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Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Let's go for a little trip to the neighborhood.

Emily Sundberg: I was taking a walk in my neighborhood, I was in a coffee shop that I go to frequently, and I saw this retail setup, as many coffee shops have now, like pantry items.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Emily Sundberg, freelance reporter and director, based in New York City.

Emily Sundberg: I saw this olive oil brand, this spice brand, and this vinegar brand, and I realized that I've seen the same three or four products, copy and pasted in stores, not only in my neighborhood, but in hotel lobbies that I've been to in Los Angeles, clothing stores that I've been to in Hudson.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, if you live in a city, you might have experienced something like this. This uncanny feeling of sameness, in shop after shop, and not the big-box retail stores, but small, independent, even locally owned mini-markets and boutiques.

Emily Sundberg: I started to wonder how these brands that I originally discovered on Instagram were suddenly in front of me, pretty much everywhere I went where you could swipe a credit card.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well, like any good reporter, Emily turned that question into a story, and she discovered that many of these highly curated shops, with a local artisanal vibe, are actually getting their goods through a network of venture capital-funded Insta-brands. Her recent piece about this phenomenon is in New York Magazine's Grubstreet, and it's called Welcome to the Shoppy Shop.

Emily Sundberg: I was curious about exploring what happens when specialty stores aren't really special anymore, because they have all the same products, and not only all the same products, but they're all these products that you originally discover on your phone. I think at first, that is a magical experience, but what happens when that exists in every store, coffee shop, wine shop, or bookstore that you go into?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about how you know that you are looking at or experiencing a shoppy shop.

Emily Sundberg: Sure. Maybe it's a pantry store, a home goods store. Those are usually the two categories of shoppy shops. The next step is recognizing a lot of these branded labels that you've seen before on Instagram, on bonappetit.com, or from your favorite influencers that you follow, who are maybe cooking influencers, or YouTubers. I think for a while, in the early days of COVID, especially, there was a bolster of new consumer packaged goods startups that you would order online.

Then slowly, you started seeing them in your neighborhood shops. There's this one brand of olive oil called Graza, that is in this squeeze bottle, that I started seeing online and then very quickly started seeing in my neighborhood stores, and now it's in Whole Foods. There's another brand called Diaspora, which is a spice company, a lot of food magazines have written about, because of their sustainability story and their equity for farmers in India.

Suddenly, it was in every single store I went to, whether it was a home goods store or a coffee shop, or places that I would never think to buy spices. Part of this trend is also really deep storytelling on the labels, really bright packaging. Maybe you'll see a photo of the founder on the back, and that's another part of this story, too. It's this grounding in emotional play with the shopper, which is part of the idea of small washing, which was another fun tangent to go on in the story.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well, let's go on that tangent a little bit. What is small washing?

Emily Sundberg: Small washing is when a brand uses their small size as a marketing tactic. Small businesses have existed since the beginning of time, but over the pandemic, everybody wanted to support a small business. You wanted to keep your local restaurants open, you wanted to keep your 100-year-old bookstore open, everybody to make it in the end, not just for Amazon to take over and become the hero.

A lot of companies, they start out small and humble, that's part of their story, and how they get customers to be attracted to them. Maybe the product's good, but their story's really great, the idea of buying something a little bit more relatable, and you're not just supporting a business, but you're supporting a person. What I love to look up is how much money these companies actually raise, which is usually pretty public.

You can see on Crunchbase, TechCrunch, or Bloomberg, many of your favorite small businesses aren't so small. Some of them have raised 5, to 10, to $50 million, but they maintain that small story. I think venture funding is great. You can grow a business that way, but it's just a fact that your favorite small business might not actually be so small.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: All right, quick break. We're talking more shoppy shops right after this.

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All right, we're back with Emily Sundberg, freelance writer and director, and we're talking about shoppy shops. Let's also go down this piece that you were initially giving us, around-- We experienced these brands maybe the first time in this direct-to-consumer, or social media. Why go to retail? I'm wondering if it is connected to the pandemic.

Emily Sundberg: Yes, there's definitely a return to retail right now. You can see it in even quarter one reports from this year that companies like Shopify or Herding, which is an online shopping software that most online businesses in the US use for setting up their online stores, you also see that there's this return to malls in America. I think people definitely miss the tangible experience of going into a store. I think as people return to the office, they're also spending more time in the neighborhoods that they live in or work in.

I think that there's also just so many brands now, you can have a better comparison experience when you're in the store, and you can look at each of them next to each other.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Is that in any way different than when I could finally buy my QVC items at Bed Bath & Beyond in person?

Emily Sundberg: I don't think it is that different. I think it's-- Were you excited when you were able to buy them in person?

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] I don't know that I was, but yes, everyone's [unintelligible 00:06:31] see those weird QVC things, you're like, "Oh, my gosh."

Emily Sundberg: Mr. Scrubby, or whatever it is that you're being told on late night TV. Yes, totally. I think we can fight being a human pretty hard. We can fight human experiences of getting outside and being in a neighborhood pretty hard, and there is a certain delight to laying on your phone late at night, just mindlessly shopping and ordering things, but man, it's a lot of hardboard. [laughs] If you can just pick up a bottle of olive oil in the store, it's a lot nicer to just come home and use it, and not have to think about when recycling day is.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A final question. Talk to me about how this affects one of our democratic, with a little d, capacities within the context of retail and capitalism. We are meant to be able to vote with our feet, vote with our dollars. Does it make it harder for us to be shopper voters, conscious consumers?

Emily Sundberg: I think there's two parts to this question. I think it's easier than ever to become a business owner. I could go on to TikTok today, start saying that I am starting a business from my house, and I could potentially go viral and get a ton of inbound purchases in the next two days. I don't need to go to Harvard Business School or major in finance to be a business owner anymore. On one hand, that's why we see more brands than ever.

With that, it's easier to raise capital, because there's more opportunities for these venture funds to grow and make money. As far as the shopper goes, I think that it has always been the responsibility of the consumer to understand what they're buying. Whether that's the implications of shopping on Amazon or the implications of supporting what they think is a small business. It took me two Google searches to find out what some of these companies have raised.

It's easy to find out who entrepreneurs' parents are. It's easy to find out who entrepreneurs' investors are. If you want to know those things, I think it's easier than ever to find those things out, to be a conscious shopper, and make better decisions.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Emily Sundberg is a freelance writer and director. Her recent piece in New York Magazine is Welcome to The Shoppy Shop. Emily, thanks so much for talking with us.

Emily Sundberg: Thank you so much.

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