What sets a luxury brand apart today? The answer is possibly anything from the quality of the product to the marketing behind it. For Trey Taylor, the founder and nose behind Serviette, a NYC-based fragrance brand, it’s taste.

What started off as a personal project and a hobby is now a full-fledged perfume brand. Officially launched in February, Serviette, the French word for napkin, is Taylor’s attempt to explore “cultural sophistication.”

“I started Serviette because I felt that the current kind of cultural landscape was kind of lacking,” Taylor told Retail Brew. “A lot of people were getting recommendations via their TikTok algorithms for things like mob wife aesthetic or these kind of trappings of like hashtag culture, that, to me, just felt very uninspired. I wanted to encourage people to kind of break out of that and help them discover their own personal taste.”

Keep reading here.—JS

Trader Joe’s, Aldi, and Lidl are running circles around many supermarket chains when it comes to foot traffic, according to the latest data from Placer.ai.

The grocery segment overall increased only 1.5% YoY in the first half of 2025, but foot traffic over the same period increased 11.9% at Trader Joe’s, 7.1% at Aldi, and 4.9% at Lidl, according to a recent post on Placer.ai’s website.

While some of that aggregate growth could be attributed to the chains adding locations, per-location traffic increases outpaced the segment for the first half of the year, too. While the per-location increase for the segment grew just 1.2% for the period, it jumped more than five times for Trader Joe’s to 6.2%, and for Aldi and Lidl it increased to 2.8% and 2.1%, respectively.

Keep reading here.—AAN

CVS has threatened to close 23 pharmacies in Arkansas after the state passed a law banning companies that own pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) from also operating pharmacies starting in 2026.

But CVS also has a lot of competition in the retail pharmacy space, including independent pharmacies, major retail chains like Walgreens and Walmart, and online options like Amazon. Experts told Healthcare Brew CVS closures could open the door for other retailers to grow their footprints in the state.

Keep reading here on Healthcare Brew.—CM