Happy Thursday.

We’re live on X and YouTube — let’s ride!

Olive Garden Revives $100 Pasta Pass - Olive Garden is bringing back its Never-Ending Pasta Pass for the first time since 2019. The restaurant chain will sell 10,000 passes for $100 each, offering 13 weeks of unlimited pasta, soup or salad, and breadsticks. Are you not entertained?! Before you fix your website, fix your offer.

Whatnot Acquires AI Startup Shaped - Whatnot has acquired AI startup Shaped to improve real-time product recommendations and search across its live shopping platform. Shaped's founder, Tullie Murrell, and nearly a dozen engineers will join Whatnot to form a new Applied AI Research team. Live-selling and recommerce are two trends in 2026 that cannot be ignored. Whatnot is powering them both.

Lemme Faces New GLP-1 Lawsuit - Lemme, the supplement brand co-founded by Kourtney Kardashian Barker, has been hit with a new class action lawsuit alleging its GLP-1 Daily capsules were marketed with misleading weight loss claims in violation of California consumer protection laws. Many marketers on the timeline say they’ve seen this one coming…

Gap is dropping a denim capsule with Hailey Bieber this week, built on her favorite vintage Gap jeans, 1996 branding and all.

Quick question: who exactly is the 90s nostalgia for?

Maybe not the people who actually lived it. This is the part I find fascinating.

Per Adweek, the Hailey Jean comes in extra baggy and low-rise loose across six washes, her signature printed inside the pocket lining, CD players in the campaign visuals. And the audience it will hit hardest is Gen Z women who were not alive in 1996.

Nostalgia works best on people who never lived it. Sounds backwards, but we've all done it. Every generation romanticizes an era it missed, because you get the aesthetic without any of the reality. Gap ran this exact play with Katseye, a group of 18-to-20-year-olds dancing to Milkshake, a song from before some of them were born. It crushed.

This is an incredible way to do a collaboration in 2026: take an A-list name at the peak of her influence, then wrap her in an era your brand actually owns. Gap isn't renting the 90s the way most brands rent a trend. Gap was the 90s. The archive is theirs, the branding is theirs, the jeans are literally modeled on their own vintage product.

Then Gap catches the Gen Z buyer chasing the aesthetic, and the millennial updating her wardrobe who remembers the original. Two audiences, one drop.

Dig through the era your brand honestly owns.

Somebody too young to remember it is ready to buy it.

Measure what's actually driving your revenue.

If you live in the Ads Manager, you know the problem: every platform takes credit and every dashboard tells a different story. Meta says 4.2 ROAS. TikTok claims the same conversion. Which one is lying? Honestly — all of them.

Northbeam fixes this with proprietary data that starts from the actual purchase and then rebuilds the customer journey from real orders, real clicks, and real verified ad views. That measurement gets pushed back into the ad platforms, so optimization runs on what's actually driving revenue — not what the platforms assume is.

Start measuring what used to be unmeasurable.

→ Book your demo at Northbeam.io

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See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team