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France Bans Nicotine Pouches - France just banned Zyns and the entire nicotine-pouch category. One of the most-talked-about CPG products of the last few years is now contraband in a major European market—and regulators tend to love a good precedent.

Congress Quietly Tries to Bring De Minimis Back - Reps. Carol Miller (R-WV) and Don Beyer (D-VA) just introduced the Secure Revenue Clearance Channel Act, a bipartisan bid to restore the duty-free channel for low-value imports Congress killed 16 months ago. A $15 dress from China now eats ~$5.25 in duties, and the EU's own €3-per-parcel duty hits July 1. Politicians broke the channel—now they're racing to build a new one, but operators have been eating the bill the whole time.

Oasis Health App Rebuilding? - Controversial Oasis Health App spent the week under fire from brands for reporting false data — after rumblings of a potential class action lawsuit they are publicly hiring to rebuild every part of their stack and methodology from the ground up.

Think about how much of the operator job AI now does or is about to do: strategy decks, dashboards, most of the copywriting, creative work, attribution math, briefs. All of it is collapsing into a prompt. The one piece left for a human is taste, and that's the piece most DTC organizations are still underpaying for.

Builders, tastemakers, measurers.

Every role on a modern team is either a builder, a tastemaker, or a measurer. AI is eating the measurer entirely and chewing through the easy end of the builder. The tastemaker is the only role it cannot touch, because taste lives in gut and experience, not in data. Example: Cloudflare cutting “measurer” jobs heavily in a banger quarter. ClickUp did the same move in the same week and went public about paying million-dollar comp bands to whoever's left.

Why is taste the only durable moat?

David Protein launched tinned cod last week at $10 a can and nobody is flinching, because the packaging looks like a Renaissance painting. A model would never do this. Aaron (Head of Ecommerce, Frostbuddy) is running localized email automations that fire the morning after an LA Dodgers win. Five times the revenue per email of a normal campaign with six to seven percent click through rates. A human with taste strategized, then handed the execution off to AI.

Pay is bending toward people who can decide what should exist and how it should feel. Everyone else is competing with a model that gets faster and cheaper every quarter.

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See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team