The most valuable placement you own may be inside your product, not on your site.
Marketing Brew reported in December 2025 on how Erewhon's collaborations actually work. A single celebrity smoothie can carry up to 5 paying partner brands as ingredients. At peak, the store reportedly sold 40,000 of them a month. Salt & Stone's placement reportedly made it the store's number 1 seller.
That is not co-marketing. Co-marketing trades audiences and splits cost. This is paid placement inside the formula. The partner funds production or pays a fee, and receives the ingredient credit, the sampling moment, the photography, and access to a customer they cannot reach through a media buy. You receive funded inventory, a limited run SKU, and press coverage nobody had to pitch.
To run it you need 2 things. A product with composable parts, whether that is a bundle, a kit, a menu item, or a formulation. And an audience a partner cannot buy anywhere else. Then account for it properly. Track the placement fee, the incremental units, and the lift on the partner's own SKU if you stock it, per collaboration, so you learn what the space is worth before you price the next one.
The honest catch: the moment a placement is paid, your recommendation stops being a recommendation. Erewhon holds that line because the theater is obvious to everyone involved. A brand built on expertise cannot. If customers believe you selected the ingredient on their behalf, paid placement is a credibility trade, and you may only get to make it once. Disclose it plainly, and charge enough to make the disclosure worth it.
Retail media spent years selling banner space on category pages. The version that works is the one the customer can taste.
