Fashion’s Latest Obsession: The Grocery Store
The Debrief
This episode explores the emerging trend of fashion and beauty brands partnering with gourmet grocery stores to create experiential marketin
Key takeaways
- Erewhon served as a foundational player in the trend through beauty-focused partnerships like the Hailey Bieber strawberry glazed smoothie.
- Meadow Lane has experienced high demand for collaborations, managing 16 different brand partnerships since its New York opening last November.
Main topics
- Gourmet grocery collaborations
- Experiential marketing strategies
Notable quotes
The produce is displayed like art.
Conclusion
Grocery store partnerships offer a powerful way for brands to build lo
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:08) Hello and welcome to The Debris from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler-Young. Fashion brands have long used cafes, restaurants, and hospitality to sell a broader lifestyle. Now they are turning to a slightly less expected partner, the gourmet grocery store. From branded smoothies and limited edition tote bags to run clubs and full-scale market takeovers, labels are using destinations such as Air One, Happier Grocery, and Meadow Lane to enter customers' everyday routines. And the appeal makes sense. These stores combine food, wellness, and community in a highly sensory aspirational space. But as more brands adopt the format, there's a risk that these collaborations become little more than an expensive photo op. This week, I'm joined by BOF marketing correspondent Haley Crawford to discuss why fashion is moving into the grocery aisle and what brands need to do to get it right. Haley, welcome back to The Debrief. Hi, Sina. Thanks so much for having me. So I want to back into the conversation a little bit and go back to the early days. Tie-ups between gourmet grocery stores and beauty in particular, maybe fashion to a lesser extent, are not entirely new. Can you talk to us about the earlier iterations of what laid the foundation for what we see today? Absolutely. Speaker 2 (1:31) So Erewhon, which is one of the big LA gourmet grocers and definitely an early player, absolutely laid the... framework for a lot of these partnerships. And they definitely got their start more in the beauty and influencer celebrity realm. So we saw in 2022, they teamed up with the likes of Hailey Bieber on her strawberry glazed smoothie to kind of borrow from some of her popular beauty looks. And they also teamed up with Summer Fridays, which is a beauty label, to create these $20, $22 smoothies that were inspired by either the celebrity or the brand. So that was kind of an early iteration of it. We also saw brands like British handbag label Enya. Hinmark has been creating handbags or custom grocery totes for the likes of Waitrose and Dalesford for the past several years. So both of these definitely more product oriented, but those absolutely laid the groundwork. And now... We've definitely seen an expansion of gourmet grocery as well amidst the wellness boom. So according to BOF State of Fashion 2026, wellness is expected to be a $2.5 trillion business by 2028. And nutrition is obviously a huge part of that, right? So these gourmet grocery stores are really a place that brands are seeing opportunity now more than ever before. Air One was definitely the OG, but now there's more and more like happier grocery. Speaker 1 (2:53) Well, you know, it makes sense to me why Air One and the $22 smoothie is appealing to a beauty brand or to a fashion brand for that matter. And also some of the other labels that you mentioned, Metal Lane, Happier Grocer. I'm very curious. as to who saw the opportunity and who first. Obviously, these aren't your value-driven mass market grocery stores. And I'm not going to name examples, but I could understand an Air One versus a values-driven dollar store format, family-centric format. These are very, in their own right, a sexier grocery store format. Who do you think is initiating the conversation here? And I know your reporting gets into a little bit of this, but what did you hear? Speaker 2 (3:37) Yeah, well, I love that you called these gourmet grocers sexy. And I definitely think brands are seeing that sex appeal right now. You know, and as shoppers flock to these stores and are really spending a lot of time in them, right? They're so attractive. They're really beautiful. The produce is displayed like art. You know, it's a really enjoyable place to spend time. And I think brands... are getting the memo that they should probably be popping up there too. And so one great example is Meadow Lane. So they opened in New York under a year ago, last November, and they've had countless brands reach out. They actually didn't even think they would start with the collab model. They kind of didn't want to go down the influencer smoothie route, but they got so much inbound requests that since November last year, they've already had 16 collabs and have turned down countless others. And this is across categories from beauty to high fashion to... media. So they've had tons of partnerships. So definitely the brands are, I think, starting to feel hungry, I guess, for lack of a better word for these kinds of partnerships. Speaker 1 (4:36) Well, obviously your focus at BOF is marketing. You are a marketing correspondent and there are different... I think there are different seasons when marketers want certain or have certain objectives. Right now, according to your reporting, what marketers really want right now is experiential, tangible, and sensory. And that's what these gourmet grocery stores bring. Can you talk a little bit about the appeal of those three things right now? My guess is that because we're in the age of AI, and I've talked about this so many times in the debrief, but also we're just so digitized, like social media, all of the things, people want to be in the world again. They want to feel and touch and see. So is that sort of the idea here? Speaker 2 (5:15) Absolutely. Absolutely. I think in this hyper digital era, the era of AI, AI slop, people just blindly scrolling through so much content. I think brands are really seeking out moments that feel more evocative, where they can truly connect and not necessarily do so through a screen. And we saw the early iteration of this last year, a lot of brands were leaning into food in their marketing. And that was still marketing imagery, right? So brands like Louis Vuitton, Jacquemus were using everything from butter to bananas to... in their marketing imagery because it was so evocative. But again, visually so. So now brands are taking this marketing approach a step further by really showing up in the spaces where the food actually lives, where consumers are interacting