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Founder Interview – Stella S.
February 9, 2026
Seed Five
The New Standard: a 2025 Recap
Bethany Vogel
As the publication director of Seed Five, Bethany helps guide the company's written voice and direction. A graduate of Binghamton University, Bethany's external work explores art history's influence in the modern age, along with theology and criticism.
The creative ecommerce market in NYC has not only evolved throughout 2025, but has gone through a series of fragmentation, reassembly, and eventually turned into something fundamentally different. The city’s digital-oriented brands, as a result of high rent and minimal studio spaces, used their circumstances as a catalyst to rewrite what it means to be a seller online. Creatives implemented a series of new strategies, including the NYC pop-up craze, utilizing content studios, and merging the vital components of entertainment, community, and commerce.
Pure, traditional commerce has been long gone in the city, but not entirely as a result of failure. 82% of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that are pulling in over $50 million in revenue are the brands maintaining physical retail spaces. However, particularly in NYC, they are unlike what we typically associate with retail storefronts. Instead, they’re referred to as “experiential commerce ecosystems,” spaces where transactions are equivalent to the experience provided.
DTC Brands with Physical Retail Presence
During New York Fashion Week this past September, Liquid I.V. transformed a Soho bodega into an interactive 2-room “journey,” with the endpoint reaching a state of “zen.” Accompanying the display was a custom ATM dispensing product samples and “confessionals.” This marketing tactic and implementation is one of the many that showcases how the NY scene values participation, especially when considering the trajectory of content creation trends.
Acknowledging this, NYC creative commerce leaders made a drastic pivot: becoming content creators who happened to sell things. Glossier’s strategy for their brand doesn’t solely focus on pushing products, instead it’s about featuring real customers in their feed, offering real people the chance to become micro influencers. Their Instagram page doesn’t feel like one huge advertising campaign—it’s where millions of their community members participate in the brand’s story.
2025 showed that it wasn’t just about which platform or ad performed best, it was about reinventing infrastructure, which ultimately determined those who scale and those who fade out. Over $14 billion in venture capital poured into NYC startups in recent years, and such capital concentration is promoting a winner-take-most dynamic. The technical sophistication required to sustain consumer demands led to a tiered system: you have brands that lean into headless commerce, implementing AI personalization with real-time inventory syncing software, and then you have the rest, struggling to compete against such innovation.
The fundamental truths about creative commerce in NYC show how:
- Physical presence is non-negotiable – mere digital-first campaigns are no longer part of the playbook, creative entrepreneurs are building new ones from scratch.
- Entertainment is the new advertising – brand success is now indicated by how much they can influence a person’s emotions, solidifying that the content-to-commerce pipeline isn’t a one-off success, it’s table stakes.
- Infrastructure determines destiny – brands that focus on building up their tech and treating operations as a competitive advantage are making leaps and bounds that capital alone can’t reach.
The bottom line is that NYC’s creative commerce market this past year didn’t only rely on growth, but on the actual transformation of the industry standard. For founders, it’s never been more clear—differentiate or die. The middle ground is obsolete; there either needs to be radically better operations or radically more compelling content, but the magnum opus is a hybrid model. The blueprint that worked in previous years is defunct, and the one for 2026 has not yet been outlined, but in the city that never sleeps, it should never settle.
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