The consumer price index earlier this week showed that inflation isn’t easing quite as quickly as hoped. That’s made it a good time for private labels, or store brands. This week, Target announced it’s revamping its own brand, Up&Up — with improvements in quality, packaging and hundreds of new items.

Private label sales now generate roughly $250 billion a year in the U.S., according to retail consultant Matthew Hamory at AlixPartners. And they’ve been been gaining market share the last couple years.

“You know, with inflation and maybe a looming recession, private label can really come more into its own, right, because the value proposition is even stronger,” he said.  

Some retailers are now copying Trader Joe’s with unique and high-quality private label products you can’t buy anywhere else but most are what Hamory refers to as name brand equivalents. (Or in internet speak: dupes.) 

Dupe videos have helped turn many young consumers onto off brands and even given them a kind of cache, said Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the Wharton School.

“The anti-brand brand movement, it’s a different way to create a different meaning system, but it’s still a brand,” he said.

Reed added that that’s what helped make Target Targét.