What is Private Label?
What is Private Label? This is the newsletter for everyone who loves to read and discuss retail, consumerism, fashion, beauty, shopping, and more. Whether you work in a buying office or love window shopping. If you want to dig into the trends, why certain products take off, and who is leading your favorite brands — you’re in the right place.
Private Label is a retail term referring to an in-house brand. Exclusive, not available everywhere else, designed by the insiders who know the business and made just for you. That’s what you will find here. The inside perspective.
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What is covered at Private Label?
Retailers, brands, brand strategy, collaborations, new launches, rebrands, start-ups, direct-to-consumer, trends, forecasting, a heavy dose of fashion, but plenty of beauty thrown in too.
Every Tuesday, The Rundown — the week's news, moves, and launches, edited down to what actually matters.
Every Thursday, Deep Dive is your most complete read of the week — the industry moves, the launches worth analyzing, the collabs with the strategy explained, the people and the news that matters, and always, the thing everyone else reported but nobody actually unpacked. This is the issue worth setting aside time for.
Every Sunday, Open to Buy is your weekend read — the shopping picks, fun links worth a click, reasons to open a few too many tabs. Whatever I've been thinking about that couldn't wait. The issue that feels like texting a friend who happens to know everyone in fashion and retail. Paid subscribers get it Saturday morning.
And if you know my work, you know I can’t help dropping in the extras — Fashion Spiral when a trend needs the full origin story, Brand Crush when I’m obsessed with what a brand is doing, Retail 101 when the news is worth a deeper explanation, and Retail Book Club when I find a read I can’t wait to discuss about the business of retail. All these will be sprinkled in too for paid subscribers.
Who is Sarah Shapiro?
I grew up obsessed with fashion, studied Fashion Design and Retail at Syracuse University, and spent the first decade of my career in the buying office at Bloomingdale’s. I learned the inner workings of the retail industry (margins, open-to-buy, assortment building, trend forecasting, and yes, building private label brands) and was immediately hooked. From there, I moved through the retail world building merchandising strategies, and launching products. The obsession never stopped — I've spent two decades tracking what's moving in retail and fashion and why.
In 2019, I started writing Retail Diary — a newsletter about the business of fashion and retail that became a regular read for industry founders, CEOs, and editors. My insights and the Substack were featured in the New York Times, Vogue Business, Business of Fashion, and Marie Claire. In 2024, it was acquired by Puck, where I was the Retail Correspondent for Line Sheet. I’m now a contributor there. Private Label is what comes next.
I live in the Bay Area with my husband and two kids (but I’m never giving up my 917 area code.) I fuel my store visits with Diet Coke, and wind down with whatever fiction I’ve got loaded on my Kindle.
How do I work with brands?
Interested in a deeper dive on anything here? I partner with clients on custom presentations on retail trend forecasting and deep industry insights. I fractionally advise retailers, brands, and founders — helping them see around corners about what's new and next in retail.
Brand partners help fund this newsletter — so I can stay heads-down, finding the best insights for my subscribers. As a brand partner, you get access to a hyper-engaged cohort of retail fanatics.
Contact sarah@privatelabel.ltd to learn more.
