How cult brands like Erewhon, Rhode and Alo Yoga turned belonging into big business — and what the next wave can learn.
Few grocery stores double as social hubs, but Erewhon isn’t most grocery stores. With curated shelves of raw nut butters, biodynamic kefirs and anti-inflammatory tonics, it has become a wellness mecca: part boutique, part café, a place to see and be seen. Stop by any of the Los Angeles locations, and you’re guaranteed to find preternaturally beautiful young people milling under bougainvillea-covered awnings with a $20 USD smoothie in hand or browsing the supplement aisle like it’s a concept store in SoHo. Those who don’t ‘get it’ could never fathom paying $19 USD for a single strawberry from Japan, but luckily enough for its founders, plenty of people do.
Once a niche health food co-op, Erewhon has morphed into a lifestyle monolith — a byword for a certain type of rarefied self-optimisation. It’s not just a grocery store, it’s a mise en scène for a curated, collagen-boosted life. A living, breathing billboard for $500 juicers and custom mushroom powders, and as The Cut once put it, an allure so strong, people will hold down three jobs just to afford to shop there.
Elsewhere, in yoga studios from Hollywood to Holland, eyeballs struggle to land on anything but the stitched “A” of Alo Yoga leggings as they move into their downward dogs. The successor to LuluLemon, Alo alchemised athleisure into something aspirational. Their playbook wasn’t product innovation, it was proximity. To the right bodies. In the right places. With enough high-saturation content and vitamin D to make spandex look spiritual.
Then there’s the original cult brand, Glossier, Emily Weiss’s pink-tinged beauty juggernaut which taught an entire generation of millennial women how to buy into a mood. As any woman of a certain age who visited NYC in the 2010s will recall, cueing around the block to stand in front of the “You Look Good” mirror or watching as your Boy Brow descended from a Willy Wonka-like conveyor belt, as if from the heavens, was the apex of earthly happiness. The iconic pink pouches wouldn’t pass the sustainability vibe check today, and the formulas were often average — but that was never the point. The point was identity. The products were just the access code. And as consumer tastes have evolved, so too has the beauty landscape: In 2022, Rhode stepped in as Hailey Bieber’s Gen-Z heir to the beauty throne Cloud Paint once ruled, with parasocial intimacy and a glazed aesthetic in place of millennial pink.
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