The CQ | Faire on a Tear
Plus the Forerunner Team's Must-Reads of the Week
The CQ is Forerunner’s weekly newsletter rounding up the top consumer news, plus bonus musings from our investment team and portfolio highlights. Subscribe to get the latest each weekend.
Faire continues to put on a masterclass in building with thoughtfulness, resilience, and ambition.
In the past ~5 years, they've gone through a pandemic — with indie retail doors closing nationwide — an ecommerce boom, historic inflation, soaring interest rates, tariffs, and mounting economic uncertainty.
And yet today, the business is stronger than ever:
$500M projected revenue in 2025
New business lines representing the fastest-growing divisions of the business
95%+ gross dollar retention, 110%+ net dollar retention
Faire continues to be one of the most important ecommerce companies of the last decade. Check out The Information for a scoop on the unique momentum they’ve seen this past year.
What We’re Talking About On Slack:
Americans lose faith that hard work leads to economic gains. According to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, only 25% of people think they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, the lowest figure since the survey started in 1987. The poll also found that almost 70% of Americans believe the American dream is out of reach, the highest percentage in nearly 15 years. While a larger share of Democrats (90%) had more negative views about the future than Republicans (55%), “the discontent reaches across demographic lines. By large majorities, both women and men held a pessimistic view in the combined questions. So did both younger and older adults, those with and without a college degree, and respondents with more than $100,000 in household income, as well as those with less.” The high level of pessimism is largely driven by persistent concerns over inflation: 28% of respondents continue to report major financial strain due to rising prices, a figure that has remained unchanged since March 2023, even though inflation itself has dropped. Additionally, 56% of people have little to no confidence in their ability to afford a home.
Related: the middle-class vibe has shifted from secure to squeezed. Consumer sentiment among Americans, especially the middle class, dropped nearly 6% in August, after trending up in June and July, according to the University of Michigan index. Households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 have seen a sharp decline in confidence since June, now aligning more closely with lower-income households, per Morning Consult data. Over 70% of consumers surveyed from May to July said they plan to cut back on purchases with large price increases in the year ahead.
She’s 7 years old. Her parents are saving to support her when she’s 30. A combination of rising costs and a difficult economic landscape for younger generations is leading some parents to put away money now to help support their children well into their adulthood. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found 60% of parents of 18- to 34-year-olds say they provided financial help in the past year. Parents are helping pay off debt payments and groceries, and one-third of younger millennial homebuyers received a down payment, per the National Association of Realtors. Because housing prices have increased over 400%, medical costs by nearly 700%, and tuition and child care more than 10 times since 1980, parents and financial planners are starting to not look at financially supporting adult children as a stigma. “I think you either need to be comfortable with your kids struggling or you need to set aside some money now.”
Why the wealthiest shoppers keep sending things back: Higher-income households had the highest retail return rate in 2025 at 5.3%, compared to 3.7% for lower-income households, according to a Bank of America Institute report. While 76% of U.S. shoppers consider free returns a key factor in choosing where they shop, the practice cost retailers $890 billion in losses last year, per the National Retail Federation. Return rates have more than doubled since 2019 among large retailers, with wealthier shoppers returning 20% of department store purchases, versus 11% for lower-income consumers. “One reason may be that higher-income households are less cash-constrained and so are more likely to buy items speculatively when they are searching for a particular purchase, in the knowledge they can return it later if they decide it’s not right for them.” Boomers, Gen X, and millennials all return items at about 16%, and Gen Z at 10%, except in electronics.
The new millennial parenting anxiety: Seeking to instill adaptability, empathy, and cultural awareness in their children, millennial parents are embracing ambitious, often expensive family vacations. A 2024 Vox Media poll found that 76% of millennials and Gen Z said travel reflects who they are, and 88% said it contributed to personal growth. According to a March Bankrate survey, 29% of Americans planned to take on debt to travel in 2025—and of all generations, millennials were most interested in travel, most likely to say they couldn’t afford it, and most likely to say they were willing to take on debt for vacation. A 2022 Family Travel Association study revealed that 85% of parents were very likely to travel with their children in the next year, and 76% wanted to travel internationally. “Even vacation is no longer spared from what the sociologist Annette Lareau…calls ‘concerted cultivation’: caregivers’ attempts to shape their child’s development and set them up for future success. Such efforts are at the core of intensive parenting, which rose in popularity among the American middle class in the mid-to-late 20th century; inequality was growing, manufacturing jobs were disappearing, and parents started worrying that their children might never reach financial stability—not without their careful and constant hand. Now, a similar uncertainty drives many parents to take their kids abroad.”
The New Yorker imagines what the future could be like when A.I. is coming for culture. Chatbots are already a part of everyday routines, there are an increasing number of virtual influencers, and one study found that more than 50% of text on the web has been modified by artificial intelligence. AI is poised to dramatically increase the volume of creative work and simultaneously automate the process of creation, which could lead to entirely new forms that will pull us in unexpected directions, like a short story written about the chemical “element boron in the style of Roald Dahl.” Jaron Lanier, who’s considered an initial inventor of virtual reality and now works at Microsoft, says, “it’s possible that the very notion of ‘content’ will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that’s designed to have an effect on the recipient.” For instance, custom-created AI-generated music that exists only for a single listener and vanishes afterward. But what repeatedly comes up in the piece is that AI is trained on past data, so it often relies on cliches and repackages old ideas rather than inventing new ones. “A further challenge is that A.I. lacks artistic agency; it must be told what’s interesting. This suggests that A.I. culture could submerge human originality in a sea of formulaic art.”
Bloomberg delves into how chatbots and AI are already transforming kids' classrooms. AI is rapidly integrating into U.S. classrooms, with only 1% of school districts still banning it and over 50% actively training teachers, while the global educational AI market is projected to grow from $6 billion in 2023 to $32 billion by the end of the decade. A Gallup/Walton survey found 60% of teachers use AI sparingly, but three-fifths believe regular student use may harm skills like writing and critical thinking. Though there are concerns about accuracy, bias, surveillance, and the erosion of student creativity, most of the biggest school districts, including New York’s and the six next largest, now allow and encourage some AI use. Over 60 companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, pledged support for AI education, and Microsoft alone is investing $4 billion in global AI initiatives, including training 400,000 U.S. teachers. Some education researchers fear this will lead to a dependence on AI that will not only degrade critical thinking but will transform “public education from a civic institution into a portal for funneling money to private interests.” Still, educators acknowledge that the future will be AI-driven and the importance of teaching children to use these tools responsibly.
AI is eliminating jobs for younger workers. A new Stanford University study, using ADP payroll data from 2022 to 2025, provides the strongest evidence yet that AI is eliminating jobs for younger workers. The research found a 16% decline in employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in industries susceptible to AI automation, like customer service and software development. However, the research reveals a nuanced picture, showing that while younger workers face displacement, more experienced employees in the same sectors are seeing their opportunities remain flat or even grow. This suggests that AI is automating repetitive tasks, but it's not lowering wages and may lead to new roles that require human-AI collaboration. “I think there's still a lot of tasks where humans and machines can outperform [AI on its own].”
Why Gen Z is resurrecting the 1990s: Concerned about the effects of technology and social media, many Gen Z adults are feeling nostalgic for the pre-digital era. According to a 2023 Harris Poll, 80% of Gen Z feel their generation is too tech-dependent, 75% worry about its effect on mental health, and 58% said new technologies were more likely to drive people apart than bring them together. This is also reflected in a 2025 survey, where 68% of Gen Z reported a desire for eras before their time, and 73% are drawn to retro media and hobbies. The research finds that this “historical nostalgia” for a time that predates them can improve mood, increase feelings of belonging, and instill a sense of meaning in life. “In other words, nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination.”
Portfolio Highlights:
Bloomberg reports on the trend of people leaving the security of finance, law, and other white-collar jobs to become travel advisors, with quotes from Fora Co-founder Henley Vazquez.
webAI CEO and Cofounder David Stout joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the importance of edge computing in consumer AI.
Job of the Week:
Principal Product Manager at Dutch, the telehealth platform for pets.
There are ~1700 other open jobs at Forerunner portfolio companies — check ‘em out.