Shopify has launched Tinker, a free mobile app that brings together 100+ AI tools into one place letting merchants create everything from logos to product visuals using conversational prompts. It unifies models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others, pulling context from past work to maintain brand consistency across outputs.

Amazon is taking on Walmart with a physical retail project nicknamed “Project Kobe” With Walmart-style stores with embedded, robotics-powered fulfillment. Each site will exceed 225,000 sq. ft., with over 100,000 sq. ft. dedicated to robotic fulfillment, while AI systems will determine what products each location should carry based on demand and constraints.

Europe is making cross-border e-commerce more expensive and more complex. A new €3 fee is being introduced, with additional handling charges expected to stack from November. At the same time, the €150 duty-free exemption is being scrapped. For US e-commerce brands, the headache just continues to get worse.

Alex Earle has launched a DTC skincare line called Reale (an acronym of Earle) building on her success of 8.3 Million followers that originally stemmed from her trouble with Acne during college. As with every high profile launch, there is some pushback with The New York Times producing a piece, but Earle is owning it mimicking her critics stating: “I can’t be launching a skin care company because I’ve done Accutane three times…So I’m just a big fat liar.”

Urban Outfitters is doubling down on experiential retail. This time with a collaboration with Vans for its “On Rotation” Pop-Ups. The project features “lounge-style” in-store installations and follows on from collaborations with Nike and Ugg.

An anonymous figure has arrived on the DTC scene with a new product, with a strong message, pointing a finger at social-led founder brands:

The product itself—a mushroom coffee gummy called BRÜCHEW—is center stage. But what actually stands out to us is the brand and the way it’s been introduced, with a series of anonymous videos feeling less like promotion and more like a deliberate narrative being revealed in series.

Ashna Rana runs a boutique CRO studio, Studio Gro, specializing in experimentation programs for health and wellness CPG brands. She's worked with brands from pre-revenue to $50M, including Casper, Ritual, Manukora and Kolkata Chai, driving measurable CVR improvements of 30%+ for clients. We sat down with Ashna to get the insights:

If you had a magic CRO wand, what’s one thing you’d fix on 80% of e-commerce websites today?

Optimize the first two folds of their homepage to explain their product as clearly as possible. A new user should know what you do and what makes you unique within one to two scrolls.

The thinking around CRO can be very granular, questions are linked to data, but there is a bigger picture. What are some of your viewpoints around emotion and behaviour around purchases?

You are marketing to people on the other side of the screen. Reducing them to pixels and data points minimizes the human element of a digital marketplace—and that's a mistake. You need to be asking the question: Why should someone care about why their paycheck goes to your project?

People are growing up online rather than coming to it later in life. With that, dark pattern recognition has only increased. Early CRO was built heavily on dark pattern methods: false urgency, manufactured scarcity, manipulative defaults. I believe brands that rely on exploiting human emotion to convert will not scale and will not last—especially as the demographic makeup of the American consumer continues to evolve. That is not the future of CRO.

At the highest level CRO requires analyst style thinking and even data scientists. How has AI changed that, and what can founders do now that they couldn’t two years ago?

AI is fundamentally increasing the speed and clarity with which founders can understand where their product/brand is excelling or falling short. This stems from the fact that AI has made it easy to parse through enormous amounts of data and reach clear conclusions at remarkable speed. Including user surveys, post-purchase surveys, competitor analysis, and actual test data analysis to identify trends.

I use it the way I'd use a smart team member: to pressure-test a point of view, sharpen a message, or think through a problem from a different angle. That's meaningful. But handing a founder an AI audit of their site without the strategic foundation to interpret it isn't an upgrade. A tool without the knowledge to use it for your specific purpose is a net nothing.

You can hire Ashna through The Starters HERE.

The Output Era is here. The age of headcount is over; the age of output has begun.
As AI accelerates, layoffs are no longer the exception — they’re the signal. We delve into the data.

In Q1 alone, Oracle, Amazon, and Epic Games have cut over 50,000 jobs, with goals of reducing workforces by 10–30% across their organizations.

In an AI era, revenue per employee is back as the most prominent metric for company success.

Freelancers are making up a staggering $1.7 trillion of economic activity, as more brands hire fractional talent, with workers increasingly splitting their time across two, three, or more companies.

SOURCES: HERE and HERE

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