🧴 Baby’s first serum

Plus: The 8.3m Americans getting a raise, epic panoramic photographs, and more. 

Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋  Good morning. A reminder to not sweat the small stuff today: A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 38m American obituaries published between 1998 and 2024, and revealed that words related to "tradition" and "benevolence" appeared most often, popping up in 70%+ of obits. We're guessing few mentioned slide decks or deadlines, so here's to keeping some perspective in 2026. STARTING UP Can better coffee bring workers back to the office? ❌  The problem: Office coffee usually sucks. Coffee machines leave batches sitting stagnant for hours or rely on plastic pods filled with subpar beans.  💡  The pitch: BrewBird wants to help employers tempt workers away from the coffee shop and into the office with roasts that taste like they're fresh from the barista. The startup built a $10k single-cup machine that brews coffee with the push of a button and uses pods with custom QR codes that tell the machine exactly how to brew the whole beans inside — from water temperature to brew time.  🚀  The outlook: The startup's machines — which have gone through many iterations — are already being used in Meta, LinkedIn, Gap, and Salesforce offices, and the company has signed partnerships with many of San Francisco's local roasters to distribute high-quality coffee to sleepy tech employees. NEWS FLASH   A bit heavy: Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp have raised a reported $29m for West Co., a social media startup that Sharp said will try to address "the terrible devastation of the human mind and heart that we've wrought" in the last 15 years. Its first product, Tangle, is an app for setting daily intentions. Airbags for your hips: Montreal startup Azimut Medical has developed pants that can detect if the wearer is falling and inflate a compact airbag to prevent hip fractures and other injuries in seniors. Clinical trials begin this month. Finally, the innovation we needed: FrontierX announced Vex, a small robot companion for pets that follows, plays with, and records them, then uses AI to edit a video of their day. The startup also announced Aura, a companion bot for people that can read your mood. Keep it light: UK startup Longbow plans to launch 150 of its "featherweight" EVs this year, per Fast Company. They'll retail for ~$110k, and weigh half as much (or less) as other EVs — which weigh several tons due to their heavy batteries — thanks to lightweight materials. MANAGER UP The manager's guide to talking when it's awkward "Difficult conversations bring risk: the risk of being misunderstood, of upsetting someone, of saying too much or too little. So instead, we delay. We drop hints. We tell ourselves 'now isn't the right time.' And the moment passes." — Leanne Elliott, Truth, Lies & Work podcast   If you can empathically relate, we wrote you some scripts.   You know that employee who's been showing up late for three weeks straight? Or the one whose passive-aggressive Slack messages are making everyone uncomfortable?   Yeah, we need to talk about that… because every time you dodge one of these convos, you may be costing your company $7.5k. 15 scripts for managers THE BIG IDEA Skincare for kids is growing up    What need do children have for expensive anti-aging lotions and serums? None — but that doesn't mean they don't want them, anyway.    TikTok-influenced teenyboppers have been driving demand for skincare since 2023, when beauty retailer Sephora reported a 2x increase in the number of customers ages 9-12 (AKA "Sephora tweens") over the past five years, per Forbes.   Now, a new crop of beauty companies are tapping into the youthful market with kid-friendly serums, toners, and cleansers, packaged in colorful containers and touted as "clean," "gentle," and dermatologist-tested.  Evereden, which launched in 2018 as a skincare company for mothers and infants, released a preteen skincare line in 2021. Today, it is the brand's fastest-growing segment and a driving force behind Evereden's $100m in annual sales. (It also sells crayon-shaped lipstick and Barbie-branded moisturizer for kids as young as 3.)  Sincerely Yours, another new skincare brand for tweens, co-founded by a 15-year-old influencer, saw 80k+ people attend a Sephora-hosted pop-up event in September. Its products sold out within the first hour.  Others include Bubble Skin Care, Pipa, and Rini, which launched in November, founded by celebrity-entrepreneur Shay Mitchell. These products are more expensive than traditional children's options — e.g., Johnson's baby lotion costs just ~$5, compared to Evereden's $28 moisturizer — but cheaper than ones offered by kid-favored adult brands, like Drunk Elephant's $70 lotion.   Starting them young   The children's cosmetics market, a global industry valued at ~$1.6B, is undeniable.   A 2024 study by Ulta Beauty found that, thanks to social media, kids now start toying around with beauty products by age 8. Whereas, for millennials and Gen Z, that didn't happen until about ages 15 and 12, respectively.     On TikTok, young girls are mimicking older influencers with their own GRWM-style videos that showcase their extensive beauty routines.   But not everyone is happy about it The beauty-for-babies trend has divided parents, dermatologists, and the internet, with many calling it out as unnecessary and potentially harmful to kids' developing skin as well as their mental health. Rini faced serious backlash over its debut product, ~$7 animal-themed hydrogel sheet masks for preschool-age kids, and its "healthy habits, spark confidence" marketing language, which one critic who spoke to The New York Times called dystopian. But with adult skincare brands already making bank selling kids products meant for more mature skin, these new companies argue they're simply offering safer alternatives to products kids are already curious about. Let's just hope that, with the way things are going, "baby botox" doesn't eventually take on a more literal meaning.    🔗   HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Wish an AI version of yourself could go to that meeting? The dream isn't that far off. Take a look inside the $250m AI startup building digital humans.    NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Number of Americans who started the new year with a raise, thanks to minimum wage increases across 19 states. Among them: New York, Arizona, Montana, Hawaii, and Washington, which offers the nation's highest minimum wage, at $17.13.  That's an estimated $5B in additional wages, which is good news for many workers, but there is a potential downside: Experts warn that those added overhead costs will likely be passed on to consumers, per Inc. And just when we thought inflation was starting to ease up…   AROUND THE WEB 📆  On this day: In 1975, "Wheel of Fortune" premiered on NBC. 📸  Wow: Winners of the 2025 Epson International Pano Awards, a competition for panoramic photography. 🗞️  Newsletter: Superintelligence serves up AI coverage you can actually understand. ❓  That's cool: Completely random content. 🐱  Aww: Blep. SHOWER THOUGHT Board games should pack two rule books. That way, multiple people can read the instructions at the same time.  SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo. Editing by: Sara "Baby face" Friedman.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. Subscribe to our other newsletters Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream  |  Expert insights: Masters in Marketing  |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 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