Crowd Shortcuts – a quick chat about something that’s caught our attention. This week, how local neighbourhood stores are selling luxury convenience…

What’s all this then? An everyday visit to the local convenience store is turning into a luxury browsing opportunity. You may have heard of the lipstick index: it’s a way to spot a recession by lipstick sales going up as people turn to purchasing treats within their budget. Now look instead to the ‘local store index’, because this is the new place for cash-strapped consumers to find affordable luxuries.

Luxury among the cans of baked beans? Tell me more… The neighbourhood shop has undergone a glow-up. We see this in the bodegas of New York city making space for guest-curated snack boxes, craft beers and fancy, localised gifts.

Now you mention it, I have noticed expensive olive oil and kombucha on tap… Bingo!

So will we be ditching mega supermarkets? They’ve jumped on the local luxe movement, too. In the UK, supermarket giant Asda launched On The Move convenience stores last year – promising “a wide range of premium ‘Extra Special’ products” – while Aldi’s Corner Store in Sydney does a fast turnover in treat lunches: fresh sushi and artisan baked goods. Meanwhile, luxury convenience stores in South Korea have overtaken Japan in scale, and doing so with a focus on “developing unique products” (McKinsey, 2023).

Isn’t the economy amazing! Sure is. But local luxe is not just being driven by the economy. It reflects changing consumer values – as we see in how 7-Eleven (the largest convenience store chain in the US) is installing new charging stations for electric vehicles in its local branches, hoping to attract the environmentally-minded customer.

And the cherry on the luxe cake… here’s the even better sell: it takes us full circle back to a time when we’d go to the local baker, butcher and candlestick maker. Now the corner shop is getting the good stuff on the shelves – and not just essentials, which it always has done – it offers the kudos of a local market, of knowing what their customer really wants, of generating word of mouth recommendations.

Will this change the aspirations of product makers? They may move away from wanting to sell in enormous bulk to supermarkets and want to talk to local shop owners (even if it means lower profit margins) instead. Or brands may get better quality awareness from a local, trusted supplier.

Blimey. And the local store index? In a tougher economic landscape, few would argue with the sense in turning to the small treats to sustain us rather than emptying our bank accounts with bigger ticket items. Some may even claim their local artisan bread habit as an act of anti-globalisation… 

TL;DR: Local, luxury, convenient and conscious consumption – now that’s a shopping style that should outlast the cost-of-living crisis.

How ‘zero-waste’ became the new immersive dining experience – Crowd’s Phoebe Trimingham looks at our appetite for sustainable haute cuisine…

City Limits Volume Nine – download it here.

In our latest issue of City Limits – our regular exploration of changing urban experience – we look at solutions to world problems in the food business – from climate labels on menus to floating farms. One of our spotlights on sustainability is the rise of the zero-waste restaurant as not only a call to action, but an immersive experience for the diner.

Cities around the world are full of immersive dining experiences. From eating dinner in a makeshift aircraft, to sipping cocktails in the cupboard of a pawn-shop; going out for a meal is no longer just about the food. For those looking beyond standard dining experiences, meals are accompanied by a spectacle. So much so that experience fatigue has set in. 

So where do you turn when all the ‘experiences’ have been had? When you’re served yet another once-in-a-lifetime theatre show while trying to eat your soup? You turn back to the real hero: the food. Forward-thinking restaurants in global cities are shunning the temptation for distracting entertainment, and letting the food become the experience again. 

Enter the zero-waste restaurants: establishments attempting to do away with food waste entirely. Here, the food becomes the focus as diners buy into the admirable attempt at fully sustainable dining. While the issue of waste is certainly not a recent obsession for the restaurant industry – lots of places have been experimenting with sustainability for decades – what’s new is the front and centering of the efforts, and the glamorisation that goes with it.

Silo in London, for example, is designed ‘back to front’ with the bin in mind (irony being they don’t actually have a bin, they don’t need one). All food is used in its entirety – think cured mushroom stems and yeast treacle. Any leftovers are composted and sent back to their hyperlocal suppliers. Like Silo, Helsinki’s Nolla (‘zero’ in Finnish) sends compost back into the system, but guests are welcome to take home a scoopful too – a different kind of doggy bag. It’s philosophy of ‘refuse, reduce, reuse, and only as a last resource, recycle’ is consistent, from a reusable coffee container and a composter (above) to not accepting food that comes in single use plastic.

Meanwhile, Mume in Taipei has a dedicated sourcing manager (rare in a small, Asian restaurant) with the mission to champion underrated Taiwanese ingredients and zero-waste cooking practices.

These places strive to avoid food leftovers, but also any scrap of rubbish. Rhodora in Brooklyn – a fully sustainable wine bar also ‘waging a war against waste’ – shreds wine boxes into compost material and donates corks to an organisation that turns them into shoes. Everything is transported on bikes. Back at Silo, plates are made from plastic bags, wall lights from crushed bottles, and ceiling fixtures from dried seaweed. This all-in approach to the zero-waste concept is what makes these restaurants a fully immersive dining experience – no gimmick-y entertainment required.  

But these restaurants aren’t cheap: they’re all mid to high-end. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, sustainability is definitely something to be coveted, but why is the experience of it not more accessible? Secondly, could the price points actually work in sustainability’s favour? Making zero-waste dining a sexy, high-end experience brands the concept as an aspirational lifestyle. Like the Tesla car model, fancy zero-waste restaurants could, in turn, make the thought of intensive recycling more desirable – eggshell compost and all.  

Saying that, it is a bit odd to glamorise something that should be an everyday activity. If people are playing at sustainability when they dine out, are they less likely to practise it at home? The very act of going out for a meal that has been beautifully prepared for you distances it – managing food waste becomes something to passively experience and admire, rather than actively do. 

Either way, city diners are hungry for new, immersive experiences – and zero-waste restaurants are a welcome addition to the menu.

So this isn’t just men wearing old festival wristbands? No, this is much more intentional. Unlike festival wristbands that are usually forgotten and left on for the entire summer, the bro-celet is a carefully considered accessory – often with a heavy subtext. For Charles, the inclusion is a subtle nod to his positioning as an environmentalist King. 

Clever! These are very carefully planned. Men are purchasing them from designer boutiques and incorporating them into their daily wardrobes. Work, gym, pub; the bro-celet is a constant companion, favoured by both bankers in boardrooms and tech bros in Silicon Valley who wear them as a savvy power move, often paired down with an Apple watch.

And what about those A-listers you mentioned? Bro-celets have appeared on the wrists of some big names, like David Beckham, Harry Styles, Timothée Chalamet and Brad Pitt. It’s a subtle way to show some rebellion, and can easily be hidden under a sleeve when needed. Plus, many of these bracelets have a charitable connection, which is a nice bonus for those who want to avoid getting too political about capitalism and what not.

I was planning on wearing a tuxedo today, can I still ‘bro-celet’? Go for it! While some may assume a casual bracelet wouldn’t go with a formal suit, like the one worn by King Charles, the mix of high and low is all part of the charm.

TL;DR: Want to tell the world how much you care about [insert charitable cause], but are too busy getting ahead? Throw on a bro-celet and let your accessory of choice do the talking for you. 

Our relationship with food doesn’t only reflect our culture, it also helps to define it. In our latest issue of City Limits we invite you to enjoy our appetizers and insightful mains on city food…

City Limits Volume Nine – download it here.

We’ve seen so much in our City Limits series – Crowd DNA’s ongoing exploration of the urban experience – since it began in 2018. Over five years, it is our opportunity to bring together thoughtful reporting of what is happening now in cities and forecast how it could look next in compelling sectors like city living, youth culture, and mobility, to city-centric solutions and the night economy. 

We’re now back with our ninth issue and to ask what’s happening in the food and drink business in cities around the world after a challenging few years. It explores how what we eat and drink impacts on a city’s culture, ways that urban plays its part in a product’s story, and how food is such a pleasurable taste of change as it happens in our ever-evolving cities. 

We go to restaurants in Tokyo where Kaiseki fine dining means fun and frivolity, find out why Singapore’s hawker food culture is being harmed by nostalgia, enjoy slow moving cuisine in London, and taste when food gives community to the diaspora in cities around the world – and ultimately, to us all.

The full 17 page magazine includes:

City Limits Volume Nine – download it here.

In the latest issue of Crowd Signals, we step into the world of Wellbeing Recharge and analyse online conversation around Psychedelic Health...

In times when our resilience is tested, we turn to ways to bolster our mental and physical health – we call this shift in focus Wellbeing Recharge. Our Crowd Signals series reports on the trends in Wellbeing Recharge, and focuses on the potent developments in Psychedelic Health. 

The hard stop of the global pandemic gave many of us an opportunity to pause and reconsider the balance in our lives, while notions of collective – including global health – are now being confronted. This connection with ourselves and those around us is now a multi-layered endeavour as we explore spiritualism, tech-enabled optimisation, new-wave ingestibles and alternative healing therapies. 

Our third edition of Crowd Signals is now live and available to download here. This is informed by our regular exploration of unstructured data using our trends platform Crowd Signals, designed to identify real-time cultural change and future opportunities with advanced NLP, AI and machine learning capabilities. 

Using our Crowd Signals Hub we have identified seven trends within this shift to Wellbeing Recharge. This edition of Crowd Signals looks into one of them: Psychedelic Health. The full report features: 

– innovation in health technology with start-ups in micro-dosing

– insight into how knowledge about psychedelics is shared online

– trend analysis of psychedelic use from underground to mainstream

– our emotions tracking tool illustrates the role played by trust in conversations around psychedelics.

So turn on, tune in, but don’t drop out – and read here to open your mind to all the potential. 

Contact us to find out more about the seven trends in the Wellbeing Recharge culture shift, or to talk more about our Crowd Signals platform.

 

Crowd Shortcuts – a quick chat about something that’s caught our attention. This week, the bad beauty revolution…

What’s all this then? People deliberately applying ‘bad’ makeup, posting it online, and dismantling conventional beauty ideals in the process. Think grey lipstick, green freckles and influencers glueing baubles to their eyelids. 

Sounds messy. What’s wrong with a flash of red lippy? Quite a bit, it turns out. Bad beauty is there to disrupt old-fashioned beauty standards and make us think twice about concepts like learned attractiveness. 

Gotcha, but how is it different from any other beauty trend? It’s more than just a new ‘look’. The question of what makes bad beauty bad is rooted in the dismissal of an entire industry. Although trends of attractiveness ricochet through the beauty world and are always evolving – there are certain rules that have remained fixed when it comes to the idea of ‘attractiveness’. Bad beauty bluntly rejects that with its absolute disruption of makeup’s dos and don’ts. 

Fun! Exactly, the rules are well and truly out the window. Each look is unique, and no one post is the same.

So the opposite of ‘selfie face’? Yep, that’s a good way of looking at it. Bad beauty’s irregularity jars with the uniform that we’re used to seeing on social media: big lips, wide-open eyes, and feature-enhancing makeup perfectly applied. 

I’ve just clumped my eyelashes together – am I ready? Absolutely. Just be aware that things are moving away from being solely concerned with defying conventionality. Bad beauty is also about inhabiting spheres of expression that extend beyond the limits of binaries and societal constructs (you look lovely, by the way).

Ah, so it’s not really ‘bad’ then. More ‘transgressive’ beauty? Sure, but that’s not as catchy. There is a shift, though, toward influencers applying bad makeup as a way of transgressing boundaries of gender, race and sexuality. It’s becoming more about expressions of total honesty, and the power that comes from ownership of personal narratives.

TL;DR: Bad beauty is so much more than aggressively clashing eyeshadow and offensively bright lip liner. It’s a new-wave beauty movement that goes against the grain and chooses self expression over conventional attractiveness.

The baby boomer generation might be getting older but that doesn't mean they're becoming predictable, says Crowd DNA senior consultant Laura Warby. Brands are slowly but surely changing the way they communicate with this cohort, and here's why...

The week before last I bumped into a family friend in the Westfield shopping centre. She was laden down with bags from The North Face and Ellis Brigham Mountain Sports. When I asked her about what’s in them she told me excitedly that she was off to Costa Rica in a few weeks to go white water rafting, a celebratory trip to mark her retirement from 34 years as a teacher.

I shouldn’t really have been surprised. Work we completed for Global Radio showed how alike the older and younger age groups can be. Within families these groups communicate more than ever and it seems that all the facets of ‘starting out’ happen again post-family.

Fewer and fewer people are retiring in the way we used to. A study by UCL last last year showed that many 65 year olds perceive themselves as 10 years younger than their actual age and as life expectancy increases, calls to reassess what is defined as old age are gaining traction. It seems that the innovative world of advertising is lagging behind on this one, dismissing this consumer group far too readily.

Closer inspection suggests an underestimation of this cohort.

ONS figures show that they’re more likely to get divorced than any other age group. Our own data says they’re as eager to seek out new experience as anyone and are much more confident in their ability to do so.

As children fly the nest, mortgages are paid (particularly for those Boomers who’ve ridden the housing wave) and the pressure to work dissipates, the amount of responsibility carried around on their shoulders starts to subside, and with it comes a reassessment of what their life can mean.

More disposable income and improved health compared to 50 years ago has led this group to actively seek more exciting, experience-led lifestyles; more travel, new activities, new adventures… new partners (which may go some way to explain the huge growth in the number of people aged 60 plus going under the cosmetic surgeon’s knife, according to Spire Healthcare), all indicate that this is not a generation stuck in their ways.

That is not to say that all those over 65 are now carefree and hedonistic; on the contrary, many still find themselves with a significant number of years left to work, or still supporting adult children who have been affected in some way by the recession.

But that just goes to reinforce the point – this group isn’t homogenous and is actually starting to create new conventions.

Just as we have identified the tribes that exist within our millennials, so too should we take the time to understand the complexities that exist within older consumers too. When you consider that Euromonitor have predicted a global spending power of £10tn amongst the baby boomer generation, it feels like we’d be missing a trick if we don’t.