NINE BY NINE

81 BRANDS CHANGING OUR WORLD

2021: A RETURN TO OUR DEFAULTS
There’s a graph that has been in every. single. agency. presentation. over the
past year. You know the one: “ten years in eight weeks.” It tells the story of an
industry which saw a whiplash-inducing digital shift during the early days of
pandemic closures over the Spring of 2020.

The problem? The data fueling that narrative was sketchy, at best. With the
exception of restaurant delivery and e-grocery, we’ll have seen a 3% retained
digital growth after the 2020 eCommerce boom has receded. Target and
Walmart in-store sales are thumping, while online growth has slowed.

Or, to put it more simply: we’ve returned to our defaults. Best Buy, Lowes,
Home Depot. We’re going back to the “store of yore”, and eCom teams are
feeling the pain.

This year’s Nine by Nine will explore the nature of a customer who has returned
to brick and mortar. What does she find? For one, more direct to consumer
brands on the shelf than ever before. She also finds an explosion of private
labels occupying an ever-growing amount of space. When she does shop online,
she finds that DTC brands are engaging in more channels than ever before. Not
only are brands omnichannel, now so are their customers.

If you can manage to acquire a customer in the cookieless future, good luck on
selling them any product. In 2021, supply chain issues are impacting every part
of the customer journey. With supply down, and demand up, there’s less of a
reason to discount what inventory remains. Many retailers are launching resale
marketplaces in response, others are launching digital sample sales or
offloading B-stock on their primary channels. It’s a war out here.

So we find ourselves in the midst of an inflection point: a plenitude of brands,

with very little to sell, eager to continue to tell their stories and engage their
communities, but unable to do so purely through Commerce.

If a brand has nothing to sell, do they have anything to say?

NINE BY NINE
In the creation of this report, we found nine recurrent themes from the past year
of running the retail trade media operations of Future Commerce. Across three
podcast properties, a newsletter, and producing five broad consumer research
studies, we have zeroed in on the nine themes that are creating new and exciting
opportunities for consumers and brands alike.

This year’s report focuses on the brands, the retailers, the services, and
collective organizations, which are changing our world for the better. We believe
that, because everyone has to engage in Commerce, that it is a force to bring
about change in the world. Those rated on this year’s Nine by Nine are doing that
in nine distinct ways:

- Evolving from digital retailer to omnichannel business

- Providing greater access to customers of all sizes and income levels
- Putting the customer at the center of the experience
- Appealing to niches by providing curated marketplaces
- Evolving low-cost private label products into sought-after brands
- Innovating in new and exciting ways in “The Metaverse”
- Speaking directly to the C.A.R.L.Y. psychographic
- Engaging in performance art and absurdism to attract a new audience
- Promoting the well-being of their customers

In numerology, the Number 9 represents wisdom and responsibility. The

ultimate goal of Number 9 is to serve humanity. What’s more, Nine (九 pinyin jiǔ)
is considered a good number in Chinese culture because it sounds the same as
the word "long-lasting.”

If ever there was a time to look to the world of retail for wisdom, responsibility,
and durability, it is now.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 2

2021 9X9 CATEGORIES

DTC COMES OF AGE INCLUSIVE BRANDS PUTTING THE

C IN CX

NICHE MARKETPLACES PRIVATE-LABEL GRAILS METAVERSE AS MALL

C.A.R.L.Y. PERFORMANCE ART WELLNESS BRANDS

AS COMMERCE
What makes a brand meaningful?
Together with Klaviyo and Shipium, Future Commerce has created a report that
details the brands that are adapting to our ever-changing world. We are
illuminating nine brands across nine categories in an effort to spotlight
change-makers and truth-tellers.

We didn’t set out on this journey alone. We have joined forces with 30 of the
most brilliant minds in our industry to examine the question “what makes a
brand meaningful?” It’s a simple question, with quite a subjective answer. The
reality is, it depends on who is answering the question. So we sought a wide
array of diverse thinkers, founders, builders, and innovators to join us. We’ve
mined hundreds of hours of content, interviewed dozens of operators, and
together we’ve created a framework that will allow us to not only rate the
efficiency of a brands’ ability to change the world, but help us to discover
emerging brands who are hard at work building a better tomorrow.

The Future Commerce Expert Network includes operators at brands like

Tapestry, Clorox, Starbucks, Disney, SC Johnson, and Wayfair.

You can find a full list of our contributors at the end of this report in the section
entitled Methodology. We also included our 80+ Future Commerce Alumni,
contributors to our podcast content over our 250+ episode, 5-year span.

This is not a list. This second annual report of Nine by Nine will spotlight brands
that are making their mark on the world in categories that we believe will define
our future.

The future is, after all, what we make of it. Together we can shape a future we’re
all proud of.

— The Future Commerce Team

Nine by Nine 2021 | 4

DTC Comes of Age: Digitally-native brands
embracing omnichannel
Sponsored by Shipium

Has any term been more reviled—or more often redefined–than DTC? The wave
of DTC darlings reaching exit from venture-backed, to acquisition, has reached a
fever pitch during this past trip around the sun. The upperclassmen of
digitally-native brands are making their foray into the public markets, and we’re
beginning to see financials for the first time. The verdict? eCommerce is
expensive, omnichannel is a requirement for scale, and very, very, few of them
have reached revenues that justify private market valuations.

That’s where we are. But where are we going?

Brands in this category are redefining omnichannel. It’s no longer enough to just
be present in every channel. Physical retail, marketplaces, vending, and home
delivery, of course. The new expectation for DTC is to create channels out of thin
air. Live streaming, SMS concierge, store-in-store, entertainment venues,
restaurants, symposiums.

Brands like Skims have fought for channel relevance in a growing category,
achieving the scale of distribution that Skims has in a short three years is a
marvel, even if your founding team includes Kim K. Another standout includes
NOBULL. The “HIIT” brand is now the official brand of Crossfit, has physical
distribution, and forged strategic relationships with the likes of Spotify.

For every new channel that emerges, a new holdco and rollup appears as a path
to eventual exit for brands that are gaining traction as DTC has its coming of age.
Some brands are graduating to becoming their own holding companies, because
why do we have insular marketing teams? Why do we have insular technology
teams? We're better together.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 5

 DTC Comes of Age: Brands

Brand Noteworthy
Category

1 Skims Shapewear Kim K takes the podium on our list, and

at the Tokyo Olympics, as the official
undergarment of the U.S. Olympic team.

2 NOBULL Apparel NOBULL had a transcendent year, becoming

the title sponsor of The Crossfit Games,
while expanding well beyond that
community into broad fitness.

3 Glossier Skincare Glossier made a strategic retreat in

their physical retail and popup strategy
during COVID, but came out on top. Their
shroom-themed Seattle flagship is a
(literal) trip.

4 Fabletics Apparel Fabletics was well-positioned for growth

with a brick and mortar presence that
benefits from the emergence of ‘comfy
cozy culture’

5 Rogue Fitness Fitness Rogue was able to ride the wave caused
by the rising tide, keeping products in
stock due to on-shore manufacturing.

6 Parachute Home Home Parachute invested heavily in owned

channels like direct mail, and most
recently, brick and mortar.

7 Allbirds Footwear Allbirds steps out in a public market

debut while their physical retail grows
faster than their category offerings.

8 Away Travel Travel might not be a virtue, but Away’s

navigation of the pandemic was virtuous.

9 Truff Food The luxury hot sauce brand. So hot right

now.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 6

Inclusive Brands: Championing Diversity
Inside & Out:
Sponsored by Klaviyo

Inclusivity matters, full stop. Brands can no longer claim ignorance when it
comes to incorporating the myriad expressions of gender, race, ethnicity, body
shape/size and abilities into the fabric of their organization. They must do this
both internally, and consumer-facing.

“Aspirational” brands — code for exclusive — are so two-thousand-and-late.

Inclusive is the new expectation.

To the enterprise, internal diversity means changes in hiring practices, policies,

and diversity amongst the executive ranks. It also means readdressing a brand’s
mission and corporate culture. Over the last year, a number of brands have
made public pledges around diversity, but yowzers, it’s hard to keep up with who
actually fulfilled their commitment. We look forward to seeing how The 15%
Pledge and Pull Up for Change continue to hold brands accountable.

According to Val Geisler, Customer Evangelist at Klaviyo, “if a brand says they’re
for everyone, then the customer misreads this message as if the brand is for no
one. This creates a shadow of discomfort, and when people are uncomfortable,
they’re less likely to share their data. Long gone is one-size-fits-all marketing.”

Inclusivity in 2021 is not about having the historically underserved or

underrepresented being invited to the table, it’s about replacing the table. See:
the proliferation of Black-owned beauty brands creating products based on
application, not skin color. Inclusivity in 2021 is apparel brands designed for

Nine by Nine 2021 | 7

non-conforming bodies, such as Old Navy’s shift towards 0-30 sizing as their
new in-store standard.

It’s this expanded view of inclusivity that inspired us not only to create this
stand-alone category for this year’s report, but also incorporate it as a
dimension within our ranking rubric for ALL brands in the report.

As our methodology section in the end of this report shows, growth and positive
future outlook are heavily weighted in our quantitative scoring. Because of this
we recognize that public corporations which report earnings, and those startups
which publicly announce funding rounds, will naturally gravitate to the top of our
rankings.

Not the least of which is Disney, which can hardly be ignored for their strides in
trying to provide experiences for people of all ages and backgrounds. Their
investment in content like Mulan, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Shang-Chi also
support representation of AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) persons in a
year where we saw hate crimes perpetrated against those of Asian descent.

Rihanna’s Fenty took on the Victoria’s Secret model head-on, going so far as to
directly hire five former Angels. The unapologetic and irreverent tone struck a
chord on social media, where the brand has amassed an enviable following. The
growth of Rihanna’s empire has minted her as a billionaire, while providing
beauty and intimate apparel to a traditionally underserved customer base.

The brands included in this category are making good on commitments and
opening up lines of communication with consumers in new ways to realize
growth, and to bring about change.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 8

 Inclusive Brands: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

1 Disney/Marvel Media Back from last year’s 9x9, Disney is

the gold standard in offering
something for everyone.

2 Fenty | Fenty X Beauty/Intimates Rihanna became a billionaire due to

Savage the success of her inclusive beauty
brand, Fenty and intimates brand,
Savage.

3 GAP Brands Apparel Old Navy gets the nod on this year’s
list due to size inclusivity,
Athleta signs Simone Biles and
Allyson Fenix. Is GAP back??

4 Megababe Personal Care Founder and Body Talk author Katie

Sturino is on a mission to ensure
every part of every body feels the
love. Men too, with Megaman.

5 Girlfriend Apparel Ethical and size-inclusive, this

Collective brand doesn’t sacrifice anything
while addressing everyone.

6 Topicals Skincare Inclusive “flaunt your flaws”

skincare brand puts models with
eczema front-and-center.

7 Henning Apparel This plus-sized luxury brand has us

gushing.

8 Healthy Roots Toys Founder Yelitsa Jean-Charles is a

Dolls Forbes 30-under-30, giving girls a
doll with curly hair you can wash
and style.

9 Supergoop! Skincare SPF-in-everything, for everyone,

affordably-priced, and available
everywhere.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 9

Putting the C in CX: Truly
consumer-centric experiences
Talking to the brand operators right now — it’s very easy to distance yourself
from consumers. In fact, the word "consumer" is, itself, othering. We find that to
be sort of a gross word. Customers are people, after all.

What if “customer loyalty” was a two-directional phrase? While marketers are

busy trying to coax customers to purchase more through sophisticated rewards
models, customers are begging for brands to be loyal to them.

Today’s customer is acutely aware of how much power they hold. Just this year,
Kellogg’s Cereal Straws made a dramatic reappearance due to a poll on
Change.org. Dunkaroos are in lunch boxes once again due to a Twitter meme.
The Justice League Snyder Cut was the result of relentless campaigning by a
fandom.

Very few companies are as customer-obsessed as CAMP, an experiential retail

chain that brings the element of play back into the retail toy store concept, but
without the luxury price tag of the FAO Schwartz of yesteryear. Costco has its
own religion (Future Commerce’s Brian Lange chief among them), and a Twitter
thread about their hot dogs is born every 30 seconds.

Rather than being reactive, the future of brand-to-consumer relationship is to

incorporate shoppers into product and category development. Barstool have
waded into commerce, growing a formidable merch business while widening
their content beyond sports. Founder Dave Portnoy can often be found deep in
Twitter mentions (@stoolpresidente) engaging with fans and critics alike.

Brands featured in this category are champions of the customer. They’re not just
customer-obsessed, or customer-centric, their customers are practically board
members with a seat at the table.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 10

 Putting the C in CX: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

1 Chick-fil-A Evangelical Chicken Literal God-tier CX. “Hate their

politics, love their chicken.”

2 Costco Retail The best retailer in the world. Full

stop.

3 Solo Brands DTC Holding Co with Solo is proof that a holding co can
(Chubbies, Solo obsessed customers actually be more than just an
Stove) efficiency of scale.

4 Barstool Sports Media Brand with From pizza reviews to podcasts, this
impressive DTC media brand has obsessed fans that
business drive 9 figures of revenue in merch
alone

5 Fanatics Officially Licensed The de-facto source for officially

Everything licensed gear.

6 Chacos Footwear Chacos’ repair program is next

level. We only wish this was
available for everything we buy.

7 CAMP Modern Experiential CAMP built a toy store for their

Toy Store customers to play in. What a novel
concept.

8 Saie Clean Beauty Saie drives innovation to fulfill

its promise to its customer to do no
harm.

9 Parade Size-inclusive Parade is one of the few brands

womxn’s intimates engaging the trans community.
Size-inclusive from day one. One of
the few brands to make a repeat
appearance from 2020.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 11

Niche Marketplaces: Selling a narrow
category of goods

Sorry, Mr. Gates. Curation, not content, is King. Fortunately, Niche Marketplaces
excel in both. Modern curation can take many forms. Education. Expert reviews.
Editorial. We're starting to see the traditional media approach being spun up as
Internet media, and they quickly become a destination for purchasing goods.

No matter whether you’re in home and bedding, furniture, or pet care, it’s tough
to stand out right now.

Where a brand chooses to sell its goods is important. Selling direct to consumer
is just one part of the pie. As those brands become omnichannel they’re going to
need to find places to be discovered and validated. Niche marketplaces are an
ideal place to find both of these in one. And so that’s what you find here - the
emergence of marketplaces focused on category.

Rarible is more than an NFT marketplace, it is a curated art gallery for

high-quality NFT projects. Beyond selling digital goods, it is also a community
forum for discussion around emerging projects, as well as a democratized
commons for voting which projects deserve to be featured. Rarible also
launched a token which produces a yield for holders, which shares profits from
the sales of the platform to token holders, rewarding holders for launching
projects on the niche platform.

Other physical retail marketplaces are recognizable as being more than just
commerce markets, but also content plays. Slice, Food52, and Goop are all
formidable content-to-commerce giants. Goop makes a return appearance for
this year’s Nine by Nine, after launching Goop Lab in 2020, and expanding their
offerings (beyond the jade egg) into apparel, travel, and philanthropy.

Niche marketplaces are setting the stage for the future of DTC brands. In the
future, every brand will be a marketplace. We’re seeing the beginning stages of
this with the success of post-purchase co-selling marketplaces. Watch this
space.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 12

 Niche Marketplaces: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

1 Food52 Food/Bev For millennials like us it’s weird

to say but true - Food52 paved the
way and is now the OG niche
marketplace.

2 Cameo Talent Cameo gave us a talent marketplace

to connect with celebrities,
building a $100M business in the
process.

3 Goop Health/beauty Gwen set the standard for

audience-first marketplaces, and
jade eggs.

4 Kith Lifestyle Ronnie Fieg created a brand that is

both aspirational, and accessible.
He made New Balance cool again. The
new standard for building retail
marketplaces.

5 Grove Consumer packaged Curated products that are good for

Collaborative Goods your home, and good for the
environment.

6 Radical Girl Gang Retailer A marketplace for independent

women-owned brands.

7 Rarible NFT Art Gallery 2021 might be remembered as the year

of the NFT, and Rarible is the MoMA
— Museum of Meta Art.

8 StockX Luxury The luxury resale platform

authenticating everything from
Yeezys to Birkins.

9 Slice Food Discover great pizza, support local

businesses.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 13

Private-Label Grails: House brands
elevating their retail parent
The Holy Grail: something Karl Marx tells you to find. But seriously, these days
Grail means the ultimate thing you spend money on. So how in the world could a
grail be part of a private label?

The reason private labels are becoming grails is because private label products
are becoming better than name brand products. Costco’s Kirkland trail mix?
Better than name brand. Compare Whole Foods 365 with traditional CPG
organics. We know what we would pick. These brands and others have created
incredible private label products that are not only desirable because of their
excellent, excellent quality, but are also expertly designed to be more easily
merchandised and marketed. They compete with other modern brands on every
level.

Target, for instance, began revamping its private labels a few years back. This is
not new by any means, but it launched their private men’s label Goodfellow &
Co. about three or four years ago which eventually replaced the license that it
had with Mossimo. And now they’ve just launched a pet food brand called
Kindfull, which looks way more interesting than the other stuff sitting on the
shelf.

When considering all the new, beautiful and hyped brands of the world, think for
a second about the likely volume of customers discovering and purchasing these
sleek entries, compared to dollars spent on house brands. They can't hold a
candle to the scale of big-box private labels that are being sought out by
consumers now. From Trader Joe’s to Amazon, some private labels have
become synonymous with superlative quality.

The dirty truth is, a lot of these in-house brands may not even be recognizable
as a low-cost, value brand anymore. Get ready for a new world of best in class
brands created by in-house teams.

Because house brands aren’t traditionally broken out into sales figures, it’s
difficult to rank the success of these. As such, this is one of two unranked
categories on this year’s Nine by Nine.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 14

 Private-Label Grails: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

Cat and Jack Apparel If you feel like Target dominates

(Target) this list... it’s because they do.

Hearth and Hand Home The Gaines own the home category, so
(Magnolia/Target) when they teamed up with Target the
outcome was doomed to the wildest of
success.

Smartly (Target) Beauty Price has always won private label

customers. Smartly takes it to a
whole ‘nother level with sub-$2
beauty and personal care.

Nod (Tuft & Home/bedding The respect for the quality of Tuft
Needle/Amazon) and Needle’s mattress was easy to
transfer to an Amazon exclusive with
Nod.

Trader Joes Food/bev “TJ’s” has become universally

understood and loved. But this house
brand isn’t just copying established
brands, it’s creating new products
in a more innovative way than anyone
else in Food/bev. Grail.

Good and Gather Food/bev It’s difficult to overstate how many

(Target) brands Target has that live
rent-free in the minds of a
consumer.

Amazon Basics Luggage Do we want Amazon bags almost as

much as Away? Pretty much.

More Than Magic Beauty Aptly titled, this tween beauty

(Target) brand is on-trend, and sought-after.

REI Apparel/Outdoor A coveted house label that commands

as much respect as any storied
outdoor brand, but for less.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 15

Metaverse as Mall: Brands exploring the
interplay between the Virtual and the
Physical
You’d be forgiven for hearing the phrase of the year, ‘The Metaverse’, and having
a visceral reaction. The phrase is invariably followed by an onslaught of word
salad: a confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and
phrases. Is it linked to VR? Is there a cryptocurrency component? Is there a
volatile speculation tied to digital pictures of clouds and rocks?

Yes. On all accounts.

But it’s the sum of its parts being greater than the whole that makes the concept
of a metaverse so compelling. Our economy, societies, and even our identity
within those communities, now have digital counterparts. That counterpart now
doesn’t just have broad awareness in the culture, it has broad adoption. This is
what makes the collection of seemingly disparate technologies so compelling:
The Metaverse isn’t going to replace real life: it adds an additional layer of depth
and interaction on top of the real world.

The Metaverse is broken down into nine distinct areas of focus to replicate real
life, digitally:

Figure: The Metaverse now has a functional society

Nine by Nine 2021 | 16

We have a thriving meta Economy—marketplaces, investment and lending, and
a currency to transaction. Communities have formed around shared spaces,
shared values, and the goods that are being transacted. And many are finding
that they can participate in these communities with a digital extension of their
consciousness. Said more simply, your Identity in the metaverse is one of your
own creation.

Play-to-earn games like Zed run and Axie Infinity provide for entertainment, but
they also have provided new types of jobs. Virtual stablehands are being hired to
manage Zed horses. There are more Axie token holders in the Philippines than
credit card holders. It’s time to take notice that meaningful employment in the
metaverse is here.

The boundary between physical and digital is becoming much thinner.

How does this affect physical retail? By 2025, we’re projecting that the modern
definition of omnichannel should include digital goods sales. If not collectibles,
then tokens that provide access to exclusive marketplaces, clubs, or events.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 17

 Metaverse as Mall: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

Ethereum Currency Smart contracts on Ethereum make us

redefine what currency can be.
Currency in the metaverse is
infrastructure.

Aave Finance Decentralized finance allows LPs to

provide liquidity and receive an
APY. Borrowers can pay an APR. $4B
market cap and $14B assets under
management.

OpenSea Commerce OpenSea is the digital shopping mall

of the Metaverse.

Loot Property Vine founder Dom Hofman’s latest

creation. In the metaverse, we don’t
build top-down. Loot is in-game
items... that have no game yet.

Roblox Commons Howard Schultz imagined a third

place between home and work. Roblox
is the fourth place.

Axie Infinity Work Play-to-earn gaming might provide

the on-ramp to new jobs, guilds, and
organized labor.

Fortnite Leisure The night club of the metaverse.

Concerts are just the beginning.

Discord Tribes/Communities This isn’t even a contest - Discord

is where the Metaversians come
together.

Bored Ape Yacht Identity and Bored Ape is more than a profile
Club Intellectual Property picture project. It’s a universe of
IP that is available copyright-free
to all who hold the NFT. Including
traditional corporations.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 18

C.A.R.L.Y (Can't Afford Real Life Yet)
C.A.R.L.Y. (Can't Afford Real Life Yet) is a psychographic of a consumer who
hasn’t made it yet. They share expenses amongst their peer group, and believe
memes are a personality type. They single-handedly revived Crocs. Status now
also relies on how ‘very online’ one is. FOMO is at an all-time high, as the
half-life of a meme shortens, and being ‘ootl’ (out of the loop) means social
isolation.

CARLY is a stark contrast to her counterpart, H.E.N.R.Y. (Higher Earner, Not Rich
Yet), who you came to loathe during the past year. You know the dude: posting
social justice tweets from a private cabana by the beach in Tulum, equating
global travel with becoming more patriotic, and sharing his receipts from
Erewhon. Ugh.

CARLY’s worldviews stand in stark contrast to HENRY’s. Where HENRY is a

staunch atheist, CARLY actively seeks spirituality. The rise in numerology and
astrology in the past 18 months tell only part of the story. CARLY holds ironic
seances, does live Tiktok tarot, believes in manifesting, and burns sage. Holding
a Telfar bag is as much a signal of affluence as it is a signal of your ideological
leanings. It’s not that CARLY doesn’t have money to spend, it’s that they spend it
irrationally, and often at the expense of basic necessities. In the words of one
Gen Z CARLY: “I’ll go without lunch for a week to afford eyelash extensions.”

While we covered CARLY in-depth in our inaugural edition of Nine by Nine, there
is more to say. This year we saw CARLY’s coming out as a consumer. Last year’s
report focused on how CARLY thinks. This year, we focus intently on what they
buy. This unfortunately means that CARLY is reconciling with the effects of fast
fashion while also buying up DUNKIN merch. It’s complicated.

The creator economy has enabled this generation to become more

entrepreneurial. Why buy expensive candles when you can make them for
yourself and your friends? The DIY Era means that they can learn just about
anything on Youtube, memorialize themselves making and learning in public via
TikTok, and sell their wares via marketplaces like Depop.

To CARLY, everything is a content funnel: starting with their pastimes and ending
with their own journey to enlightenment.

In order to connect more deeply with CARLY, brands will seek to connect with
them on a spiritual level. They will seek to be more inclusive than with their
millennial counterparts, which is no easy task. Brands’ channels and tactics will
need to evolve, too. We predict a wave of job recs for “chief meme officers” in
the near future.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 19

 C.A.R.L.Y.: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

1 McDonald’s Food McDonald’s ability to command the

culture is unrivaled. Collaborations
with Travis Scott had people lining
up for hours to get a meal. Merch
sales included a chicken
nugget-shaped pillow.

2 TikTok Social Media TikTok videos aren’t shaping our

culture, the TikTok algorithm is.

3 Crocs Footwear 2021 is the year of the Croc.

Yeezy’s most sought-after shoe is a
knock-off Croc (a Croc-off?) Selehe
Bumberry designed luxury Croc-offs.
Even Allbirds copied them. Sheesh.

4 Shein Apparel Shein gamified “hauls” (buying more

than you need) and then showing it
off on live streams.

5 DePop Resale Marketplace Imagine making a resale app that

allows you to slide into DMs. That’s
DePop.

6 Dunkin Donuts Food Dunkin X Charli D’Amelio pioneered

fast food influencer collabs, and a
line of merch that was painfully
self-aware.

7 Afterpay Finance Making BPNL available IRL.

8 Robinhood Finance 2021 will be the year that “meme

stocks” taught us what a short
squeeze was, launched an SEC
investigation, and launched $HOOD on
the NASDAQ.

9 Telfar Apparel Telfar Clemens’ genderless “Bushwick

Birkin” bag became accessible to all
in 2021.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 20

Performance Art as Commerce: Auteurs,
Artists, and Anarchists
Dadaism. Performance Art. Maximalism. Whatever you call it, these brands
leverage absurdism to make their voices heard.

Modern performance art uses commerce as its canvas. The brand operators fall
into three operating modes: Artists, Autuers, and Anarchists. Brands in this
category don’t make products for mass consumption. They create ideas that
have viral reach. Absurdists are adapting products to make social statements on
capitalism and consumption. Dadaists of the 19th century did much the same,
and in this way, some brands have become the New Dadaists.

A prescient example of The Anarchist is heavy metal canned water brand Liquid
Death’s painting of 100 skateboards... with Tony Hawk's blood. The storyline: he
has bound his soul to the board.

While shocking, the stunt was effectively a copycat of MSCHF’s banned Nike
customizations as a collaboration with Lil Nas X. The so-called Satan Shoes
contained a drop of blood as well as a pentagram and the number 666. MSCHF’s
creation of a miniature toy line of failed startups, and late capitalism games such
as Finger on the App, firmly position it as an Auteur of absurdist commerce.

And then there’s KFC. Their steamy web shorts series featuring a “Sexy
Colonel”, played by Mario Lopez; and their collaboration with PC manufacturer
CoolerMax which featured a gaming PC with a warming drawer for chicken
nuggets firmly positions KFC as an Artist.

The standout in this category is the one and only Elon

Musk, who is the embodiment of the three personas
represented in this category. Underground trains, flame
throwers, Dogecoin, and rockets launching Teslas into
the atmosphere — nothing is too absurd for Elon.

Consumer brands are the most shocking

boundary-pushers today. We’d tell David Blaine to eat
his heart out, but he might just do it. We live in the attention economy. Venturing
into the absurd garners eyeballs without having to pay for every single
interaction.

To the performance artist brand, every day is April Fool’s.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 21

 Performance Art as Commerce

Brand Category Noteworthy

1 Tesla/ SpaceX All The PT Barnum of performance art,

(Elon Musk) Elon uses his various platforms
(Launching a Tesla on a SpaceX
rocket), to Dadaist crypto pumping
(Dogecoin), to sci-fi semi-realities
(Hyperloop).

2 MSCHF Auteur Founder Gabriel Whaley continues to

set the bar for Dadaist stunts like
pre-purchasing a “Public Domain
Cartoon Mouse” collectible, which
will deliver in 2024 when Mickey
Mouse enters the public domain.

3 Liquid Death Anarchist Metalheads drink water, too.

4 KFC Artist Ok, but what about a sexy Colonel

Sanders?

5 Mr. Beast Auteur The Youtuber is now a restaurateur,

a venture capitalist, and a
philanthropist.

6 Cards Against Anarchist You can be a dadaist too, back and

Humanity forth, forever. (Just don’t play it
with your mom.)

7 Blaseball Anarchist Blaseball is a baseball simulation

horror game.

8 Brain Dead Artist This collective is changing how to

bring artists to market.

9 Poolsuite Artist Relive 1992 again, even if you

weren’t alive the first time.
Poolsuite is the embodiment of
anemoia—nostalgia for a time that
existed before you were even born.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 22

Wellness Brands
The New Abnormal has arrived. We’re in the weird world of post-pandemic
confusion, and health continues to take front-and-center in our psyches. Not
just physical health—mental as well, as months of isolation, adaptation, and
information overload have filled the glass of our cognitive capacity over the brim.
Again, the pandemic played the role of great accelerator, as GenZ was already
hyper aware of the importance of wellness.

Brands that take a holistic view of their impact on their customers, employees,
and partners—how they’re influencing the physical, mental, relational and
more—will find gains in the market to be consistent and more stable. Reputation,
NPS, retention… the list goes on. This isn’t just about a better world. This is
smart business.

Brands like Apple and Walmart are amongst the highest ranked in this list, due
to their outsized impact. Walmart Health expanded its offering to bring health
services to physical stores. As more than 90% of Americans live within 10
minutes of a Walmart, their efforts stand to be the most impactful, especially
considering their creation of an insulin product. Apple ranks highly due to their
non-hardware policy changes, which not only include privacy changes, but also a
commitment to combat CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) on iCloud.

But look to a new breed of brands that built the foundation of their company on
being a positive influence on their customers - and beyond. Brands like
Madhappy have built improving mental health into the core of everything they
sell.

The more unpredictable the world becomes, the more we seek safety and
shelter in routine. Wellness brands promote not just a healthy body or peace of
mind, brands that rank highly in this category encourage other category
competitors to aim higher, to expand their own offerings and services.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 23

 Wellness Brands: Brands

Brand Category Noteworthy

1 Apple Health Apple’s commitment to healthcare

also includes digital wellness,
child safety, and privacy.

2 Moderna Pharma Pioneering MRNA didn’t just unlock

the Covid vaccine, it will
fundamentally change therapeutics.

3 Walmart Health Retail From launching their own insulin, to

building clinics into each of their
own stores, Walmart is bringing
healthcare to rural America.

4 Athletic Greens Nutrition This monoproduct brand has delivered

on product innovation in a crowded
market. NSF Certification makes this
the most credentialed greens you can
consume.

5 Calm Mental Health Calm partnered with Kaiser

Permanente, demonstrating the
seriousness of their commitment to
mental health.

6 Modern Fertility Health Fertility is one of the most

important considerations for women’s
health. Modern Fertility is making
it a more accessible category.

7 Hims/Hers Health Now public via SPAC, Hims set the

bar for DTC health brands.

8 Alma Marketplace Mental health is one of the most

important parts of holistic health
and Alma is the real deal.

9 Ghost Supplements/Beverage Supplements for everyday life,

gamers, and for every body.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 24

Conclusion:

Of the over 200 brands we rated from our wealth of contributions in our Future
Commerce Expert Network, we distilled it down to 81. Businesses have a
number of challenges ahead in 2021 and beyond. The goal for Nine by Nine is to
nurture this group and maintain it as a long-running program here at Future
Commerce. As time goes on, we’ll be making revisions to the list and making
additions as we see new brands entering into the marketplace. We’ll also revise
the positions of brands based on news or information that has come to light
since the original publication of this inaugural edition. We hope to inspire others
to create experiences that bring a sense of joy and fulfillment to the customer
relationship. As customers face unknown hardships in the years to come, they
will willingly part with their hard-earned money for products, goods, and
services. Our hope is that a bit more of those dollars will go to brands that are
making this world a better place for all of those involved: from factory workers,
to logistics teams, to customer experience personnel.

Every human being involved in the creation and acquisition of goods deserves to
be treated with dignity and respect. We feel tremendous confidence that this list
of 81 brands on Nine by Nine represents those who have the greatest
opportunity to fulfill that vision.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 25

Featured Partners

Klaviyo: Editorial Sponsor

Klaviyo is a leading customer data and marketing

automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and
customer connection for online businesses.

Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and
behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect
communications across email, mobile, and web. The company’s hybrid
customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by
fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their
valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 265,000 innovative
companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more
with Klaviyo. Fuel growth without burning through time and resources.
Klaviyo brings it all together: SMS, email, and more.

Learn more at www.klaviyo.com

Shipium: Editorial Sponsor

Make a promise you can keep, then keep the promise that
you made.

Built by the teams who created the ops tech powering Amazon Prime and
Zulily, Shipium helps ecommerce retailers ship their orders fast, free, and
on-time.

eCommerce retailers who own their fulfillment stack are turning to Shipium
to help optimize their delivery promises, order routing, and outbound
shipping. If you sell over $50M GMV per year or ship over 50,000 orders per
month, we can help you save over 2% on your shipping costs while speeding
up delivery speeds and tying competitive promises into your frontend store.

Learn more at www.shipium.com

Nine by Nine 2021 | 26

Chord: Contributor
About Chord

Chord’s headless commerce platform helps brands enhance their

businesses by giving them cutting-edge headless commerce technology and
access to meaningful first-party data. Chord’s unique offering of scalable
headless tech software, paired with its sophisticated data management,
insights, and governance tools, is made for commerce entrepreneurs by
commerce entrepreneurs.

Gorgias: Contributor

Gorgias is a leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce

merchants where retailers can manage all of their customer communication
and tickets in one platform (including email, social media, SMS, live chat,
phone). It’s powered with machine learning to automate up to 25% of
commonly asked questions, and seamlessly integrates into your existing
tech stack to deliver better customer support. To learn more, visit
gorgias.com/futurecommerce.

Avalara: Contributor

Avalara helps businesses of all sizes scale globally and get tax compliance
right. With international tax solutions from Avalara, businesses can manage
duties and cross-border tariffs, calculate VAT and GST, automate tariff code
classification for shipments, obtain registrations, and manage sales tax
returns so they can grow globally and serve customers around the world.
Headquartered in Seattle, Avalara has offices across the U.S., and in Brazil,
Europe, and India.

Nosto: Contributor

Nosto enables retailers to deliver personalized digital shopping experiences

at every touch point, across every device. An AI-Powered Personalization
Platform designed for ease of use, Nosto empowers retailers to build, launch
and optimize 1:1 omnichannel marketing campaigns and digital experiences
without the need for dedicated IT resources or a lengthy implementation
process. Leading commerce brands in over 100 countries use Nosto to grow
their business and delight their customers. To learn more, visit
www.nosto.com

Nine by Nine 2021 | 27

Supporting Sponsors

About Future Commerce

Future Commerce is a retail media research startup focused on helping
eCommerce businesses create strategic vision. We create content for modern
brand marketers to shape the future of their retail and DTC businesses. Our
podcasts, original research, essays, and video programming serve over 40,000
decision makers in retail, DTC, marketplace, services, and technology
companies that power commerce experiences all around the world.

The eponymously-named Future Commerce Podcast has a global audience of

over 25,000 listeners. Our media properties include our weekly Insiders letter,
which are long-form essays that cover the psychological effects of commerce,
and how brand marketers, merchants, founders, capitalists, and operators can
adapt to meet customer needs. Step by Step is a quarterly miniseries which
covers the A-Z of a topical area of customer experience, from marketing
automation to logistics. The Senses is a weekly newsletter that aggregates retail
and eCommerce news, and synthesizes it for busy operators to make sense of
rapidly-changing conditions that affect their business. Our forthcoming series
Infinite Shelf, hosted by Ingrid Milman Cordy, will focus on omnichannel and
in-store technologies.

The Future Commerce Content Studio partners with technology service

providers and consumer brands who desire to create longform content for their
growing audiences and communities. Our clients include Shopify, Klaviyo,
Octane AI, and Chord.

The Future Commerce Expert Network is a closed group of 80 operators and

decision makers in retail trade.

Future Commerce was founded in 2016 by Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange, and
is headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 28

Nine by Nine Diversity Index
Amongst the 200 brands rated on our second annual Nine by Nine report, nearly
40% are female-founded or have a female chief executive. Roughly 20% have
BIPOC or AAPI representation as a founder or chief executive.

Of the 81 finalists of our report, the overall diversity breakdown was 29.2%
female-founded and 22.2% POC representation overall.

Methodology
With learnings from the 2020 report under our belts, the Future Commerce team
set out to make the 2021 9x9 development process bigger and better – in terms
of both scope and substance.

After qualitatively assessing Categories & Brands included on last year’s report
for fit within the current zeitgeist, we updated Category hypotheses and Brands
to consider within each, which have critical relevance at this particular moment
in time. In partnership with market research firm Method + Mode, we invited the
Future Commerce Expert Network to rate interest in 12 potential Categories,
and nominate up to three brands for each. This quantitative poll revealed the 9
most compelling Categories to include in the report, and helped round out our
brand list.

We ended up with a whopping 200 brands for consideration this year.

The next phase was building our scoring rubric. Five dimensions were included
in this year’s brand score:

· Outlook/Profitability
· Cultural Relevance, powered by Surge.ai
· Earned Media Value (EMV)
· Product Innovativeness
· Social Consciousness: Internal and Customer-Facing Diversity
and Inclusion Efforts

A variety of sources were used to calculate a score across each dimension for a
Total Score for each brand; sources included CrunchBase Pro, earnings press
releases/media reports, Google News/Trends metrics and other publicly
available data.

Our Cultural Relevance scores were powered by Surge.ai. Surge.ai is a

real-time insights platform, dedicated to surfacing unified consumer behaviors
that unlock knowledge around the consumer journey. Brand Mentions is sourced
Nine by Nine 2021 | 29
via Instagram and includes all-time history of both brand and user-defined
mentions. YoY YouTube Search contains all brand-related keywords from July
2020 through July 2021. These metrics were chosen as a proxy for Cultural
Relevance given overall consumer penetration of Instagram and YouTube, as
well as consumer reliance on these channels across the customer journey.
Finally, we conducted 1-on-1 interviews with sponsors and select members of
the Future Commerce Expert Network, to provide depth and context for why key
brands made the list this year.

Our hope is that through leveraging qualitative & quantitative inputs, from a
variety of sources & collaborators in conjunction with the Future Commerce
editorial POV, the 2021 9x9 Report delivers a unique, thought-provoking take on
the current retail landscape.

Nine by Nine 2021 | 30

 Rubric
Our scoring methodology for 2021 is found below. Future Commerce, partnered
with Method + Mode, developed a scoring rubric to assist in the ranking of the
report.

A number of updates were made from the 2020 report. Namely, Social
Consciousness was given its own scoring, and EMV was deprioritized when
compared with 2020.

Model
“Perfect”
Metric Scale Values Score
Excellent / Good / Neutral / Fair
Subjective Analysis 5-1 5
/ Poor
Outlook YoY Stock Change (if Public) Up / NA or Flat / Down 1, 0, -1 1

Investment in Past 12
Yes / No 1, 0 1
Months (if Private)
Outperforming / Over-Indexing
All-Time Social Media
/ Median / Under-Indexing / 5-0 5
Cultural Relevance, Mentions: Index to Median
Underperforming / NA
Powered by Surge.ai
YoY Change in YouTube
Up / NA or Flat / Down 1, 0, -1 1
Search Results
Mass Media / Endemic Media /
Subjective Analysis 3-0 3
Trade / None
Earned Media Value Extremely Outperforming / Sig
Google News Hits: August
Above Median / Above Median / 5-1 5
15, 2021
Below Median / NA
Disruptor / Competitor / Entry /
Innovation Subjective Analysis 3-0 3
NA
Internal : Diverse &
Inclusive Organization / 1-0 1
Executives
Social Consciousness
External : Diverse &
Inclusive Positioning / 1-0 1
Mission or Product

Brand Score 25

Nine by Nine 2021 | 31