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🪩 Volume 150 | September 2, 2026

 

150 issues, holy moly. If you were here back when this whole thing was still called Toastworthy, you're a real one, and I owe you a slice. 🍰

 

Some context for today’s issue: I’ve got a house full of kiddos, so anytime I get to watch some flicks, every ad break is a parade of mom-and-baby content. Mid-episode, Sunday night, a diaper commercial came up: Pampers Amore. Their new luxury diaper.

 

Now… I was a die-hard Pampers Swaddlers girl until I got mom-woke on ingredients and defected to Coterie years ago. So watching Pampers roll out a premium, cashmere-soft, chemical-screened diaper felt weirdly personal; like the biggest kid on the block finally noticed the cool indie lunch table and pulled up a chair. My consumerism and my little justice-warrior brain went to war in real time.

 

Because this isn't a one-off. It's the exact “play” every legacy giant is running right now: find the "better-for-you" niche some scrappy brand built from scratch, then show up with 60 years of scale. (Pepsi did it to prebiotic soda. Doritos did it to protein. We'll get there.)

 

That's the issue today—what happens when Big Box comes for the little dudes.

 

 

 

 

Amore is Pampers' first brand-new diaper for newborns and toddlers since Pure in 2018—an eight-year gap, which for a giant like P&G is basically a geological era. And the spec sheet reads straight off a crunchy brand's About page: soft as cashmere, five-layer protection, hypoallergenic, free of fragrance, parabens, elemental chlorine and latex, accredited by the Skin Health Alliance and tested for 1,000+ chemicals. If you covered the logo, you'd think this was a Series-A startup with a founder who does reels.

 

 

“Our best diaper.” “Protection reimagined.”

 

But… the comparison.

 

Amore's own claims: it keeps babies "3X drier vs Coterie" and "absorbs 3X faster vs Huggies Skin Essentials." They named Coterie. Coterie (if you didn’t know) is precisely the premium clean-diaper darling that has been peeling off customers like… well, me.

 

 

Now watch what they DON'T say. Nowhere does Amore claim to be their cleanest or most chemical-free diaper. Why not? Because Pampers Pure already holds that lane—and torching Pure would mean torching their own shelf. So instead, Amore stacks absorbency + softness + "luxury" on top of clean credentials they already had. It's a positioning stack, not a purity claim. (What a competitor refuses to say tells you exactly where they're boxed in.)

 

Where's it sold? Target. Walmart. Amazon. This is the crunchy aesthetic delivered at full big-box scale.

 

And it's a pattern, not a coincidence. Pepsi bought prebiotic-soda upstart Poppi for ~$1.95B and launched its own Pepsi Prebiotic Cola. Doritos—also PepsiCo—dropped Doritos Protein the same month Amore launched. The giants don't invent the trend; they wait for a founder to prove the market exists, then show up with the one thing a founder can't buy: distribution.

 

For your business: When a giant walks into your niche, your moat is NOT the feature. They will out-absorb, out-fiber, and out-distribute you by Tuesday. Your moat is the story and the values they physically cannot manufacture at scale. So ask yourself: if a 60-year-old brand cloned your product tomorrow, what would still be true about YOU that they could never replicate or even claim? THAT sentence is your positioning. Everything else is a feature war you'll lose.

 

Something I’m ALSO noodling on… the willingness to pay double for "crunchy"—is that generational? Economical? A values thing we'll abandon the day the grocery bill wins? I don't have a clean answer. Which is exactly what Sarah and I get into…

 

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ChatGPT Voice doesn't need grandma's marketing. 🐳 → Little follow-up to our ChatGPT Voice bit: the product is now doing its own PR, for free. My doomscroll is roughly 15% people having completely unhinged conversations with the voice assistant—exhibit A, a girl calmly informing ChatGPT that she is inside the belly of a whale. When your product is this weird and this delightful, your users make the ads for you.

 

Grassroots > a billboard (shameless team flex). → We helped a client activate at their local marathon with signage on the—yes—porta potties that read "Accidents happen." See it here. It's silly in the best possible way, and it works because this client says YES to the fun, slightly-unhinged ideas instead of focus-grouping the life out of them. Grassroots marketing is criminally underrated by small brands who assume they need a media buy to get noticed. Sometimes you just need a pun and a captive audience.

 

Bob's Red Mill listened—but to whom? → Bob's Red Mill rebranded this spring, and the story is messier than a tidy "social listening win." They did solve a real, customer-flagged problem—people kept misremembering the name (one exec said shoppers called it "Barb's Red Mill"), and focus groups showed the new look nearly halved product-search time on shelf. But modernizing walked them straight into a Cracker Barrel–style buzzsaw "they took Bob out of the logo"  made extra raw by the fact that founder Bob Moore passed just two years ago. So they listened to the shelf-scanners and arguably under-weighted the heritage loyalists.