Why Fashion Brands Are Racing Into Gourmet Grocery Stores

Fashion brands are using gourmet grocery stores as experiential marketing hubs because they offer sensory, tangible spaces where consumers are already spending time in their daily routines, moving beyond purely digital brand engagement.

Summary of Fashion’s Latest Obsession: The Grocery Store. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:21 — Fashion brands have traditionally used cafes and restaurants to sell lifestyle, but are now partnering with gourmet grocery stores as an emerging channel.
• 00:01:36 — Erewhon pioneered beauty brand collaborations starting in 2022 with partnerships like Hailey Bieber’s strawberry glazed smoothie and $20-$22 branded smoothies.
• 00:04:06 — Meadow Lane, which opened in New York less than a year ago, received so many unsolicited brand partnership requests that they’ve completed 16 collaborations in that time despite initially not planning to pursue the model.
• 00:05:21 — Brands are drawn to these partnerships because consumers want physical, sensory experiences instead of digital content, seeking moments that feel evocative and don’t rely on screens.
• 00:07:01 — Viore partnered with Meadow Lane to host a U.S. Open activation featuring tennis-inspired totes and custom honeydew matcha drinks inspired by popular cocktails at the event.
• 00:09:26 — On’s running shoe brand created a comprehensive partnership with Erewhon that included a running capsule, campaign, run club, and recovery juice collaboration to create a cohesive 360-degree brand universe.
• 00:17:09 — Community building is crucial for success, as these grocery stores are already integrated into neighborhoods and daily routines, allowing brands to authentically engage local communities rather than forcing brand awareness.
• 00:20:33 — Brands should evaluate potential grocery store partners based on their capabilities and identity overlap, such as whether they can create custom products or already have established cafe setups that align with the brand’s needs.

In depth

From influencer smoothies to a full-blown category

The gourmet grocery collab didn’t spring up overnight; Haley Crawford traces its lineage back to Erewhon’s 2022 partnerships, which were explicitly beauty- and celebrity-led rather than fashion-led 00:01:36. Hailey Bieber’s strawberry glazed smoothie and Summer Fridays’ branded drinks worked because they let a $20-22 cup function as a wearable extension of a beauty look — cheap enough to be impulsive, visual enough to photograph 00:01:49. Crawford also points to a quieter, more product-driven precedent: Anya Hindmarch’s custom totes for British grocers like Waitrose and Dalesford, which have run for years without much fanfare 00:02:11.

What’s changed, in Crawford’s telling, is scale and intent. Wellness is projected to be a $2.5 trillion business by 2028 according to BOF’s State of Fashion 2026 00:02:27, and nutrition sits at the center of that boom, which means gourmet grocers are no longer a niche beauty stunt but a genuine opportunity fashion brands are chasing on purpose. The signal Crawford gives for how fast this has tipped from novelty to expectation is Meadow Lane: the New York store opened under a year ago never intending to build a collab business, yet fielded enough inbound interest to complete 16 partnerships and turn away many more 00:04:06. That inversion — grocer as reluctant gatekeeper rather than brand as supplicant — is the clearest evidence that something structural, not just trendy, is happening.

Why screens made brands hungry for smell and taste

Sheena Butler-Young pushes Crawford to explain the underlying psychological logic, and Crawford’s answer centers on sensory scarcity in an AI-saturated media environment. Her claim is that as content becomes cheaper and more automated — she invokes “AI slop” as shorthand — consumers and brands alike start craving experiences that can’t be reduced to a screen 00:05:14. Scent and taste, she argues, are uniquely powerful because they’re most strongly tied to memory, so a brand that can put itself into a smell or a flavor is embedding itself somewhere advertising can’t reach 00:05:55.

Crawford frames this as a natural next step rather than a break from what brands were already doing. Last year, she notes, luxury houses like Loewe and Jacquemus were already leaning on food imagery — butter, bananas, bread — purely for its visual evocativeness in campaigns 00:05:35. The grocery store partnership, in her view, is that same instinct made literal: instead of photographing food, brands are inserting themselves into the physical spaces where food is bought, prepared, and consumed 00:05:50. The unresolved question, which neither speaker fully settles, is whether this sensory logic is really doing something new or just dressing up the same wellness-halo borrowing in a more immersive wrapper.

Can there be real product here, or is it just marketing theater?

Butler-Young raises a pointed skepticism: beyond a tote bag or a branded cup, can a grocery collaboration ever produce meaningful fashion product, and does it matter if it can’t 00:07:59? Crawford’s answer is a qualified no on product innovation and a firm yes on strategic value — she argues the format works best when the grocer is used as a marketing and distribution vehicle for things the brand already makes, rather than as a co-manufacturer of something new 00:10:07. Her strongest example is On’s long-running partnership with Erewhon, which bundled an existing running shoe, a capsule, a campaign, a run club, and a recovery juice into one “360” experience that leans on genuine community overlap between runners and Erewhon shoppers, rather than inventing a new physical product 00:09:26.

The Dairy Boy case makes the same point differently: founder Paige Paul’s brand is already built around farm-to-table, countryside living, so her partnerships with Meadow Lane — a catered pop-up, a promotional trout dip tied to a viral sweater, an ice cream truck timed to a sweater launch — never required a new SKU, only smart timing and thematic fit 00:10:29. Crawford is candid that trying to force a novelty item, her own hypothetical of a raffia tassel skirt, risks looking trite if it isn’t rooted in both brands’ existing worlds 00:08:54. Butler-Young then pushes further on the money question — can this ever move from a marketing line item to genuine P&L revenue? — and Crawford concedes it depends heavily on investment size, but argues the real value is funnel-building: a $15 smoothie or $22 juice is a low-commitment way to get a customer who won’t yet spend $500 on a handbag into a brand’s orbit, with revenue as a secondary, sometimes incidental, benefit 00:12:21.

The sameness risk, and how brands avoid becoming wallpaper

Both speakers flag a self-undermining dynamic: the more brands rush into this format, the more it risks collapsing into interchangeable stunts. Butler-Young voices open skepticism about whether anyone genuinely needs a logo-stamped yogurt, while acknowledging the social-media “halo” effect — people flocking somewhere because everyone else is posting about it — clearly has real pull 00:13:06. Crawford agrees the format began largely as a social-media play, engineered to look good online, but insists that consumers now see through pure photo-ops, pointing to how quickly luxury brand cafes and last summer’s European beach club takeovers all started blurring into the same generic gesture 00:14:11.

Her proposed antidote is duration and depth rather than a single splashy moment: partnerships that unfold over time, in multiple forms, are more convincing than a one-off coffee cup, because they let a brand reveal different facets of itself rather than making a single transactional appearance 00:15:06. This is where she circles back to Erewhon-On and Meadow Lane-Dairy Boy as the model to emulate — not because they generated the most impressive single product, but because they kept resurfacing across months in different guises. Left unresolved is how a smaller or newer brand, without the budget or long relationship On has cultivated, is supposed to build that same sense of ongoing depth rather than being just another name in Meadow Lane’s growing list of one-off collaborators 00:04:06.

Community as the real success metric, and how to pick the right partner

When asked how brands should actually judge success, Crawford resists the pull toward vanity metrics like likes and comments, and argues instead for community integration as the meaningful signal 00:16:11. Her reasoning is that gourmet grocers are already embedded in daily routines and neighborhoods in a way most retail isn’t — people are there anyway, buying dinner, not specifically to encounter a brand — so a well-designed collaboration can reach people without feeling like an ad. Her central illustration is Prada Beauty’s Spring Market initiative, which worked with local design and experiential agencies to insert Prada blushes and Paradox perfumes into functioning, everyday markets in France, China, and Italy, including an actual green grocer in Milan’s Brera neighborhood that kept selling its normal produce throughout Design Week 00:17:15. The result, she says, was that both design-week visitors and ordinary local shoppers organically interacted with the products, which she frames as proof that the format can integrate rather than intrude 00:18:32.

On the practical question of how a brand should choose a grocery partner in the first place, Crawford’s advice centers on capability match rather than prestige or buzz. She contrasts Meadow Lane’s strength — nimble, custom menu creation on the fly for brands like Chanel and Dior since it operates from a single location — with Happier Grocery’s built-in café infrastructure, which is why Nanushka, a fashion label that already runs its own cafés, chose it for a takeover rather than building something from scratch 00:21:07. Her underlying test is whether the grocer’s actual operational strengths map onto what the brand needs to say, not just whether the space is currently fashionable — a distinction Butler-Young’s earlier question about totes “flung in a corner” was implicitly worried about, and one Crawford treats as the real dividing line between a collaboration that reads as considered and one that reads as opportunistic 00:19:50.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.