While Wall Street debates the return on AI infrastructure spending, three consumer companies – one selling running shoes, another hair color, and a third seed packets – are trading at single-digit earnings multiples and quietly picking up new customers.
What “Cheap” Actually Means Right Now
The tech selloff has pulled attention toward the obvious question: which growth stocks are worth buying on the dip? But that framing ignores a different category of opportunity that’s been sitting in plain view. Consumer companies with durable products and expanding customer bases are priced as if they’re in structural decline – and in several cases, the numbers don’t support that story.
Single-digit price-to-earnings multiples are rare in a market that spent most of the past decade rewarding growth at any cost. When a company selling a physical product – something people buy repeatedly, on a schedule, out of habit or necessity – trades at that kind of valuation, there’s usually a reason. Sometimes the reason is legitimate: the business is shrinking, the brand is losing relevance, or the category is being disrupted. But sometimes the reason is simpler: the stock is out of fashion.
Consumer staples and discretionary names tied to everyday purchases tend to get overlooked when capital is chasing semiconductors and cloud infrastructure. That’s not a new dynamic. What’s notable now is the degree of the gap – between where these companies trade and what their earnings actually look like on a per-share basis.
A $1,000 investment doesn’t buy much of a high-flying tech name at current prices. It can, however, buy a meaningful stake in a company selling something people need, at a price that assumes very little will go right.
Three Companies, Three Very Different Products
Running shoes sit at one end of the consumer spectrum – a product category with genuine brand loyalty, repeat purchase cycles, and a customer base that tends to trade up rather than down over time. The company in question here is reaching new customers even as its valuation stays compressed. That combination – growing demand, low multiple – is exactly the setup value investors look for, and it’s available right now with roughly $1,000 to deploy.
Hair color is a different kind of business. It’s less aspirational than footwear, more purely functional, and enormously sticky. People who dye their hair do it again. They do it every four to six weeks, in many cases, for years or decades. The economics of a recurring consumable in a category with limited disruption risk are straightforward – and yet the stock is trading at a valuation that implies investors expect very little from it. That disconnect is worth examining rather than accepting at face value.
Seed packets represent the most purely defensive of the three. Gardening as a category saw sharp growth during the pandemic years, and while some of that demand has normalized, a meaningful share of the new gardeners who started buying seeds in 2020 and 2021 have continued. The customer base expanded, and the company selling seeds into that base is trading cheaply enough that even modest growth justifies a higher price.
What these three have in common isn’t glamour. It’s earnings. Each generates them, each trades at a low multiple of them, and each is finding new customers rather than losing existing ones. That’s a narrow set of criteria, but it’s a useful one when evaluating where a small amount of capital might do more than it would sitting in an index fund weighted toward the same AI names everyone already owns.
The contrast with the current tech conversation is sharp. AI spending debates center on whether massive capital expenditures – billions flowing into data centers, chips, and model training – will eventually generate returns that justify the investment. That’s a legitimate question, and the answer won’t be clear for years. The consumer companies described here don’t require that kind of faith. Their revenues come from transactions that happened last quarter and will happen again next quarter, at prices consumers have already demonstrated willingness to pay.
The Case for Buying What Nobody Wants
There’s a version of this argument that goes wrong quickly – the trap of assuming that anything cheap is worth owning. Cheap stocks are sometimes cheap for good reasons. A hair color brand losing shelf space to private label competitors, a shoe company watching its core demographic age out, a seed business dependent on weather patterns and supply chains it doesn’t control – these are real risks, and none of them disappear because the multiple looks attractive. The question is whether the price already reflects those risks, or whether it reflects something closer to indifference.
Indifference is what appears to be at work here. In a market environment where investor attention has concentrated heavily on a relatively small number of technology and AI-adjacent names, the consumer companies selling physical products to ordinary people have been left behind not because their businesses have deteriorated, but because they’re simply not interesting to the people moving the most money. That creates an opening. If you’re working with $1,000 – an amount that won’t move any market but can still compound meaningfully over time – buying into unloved businesses at low multiples while everyone else argues about GPU allocation is a position with a track record that’s hard to dismiss. Whether the specific companies here fit a given portfolio depends on factors no single article can assess. But the category – cheap, unglamorous, customer-adding consumer stocks in a tech-dominated market – is worth taking seriously before the rotation everyone keeps predicting actually arrives.
For investors comparing consumer-focused options across markets, MercadoLibre vs. Shopify offers a different lens on the consumer stock question in 2026 – growth-oriented rather than value-oriented, but a useful counterpoint when thinking about where consumer dollars are actually flowing.
The simplest version of the case is this: running shoes, hair dye, and seed packets are not exciting. They will not be the subject of breathless conference presentations or analyst upgrades tied to AI integration announcements. But the people who buy them will keep buying them – and right now, you can own a piece of that at a price that asks almost nothing of the future.
