pet care is beauty’s last frontier
+ a 2025 A24 scorecard
Hello and welcome back to as seen on! Today’s newsletter is packed. ENJOY!
I’ve spent so much time reading about the WBD–Netflix–Paramount situation that I have zero will to write about it. So here are the headlines: Netflix agreed to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal valued at $82.7 billion and Hollywood is spiraling because no one really trusts them. Apparently Sarandos and Ellison both courted Trump in person ahead of the bid, as one does. Paramount cried foul on the sale process and has now launched a $77.9 billion hostile all-cash counteroffer, backed by Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and Affinity Partners, Jared Kushner’s private-equity firm. Regulators are already circling, promising a brutal antitrust fight, and everyone has a think piece on all this except me. Here’s my favorite.
Jay-Z’s investment firm MarcyPen Capital Partners, which has backed Merit Beauty and Rael, is targeting a $500mn private equity fund to invest in South Korean lifestyle companies.
A24 took out a print ad in the Boston Globe announcing a fake engagement between Rob Pattinson and Zendaya to promote its new romcom, The Drama. They also teamed up with Wheaties on a limited-edition box with Marty Supreme packaging. In the last year, I’ve covered A24’s expansion into publishing, collectible scripts, a new membership program, a national Barnes & Noble partnership, a growing music label, and ongoing merch drops. “Because A24 has established such a distinct point of view, it has the license to show up anywhere that aligns with that, transcending the role of a traditional studio,” Sara McAlpine, creative strategist and founder of SMC Studio, told Vogue Business.
But how did A24 actually do in 2025? Financially, it was a patchwork year. Materialists (≈ $36.5M) was a bright spot, but much of the slate — Eddington (≈ $13.1M), Eternity (≈ $10M), The Legend of Ochi (≈ $4.9M), Opus (≈ $2.2M) — struggled to clear even modest box-office expectations. It’s the classic A24 rhythm at this point: for every mid-budget win, there’s an under-performer soon forgotten. With several films grossing below or only slightly above their budgets, the real profitability story lives in the studios’ long tail — streaming, licensing, international deals, all the quieter revenue channels that keep the machine moving. A24 also raised fresh capital this year, pulling in a roughly $75 million led by Thrive Capital, and now sits at a roughly $3.5 billion valuation (a 40% increase from its 2022 valuation), which tells you everything about where its power actually comes from.Investors are buying into the brand’s cultural resonance, taste, its ability to make even commercial misfires feel like part of the mythology. It’s also the tradeoff A24 has always made: by prioritizing offbeat, auteur-driven projects, it preserves a kind of cultural authority that doesn’t always map cleanly onto box-office returns. I guess we’ll start to see how comfortable investors are with that level of risk, or whether A24 gets nudged toward more commercial projects — and whether any of it will matter at all.
This is the second piece I’m seeing in as many weeks about the Gen Z TV problem: “Gen Z Is Huge. Their TV Shows Are Tiny. And Hollywood Is Panicking.” Let it be known that I’ve been beating this dead horse, but now I’m changing my mind. I think it’s too early to call it. The shows driving this discourse — I Love LA, Adults, Overcompensating — are one season in at most, and deserve more time to find their footing and gain traction with the right audiences. Thankfully, they’ve all been renewed for second seasons. I will say, though, that I’d love to see these characters develop beyond avatars of Gen Z archetypes. A little emotional resonance could be nice.
But, Gen Alpha might be single-handedly keeping theaters alive. “Give them a franchise that feels like theirs and a screening that feels like a true event, and they will lobby parents, coordinate friends, and show up in force.” PG-13 is good business.
ShopMy surpassed $1 billion in revenue this year and is now generating an average of $200 million a month — a 200% increase over 2024, according to Puck’s Sarah Shapiro. I’m impressed by how well the platform has been able to corner the fashion Substack market. As one creator told Sarah, “It was all Instagram and LTK; now it’s all ShopMy and Substack.”
“Vanity Fair and Olivia Nuzzi have mutually agreed, in the best interest of the magazine, to let her contract expire at the end of the year”. I guess that’s that.
Meanwhile, Substack is piloting a sponsorship program, with a formal launch expected next year. Here’s what their team told me about it.
I have a few thoughts for you. Firstly, this is good—great, obviously. I’ve worked with a few brand partners this year and have loved it. But. My spidey senses are protesting against the idea of Substack becoming the bottleneck between creators and brands. Good for them, because a thriving ads/sponsorship infrastructure is a massive retention tool, but that’s a lot of power to centralize, especially for the Substack middle class. Also, the language here is doing a lot of work. Substack is famously somewhat anti-ads, which must be why the sponsorship framing is so insistent. I’m curious to see how different these sponsorships actually are from ads or whether the distinction is mostly rhetorical. Anyway, overall I like the sound of this.
Steven Bartlett’s media company FlightStory has made a seven-figure investment in Maggie Sellers Reum’s brand Hot Smart Rich, with plans to apply the same scaling blueprint used for Bartlett’s podcast The Diary of a CEO.
I, for one, am here for Australia’s social media teen ban. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but on the issue of social media being destructive for young minds, I have no nuance. I’m 26 and barely hanging by a thread.
Now this is fun! Justin McLeod, Hinge’s founder and CEO, is stepping down to launch Overtone, an AI dating app that has been incubated within Hinge for the last year. Tinder/Hinge parent company Match Group will lead Overtone’s initial funding round in early 2026 and hold a substantial ownership position. Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff is expected to join Overtone’s board. Sigh. Well, this is one hell of a hedge for Match Group, whose house is very much not in order. There’s not much to say here. AI is the future of online dating.
Bethenny Frankel has other ideas. The RHONY alum just launched The Core, a non-app dating platform she’s pitching as a human-led alternative to algorithmic dating. It’s basically a social club. Members apply with a 50-character statement of intent, get screened, pay an initiation fee (around $1,200), and follow strict no-ghosting rules. According to Frankel, some applicants — billionaires included — have been rejected. Instead of swipes, users get curated “connections” based on values and alignment, plus in-person events starting in January.
In what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Zuck is planning major cuts to Meta’s metaverse projects, presumably because he has snapped out of his NFT-induced psychosis at the behest of investors.
Whoever is running Phia’s PR really wants us to know Bill Gates hasn’t invested in his daughter’s company (he supports it, though!), but all the girlbosses — Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sheryl Sandberg — have. The AI fashion company, co-founded by Sophia Kianni, is raising $30 million in new funding at a $180 million valuation, months after completing its first $8 million funding round. According to Phia’s 2025 Wrapped, it reached 807,803 users this year (nice!), its top product category is hiking (interesting), and its most visited site is Quince (very interesting).
At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34%. College professors are struggling to administer exams as accommodations—mostly for ADHD, anxiety, and depression—have surged. At the University of Chicago, students qualifying for accommodations have more than tripled over eight years; at UC Berkeley, they’ve nearly quintupled over the past 15. Make of this what you will.
My favorite trend of 2025 was people policing people for performative reading, whatever that means.
FWRD, the luxury retailer operated by Revolve Group, has named Rosie Huntington-Whiteley as its new fashion director, after appointing Kendall Jenner as creative director in 2021, although they are clearly not paying her enough to have that title in her IG bio.
Ali Kriegsman is writing one of my favorite business newsletters right now. I’m going to make her teach me all about the affiliate business.
This is a reminder that Lore is doing some of the best fragrance storytelling in the game. In case I forget to add it, the Holder Object belongs in my gift guide.
Rachel Strugatz seems to be the only one truly reporting on the politics of Sephora, and it’s really such a shame because it’s great stuff.“An industry veteran once told me that a brand should never make the leap to Ulta because breaking the exclusivity with Sephora isn’t worth the sales you’ll potentially gain. Once brands enter Ulta, this person said, Sephora will go into vengeance mode and stop supporting your brand, no matter how successful it’s been. Indeed, I’ve reported that it’s normal for a brand’s Sephora business to drop 20 to 40 percent once it decides to expand its distribution. Another insider broke it down this way: Within six months of adding Ulta to your distribution, your sales at Sephora will be down, and after a year, your total U.S. sales will be down.”
Why Pet Care Is Beauty’s Last Frontier: An Interview With The Founders of Lil Luv Dog
Lil Luv Dog is selling $36 dog shampoo at the same places you buy your iced matcha. I talked to founders Cara Santana Leto and Stephanie Suganami—LA insiders who’ve worked with everyone from Kim Kardashian to Flamingo Estate—about why luxury pet care isn’t indulgent, it’s overdue, and how they plan to drag an unregulated industry into the clean beauty era.
Premium petcare walks a fine line. Some people see it as indulgent, while others see it as responsible care. When someone says they would never buy shampoo for themselves at a thirty-six dollar price point, what is your response beyond the marketing language?
In beauty, Credo, Goop, Sephora Clean—have done the work of defining what ‘clean’ actually means. Pet care has none of that infrastructure. It’s an unregulated industry where 78% of products calling themselves ‘natural’ contain synthetic ingredients, and only 3% offer plastic-free packaging. There’s no one setting the bar, until now.
We’re building a new standard through Lil Luv Dog—bringing the same level of care and transparency we expect for ourselves to what we put on our dogs. And the reality is, until sustainability and clean formulations become the norm rather than the exception, there’s a premium attached to doing it
That said, when you look at the economics, our Dry Shampoo lasts about 6 months. That’s roughly $6 a month—about 3-4% of what our customers are already spending on their pet. Our product helps extend your grooming services and, therefore, continues to support customer savings for in-between washes.
You are selling at Pop Up Grocer, Revolve, and Community Goods, which are very human and very curated spaces. What changes when a dog brand enters beauty and lifestyle channels instead of the traditional pet aisle?
Shopping in the pet aisle is a utilitarian mindset. Lil Luv Dog is taking shopping for your pet like they are a product and replacing it with shopping like it is a part of your lifestyle.
When we’re at Pop Up Grocer or Revolve or Community Goods, we’re sitting next to the products our customer already buys for themselves. They already are in a discovery mindset, prioritize clean ingredients, and expect a certain aesthetic and experience. We don’t have to convince them that clean matters or that sustainability is worth paying for—they’ve already made that decision in every other category of their life. We’re just extending that logic and meeting the customer where they are at.
It is about our dogs being a part of the whole ecosystem of values and choices, and ultimately our lives. That is how young Gen Z and Millennial pet parents are thinking about their pets – they are our family. Our customer doesn’t compartmentalize. They apply the same standards across personal care, food, home, and pet. These retailers understand that. And, that is what makes us stand out as a true lifestyle brand—one that honors the role pets play in our lives and elevates their care to the same level as our own.
You both come from the center of LA’s taste-making ecosystem through KKW, Tatcha, Glamsquad, and the Flamingo Estate orbit. What have you intentionally unlearned from that world in order to build something that feels genuine in a new category?
The relationship with your dog is one of the most unfiltered, honest things in your life. Your dog doesn’t care about the packaging. They don’t know what brand they’re wearing. So any whiff of manufactured authenticity gets rejected immediately. You can’t perform your way into trust with this customer.
We’ve had to unlearn the instinct toward exclusivity as a value in itself. In beauty, scarcity creates desire. In pet care, being hard to access feels like you don’t actually care about dogs. Our customer wants to feel like we made this for them and their dog specifically—not like they’re lucky to have access to it. We’re not above our customer. We’re beside them.
You have said you want to define the gold standard of what petcare should look like. If we revisit this conversation in five years, what is the clearest sign that Lil Luv Dog did more than create beautiful products and actually moved the category forward?
The clearest sign will be what other brands are forced to do because of us.
In five years, we want consumers asking questions they weren’t asking before—is this product third party verified? Does it hold itself to a standard? How is it reducing waste and how is it giving back? These become standard questions in pet care the way it is in beauty. If retailers start requiring ingredient transparency as a baseline for shelf placements, if the brands that used to get away with calling something ‘natural’ or clean while filling it with synthetics can’t do that anymore because the consumer knows better, then we have updated the category and moved it in the right direction.
Right now, pet care is where beauty was fifteen years ago. No standards, no gatekeepers, no accountability. We want to be the reason that changes. Not because we built a regulatory body, but because we raised expectations. Because we made transparency the price of entry. The win isn’t that we’re the only clean and sustainable forward brand. The win is that we made clean the baseline—and then we had to keep innovating to stay ahead of a standard we set.
so jam packed!!! love the lore bottle designs ...they are made to be on the bedside table!!!
We did an AMA with Melanie from Lore and she's so delightful and I'm in love with their bottles, they're little pieces of art. Also you can use the caps as candlestick holders apparently.