👉 Flip Shuts Down 😢

Will Flip’s closure sparks fresh debate on whether video shopping can thrive in the U.S? —plus LV’s bold beauty bet, YouTube’s new “Hype” tool, and AI-generated product videos.

Sep 02, 2025

Hey Everyone 👋

You may have seen the news—Flip, the U.S. social commerce app blending TikTok-style product reviews with in-app shopping, officially wound down this week. Despite rapid growth (16M+ users, $375M GMV, and $300M+ raised), the model couldn’t sustain itself: high transaction velocity but low order values made commissions too thin.

It’s sad to see such a promising team and creator community shut down, and even sadder knowing many will point to this as proof video commerce “can’t work” in the U.S. Have you used Flip? Will you miss it?

Anyhow, let's get started

📰 Snippets

💄 Louis Vuitton enters beauty

Confidence has no price—but Louis Vuitton is testing the limits. The brand launches its La Beauté line this Friday with lipsticks at $160 and eyeshadow palettes at $250👀. LV calls it “much more than a line of cosmetics”. Interesting move as cosmetics sales have not been as strong.

▶️Discoverability

YouTube has rolled out its “Hype” feature to 39 countries—including the U.S., U.K., Japan, and India—to help smaller creators gain visibility. The tool lets viewers “hype” up to three videos per week from channels under 500K subscribers; hyped videos earn points that can land them on a new Explore page leaderboard.

AI & Product Video 🖐️

One recurring complaint from merchants is that content creation becomes a bottleneck when trying to scale video commerce. With the rapid progress of AI — and given that we already have access to product data, checkout, and existing media — we wondered if AI could support merchants by generating short product value-prop videos with variations tailored to different audiences. For example we created this one - full AI generated in few minutes. We'd love your opinion on the product. Share a product URL and we will send you various videos for review. Are you interested to participate?

VideoCommerce Tip

Did you know that adding shoppable video to your abandoned cart flow is showing promising results? One user reported significant engagement and was able to recover more sales compared to their previous strategy.

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