Fashion’s Latest Obsession: The Grocery Store
Fashion brands are increasingly partnering with gourmet grocery stores like Erewhon, Meadow Lane, and Happier Grocery to create experiential marketing activations that blend food, wellness, and lifestyle. These collaborations offer brands a way to engage consumers in sensory, tangible environments amid digital fatigue, though success requires authentic brand-store alignment and meaningful community connection rather than surface-level photo opportunities.
Summary
The episode discusses how luxury and fashion brands are shifting their marketing strategy by collaborating with high-end gourmet grocery stores. The trend began with beauty brands creating celebrity-endorsed smoothies at Erewhon around 2022, and has expanded to include full-scale partnerships across fashion, activewear, and beauty categories. Meadow Lane, which opened in New York in November 2023, received 16 collaboration proposals within its first year, indicating strong brand interest despite initially resisting the influencer smoothie model.
Haley Crawford explains that these partnerships appeal to marketers seeking experiential, sensory, and tangible connections with consumers in an era of digital fatigue and AI-generated content. Gourmet grocery stores serve as aspirational, community-oriented spaces where consumers already spend time, making them effective environments for brand discovery. Examples include On Running's long-term partnership with Erewhon featuring a running capsule, run club, and recovery juice; Viore's US Open activation at Meadow Lane with honeydew-inspired beverages and tennis-themed totes; and Dairy Boy's collaborations with Meadow Lane including custom trout dip and ice cream truck activations.
The discussion emphasizes that successful partnerships require deep brand-store alignment rather than generic products. Prada Beauty's Spring Market initiative exemplified this approach by partnering with local agencies across regions to create immersive experiences where perfumes were integrated naturally alongside everyday groceries. Brands should evaluate potential partners based on unique capabilities—Meadow Lane's ability to create custom menu items versus Happier Grocery's established cafe infrastructure.
Crawford identifies community building and sustained long-term partnerships as key success metrics, rather than short-term social media visibility. While these collaborations can drive new customer acquisition and brand awareness at accessible price points (smoothies versus high-end handbags), their primary value lies in building loyalty and engaging specific local communities with shared interests.
About this episode
<p>Fashion brands have long used cafes, restaurants and hospitality to sell a broader lifestyle. Increasingly, they’re looking to a less obvious partner: the gourmet grocery store. From branded smoothies and limited-edition tote bags to run clubs, labels are tapping destinations such as Erewhon, Happier Grocery and Meadow Lane to reach consumers in the course of their everyday routines. The draw is clear: these spaces sit at the intersection of food, wellness and community, while offering a highly-sensory environment for brand storytelling. But as more labels pile in, the challenge is making sure these collaborations amount to more than an expensive Instagram moment.</p><br /><p>In this episode, senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young is joined by BoF marketing correspondent Haley Crawford to discuss why fashion is moving into the grocery aisle and what brands need to do to get it right.</p><br /><p><strong>Key Insights: </strong></p><ul><li>Tie-ups between gourmet grocers and beauty predate today's boom. Erewhon laid the groundwork with early influencer- and celebrity-driven partnerships — including Hailey Bieber's strawberry glazed smoothie in 2022 — while British handbag label Anya Hindmarch has made custom grocery totes for Waitrose and Daylesford for years. Now, Crawford says, "gourmet grocery has just grown so much that there's a much larger sandbox for brands to play in."</li><li>Crawford is skeptical that grocers are fertile ground for genuinely new fashion products. The more successful tie-ups — like On's long-term Erewhon partnership, which paired a running shoe capsule with a run club and a co-branded recovery juice — use the grocer to market products the brand already has. "This is where brands might have more success than trying to force a raffia skirt that has nothing to do with the brand or the grocer," she says. "It really has to lend itself well to the universe of the grocery store."</li><li> For most brands, Crawford says the value of these collabs is primarily top-of-funnel – offering marketers a path to connect with customers who may not be ready for a major fashion purchase If they're not ready to shell out $500 for a handbag, they can definitely afford a $15 smoothie," she explains. "That can be something of a revenue driver, but it more so gets them into the funnel and drives that loyalty and brand awareness."</li><li> In many cases, brands are borrowing "wellness halo" from these stores, Crawford says. But she warns the format risks becoming generic as more brands pile in: "We've seen it with every brand launching their own café... brands need to be wary of that as they tread into the space so it doesn't just become another hot new trend that they're jumping on."</li><li>The strongest partnerships hinge on genuine identity overlap and understanding a grocer's specific capabilities — whether that's Meadow Lane's ability to whip up custom menu items like a trout dip for Dairy Boy, or Happier Grocery's built-in cafe setup, which let fashion brand Nanushka import its own cafe concept to New York. Prada Beauty took a different route entirely, partnering with local design agencies to stage market takeovers in cities like Milan for its Prada Spring Market. . Crawford's takeaway: brands should ask "what can these grocers offer to me?" before chasing the trend.</li></ul><p><br /></p><p><strong>Additional Resources:</strong></p><ul><li><strong><u><a href="https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/marketing-pr/hotels-fashion-most-in-demand-partner/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">How Hotels Became Fashion's Most In-Demand Partner | BoF</a></u></strong></li><li><strong><u><a href="https://www.businessoffashion.com/news/beauty/erewhon-is-coming-to-new-york-with-a-smoothie-bar/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Erewhon Is Coming to New York With a Smoothie Bar | BoF</a></u></strong></li></ul><hr /><p style="color: grey; font-size: 0.75em;"> Hosted on Acast. See <a href="https://acast.com/privacy" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: grey;" target="_blank">acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.</p>
Key Insights
- Meadow Lane received so much unsolicited inbound interest from brands that despite initially wanting to avoid the influencer smoothie model, they entered 16 collaborations in their first year and turned down countless others, demonstrating strong brand appetite for grocery store partnerships.
- Crawford argues that successful partnerships require deep brand identity overlap with the grocer's customer base and values, rather than generic co-branded products, as exemplified by Prada's Spring Market integration of perfumes into local markets during Design Week.
- The appeal of gourmet grocery collaborations stems from consumer digital fatigue and the desire for tangible, sensory experiences in physical spaces, contrasting with earlier fashion marketing approaches that used food only as visual imagery in digital campaigns.
- Brands like On Running and Dairy Boy achieved deeper engagement by creating extended, multi-format partnerships over time—including run clubs, capsule collections, and recurring activations—rather than one-off promotional moments.
- These partnerships function primarily as customer acquisition funnels and community engagement tools rather than significant revenue drivers, as lower-priced items like smoothies introduce consumers who may later invest in higher-ticket fashion purchases.
Topics
Transcript
Hi, I'm Molly Graham, host of TED's Work Life. I talk to founders and operators every week who can tell you exactly what got them to where they are, and exactly what almost broke them along the way. Ask any of them the real secret, and it's never do everything. It's knowing what's worth your energy and what's not. Laundry is on the not worth it list. You knew that already. You just hadn't outsourced it yet. Rinse picks up your laundry and dry cleaning, cleans it exactly how you like, and delivers it back ready to wear. Sign up at rinse.com. Rinse. It's time to be great. This episode is brought to you by Macy's. Boho is back, and…
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