The Luxury of Light: How Commerce Colonized Christmas
Welcome to Friday, futurists.
🖼️ This week, we celebrated our last event of the year, a live podcast recording experience at The Moore Miami, with special guests Tom Goodwin, Nick Susi, Jesse Kirshbaum, and Michael Miraflor.
From edible credit cards and floppy disks to consumable ideas, it was a jam-packed day with breadth and depth. That content should be in a podcast player near you very soon.
The London Brief: The Illuminated Commons
In an era where everything is content, Bond Street's multimillion-pound light displays reveal how luxury brands are transforming civic traditions into social media moments, turning winter darkness into commercial light.
These installations have slowly garnered larger budgets, begetting larger audiences—and blurring the line between celebration and spectacle. As streets and stores continue to outdo each other, the question remains: are we illuminating tradition or merely lighting up luxury?
Emily Wilson returns to file the last edition of The London Brief for 2024.
Despite its name, everything is not OK at Okendo.
This week, Okendo CEO Matthew Goodman took to LinkedIn to take aim at its rival, Yotpo, for being “all about hype” with its marketing.
Yotpo has executed a historic brand turnaround by hiring VP of Retention Eli Weiss and return of CEO Tomer Tagrin following multiple bouts with cancer. Their ‘stunt marketing’ campaigns, combined with a repricing strategy that makes it more competitive, and the rollout of an email product and an uplevel of its SMS solutions, have led to a reversal of sentiment about the brand in record time.
Goodman, in a rather stiff teleprompter-read address, accused Yotpo of lacking substance while Okendo focused on quality of product. “Why is it that Shopify’s best brands have switched from Yotpo to Okendo?” asked Goodman. He goes on to reference brands like Blueland, Vegamour, mnml, and Nobull. To be very honest, I’ve never heard of mnml or Vegamour.
According to Perplexity Pro data, Blueland's online revenue amounted to approximately $18.1 million in 2023. That said, Blueland has raised a total of $23.08 million over 7 funding rounds. mnml's online revenue amounted to $42.8 million in 2023.
The irony of Goodman’s accusations lies in the fact that the video’s editing style—with a fast-paced hook and critique of Yotpo’s viral campaign images—is itself engaging in the type of marketing tactics he calls into question. By drumming up a feud, Goodman is trying to attract attention. It is itself a stunt; but one that feels like it positions Okendo defensively.
“Chat, is this real?” asked Nick Susi at this week’s recording of Future Commerce LIVE. Susi’s recent essay “if you want to create a monocultural event, you’ve got to start a war,” is indicative of the kind of battle that Yotpo has been embroiled in since before the pandemic. But is the feud real? Performative antagonism can feel like the kayfabe of professional wrestling—where we know it’s fake, but we want it to be real.
In Q4 budgeting motions slow the sales cycle, which forces more marketing activity into owned and organic channels for SaaS opoerators. That’s why so much B2B marketing today looks more like the drop model: from Shopify Winter ‘Boring’ Editions to FRMT Apparel by Fermát Commerce, to numerous Yotpo gifting campaigns.
The game of influence works. I should know because I have received, unprompted, merch and apparel from these vendors and have made unsponsored posts without compensation, Yotpo included.
For all of Yotpo's viral success, their aggressive price-slashing and social media stunts raise some eyebrows. The company, which once prided itself on having the most robust enterprise features in reviews and UGC, is balancing its premium position for social media stardom and discounted contracts. And, their new email is late to the party, entering a crowded field where Klaviyo has been dominating for years, and Shopify has a bundled solution.
They say timing is everything, which is why we see so many of these marketing campaigns coming from SaaS B2B software brands in Q4. As David Foster Wallace observed, ‘Nothing brings you together like a common enemy’—and during BFCM season, when brands slow sales cycles, what better way to command attention than by manufacturing conflict?
Maybe Goodman has a point: sometimes the loudest voice in the room is compensating for something.
Or perhaps it’s because eCommerce feels more demanding than ever, and we have no choice but to win. Whatever it costs.
Disclosure: Yotpo and Okendo are former advertising partners of Future Commerce.
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