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OpenAI Smart Glasses - The AI hardware race is converging on your face. OpenAI just poached Paul Meade, Apple's Vision Pro and smart-glasses chief, to build its own lineup of AI devices, while Mark Zuckerberg argues glasses are hitting their smartphone moment and will feel strange without built-in intelligence within five years. For operators, the takeaway isn't the gadgets, it's the pattern: Meta, OpenAI, and Apple are all betting the next dominant consumer surface comes after the phone, and whoever owns that face-level device owns the next decade of attention.

Meta Ads Manager: New “Created with AI” Label - Meta is rolling out a voluntary checkbox that lets advertisers tag ads as "created or edited with AI," but one operator who A/B tested identical videos says the labeled versions performed noticeably worse, which means almost no one has a reason to opt in (other than getting sued).

Unilever Chases Thorne at 6.15x Sales, Bidding for $4B- Unilever is exploring a bid for supplements brand Thorne at up to $4 billion, roughly 6.15x its expected $650M in sales, with Haleon reportedly circling too, per the Financial Times. The eye-opener for operators is the math underneath: L Catterton took Thorne private for just $680M in 2023, so a sale near $4B is about a 6x return in under three years, and it sits alongside a wave of premium wellness deals (Unilever's Grüns and Nutrafol, Danone's Huel, Celsius and Alani Nu) that mark supplements as the category strategics will overpay to own.

By Colin Dougherty

The most profitable ecommerce businesses you've never heard of don't sell anything cool. They sell engine pistons and ranching supplies, and they're enormous.

Kenny Trusnik (Founder & President, Forest City Digital) runs a performance agency that works across categories most marketers would never pick: automotive aftermarket, industrial, ranching gear. He describes holding companies that own six or seven brands, each doing eight or nine figures, with giant catalogs and, often, a single marketer running the whole thing.

The brand names wouldn't impress you. The revenue would.

That gap is the opportunity. In a glamorous category, every basic lever has been pulled a hundred times. In these unsexy ones, the fundamentals are wide open.

Trusnik points to product descriptions: enormous catalogs where the listings have no real marketing copy at all. Just writing proper descriptions, he says, has driven 50 to 70% revenue growth year over year, because it makes the catalog searchable, shoppable, and findable by AI. One overlooked basic, applied across thousands of SKUs.

Ambitious operators chase apparel and beauty and supplements, where the competition is brutal. Meanwhile the boring verticals sit with huge demand, real margins, and less necessary marketing sophistication.

You don't need a trendy product to win online. You need one with demand.

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Ecomm Cowboy Team