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Haeckels opens a day spa for seaweed treatments

Haeckles House, Margate

Haeckels House, Margate

Haeckles House, Margate

Margate, UK – The natural skincare brand has launched Haeckels House as part of its mission to aid the planet’s ocean crisis.

The space comprises the first and second floors of the Haeckels store, close to Margate's seafront. With three treatment rooms, customers are invited to experience a range of thalassotherapy treatments that draw ingredients from the sea – the primary resource for many of the brand’s skincare products.

Using seaweed from Margate's beaches, the treatments include a detoxifying seaweed wrap, a seaweed bath and a seaweed, sea buckthorn and walnut shell body scrub. Alongside its wellness offerings, Haeckels House will act as an events and creative broadcasting space for the local community.

Driven by environmental concerns, Haeckels is utilising natural, found ingredients to encourage consumers to rethink their relationship with the ocean. To see how creative practitioners are taking inspiration from our tides, read our design direction Submerged.

Dote’s Shopping Party is a live-stream retail platform

Dote Shopping Party

San Francisco – Social shopping app Dote has launched Shopping Party, an interactive live video shopping experience, which it likens to ‘Twitch for shopping’.

The new feature launches with a two-week series of more than 400 Shopping Parties. Each party is hosted on the platform by a Dote Creator, who can broadcast to and chat with fans while browsing the app’s 150 retail brands. In addition to making online shopping more social, the interactive feature will make it possible to foster real-time feedback for brands and retailers.

According to Dote, Shopping Party aims to recreate elements of the real-world experience of shopping with friends for the app’s Gen Z audience. ‘When we started shopping online, the experience became one skewed toward convenience and assortment,’ says Dote founder and CEO Lauren Farleigh. ‘With Shopping Party, we've created a first-of-its-kind, immersive shopping experience that provides all the benefits of e-commerce, but in an engaging way you can enjoy with friends.'

Find out why consumers are seeking more interactive, entertaining and social shopping experiences with our new retail macrotrend Community Commerce, launching this week.

Jumbo is a concierge for your privacy settings

US – Jumbo provides a simple interface from which users of the app can control all of their online privacy settings.

While citizens can control their online data under their own volition, the requirement to hop between apps and various settings and platforms can be tedious. Jumbo hopes to offer a streamlined solution with its minimal interface that allows users to privatise their Facebook settings, clear Google search history and rid Alexa of their history of voice commands.

The app also offers the functionality of removing Tweets after a chosen time period, making social media more ephemeral. ‘Today, millions of people want to enjoy the freedom of social media expression without the downside of creating an endless trail of thoughts and feelings, that will follow them forever,’ reads the brand’s press release.

With more consumers aware of the value of their data, we are in need of a new moral framework that prioritises privacy and places the control back in the hands of users.

Jumbo privacy assistant

Puppo creates personalised adverts for dogs

Puppo, campaign by Colenso BBDO Auckland

New York – The petcare brand has launched bespoke ads for every dog registered in New York City to highlight its personalised products and services.

The start-up, which formulates and delivers customised dog food, worked with Colenso BBDO on the campaign. Playing on Puppo’s ability to help pet owners address their dog's unique health concerns through diet, the campaign has used data from the public New York City Dog Licensing Dataset, generating a series of over 100,000 unique ads. The result combines a modular copy system and simple art direction, with dogs individually addressed by name and breed.

Kimberley Ragan, creative director of Colenso BBDO, says: ‘Straying from the typical one-ad-for-100,000 consumers format, instead creating one ad for each of the 100,000-plus dogs who live in New York City, allowed us to connect with owners in a more meaningful way, and help them find the right diet for their pup.’

In our High-end Pets Market, we explore how Millennials in particular are driving growth in the petcare sector.

Stat: Consumers expect returns as standard

Rethinking Returns, a new report from Klarna, considers the extent to which returns have come to play a vital role in the shopping experience. While returns themselves are not a new phenomenon, the research proves that they have continued to rise, becoming ingrained in consumer attitude to and expectations of retail.

Of the 2,000 people surveyed by Klarna, 84% said they would be more likely to purchase from a retailer that offers free returns, while 62% of shoppers said they would not purchase from a store if it did not offer free returns. As returns culture continues to drive e-commerce, retailers are rethinking their logistics and developing new sustainable initiatives for both delivery and return of purchases. For recent brand case studies, explore our Eco-logistics microtrend.

Thought-starter: Will fashion embrace eco-friendly fur?

With the real versus replica fur debate still raging, deputy foresight editor Kathryn Bishop explores the eco innovators disrupting fashion production with fur alternatives that are both desirable and sustainable.

The subject of using fur as a material in fashion is as contentious as ever. While faux fur has been presented as a creative, ethical alternative, concerns about the environmental impact of its synthetic microfibres have grown.

‘We don’t want to kill animals to have our fur, but what [fashion brands are] not telling us about is the carbon consequences of extracting the material for faux alternatives,’ says Mary Creagh, MP for the UK’s Labour party and leader of a parliamentary inquiry into sustainability in the fashion industry.

In response, brands like New York’s House of Fluff are taking faux fur fashion in another direction altogether. Working with chemists at Cradle to Cradle, it is creating a fake fur textile that is compostable and will disintegrate into the earth. Elsewhere, lab-based innovators Vitro Labs are developing fur pelts using stem cells.

Read the Conscious Fur microtrend here.