Ela Ceren Diker

Ela Ceren DikerJul 27, 2026

I walked past the new SEPHORA on Carnaby Street this weekend and the queue stretched halfway down the street. Music pumping, a crowd genuinely having fun just waiting to get in and that's the point. Sephora isn't just selling product, they're selling an experience worth queuing for. Some context on what's actually happening: this is Sephora's first "boutique" format in the UK, a smaller, ~2,700 sq ft concept, its 16th store overall, opened July 23rd on one of London's most iconic streets. And it's a deliberate shift. After two years of large-format flagship openings (Belfast, Bristol, Edinburgh), Sephora is now going smaller and more local, designed for the lunch-break browse, the after-work pop-in, the "grab something before tonight" moment. The store also debuts Sephora's new Beauty Scan tech: an advisor scans your skin via phone and gives you personalised skincare and shade-matching insights, tied straight into the MySephora app. Curation is tight too cult and indie names like Rhode, Glossier, Rare Beauty and Sol de Janeiro, all TikTok darlings, sitting in a physical space built for discovery. One of women's favourite weekend activities is genuinely just walking around Sephora browsing, swatching, filming a haul. Sephora has understood that better than almost anyone, and now they're bringing that magnetism to the high street, block by block.

Ela Ceren DikerJul 24, 2026

Some wins deserve a shoutout and this one's a big one. 👏 dussl, the Glasgow-born skincare brand founded by Fraser Wilson, just landed on the Holland & Barrett homepage, with their Calming Aloe Vera After Sun Gel sitting front and centre under the Summer Shop. For a self-funded, founder-led brand, this is exactly the kind of retail moment that changes the trajectory. What makes dussl worth watching: Fraser left a career in tech to build a brand around one deceptively simple insight, UV exposure doesn't clock off, so protection shouldn't either. No hyper-gendered packaging, no 10-step routines. Just multi-tasking, gender-neutral formulas that make daily SPF effortless. They even donate 1% to skin cancer charities. That clarity of positioning is why retailers like Holland & Barrett take notice. In a crowded suncare category, dussl isn't shouting louder, it's simplifying better. Congratulations Fraser Wilson and the dussl team. From DTC to a national retailer's homepage in this short a time is no accident, it's proof that a sharp brand mission travels. ☀️ Watching this brand journey closely. 🙌 #skincare #SPF #brandstrategy #creatoreconomy #retail

Ela Ceren DikerJul 29, 2026

Nobody expected Kim Kardashian's energy drink ad to be this good and that's exactly why it worked; I keep thinking about her new UPDATE campaign, not because of the drink, but because of the move itself. For years, the internet had a running list of "things to say about Kim": the surgery speculation, the "get your ass up and work" line, the bar exam she never passed. Normally a brand would run from that. UPDATE walked straight into it. The ad is shot like a press conference. Gloria Allred asks her point blank, "did she even ever pass the bar?" No pause, no defensiveness. Kim looks at the camera: "No, I didn't pass the bar. I raised it." A few scenes later she's sealed inside a glass box on a pedestal, typing away while people watch her like a museum piece, a straight callback to the "get up and work" clip that once got dragged online. What struck me isn't the humour, it's the sequencing. She didn't ask people to forget the criticism or move past it quietly. She picked it up first, turned it into the plot of her own ad, and made everyone else's jokes feel late to the party. That's the part most brands get backwards. We spend so much energy trying to control what people say about us that we forget the fastest way to defuse a criticism is to say it yourself, louder, and with better timing. It also only works because there's something real underneath it. UPDATE isn't leaning on the joke alone, it's built around paraxanthine (the compound your body makes when it breaks down caffeine) for steadier focus without the crash, and it's already scaled into major retail, including a big Walmart rollout. The humour buys attention. The product has to be the reason people stay. And nowhere in the ad does anyone explain the references. If you know, you know. That's what made people feel like insiders instead of an audience being sold to. A brand, at the end of the day, isn't a logo or a famous face on packaging. It's the sum of every impression someone forms of you, and whether they feel in on the joke or outside of it. So the question I keep coming back to: what's the one thing people already say about your brand that you're still trying to outrun, instead of picking up first?