In late 2025, Mammoth bought Coterie, a high-end diaper brand founded in 2019 with celebrity investors like Karlie Kloss and Ashley Graham.

The deal was reportedly valued at over $1 billion and involved a mix of cash and stock. Mammoth said in October that Coterie surpassed $200 million in net revenue over the previous 12 months, a nearly 60% jump from the prior-year period.

Coterie’s premium diapers can cost as much as $1 per unit, a steep price for some parents. But the brand has found many consumers are willing to pay more for the product, which promises high absorbency without added fragrance, latex, rubber, parabens, pesticides or chlorine bleaching. Coterie has been “very profitable” over the last three years, according to the brand’s CEO Jess Jacobs.

“Seventy-four percent of parents are willing to pay more for better-for-you products,” she told CNBC. “Parents are looking for better and deserve better, and they’re questioning the status quo, just like we are as a brand and as a company.”

Forty-three percent of the brand’s new customers come from word of mouth alone, according to Coterie.

Under Mammoth, Coterie now has the advantages of being a part of a bigger company; it can learn from e-commerce strategies for Amazon that currently work for Mammoth’s brands. As Coterie broadens its retail exposure beyond higher-end grocers like Whole Foods and Erewhon, Mammoth can introduce it to more retailers. And diapers are complicated to manufacture, so Mammoth can help support that process as Coterie continues to create innovate on its diapers.

For example, Coterie is currently in talks to add more retail partners. And Mammoth sees bigger potential for the brand, too.

“Coterie is a brand that can really extend across baby care,” Katz-Mayfield said. “It’s not just a diaper brand.”

But Coterie’s success has caught the attention of legacy players, who are eager to adapt some of the upstart’s playbook.

For decades, a handful of companies have dominated the household goods and family and personal care categories. Their portfolios are chock-full of iconic brands used every day by Americans, and their histories often stretch back more than a century.

In 1837, soap maker James Gamble and candlemaker William Procter became business partners, creating the company that still carries their names today.

Originally founded as a paper mill company in 1872, Kimberly-Clark now owns a host of brands like Kleenex, Huggies and Cottonelle. It went public nearly a century ago.

In 1930, a merger between a Dutch margarine producer and a British soap maker gave birth to Unilever.

While those massive companies competed with each other, it was nearly impossible for a newcomer to gain a foothold in their well-established categories. For a nascent company, launching a new product was pricey and difficult, as legacy brands held onto their shelf space with a death grip and retailers were reluctant to take a chance.

But over the last decade, these consumer giants have faced a new threat from upstarts.

“We are really seeing competition in CPG has fundamentally intensified, and it’s coming everywhere,” said Sally Lyons Wyatt, chief advisor for Circana’s consumer goods and foodservice insights division. “Small manufacturers are gaining share. Digital and social platforms are lowering the barrier for entry for a lot of these smaller brands.”

The rise of e-commerce meant launching a new consumer packaged good was not the daunting task it used to be. A successful direct-to-consumer business often leads retailers to come knocking on the newcomers’ doors.

“The big retailers have also made the case that they want these culturally relevant brands in their stores to bring in consumers,” RBC Capital Markets’ Modi said.

And social media has also transformed how consumers think about what products to buy.

“Cultural relevance is now equal to or superseded brand equity,” Modi said. “If you think about it, most of the big brands are not losing share to other big brands. They’re losing share to the smaller disruptive brands.”

Look no further than diapers, a $5.43 billion market in the U.S., according to Euromonitor International data.

In Procter & Gamble’s fiscal second quarter, which ended in December, its U.S. diaper volume shrank 2%. Its Pampers had fallen to second place in U.S. diaper sales, trailing Kimberly-Clark’s Huggies for the first time since 2021, according to Euromonitor data.

“I don’t want to gloss over the fact that we have work to do to recover share,” P&G CFO Andre Schulten told analysts on the company’s earnings conference call in January.

While Coterie is growing fast, it remains a much smaller diaper brand than Huggies and Pampers. Still, it looks like P&G has taken note of its success.

P&G had challenged Coterie’s claim that its diapers were up to four times more absorbent than leading brands. A year ago, the Better Business Bureau’s National Programs’ National Advertising Division recommended that Coterie stop using the claim, which the diaper brand followed.

In March, P&G launched Pampers Amore, a line of premium diapers that it touts as “microbiome compatible” and “hypoallergenic.” Most tellingly, the line’s own packaging directly pits it against Coterie; it claims that its liner keeps babies three times drier than Coterie.

“The reality is, they are chasing something that is already gone,” Coterie’s Jacobs said. “We carved out that premium category, we’ve grown it. It’s growing 20% since 2020 and 10% year over year. And they’re late. So it’s a question of, can they move faster? Can they be more nimble, and can they get ahead? And the reality is, at this point, and certainly in diaper, it does not seem like they can.”

Jacobs estimates that Coterie is roughly 18 months ahead of legacy diaper brands.

But CPG giants still have some advantages, according to Modi. For example, the war with Iran is complicating supply chains for key components like packaging materials. While still a headache for legacy brands, they are able to navigate the challenge more nimbly thanks to their size and bargaining power.

And then there is innovation. Modi said that he thinks that big brands still have better research and development teams, which should help them create the best product possible.

And Kimberly-Clark’s exposure to the very competitive Asian diaper market is fueling its innovation, CEO Michael Hsu said that Barclays Americas Select Conference in May.

“We’re going to go through these trial cycles where people are going to try these new things, and they’re like ‘Yeah, maybe I don’t like this as much,'” Modi said. “And they start switching back to some of the bigger brands where the products actually work.”

Rather than trying to beat them, some legacy players have decided to join the upstarts instead. Procter & Gamble bought Native deodorant for $100 million and turned it into one of the company’s dozens of billion dollar brands, by Modi’s estimate. Unilever has snapped up a number of challenger brands, like Gruns, the DTC supplement gummy brand, and Squatch, which sells personal care products aimed at men.

But those deals aren’t always a success for the buyer — or the seller. Sometimes their corporate cultures don’t mesh, or the new owner does not know how to incubate a smaller brand, according to Modi.

For many legacy players, Modi thinks that the best strategy is to create new brands, rather than trying to bring existing lines up to speed.

“It’s about how quickly they can move and how willing they are to be patient and develop a brand,” Modi said, adding that many companies lack the willingness to wait for a small brand to grow into one worth $1 billion.

For its part, Mammoth is trying to prove itself as the kind of company with the ability to help upstarts become personal care powerhouses.

“We would rather have a small portfolio of large brands than a large portfolio of small brands,” Katz-Mayfield said.

Going forward, he and Raider want to add more brands in what they call the “everyday care and wellness” categories. They are looking to add more products to their portfolio that are in “consumable consumer categories,” barring human food and beverages.

“We’re really dogmatic about some of these things that we would never do M&A just to do M&A and buy scale and growth, because we’re not trying to flip these things. We’re trying to own them forever,” Katz-Mayfield said.

Unlike traditional consumer goods companies, Mammoth is less focused on entering specific categories to complement its overall portfolio and instead more interested in customer retention and its growth prospects across e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail, according to Katz-Mayfield.

“We have to believe that something is online-led but has big omnichannel potential,” he said. “It can be a big $200, $300 million-plus brand because that’s where we’re going to add the most value, helping those brands scale on that journey.”

Mammoth has a team that tracks new brands, starting when they begin to gain traction on social media or Amazon. But every potential acquisition is likely also getting attention from legacy CPG companies or venture capital and private equity firms.

To founders, Mammoth gives its pitch as an owner that offers independence and autonomy, with the infrastructure and corporate support that can introduce upstarts to big retailers like Target. Mammoth also wants the founders and executive teams to stay on for a while.

“We kind of view ourselves as a little of a Goldilocks,” Katz-Mayfield said.

And a new acquisition is likely coming to Mammoth sooner rather than later. The company is primarily focused on growing its portfolio through dealmaking, according to Katz-Mayfield.

“For us, I think like one or two deals a year is probably the right pace,” he said, adding that he believes that Mammoth will have portfolio of eight to 10 brands within the next three or four years.

For all the focus on M&A, innovation hasn’t stopped at Mammoth’s existing brands. For example, Harry’s has been expanding its range of skincare for men.

“The way we think about it, these brands are still pretty early in their journey,” Katz-Mayfield said. “They all have tremendous potential.”

Mammoth still launches new products online first, demonstrating the company’s continued belief in the DTC business model, despite rumors of its demise. About half of Mammoth’s revenue still comes from online sales, according to the company.

“I think DTC is the single greatest place on the planet to build products and brands,” Raider said.

But the buzziest news for Mammoth will likely be its initial public offering, although the co-CEOs played coy about those potential plans.

“Don’t know where that came from,” Katz-Mayfield said when asked about the Bloomberg report about a potential IPO as soon as this year that identified four banks reportedly working on the deal.

“We’re fortunate that we make money as a company, and we’re able to use some of that cash flow,” he added. “We’ve always been sort of more agnostic to what the structure is, but we certainly want a set up that allows us to have access to capital, whether that’s privately or publicly, at some point in the future to pursue that strategy.”

Cook has called privacy a “fundamental human right” for years. In an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in mid-March, he reiterated that Apple does as much processing as possible on the device. When necessary, Apple uses what it calls Private Cloud Compute, which is essentially a secure extension of the device in the cloud.

Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management says Apple’s leadership misread the market.

“It comes down to a failure to recognize where the world was going and the speed things were happening,” he said, leaving the company now at a “fork in the road” when it comes to the long-term relevance of its products.

The challenge, Munster said, is in “powering an AI digital assistant.” If Apple doesn’t solve that, he warned, somebody else will, a development that could eat away at Apple’s control over the future.

Siri should have given Apple a head start. It launched in October 2011, a day after Jobs’ death. It would be years before Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant hit the market. But the product stagnated.

Apple “basically blew a five-year lead” said Walt Mossberg, a former Wall Street Journal columnist who long chronicled Apple.

Dag Kittlaus, Siri’s co-founder, left Apple after Jobs died, telling CNBC recently, “I didn’t want to work without him.”

Kittlaus said that Siri kept improving on the technical side, particularly in speech recognition. But without Jobs’ instincts and product vision, the company never really expanded Siri’s capabilities, he said.

“There are no further technical barriers to any part of the Siri vision that we had from the old days,” Kittlaus said. “We would kill to have the technology back then that exists now.”

Adam Cheyer, who created Siri alongside Kittlaus, said the original vision was far more ambitious than what shipped. The idea was to create a system that could both answer questions and take action, eventually supporting a broader ecosystem that could be used by outside businesses, similar to the App Store. He said the challenge was combining “knowing and doing” in a single system.

The first company that can do that with “the right experience” will be “the dominant technology company for this next AI age,” Cheyer said. “And I think Apple can still play there.”

Today, AI is a cloud business. The models behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude are too big to run on a phone. But models are shrinking. Within a few years, hefty workloads will run on a chip inside the phone.

That’s Apple’s bet, and the company has been integrating AI-capable silicon into its devices since 2017. When AI moves onto the device, the thinking goes, Apple’s privacy problem starts to solve itself. User queries all get processed locally, never touching a cloud server.

Dediu says it follows a historical pattern of computing moving from the center to the edge, from mainframes to PCs to phones.

Tony Fadell, who built the iPod and the first three iPhones before co-founding Nest and selling it to Google, said early signs of the computing shift are already visible. As more people experiment with personal AI agents, some are running the infrastructure themselves, often on devices like a Mac Mini at home.

The Google partnership could be the bridge for Apple, Kittlaus said.

“People get motivated when they see a path to victory,” he said. “I think that is the moment.”

As AI moves to the edge, the question for Apple is whether the device it’s spent the past two decades perfecting remains the center of computing.

Last year, OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s design firm, io, for $6.4 billion and charged the former Apple design chief with building something as consequential for the AI era as the iPhone was for the move to mobile.

“That’s an amazingly big ask and amazingly big vision,” said John Sculley, who was Apple’s CEO from 1983 to 1993, in an interview. “You can’t underestimate someone as brilliant as Jony Ive.”

Ive, who designed the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, among other gadgets, is reportedly developing a family of screenless devices for Sam Altman’s company.

Dediu said that’s the scenario Apple should worry about — not a better device, but a simpler one that doesn’t need a screen. If the AI interface turns out to be something people wear rather than hold, Apple’s advantage in visual design stops mattering.

It’s not an approach that’s worked yet.

Ken Kocienda, who spent 15 years at Apple and invented keyboard autocorrect for the original iPhone, left in 2017 and joined AI hardware startup Humane a few years later. Humane attempted a screenless, AI-native device, but the effort failed.

Kocienda said the idea may still prove to be right, just too early. Fadell is less concerned.

“These pins, pens, all these pendants — I think they’re all accessories to the phone,” he said. “You’re going to see a federation of devices … and they’ll all be AI-enabled, as opposed to removing devices from your life.”

If the future of AI hardware revolves around the phone, Apple may be poised to lead again, with a next chapter shaped by the same strengths that built the company.

That was the backdrop at Apple Park before dawn on Tuesday. As employees and Cook gathered on the lawn, the grass still held the night’s rain.

The sky cleared just as Nasdaq’s opening anthem rolled across the yard, and Cook stepped forward to ring the bell. The whole scene felt almost impossibly controlled, as if even the weather had deferred to Apple’s choreography.

Everything came together just in time to show Wall Street, and the company is betting its Siri refresh will do the same.

The anniversary celebration was capped by a performance from Paul McCartney, another flourish in a production designed to project confidence in the path forward as Wall Street waits expectantly for Apple’s AI comeback.

WATCH: Warren Buffett on Apple: I sold too soon

One of the top reasons for customers’ Target trips is a simple one — running in for a quick grocery item like a gallon of milk or box of pasta. The challenge is getting shoppers to buy more of their food there.

Food is the No. 1 traffic driver for Target, and over half of customers have food in their shopping basket, said John Conlin, senior vice president of merchandising, food and beverage. Target’s grocery category, which it labels food and beverage, drew higher sales than any of Target’s merchandising segments in the past fiscal year. It grew by about 1% year over year and totaled $24.14 billion — or roughly 23% of Target’s net sales for the fiscal year. 

Yet for many customers, Target is a destination for buying just a few grocery items rather than a fuller basket of food for the week. Plus, competition has grown fiercer — not only from the nation’s largest grocer by revenue, Walmart, but also from Amazon and fast-expanding discounter Aldi.

“We don’t want food to just be a business that guests are shopping while they’re at Target,” he said. “But increasingly, we want to be a business that is why guests are at Target.”

He said Target is “trying to carve our own lane with our assortment strategy” rather than copy the grocers down the street.

Going forward, Target will expand the square footage it devotes to grocery as it remodels stores and builds new ones, Conlin said. In over half of the stores that the company remodels, Target will double the square footage for fresh foods like fruits, vegetables and meats, he added.

The company also plans to add more brands that shoppers haven’t yet discovered and lean on seasonal items and private brands. To stand out from competitors, Target is going to ramp up the amount of new items by up to 50% in key categories like snacks and dry groceries, Conlin said.

But he acknowledged a challenge that has tripped up Target in recent years, which it’s tried to fix by owning its supply chain and opening a new facility in Colorado in the next year.

“None of this comes to light if we’re not in stock for our guests,” he said.

He declined to share a key detail about some items and brands that Target is adding: price points.

In many of Target’s stores, customers buy lip gloss and other items from Ulta Beauty. That will change in August, after the two brands announced the end of a deal that brought the mini beauty shops to nearly a third of Target’s big-box stores. 

On Tuesday, Target said it plans to give its own beauty assortment a glow up. This fall, it will open what it is dubbing its Beauty Studio in more than 600 stores and online, said Amanda Nusz, senior vice president of merchandising for essentials and beauty at Target.

Beauty Studio will replace Ulta Beauty at Target. It will be a dedicated shop within the store with prestige beauty brands, elevated lighting, enhanced service and a loyalty program tied to beauty, Nusz said. In renderings, the beauty shop looks similar to Ulta Beauty at Target, but without the beauty retailer’s branding. 

Nusz declined to share the national brands that the Beauty Studio will carry and whether it will offer some of the same brands sold by Ulta Beauty and other competitors like Sephora.

Beauty “has been one of the strongest growth engines for Target,” Nusz said. She said it was also the top growth category for Target’s curbside pickup service, Drive Up, and in-store pickup of online orders in the fourth quarter. A bonus for Target: Beauty tends to draw in younger shoppers.

The segment’s sales were roughly flat year over year in the most recent fiscal year, but accounted for about 13% of Target’s overall net sales for the period.

Along with rolling out Beauty Studio, Nusz said, Target will add more well-recognized national brands like sunscreen brand Supergoop, lean into trends like Korean beauty and invest more in men’s beauty, such as grooming and fragrance items.

In the back of Target’s stores, the retailer is giving an overhaul to a department that’s typically known for selling consumer electronics, toys and books.

Instead of calling it the traditional name, hardlines, Target coined the category Fun101.

Cassandra Jones, senior vice president of merchandising for Fun101, said the goal went beyond the new name, however. Target wanted to turn around a category that was falling flat.

Starting in late 2024, Target has had a tighter focus on four key areas: play, which includes toys like plush stuffed animals and popular brands like Lego; pop, which includes culturally inspired items like a limited-edition collection tied to Netflix’s “Stranger Things” and another linked to the 30th anniversary of the movie “Space Jam”; sport, which includes items like water bottles and licensed sports apparel for professional teams; and gadget, which includes trendy takes on products like phone cases and headphones.

On the other hand, Jones said Target has cut back on items like TVs and laptops, where it’s harder to stand out from retail competitors or inject a sense of style.

Sales of Fun101 merchandise were roughly flat year over year in the most recent fiscal year, but drove $15.8 billion, or 15%, of Target’s net sales for the period.

Jones said shoppers will see the category go bigger in the second half of the year. Target plans to open a fan shop in stores and online with licensed sports gear, expand its position as a “trading card destination” and open a “collectibles zone” for other types of merchandise.

Target used to be known for its fashion-forward yet affordable throw pillows, lamps, bedding and other home decor. The category, however, is now one of the retailer’s weaknesses — particularly as it competes with digital players like Wayfair, big-box competitors like Walmart and Costco, off-price chains like TJX‘s HomeGoods and specialty players like Crate & Barrel or Pottery Barn.

Sales in the home furnishings and decor category totaled $15.61 billion in the most recent fiscal year, sinking by nearly 7% year over year. That’s a deeper sales drop than in any of Target’s other key merchandise categories.

The big-box retailer is working to become a destination for the category again, said Mara Sirhal, senior vice president of merchandising for home, who stepped into the role about three months ago.

“Our home business has not delivered to its potential, point-blank,” she said. “The industry grew. Target home underperformed. We lost meaningful share over the last two years, and our authority and style inspiration has weakened. That is on us.”

Among the problems, she said, Target “lost clarity in our point of view,” with a blander assortment rather than a stylish, eye-catching one.

Sales of home goods at Target have also been hurt by economic factors, including higher interest rates and pricier homes in the U.S., which have led to a much older first-time homebuyer, she said.

Starting in June, Target will rebuild the category as part of a multiyear turnaround effort, she said. One of its first moves this summer will be redoing about 75% of its assortment in decorative home, which includes items like candlesticks, throw pillows and greenery. By the fall, she said, three-quarters of its bedding assortment will be reinvented. And next year, she said, Target will overhaul its kitchen and dining merchandise.

It won’t just be the products changing, she said. Shoppers should expect to see new fixtures in stores, too, such as elevated wood displays. It will also use its third-party marketplace, Target Plus, to sell large items that are easier to carry online, such as rugs, mattresses and furniture, she said.

Another well-known category in Target stores has become a weaker link, too. Apparel and accessories sales at the company fell to $15.74 billion in the most recent fiscal year, down about 5% from the prior year.

To drive sales growth again, the big-box retailer aims to spot trends earlier, speed up the time it takes for new looks to hit shelves and sharpen the selection of clothing that it carries — even for basics like tank tops, said Gena Fox, senior vice president of apparel and accessories at Target.

She said the company’s performance “has not been where we want it to be over the past year.”

Denim, T-shirts and tanks make up about 25% of Target’s total assortment, Fox said. Last year, it overhauled its denim to raise the quality and style, which led to a 10% year-over-year lift in sales for that category.

This year, she said, Target plans to take that same approach to fix T-shirts and tanks, which have had weaker sales. Some of those refreshed closet staples are starting to hit store shelves and Target’s website.

Target is also working to get ahead of trends, which it features in collections in stores and online, she said. To spot trends, it’s using a new artificial intelligence-powered tool called Target Trend Brain, which helps the company’s designers and merchants identify the styles, colors and materials that customers may want.

For example, insights from Trend Brain helped inspire a Western edit of clothing and accessories like purses with fringe and belts with embroidery, with all items under $40. That area will soon rotate to a collaboration with Roller Rabbit, a colorful and brightly patterned pajama brand, that will include swimwear, sundresses and pool accessories.

Fox said the apparel and accessories timeline is now about 40% faster as the company reacts more in the moment rather than planning six to 12 months in advance.

Along with those trend-driven items, Target will expand national brands and add new partnerships. Last week, the company announced it would bring Levi’s to more stores, which will mean the denim brand is in more than 1,000 — or roughly half — of its stores, Fox said. It also developed an exclusive clothing line with country music singer Megan Moroney, which will coincide with her upcoming tour.

Tuesday marks Quincey’s last earnings report as CEO. The company announced in December that Chief Operating Officer Henrique Braun will succeed him as chief executive, effective March 31.

Braun said on the company’s conference call Tuesday that he wants to improve Coke’s speed when taking new products to market, better integrate its marketing where customers actually buy its drinks and continue efforts to digitize every step of its system.

“Our system needs to focus on being a little bit better and sharper everywhere to drive transformation and impact,” Braun said.

The company also plans to stay “flexible and opportunistic” when it comes to acquisitions, according to CFO John Murphy. While he noted that Coke’s track record hasn’t been perfect, he added that almost half of the company’s 32 billion-dollar brands were the result of deal-making.

Executives plan to share more about the company’s future priorities during its Feb. 17 presentation at the annual CAGNY conference.

As of Tuesday’s open Coca-Cola shares have risen roughly 20% over the last year, raising its market value up to more than $330 billion.