How Blue Apron Found Its Fresh Start

Welcome back to The Friday Fortune! The air’s getting crisp, the group chats are full of fantasy football drama, and suddenly everything tastes like cinnamon. It’s officially that in-between season where we’re half in pumpkin-mode and half in panic-mode over Q4 goals.

Whether you're polishing up end-of-year campaigns or just avoiding another “quick sync,” this is your weekly pit stop for productive procrastination. Marketing insights you can skim while pretending you're not already planning your Halloween costume.

Here’s what’s on deck this week:

• A sit-down with Blue Apron’s Head of Marketing, Raina Enand

• Netflix to sell ads through Amazon’s DSP

• Manscaped x OpenFortune

📈 Marketer of the Week

If there’s anyone totally changing what it means to revive a legacy food brand, it’s Raina Enand, Head of Marketing at Blue Apron of Wonder. With a career spanning beauty, e-commerce, and food innovation, Raina has built her reputation on bold pivots and solving puzzles that most marketers would shy away from.

Raina cut her teeth at L’Oréal, where she learned every side of brand management like P&Ls, launches, supply chain, and more. When she realized digital marketing was about to explode, she left to join a startup. That leap set her on a path through Jet, Vroom, and Standard, gaining fluency in every channel from direct mail to podcasts.

Her biggest adventure came at Wonder, which she joined before it even had a name. Launching in the middle of the pandemic, she helped scale an idea from food trucks cooking meals outside customers’ homes to more than 55 restaurants nationwide. That journey set the stage for Blue Apron, which Wonder acquired in 2023.

When she moved over in early 2024, Raina faced a brand beloved but boxed in by its reputation. Blue Apron was synonymous with meal kits, but consumers had changed. What they wanted was speed, flexibility, and ease. She saw that the only way forward was a full refresh, from business strategy to branding to marketing. If nothing changed, Raina worried that people would see the Blue Apron name, assume they already knew what it offered, and move on without giving the brand a second thought.

The rebrand made subtle but powerful shifts. It has softer, more neutral design choices, photography shot in real kitchens instead of studios, and a voice that feels more like a sous-chef than a taskmaster. Raina describes it as “that hand on your shoulder that’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve got this.’”

To relaunch, her team leaned into a cultural truth: subscription fatigue. Instead of rigid weekly boxes, Blue Apron now offers flexible shopping and quick, heat-and-eat meals. The campaign put dollars behind TV, connected TV, podcasts, and streaming audio for the first time in years, while also enlisting more than 100 influencers to create genuine, personalized content.

Looking ahead, Raina compares Blue Apron’s transformation to Abercrombie’s reinvention, shifting from a dated perception to fresh cultural relevance. The work doesn’t stop here. The next year will be about optimization, personalization, and ensuring loyal customers feel heard while new ones reconsider the brand.

Raina’s Takeaway

Raina’s leadership philosophy is deceptively simple: “See something, say something.” She pushes her team to raise questions or flag ideas, because that’s how brands evolve and how marketers stay sharp.

For Raina, every challenge is a puzzle worth solving, whether it’s launching a brand no one’s heard of or reshaping one everyone thinks they know. And if you ask her team to describe her energy? She’ll admit she’s an espresso martini… fast, bold, and a little addictive.

To hear more about how Raina is reinventing Blue Apron for a new era, and why she’s unapologetically a socks-on sleeper, listen to the full episode of CMO Weekly.

🥠 The Cookie Jar

Crack open a handful of the week’s best marketing links—because good fortune favors the curious.

• Netflix to sell ads through Amazon’s DSP. When your biggest competitor becomes your business partner… it's complicated.

• T-Mobile taps into NFL hype as top sponsor of George Kittle series. Because nothing says "Can you hear me now?" like a tight end's tight schedule.

• Inside the social media frenzy around ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’. The real glow-up was the engagement metrics we made along the way.

• Manscaped Making a Smooth Move with OpenFortune. Finally, a partnership that's not rough around the edges.

That’s a wrap for this week’s Friday fortune.

If you enjoyed the read, pass it along to your favorite marketer who could use a little extra inspo in their inbox.

Until next time, may your marketing be memorable and your cookies always be fortunate!

— The OpenFortune team