The public-company
earnings that move
consumer brands.

The biggest public companies report the weather that smaller brands are about to operate in. Meta and Google tell you where CPMs are heading. Shopify and Klaviyo tell you which features are getting roadmap priority. Affirm and PayPal tell you how the consumer is actually spending. The public DTC brands are your closest comps, and the CPG majors are the acquirers. This tracker logs every 2026 earnings print from that roster, with a plain read on what each one means for you.

It covers both 2026 reporting waves so far: the Q4 2025 and full-year reports released from late January through March, and the Q1 2026 reports released from April through June. Every figure ties to the company's own investor-relations release or its SEC filing. The two sections below give the collective read on each wave; the five layer tables that follow give the company-by-company detail and the operator read on each. If you want to jump straight to the takeaways for a smaller brand, skip to what smaller brands should do.

The Q1 2026 read,
in one paragraph.

The Q1 2026 wave, reported from April into June, told a consistent story. Ad costs on the dominant platforms re-accelerated. Meta's average price per ad rose 12% year over year, up from 6% a quarter earlier, on top of 19% more impressions, and it raised full-year capex guidance to $125B to $145B to keep improving the auction. Amazon's advertising grew 24% to a business now over $70B on a trailing basis, and Google Search ads held plus 19% with management saying AI was adding queries rather than eating inventory. The read for a smaller brand is blunt: budget for higher CPMs on Meta, Google, and Amazon, not lower ones.

Underneath the price inflation, the consumer looked resilient but value-conscious. The BNPL names all grew volume in the low-to-mid 30s percent with benign credit, and both Affirm and Klarna described the consumer as financially healthy. But PayPal's branded checkout grew only 2%, and in packaged goods the food and beverage giants still grew almost entirely on price while volumes stayed flat to negative. The genuine volume recovery showed up in home and personal care, beauty, and health-positioned food: P&G returned to volume-led growth across all ten of its categories, Unilever's underlying volume jumped to plus 2.9%, and prestige beauty kept recovering on fragrance and China.

For the public DTC brands, Q1 was a lesson in fragility and discipline. Tariffs hit gross margins across hardgoods and apparel, and the winners defended margin with selective price increases and higher-margin mix rather than discounting, with On and FIGS actually raising guidance through it. The sharpest warning came from Oddity, whose revenue swung from plus 25% to minus 26% purely because one ad platform's acquisition cost roughly doubled. The durable brands leaned on retention (Chewy's 84% Autoship base) and channel mix (YETI's wholesale carrying a soft DTC quarter) rather than paid-traffic volume. That contrast, between brands that own their demand and brands that rent it, is the throughline of the whole wave.

The Q4 2025 read,
the baseline it built on.

The Q4 2025 and full-year reports, released from late January through March, set the baseline the Q1 wave then extended. Ad-price inflation was already underway but milder: Meta's price per ad rose 6% and it guided 2026 capex to $115B to $135B, a number it would raise a quarter later. The clearest signal was the emerging-platform repricing: Reddit's ad revenue grew 75% and its ARPU 42%, a channel getting more expensive fast off a low base, while Snap's effective CPMs fell as impressions outran demand. The split between expensive incumbents and cheap challengers was visible from the start of the year.

On the infrastructure side, the Q4 wave was where the agentic-commerce theme crystallized. Shopify posted its first quarter above $100B in GMV and framed 2026 around funding Catalog, Sidekick, and a Google-co-developed Universal Commerce Protocol so AI agents transact through its checkout rather than around it. Klaviyo, Braze, and HubSpot all shipped AI agents into general availability with usage-based pricing. The platforms told you, in January and February, exactly where their 2026 roadmap budgets were going.

In packaged goods, the full-year numbers exposed the price-versus-volume tension that defined the year: Mondelez grew on nearly 10% pricing while volumes fell almost 5%, Coca-Cola's full-year volume was flat, and P&G's organic growth was zero with negative volume. That was the stretched-consumer baseline. The Q1 volume recovery that followed was the news; the Q4 pricing-led, flat-volume picture was the setup. For DTC, Q4 was where tariff pressure first showed in gross margins (YETI, FIGS, Warby Parker), and where Celsius showed how an acquisition can add 86% to a top line while diluting margin first.

Ad platforms:
who sets your CPMs.

These are the companies whose earnings calls move your cost of traffic. The pattern in 2026 is a split: the big three (Meta, Google, Amazon) are getting more expensive, funded by record AI capex that makes their auctions better-targeted and more competitive, while the challengers (Snap, Pinterest) stayed cheap and Reddit and AppLovin are the ones to watch. The latest print for each is below, linked to its filing.

The practical move is diversification before the challengers reprice. Meta and Google will keep taking price because their AI capex keeps making the inventory more valuable, so the offset is creative volume, first-party data, and a deliberate presence on the cheaper channels while they are still cheap. Before you raise a paid budget against these CPMs, it is worth pressure-testing the unit economics: our free break-even ROAS calculator and max allowable CAC tool tell you what a rising CPM environment can actually support.

Commerce infrastructure:
what gets built next.

These earnings calls are the clearest read on which features your platforms will prioritize and where the upsell pressure is heading. The dominant 2026 theme is agentic commerce and AI-native tooling: Shopify is funding it hardest, and Klaviyo, Braze, and HubSpot are all shipping AI agents into production with usage-based pricing. The one laggard is Salesforce Commerce Cloud, flagged as a drag even as Agentforce crossed $1B in ARR.

The signal for a Shopify brand or app founder is that the roadmap budget is flowing to AI discovery, agentic checkout, B2B, and Markets. Wiring into those early aligns you with where the platform is investing rather than against it. For how this maps onto the broader stack a brand assembles as it scales, see the agentic commerce playbook for Shopify brands.

Payments and BNPL:
the real-time spend read.

Payments volume is the closest thing to a live feed on discretionary spending, and BNPL is the sharpest slice of it. The 2026 read is a healthy-but-selective consumer: the pay-over-time names grew volume in the low-to-mid 30s percent with benign credit, while the incumbent wallet and seller layer grew only modestly, a sign that growth is concentrated in financing-enabled purchases and new merchant supply, not broad per-customer expansion.

For a DTC brand, the takeaway is to treat BNPL as a live conversion and average-order-value lever, because the data says financing-enabled purchases are where discretionary demand is actually growing, while not assuming a rising-tide checkout environment that PayPal's numbers say does not exist. One more data point for the backdrop: Stripe stayed private through 2026 but disclosed $1.9 trillion in 2025 payment volume, up 34%, so money is still moving at scale even with public-market payments multiples under pressure.

Public DTC brands:
your closest comps.

These are the brands you can actually learn from, because they disclose the mechanics: gross margin, channel mix, marketing intensity, and how they are handling tariffs and paid acquisition. Three lessons run through the 2026 prints: tariffs are eating margin and the answer is pricing and mix, not discounting; single-channel acquisition is dangerous; and retention plus omnichannel is what separates the durable from the fragile.

The Oddity print is the one to sit with. A high-margin, high-repeat, 97%-DTC brand lost a quarter and a full-year outlook because its largest ad partner's acquisition cost spiked, and lost first orders compound into lost repeat revenue all year. That is the single-channel risk every DTC founder carries, quantified. The healthier model in the same table is Revolve growing marketing dollars while shrinking marketing as a percent of sales, and Chewy leaning on an 84% subscription base. If you want the framework for which of these levers matters at your stage, the DTC growth inflection points piece maps it out.

CPG strategics:
demand and the acquirers.

The large CPG companies are two signals at once: a read on category demand, and the acquirers who might one day buy your brand. In 2026 the demand read split along category lines, with center-store food and beverage still growing on price while volumes stayed flat, and a real volume recovery in home and personal care, beauty, and health-positioned food. On the deal side, the appetite was unmistakable: the majors kept buying niche, high-velocity brands.

The M&A appetite is the part a founder should not miss. Church & Dwight said it plainly, that it is hunting "market-leading" fast-moving-consumable brands and paying up for high-velocity niche names, and PepsiCo, Estée Lauder, Unilever, and Colgate all bought growth in 2026. That is a live exit door for a scaled, growing DTC brand. For the deal-side view of who is buying and at what price, see the 2026 consumer M&A window explainer.

What a smaller brand
should do with this.

The whole point of reading the majors is to act on it before the effect reaches you. Here is the operator translation of the 2026 prints, the specific moves a smaller consumer brand should make off what these companies reported.

Budget for CPM inflation and diversify off it. Meta, Google, and Amazon are taking price and will keep doing so while their AI capex compounds, so model rising blended CPMs into your plan rather than hoping for a reversion. The offset is not a single silver-bullet channel, it is creative volume, first-party data, and a deliberate, funded presence on the cheaper channels (Snap, Pinterest, and Reddit and AppLovin as they open) while they are still underpriced.

Adopt your platform's AI priorities early. Shopify is funding Catalog, Sidekick, and agentic checkout; Klaviyo and Braze are shipping AI agents. When a platform tells you where its roadmap budget is going, the features it names get the investment, the integrations, and eventually the ranking preference. Being early on agentic checkout and AI discovery is cheaper than being late.

Treat BNPL as a conversion and AOV lever, not a nice-to-have. The clearest growth in discretionary spend is running through pay-over-time, with healthy credit behind it. Offering Affirm, Klarna, or Afterpay at checkout is one of the few tailwinds the data actually supports, because the broad rising-tide checkout environment that PayPal's numbers rule out is not coming to rescue your conversion rate.

Build a gross-margin and sourcing cushion for tariffs. Every hardgoods and apparel brand in the comps ate a tariff hit to gross margin, and the ones that held up (On, FIGS) had the margin headroom to absorb it and the pricing power to pass some through. If your margin is thin and your sourcing is single-country, that is the exposure to fix before the next tariff headline, not after.

Go omnichannel and lead with retention. "DTC" now means omnichannel: YETI's wholesale carried a soft direct quarter, Warby and FIGS added stores, and e.l.f. leaned on retail shelf. And the brands that held up did it on retention and subscription (Chewy) rather than paid-traffic volume. Owning your demand is the entire lesson of the Oddity print. To pressure-test where your own economics sit, the free Shopify store audit and the DTC growth scorecard are a fast starting point.

IPO and S-1 watch.

New filings are their own signal: an S-1 is the first time a private brand's real numbers become public, and it resets the comp set. Here is the 2026 consumer and commerce IPO activity worth tracking, updated as new registrations land.

The Reformation S-1 is the most instructive for founders, because a profitable, roughly 90%-DTC apparel brand choosing to go public is a real vote of confidence in the model at a time when most consumer exits are trade sales. Its filing is the clearest public benchmark for what a healthy DTC P&L looks like at scale.

How this tracker
is built.

Every figure here ties to a primary source: the company's own investor-relations press release, or its SEC filing (an 8-K, 10-Q, 6-K, or F-1). The links in the tables go to those documents, not to secondary coverage. Where a metric came from an earnings call rather than the release, it is treated as reported. Nothing is estimated or invented. If a number could not be verified against the company's own disclosure, it was left out.

The window covers both 2026 reporting waves so far: the Q4 2025 and full-year reports released from late January through March, and the Q1 2026 reports released from April through June. Fiscal calendars vary, so some companies report offset quarters (Affirm's fiscal year ends in June, e.l.f.'s and Estée Lauder's in June or March, Salesforce and Braze on a January year-end, the European CPG names on half-year and quarterly trading updates), and each row notes the actual period. The "operator read" column is my own interpretation of what each print means for a smaller brand, not the company's guidance.

This page is refreshed daily. As new earnings prints and S-1 filings land, they are added to the tables and the collective reads are updated, and the underlying data lives in a maintained ledger alongside the 2026 consumer M&A and funding tracker. The next full wave, Q2 2026, begins reporting in late July, so expect the tables to fill out through August. If a company you care about is missing, it is either outside the consumer-brand-weather roster or it had not reported inside the window, not an oversight.

Questions I get about
reading these earnings.

Which public companies most affect DTC and consumer brands?

Are ad CPMs going up in 2026?

What do 2026 earnings say about consumer spending?

What is Shopify prioritizing in 2026?

How is this earnings tracker sourced and kept current?