In a time when misinformation is everywhere and consumer skepticism is at an all-time high, trust has become marketing’s most valuable currency. And for all the new tools and platforms marketers have adopted in the digital age, one channel consistently earns that trust more than any other: direct mail. Despite years of predictions about its decline, direct mail has not only survived — it’s thriving. In fact, it’s become the quiet powerhouse in omnichannel marketing strategies. As digital fatigue, privacy concerns, and ad fraud undermine confidence in online media, marketers and consumers alike are rediscovering the value of physical mail. The stats tell the story. Americans are seeing more ads than ever, but believing fewer of them. Social media feeds are crowded with questionable claims, sponsored content is often indistinguishable from organic posts, and AI-generated misinformation is rampant. Inboxes are overrun with scams, phishing attempts, and generic automated messaging.

Major retailers like Target, Walmart and Aldi have recently announced redesigns of their private-label brands. The recent string of rebrands signals new investment in how these products are perceived. As more consumers embrace store brands, many major retailers have decided they need to improve the way they look. In 2024, Target introduced new, colorful packaging for its Up&up brand designed to make it easy to identify products as customers shop with large product names. Last year, Aldi began a refresh of its branding and packaging to put its logo on every private-label product in the store, and to bring consistent fonts and graphic design to all Aldi-branded products. In April, Walmart announced a redesign of its Great Value brand, its first full brand refresh in more than a decade. The refresh aimed to provide consistent placement of nutritional information, clearer visual cues to help customers pick the correct items and a modernized look.

When I convinced my bosses at Wirecutter to spend over $700 on a 450-pound, 6-foot-tall cardboard box filled with hundreds of mystery products that had been returned to Amazon and other retailers, I assumed that what we’d find inside would be a revealing snapshot of what shopping looks like today. Anyone can buy these pallets stuffed with discarded products. For months, I’d watched content creators on social media giggle in excitement as they’d pull packages one by one from their own surprise boxes and rip them open, ceremoniously revealing a bevy of weird and wonderful items. Secondary sales were worth an estimated $846 billion in the US in 2024, up from $297 billion in 2008, according to Zac Rogers, PhD, associate professor of supply-chain management at Colorado State University, who told me that those figures are probably conservative. Quick-and-easy returns are a benefit of shopping at giant corporate retailers, and people take advantage of return policies liberally. An estimated 15.8% of sales, worth around $849.9 billion, will be returned in 2025, according to data from a joint study done by the National Retail Federation and the UPS-owned company Happy Returns.