some particular info and discovered about half a dozen sites like BS that have proliferated over the past week alone.

AI has made it easy for anyone with access to a phone to generate code for bots that create a focused algorithm, then use AI to create a website, and smash them together with no concern for accuracy. Their goal is to generate commission sales through links that consumers click to reach a product page on Amazon or other. As holiday season gets closer the more of these will appear.

A large part of marketing involves telling consumers about the advantages of your product - but also defining what you’re against. Once that information is described on a product page, or more fully across your website, it become fair play for a scaper to bulldoze through and jumble everything together.

What Is Probably Happening

First, a crawler collects information from brand websites, retailer listings, ingredient databases and other publicly available pages. An automated system then sorts that material into categories such as ingredients, benefits, allergens, irritants, acne suitability or sensitivity.

The problem is that extraction is not the same as understanding.

A human reading “formulated without petrolatum, parabens or synthetic fragrance” understands that those substances are excluded from the formula. A basic extraction system may simply recognize three ingredient names on a product page and add them to its database.

Once one piece of information is misclassified, that error can influence everything the system generates afterward. A nonexistent ingredient may be assigned an estimated concentration, included in an irritation analysis and used to produce a definitive-looking product rating.

The resulting page may contain no firsthand product testing and no consumer reviews. Nevertheless, its headings, numerical scores, ingredient tables and precise-looking percentages give it the appearance of an expert evaluation.

The site can then reproduce that format across thousands of products, creating highly specific pages designed to answer searches such as:

• Is this product safe for sensitive skin?

• Will this product cause acne?

• Does this product contain parabens?

• What are the ingredients in this product?

• Is this product irritating?

That structure makes these pages exceptionally searchable, even when the underlying information is wrong.

Why the Wrong Information Can Outrank the Brand

The brand’s own product page may lead with evocative copy, founder storytelling and broad promises such as “clean,” “gentle” or “nourishing.” Meanwhile, the automated site publishes a page containing the precise phrases consumers type into search.

It may also include:

• The complete product name

• Ingredient-by-ingredient headings

• Skin-concern categories

• Numerical ratings

• Frequently searched questions

• Links between hundreds of ingredient and product pages

• Comparison and “dupe” pages

• Affiliate shopping links

• Regularly generated or updated content

In other words, the automated site may have built a better information architecture around the product than the brand has, even though its information is less reliable.

Make a note of this: being the original source does not guarantee that you will be the most visible source.

How You Can Establish an Authoritative Product Record

1. Create one indisputable source-of-truth page for every product

Your product page should explicitly contain:

• Official current ingredient list

• Full INCI list in plain HTML text

• Product name, size, SKU, UPC or GTIN

• Formula or ingredient-list revision date

• Who supplied and verified the information

• A clearly separated “Formulated without” section

• Contact information for ingredient questions

Use unmistakable language:

Official Full INCI Ingredient List
This is the complete and current ingredient declaration supplied by [Brand].

Then place exclusions in a separate section:

Ingredients This Product Does Not Contain
Petrolatum and parabens are not ingredients in this formula.

I would avoid putting the ingredient list and the “free-from” list inside neighboring collapsed tabs. Tabs are elegant for people but can produce an undifferentiated word soup for unsophisticated crawlers.

2. Add machine-readable product identity

Use accurate product structured data with the brand, product name, image, SKU, GTIN or MPN, description, canonical URL, offers, and other supported information. Google confirms that product structured data can help it understand and present product information, while Merchant Center identifiers help Google match information to the correct product.

There is an important limitation here: Google’s standard cosmetic product markup does not provide a dedicated, broadly supported field for a complete INCI list. Schema.org’s additional property can be used for characteristics that do not have a dedicated property, but brands should not assume that Google will display or privilege a cosmetic ingredient field merely because it appears in JSON-LD.

Structured data helps establish the product’s identity. The visible page still needs to state the ingredient facts clearly.

3. Publish a crawlable ingredient fact sheet

For products in danger of being misrepresented, I would create a separate page titled something like:

[Product Name] Official Ingredients and Formula Information

That page can answer the searches the bot site is currently winning:

• What are the ingredients in [Product]?

• Does [Product] contain petrolatum?

• Does [Product] contain parabens?

• Is this the current formula?

• Where can the official ingredient list be verified?

• How should third-party ingredient ratings be interpreted?

4. Correct the external record

Send each site a formal, unemotional correction notice containing:

• The exact URL

• Screenshots of the inaccurate statements

• The incorrect ingredients or ratings

• The complete official ingredient list

• A link to the authoritative brand page

• The date the formula was verified

• A request for correction, reprocessing, and written confirmation

• A reasonable response deadline

Do not argue broadly about whether their algorithm is good or bad. Give them a clean factual record showing that they were notified of a specific error.

Also preserve dated screenshots and copies of every exchange. If the false information persists, that history may matter.

5. Build corroboration, not artificial positivity

Brands should distribute accurate product data to:

• Authorized retailer product pages

• Google Merchant Center

• Brand profiles and shopping feeds

• Credible editorial coverage

• Professional or practitioner partners where appropriate

• Press materials and digital line sheets

• Relevant industry directories

• Product-testing or certification organizations

• Well-maintained social profiles and video descriptions

Use the same product name, identifiers, ingredient list, and canonical brand URL everywhere. Google specifically encourages accurate product identifiers such as brand, GTIN, and MPN because they help it understand which product is being described.

The goal isn’t twenty suspiciously glowing articles. It is a network of credible, consistent sources that all point back to the same verified facts.

6. Ask search engines to revisit corrected information

After strengthening or correcting the official page:

• Request reindexing through Google Search Console.

• Ensure the page is included in the sitemap.

• Use a truthful lastmod date when substantive information changes.

• Monitor branded queries and Search Console impressions.

• Check Bing and Copilot results separately.

Google allows site owners to request recrawling of updated pages, although indexing is never guaranteed.

Search engines generally will not remove a third party’s page merely because a brand disagrees with it. Legal-removal channels exist, but they are intended for content that violates applicable law or defined policies.

7. Report genuinely scaled or deceptive operations

If a site is publishing thousands of thin, templated pages with inaccurate information and little original analysis, document the pattern and submit a spam report. Don’t merely report an unflattering review. Demonstrate:

• Repeated factual extraction errors

• Near-identical page templates

• Unsupported ratings

• False claims of testing or expertise

• Pages apparently generated primarily to capture search traffic

• Failure to correct verified errors

That aligns the complaint with Google’s actual policies rather than making it look like reputation management.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

It’s (somewhat past*) time to start getting down to the nitty-gritty of holiday media outreach - getting your beautiful products and holiday recommendations into those luscious holiday gift guides - but it’s not at all too late.

There was a time when it was mandatory that holiday pitching start in July - that gave print magazines time to put together sample layouts, sell advertising space, and then calculate the number of pages they’d be able to run based on ad sales. This was a formula that particularly pertained to print media, but with the plethora of opportunities across all digital, filmed + recorded entertainment, and social media, the schedule has changed significantly.

*My point here is: there’s a mountain of media out there to be conquered and the sooner you start climbing it, the better for your holiday outcome. And this is precisely why hiring a PR firm or specialist is more cost effective than trying to source names and contact information on your own.

BUT … small business and founder led brands love to try to do everything themselves - or at least have a hand in the process, so let’s review how you as a lifestyle brand should approach strategically building a great PR list for Christmas 2026.

Read more

As I’m typing this from my perch up here in the Napa Valley we just had a teeny earthquake that shook my computer around - AND we’re experiencing our first drizzly rainfall of the season. So it’s a banner day here in wine country 🍇 🍷

I have a fuller September marketing guide on my LinkedIn and Instagram.

✔ Google has handed brands a new way to organically capture recurring traffic - did you know that?

Like most of us, you probably rely on Google to bring readers to your brand blog and then over to your online store (if you haven’t started or updated your blog for awhile now is the time to jump in).

A great way to encourage readers to come back is to have them add your site to their Google Preferred Sources List. Many brands and publications do this via a discreet pop-up at the bottom of a post or landing page.

You can add a simple snippet of code to your site to have an official Google-styled “Add to Preferred Sources” button. When readers click it, they are guided through a quick flow to add your domain to their Google Search profile, before returning right back to your page. You can also add it through a deep link that functions just like any other link that you might add to copy on your website.

Why you should do this: By adding your site to a reader’s Preferred Source List you’re creating a de facto content subscription that steers them to your site time and again.

💔 Following Dolly Parton’s passing on August 25, 2026, there’s been a noticeable surge in sales of butterfly-themed products and memorabilia.

Because the butterfly was Dolly’s signature personal symbol and the literal logo of her Dollywood theme park, fans have turned to butterfly-centric merchandise as a tangible way to honor her legacy.

Retailers, boutique brands, and independent creators have reported massive activity:

• 🦋 Immediate Merchandise Sellouts: Pop-culture retailers and independent music shops reported selling out of all physical Dolly merchandise—with a particular focus on butterfly-emblazoned items—within 24 hours of her death being announced.

• 🦋 Charitable Jewelry & Apparel Collections: Brands have launched or expanded butterfly-themed collections. These collections have seen overwhelming consumer interest, with portions of the proceeds being directed to her beloved literacy charity, the Imagination Library.

• 🦋 Etsy and Custom Goods Influx: Platforms like Etsy have seen a sharp increase in demand for butterfly shades, themed hoodies, and handmade Dolly-inspired decor.

• 🦋 Tribute Promotions: Local businesses, bakeries, and craft shops have actively used butterfly graphics and products to frame their tribute sales, often seeing high traffic from mourning fans looking for physical keepsakes.

• 🦋 9/25 Has officially been declared Dolly Parton Appreciation Day in Manhattan - but not to be out done by the Big Apple, the entire Golden State of California has declared 9/25 Dolly Parton Day as well … new this morning Cocke County Tennessee has also declared the date as DPD - I have a feeling there will be more states, cities and countries to follow …

✔ Pinterest released it’s 2026 Hobbies List last week and top trends include equestrian pursuits, gardening, painting, tarot and astrology, home cafe, DIY magazines, and collecting.

Not exactly new, but follows the trend that’s taking us all back to the time before Apple introduced the iPhone.

If you’re a brand that doesn’t offer knitting kits or tarot cards don’t despair → use this trend report as an inspiration guide for content.

A skincare business for example can deduce that interest in sensory hobbies is high and that people can use skincare and makeup as a way to express their creativity, and unplug. For example:

The Kitchen Witch and Cosmic Reset section demonstrates that consumers enjoy potions, herbalism and rituals. Brands can highlight ingredients such as adaptogens, mushrooms, and other extracts.

Apothecary style displays with amber glass and vintage inspired artwork fits in with this trend well. By selling a ritual - masks and serums can be seen as screen-free activities that help customers unplug.

Weekend Equestrian begs for skincare that helps customers protect their skin while out romping through the countryside on horseback. Content with luscious photography featuring outdoorsy attire and “fresh-off-the-trail” flushed, dewy skin are winners.

Other ideas for capitalizing on this trend? Host a quilting bee; Product Bedazzling Party (or contest on social media); or holiday wreath making event.

✔ FYI if you’re sick of seeing AI pin results populating your Pinterest queries you can turn them off by following these steps:

1. Open Pinterest and go to your Profile.

2. Open your account Settings or tap Refine your recommendations.

3. Locate the GenAI Interests tab.

4. Toggle the items or categories to the Off position (they are turned on by default).

✔ Google Trends reported a surge in home decor search themes this past week

As with every Autumn, the weather turns cooler and people spend more time indoors contemplating their homes. It’s no surprise that home decor is a big focus on Google search trends.

The top searches included art deco and included bathroom accessories; chrome furniture and accessories; Teal and Magenta wall paint colors; rattan accent chairs; leather arm chair; pink couch, ceiling paint different from wall paint; neon beige color; warm greige paint colors; greige couch; greige wallpaper; limewash paint in black, followed by beige; bouclé furniture; boucle couch cover.

In keeping with Pinterest’s reports above Vintage is a top search for the year with vintage braided rugs and vintage wood coffee table topping the trending home furnishing items in 2026.

✔ State Fairs are a new target for beauty and fashion brand popups

E.l.f recently hosted a “real dill”- themed pop-up at the Minnesota State Fair showcasing their pickle inspired lip balms. The result: about 64,000 attendees passed through the pop-up - checking out e.l.f wares for about eight minutes each. Other brands to create pop-ups include Levi’s, Lucchese, and Wegmans.

✔ Sephora announced its TikTok Shop - Sephora Drop Shop

The shop will feature exclusive monthly curated picks from Sephora partner brands. “Each featured brand will have a dedicated moment to bring its products to life, tell its story and connect with new audiences” they announced yesterday.

✔ Target is looking for creators to help launch it’s new Beauty Studios - the goal is to leverage each creator’s relationship with their followers.

Their point of view on the subject: Target is looking for real distinction from creators, telling the audience at LTKCON “if you can't say what you do that couldn't be made somewhere else, you don't have a business yet”.

✔ Google Pics is taking on Adobe and Canva

Are you’re addicted to Canva - I certainly am … the ease of use and accessible pricing are key points that I love about it. However Google is rolling out an AI-first Canva rival starting with Google Pics. I think the AI-first element may make the product less appealing than Canva because certain platforms (like Substack, Pinterest, and Instagram) actively downgrade content made with AI.

✔ Bedazzling is back, but instead of belts and sweat pants people are gilding their plastic drink cups and product containers.

Once upon a time, way back in the 1970’s and ‘80s if you mentioned “Bedazzling” you conjured images of this machine being used by (somewhat eccentric) gals with long nails and big hair.

But the term "bedazzle" has existed since the 1590s, the Bedazzler cleverly co-opted the name when it made its famous stapler for rhinestones 50 years ago.

The new bedazzling and bejewling craze is a way to (waste time and landfill space - JK) touch grass ie: unplug by embracing creativity and self-expression (and then film it and post it on social media - ha ha JK).

Even if the realities are a bit hypocritical and in some cases dangerous, it’s fun IMO. The result is a cute trend that any brand can easily make their own → buy a bedazzling kit on Amazon and apply rhinestones en masse to your product.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

I love Target - I want to establish that point from the get-go. Everyone knows you can find really fun, well priced items for your closet, home, kitchen cupboards and more. There’s discovery in every department - including their beauty and self care sections.

Shopping for beauty at Target however, is an exception. Trying to find particular products can become really frustrating when an item you’re looking for - say an eyebrow pencil - has been placed on a swingy peg at ankle level and you’re forced to bend into Downward Facing Dog in order to see it. And then you’re only able to glimpse it in this upside down position for a second or two, because inevitably, your glasses fall off just as a mom with a shopping cart loaded with 25 items and trying to wrangle 2 kids needs to come through.

So you move out of the way, get your glasses back on, and happen to spot an interesting lip care brand that you’ve seen influencers extolling the virtues of on Instagram - so you wander over. The display looks as though store personnel have been ignoring it for weeks - empty testers, and only one or two shades in a seriously-never-going-to-work-for-your-skin-tone huddle sadly at the back of its 12 inch section.

Other shoppers wander nearby looking for a particular brand they saw on a TV show, you happen to be standing near the brand’s display (which for no particular reason is behind locked doors) so you wave the shoppers over. They look relieved and dismayed at the same time - oh if only they could find someone with a key?

Is it worth the struggle to save a few dollars? To me - no, I’d rather go to a local beauty boutique like Citrine, Lemon Laine, Wren & Wild, Aillea, the Detox Market, or Credo - however there aren’t many of these in my area in the Napa Valley. We have world class spas, and Michelin Star restaurants at every turn, but not much in the way of great independent beauty.

We do however have a number of BlueMercury (owned by Macys) stores in our area - which, while not independently owned, understand that careful curation and personal service are necessary elements of a successful beauty shopping experience.

If you ask a question about a product at BlueMercury the salespeople don’t usually stand in front of you and read the packaging over to get the answer (or worse, Google the product on their phones while you wait - I can do that myself thanks) they have a good understanding of each line, who it’s best for, why it’s been selected for the store, ect.

At Whole Foods, (at least in its Napa store) skincare gets a substantial, beautifully maintained section with knowledgable and interested staff nearby. It’s next to the vitamin and wellness section so they naturally co-exist as a wellness story. Cosmetics are much more limited and it’s clearly a deliberate choice. Rather than trying to compete with Ulta (which is just across the street) Target or Bluemercury (both in the same shopping center) across every beauty category, Whole Foods leans into the areas that fit naturally with its health-and-wellness authority. The result feels “chosen for you” rather than incomplete.

There are Sephora and Ulta here, which, at some locations, are not the best with customer service - but at least store designers make the shopping experience a little more workable with flattering lighting and clean, wide aisles.

So all this preamble is to say that Target’s announcement from last week has many in the beauty industry raising their beautifully coiffed eyebrows - myself included.

Target ended its relationship with Ulta last month - in its place the mega retailer announced Wednesday that it’s creating unique Beauty Studios in more than 600 Target stores and will launch them on September 10th, 2026.

These Beauty Studios will have on offer more than 1600 products from about 90 brands - many of them from founder-led or internationally based companies.

Most interestingly, the concept includes beauty advisors offering customized attention; central discovery tables; and highly curated, seasonal selections rather than simply aisles of inventory.

The curation trend of course is key - sales at Target have fallen off over the past few years, while retailers like Sephora continue to grow and gain market share. Ulta has grown from an $8.6 billion business in 2021 to $12.4 billion in 2025 - and just raised its outlook for 2026.

While over at Target overall sales have slipped from about $109 billion in 2022 to $105 billion in 2025, with its beauty department bucking the downward trend. Target beauty sales actually grew from roughly $12.5 billion in 2023 to $13.2 billion in 2025 and are currently growing at a high-single-digit rate - despite the difficulties I mentioned above.

So just judging from the numbers, Target is working to capture dollars from the booming specialty-beauty market while protecting one of the healthier categories inside its own stores.

We’re months away from knowing whether the addition of about 60 new brands (90 brands, ⅔ of which are said to be new as per official press releases) to the store’s burgeoning stock is going to be a great strategy for Target - and if, in about 6 weeks, those dedicated sales people aren’t in fact pulled away to stock shelves in the grocery area, leaving the studio section unmanned most of the time.

While the Target Studio illustration (below) shows space for about 40 brands tops - it’ll be interesting to see how the other 60 Target Studio brands are displayed throughout the department.

The numbers aside, what strikes me about this development is the promise of specialized curation and personal service, qualities most of us would associate with a local specialty beauty store.

Amanda Nusz, senior vice president of merchandising, essentials and beauty at Target told Allure last week:

“A lot of time and energy has been spent with the consumer working on what we believe is going to make us compelling in our next chapter of beauty … This allows us to curate an assortment and an experience that allows people to explore beauty in more inspiring spaces.”

It’s important to note that much of Target’s curation focuses on well established brands, rather than emerging brands waiting to be discovered.

Names such as Beautyblender, Briogeo, Dyson, First Aid Beauty, IGK, Joico, Mario Badescu, Nioxin, Ouidad, Paul Mitchell, St. Tropez, StriVectin, Sunday Riley, Supergoop!, TULA and Wella, along with fragrance names including Coach, Dolce & Gabbana, Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish are well known. Several of these were already available through the old Ulta-at-Target arrangement. Sunday Riley, for example, had an entire Ulta Beauty at Target assortment. Most of these brands are widely available on Amazon and through other large retailers.

Even some of the names that feel like emerging brands are already established elsewhere. SARELLY, which Target is highlighting as one of its founder stories, has a substantial physical-retail footprint in Mexico, including Sephora, Ulta Beauty, Liverpool, Costco and specialty beauty stores. Target may be a significant U.S. expansion for it, but it isn’t the brand’s first encounter with physical retail.

Buff Beauty is a founder-led category-building newcomer. Some of the other less familiar names are CHROMA, Gróa, Kayura, MIXIK SKIN, Modern Magic, Remilia, Smooch Body and Volo.

For independent beauty retailers Target Studio creates issues other than competition for consumer dollars. Small stores are usually the ones that act as de facto incubators by sourcing, introducing, and educating about new, unfamiliar brands.

Yet as those brands grow, independent retailers can find themselves with decreasing leverage to keep them. Bigger accounts bring bigger orders, wider exposure and more predictable volume. Meanwhile, independent stores might struggle to meet minimums year round or gain access to the larger names their customers are asking for.

Indie Brands and Retailers: Don’t Try to Out-Target Target

If you run an independent beauty store, Target Beauty Studio should probably reinforce the value of doing the things a mass retailer has the hardest time delivering consistently.

• Know your assortment intimately. Don’t read the package back to a customer who asks a question. Know why you brought the product into the store, who loves it and who probably won’t.

• Introduce people to things they wouldn’t have found themselves. That’s one of the reasons customers visit a great independent store in the first place.

• Give your assortment a point of view. Founder-led, treatment-oriented, ingredient-driven, design-conscious or difficult-to-find brands give your staff something worth explaining.

• Don’t duplicate endlessly. Target can carry dozens of solutions to the same problem because breadth is part of its proposition. An independent retailer has the luxury of saying, These are the four versions we think are worth carrying.

• Merchandise beautifully. Put products where customers can see them, reach them, test them and understand why they belong together.

And most importantly, know your customers. You do not have to cover every category to feel like a serious beauty destination. Strong retail concepts often have a very clear center of gravity:

• Whole Foods credibly owns skincare, body care, clean ingredients and wellness-adjacent beauty.

• CVS: convenience plus health/pharmacy authority.

• Lemon Laine and Citrine: curation + intimacy + knowledgeable people.

• Bluemercury: upscale curation and personal service at larger scale.

• Credo: strong point of view, standards, education and curation, while scaling high-touch specialty retail.

• Sephora and Ulta: enormous assortment + discovery + expertise + services.

• Benefit BrowBars: specialization + service + demonstration.

• Target Beauty Studio: trying to incorporate pieces of nearly all of these inside a mass merchant.

A small independent retailer can own sensitive skin, natural fragrance, clinical skincare, founder-led brands, luxury clean beauty, or whatever genuinely fits its customer.

That’s a point of view that contrasts nicely with Target, which needs to serve the person buying a $7 mascara, and the person looking for prestige skincare, and the teenager chasing a viral lip product, and the salon-hair shopper, and the fragrance customer → all inside the same department. A smaller retailer doesn’t.

An independent retailer can remember what someone bought last time, know that she hated the texture of one sunscreen but loved another, tell her with all honesty when she doesn’t need the expensive serum she’s holding, call her when the fragrance she loved finally comes back into stock, and create a relationship that makes someone choose your store even when Target is five minutes away.

One of America’s largest retailers has decided that the next opportunity in beauty involves more curation, more expertise, more discovery and more personal service - ie: what small specialty retailers already do well.

For independent beauty, the answer isn’t to become more like Target, it’s to become exceptionally good at everything Target wishes were easier to do at scale.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

• Interest in Pumpkin Spice Lattes have declined year over year according to Google data.

• Matcha lattes are currently gaining interest - pushing out chai and pumpkin spice flavors.

Of course it would be silly to think that warming autumn drinks are going anywhere, but it might surprise you to find what’s taking PSL’s place this year.

Cider is gaining traction this Fall - and according to Google the top trending drink is “tequila apple cider” … didn’t I tell you that gourmand themes are growing up?

Other cider flavors include pumpkin cider and more open ended queries into cider cocktail ideas.

For coffee drinks there’s heated interest in banana flavored blends (up 300% in the past 30 days):

• Banana Bread Coffee

• Banana Syrup

• Banana Bread Syrup

Other popular flavors are:

• cardamom latte (+300%)

• peanut butter latte (+80%)

• hazelnut latte (+60%) - I’ve been enjoying this one myself this week :-)

• pecan crunch latte is up +190% so far in August

• caramel apple iced coffee

And as we’ve talked about before, some of us want summer to linger longer, while others are ready for sweaters and snuggly blankets in late July. This is a trend that’s growing for some reason.

According to Google Trends, searches for “when do pumpkin spice lattes come out” usually spikes every August - and over the past month, it has increased +510%

• 2006-2013: peaked September and October

• 2018-2023: Search interest consistently peaked in the last week of August

• 2023 and 2024: Search interest was highest in the second-last week of August

• 2025: Search interest peaked the last week of August

So, if you’re planning an Autumn open house or trunk show, consider offering your guests Tequila Cider or Banana Bread Lattes.

Wanna do your own comparisons? Google Trends aka Google Explore gives you great insight into what American consumers are looking for and interested in.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

Follow me on Instagram / Let’s connect on LinkedIn

When I saw these numbers last week from Circana reflecting solid growth in the fragrance and skincare categories in the first half of 2026, I was amused … happy of course because I work in marketing for beauty brands … but also thought the timing was interesting.

When I moved coasts a few months ago my entire collection of fragrance had to be tossed. It’s very hard to pack perfume bottles into shipping containers and not worry that the bottles will be broken and leak out onto clothing or artwork and ruin them. Perfume is also flammable - so just use your imagination there.

So just recently I’ve been trying to figure out what to replace my East Coast bottles with out here in wine country … it’s a different vibe on the West Coast, obviously, so many, many fragrances need to be scouted.

So my moving drama aside, 2026 is proving to be a really sweet year for brands selling little luxuries like fragrance.

New first-half U.S. beauty data reported this month shows fragrance continuing to perform strongly despite weak consumer confidence in the economy overall.

Mass-market fragrance sales are up 15% - an uptick that began several years ago has become structurally embedded in US culture.

There has been a good deal of innovation designed to make fragrance easier to discover and collect: minis, discovery sets, body mists, hair perfume, layering fragrances, dupes, gourmand fragrances, celebrity fragrances, niche fragrance brands and fragrance wardrobes.

In 2024, mini and travel fragrance units were growing at twice the rate of the overall fragrance category → younger shoppers were driving body mists and dupe culture.

By the first half of 2025, new fragrance brand launches accounted for nearly one-third of prestige fragrance’s dollar growth.

As of August 2026 brands are still piling their pretty bottles onto fragrance counters. For example L’Oréal launched NYX over the summer with modestly price-pointed hair-and-body mists specifically aimed at Gen Z, citing the launch timing on fast-growing mass fragrance market.

So there’s a consumer fueled feedback loop we can learn from here:

Read more

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before but I graduated from San Francisco State University after 6 short years studying English literature, poetry, short story writing, and fiction writing. I really never wanted to leave. August Coppola (Frances Ford Coppola’ s brother, Father of Nicolas Cage, Uncle to Sophia Coppola) was dean of the College of Creative Arts when I was there - I had instructors like Ethan Canin (Emperor of the Air) and Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun) making things fun and challenging - why would I leave that and head out into a job market?

Bear with me - this will have relevance in a minute or so...

In my life I’ve logged countless hours dissecting sentences in pursuit of meaning, parsing adjectives to understand the author’s true message. I currently spend weekends sinking into novels with the total, consuming devotion of an archaeologist who’s suddenly discovered a lost city.

With all this fiction based puzzle parsing you’d think I’d find product and brand descriptions to be as interesting as reading the owner’s manual for my 26 year old truck.

Ahhh but here’s the quandary - with the option to “improve text with AI” jammed onto every selling platform from Shopify to Squarespace, I see clients writing product descriptions that read like the opening paragraph of a steamy romance novel. Many, many adjectives - not many facts. And they’re launching their products into cyberspace without any safety tether to anchor them to Google. And because new customers can’t find them without heavy PR and social media support, their pages fail to do the one thing they're actually meant to do: sell passively.

Read more

Well, it’s almost the end of August and it seems like we’re just ripping along into Autumn and Holiday. Have you gotten your marketing plan set up for the end of the year, or are you still considering adding more pieces to it? These days, changes seem to pop out of nowhere and it’s great to stay flexible. Here are some of the more interesting marketing headlines from the past few days that might give you a burst of inspo:

→ Holiday shopping is becoming a much longer AI-assisted research process

Google published new holiday-shopping AI related research last week that’s actually relevant for independent brands.

→ Online shoppers who use AI during their purchase journey encounter an average of more than 12 touchpoints, versus about 4 for non-AI users.

→ 75% of Google AI users say AI allows them to search more naturally, including highly specific questions and visual searches.

Tip: Your product pages need to answer common questions customers might actually ask an AI assistant: Where is this made? What does it smell or feel like? Is it the best choice for sensitive skin? Would a man like it?

Your brand website and product pages need to plainly explain what the products are, who they’re best for, what the ingredients are in straight terms (not flowery language), what makes them different from similar brands … and other common questions that shoppers might ask in person.

Keep it imaginative but on-point: product descriptions that read like dishwasher manuals aren’t what I’m suggesting → however product profiles that seem to get lost somewhere in a flower field won’t make sense to a (relatively stupid) machine, ie: “An elevated sensory experience inspired by the natural world” doesn’t tell a (again, a relatively stupid) machine much if you never get around to mentioning that your candle smells like cedar and is made with a proprietary bee and soy wax blend.

Consider that in the AI era you’re now writing product copy for at least two audiences:

1. Your target market which may be women in their mid 40’s;

2. AI … which I like to characterize as her know-it-all tween daughter who frequently misinterprets information but insists she’s right no matter how many times you correct her.

» Related Read: How Brands Turn Products Into Micro-Media Assets in 2026 «

→ So, AI can find you a 60” velvet sofa, but being a silly machine it doesn’t know if it’s stylish or not.

This week, ClickZ published an interview with Sebastian Pflumm, VP of Search and Discovery at Furniture.com. Pflumm makes the point in the article that an AI agent can be great at suggesting the functional part of a product, ie: reporting dimensions, price, materials, color, scent, availability and other needs, but it can’t settle on something as personal as a shopper’s taste. See my comments above.

Prior to his role at Furniture.com, Pflumm spent more than a decade advising brands in the retail and consumer space at McKinsey - so this isn’t a new frontier for him. He recommends a brand perform enough structured groundwork and PR to ensure that there’s common knowledge of a company floating around the internet for machine models to draw a broad picture of your brand from. This will lend context to what AI recommends and provide better brand recognition to those shoppers behind the queries.

→ Brand building can be romantic

This is def. giving You Got Mail vibes. It is also underscoring the current trend in which lifestyle brands are no longer just product designers, manufacturers, retailers, and influencers → they’re also entertainment companies.

The apparel brand Rhone recently launched A Love Letter to NYC, a campaign inspired by the romantic comedies of 1990s New York.

Rhone’s CMO Bethany Evans has described the company as reaching an inflection point after years of focusing heavily on performance marketing. As the company expands through retail and wholesale, it’s putting more emphasis on upper-funnel brand building.

The Love Letter to NYC campaign stretches across video, social, print, direct mail, outdoor, retail, Citi Bike docks, a photo booth, and an integration with The New York Times’ Connections game.

Tip: Independent brands should consider the thinking behind Rhone’s move: Performance marketing answers “Where can we find someone ready to buy?” Brand marketing answers “Why should anyone remember us when they’re ready to buy?”

→ DTC isn’t dead, but the old DTC formula is

Glossy and Modern Retail held a State of DTC discussion on August 12 against a telling backdrop: once-celebrated direct-to-consumer companies are struggling. Their framing for the event was centered around the notion that direct-to-consumer isn’t disappearing → but it’s evolving.

For years, DTC marketing was no more complex than: acquire customer through Facebook or Instagram ad → send customer to website → optimize conversion → repeat.

That was never a reliable brand strategy, and I have always recommended to my clients that they work with Main Street retailers and market with a Big Tent mindset.

The old marketing model was a distribution and customer-acquisition system that made sense during a period when digital advertising economics were very favorable - and that’s no longer the case.

The model that emerged from the talk looks much messier, but healthier: DTC + wholesale + retail + PR + creators + search + AI discovery + physical experiences + community = marketing

→ The evolution of beauty retail is experiential

Heathrow Airport and travel retailer Avolta have brought back their Redefine Your Beauty campaign across all four Heathrow terminals. The campaign combines shopping with personalized beauty treatments, interactive brand activations, exclusives, and gifts-with-purchase.

For a boutique, spa, candle company, jewelry maker or skincare brand, a five-person workshop, scent consultation, styling appointment, repair clinic, meet-the-maker afternoon or holiday wrapping bar makes a shopping experience memorable.

Tip: Retailers should give customers a reason to visit their store, rather than merely another place where merchandise happens to be available.

→ The creator economy is less glamorous than it looks

New CreatorIQ research surveyed more than 5,000 creators and found that about 67% earn less than $10,000 annually from content creation, and less than 5% of those surveyed earn more than $100,000. For about 63% of the respondents, creating content isn’t even their primary source of income.

Tip: This reinforces the case for looking below celebrity and mega-influencer level. A brand may find genuinely knowledgeable creators who have highly relevant audiences and are still treating content as a side business. Product seeding, modest paid partnerships and longer-term ambassador relationships may be far more realistic than the influencer industry may suggest.

→ Ugg is recruiting art students rather than conventional fashion influencers

Modern Retail reported this week that footwear and apparel brand Ugg is launching a college ambassador program called Ugg Creative Lab. In support of back-to-school shopping, Ugg is working with students at Pratt Institute, Central Saint Martins and Seoul’s Hongik University. Students will create work interpreting Ugg products through their own creative disciplines.

→ Also this week, Sophia Petrillo’s Thrift Store Bag sold to a women in West Virginia for an amount that could easily afford a median priced house in that state.

I’ll take any opportunity to write about the Golden Girls so I absolutely discussed the marketing lesson of this amazing story on my blog here.

Carolyn Delacorte is the founder of Boxwood Co — a trailblazing PR + marketing firm that’s served lifestyle brands in the food, beauty, decor, and baby industries for more than 28 years.

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So - I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been here in St Helena for a few months - reacquainting myself with Northern California after so many years away.

Down In the valley they’ve been harvesting early-season grapes for sparkling wines, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. The process fills the air with a gorgeous, softly sweet - distinctively fruity - bouquet that I wish someone would make into a candle or a room spray.

When I was growing up, the Napa and Sonoma area was a quiet backwater dotted with a smattering of vineyards amid sprawling cattle ranches and orchards. As a kid in the 1970’s I came up here for horse shows - and let me tell you, it was rural - very pretty but nothing approximating the wine and spa culture that inhabits the area today.

Why did it change? Well, that brings us to today’s subject - the 50th anniversary of one of history’s breakout PR events. Loosely outlined in the film Bottle Shock (starring my favorite actor, the late Alan Rickman) the Judgement of Paris, as the event is now known, gets its name from the one lone article written about it at the time - a four paragraph blurb buried on page 58 of Time Magazine, crowded into one inside column alongside an Armstrong Tire advert. Not a great clip by conventional standards, but WOW what an impact.

There are PR campaigns with seven-figure budgets, celebrity ambassadors, carefully orchestrated press previews and media lists containing hundreds of names.

And then there was the Judgment of Paris.

The idea behind the event was simple: grab a few bottles of wine from France - and a few from California - toss in a sprinkling of French wine experts, schedule a blind tasting on a sleepy Monday afternoon - and invite the press in to cover it.

The result that no one saw coming.

On May 24, 1976, British wine merchant Steven Spurrier and his American colleague Patricia Gallagher gathered some of France’s most respected wine authorities at the InterContinental Hotel in Paris. The occasion was a blind tasting comparing prestigious French wines with a collection of largely unknown bottles from California.

It was supposed to be an interesting little event pegged to America’s Bicentennial. It was pretty successful :-)

This year marks its 50th anniversary, and while the story has been repeated so many times that it has acquired its own mythology (the winning vintages are in the Smithsonian Institute for goodness sake!) its retelling here in a PR context is hugely useful to anyone trying to get attention for a smaller brand.

Let’s make a note of this one crucial fact: The Judgment of Paris wasn’t the brainchild of a seasoned marketing wiz or a massive think tank. It was put together by an independent wine shop owner kicking around ideas with his staff.

It Began With a Very Good PR Peg

Steven Spurrier was an Englishman selling predominantly French wine in Paris and running L’Académie du Vin, a wine school that catered heavily to English-speaking wine lovers.

Since Spurrier spoke English, American winemakers passing through Paris had begun bringing California bottles for him to taste. As it turned out, the wines were really quite good.

At the time, this was by no means conventional wisdom. Fine wine effectively meant French wine, and California, known for its cotton crops, rolling cattle ranches, and peach orchards, barely (well, didn’t) registered with the European wine establishment.

Patricia Gallagher, an American who ran Spurrier’s wine school, had visited Napa in 1975 and came away particularly impressed by its Chardonnays and Cabernet Sauvignons. She suggested holding an event in Paris to bring them some attention.

Then she supplied the thing every good PR idea needs:

They Had A timely hook.

1976 was the 200th anniversary of American independence. ahhhh Vive l’Amérique!

Why not use the Bicentennial to introduce French wine authorities to some of the best wines being made in America? C'est une super idée!

So, Spurrier traveled to California, selected six Chardonnays and six Cabernet Sauvignons, and invited prominent French wine authorities to taste them. His Académie had enough credibility that they accepted.

It was, at first, just a clever promotional tasting … but then … drum roll please … and this means everything …

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