For many of the people in line, this would be their first piece of Knicks gear. Such is the effect of Knicksmania, an ecstatic response from a city that has not seen its pro basketball team reach the championship since 1999.  

But for those unwilling to brave the long lines, or spend at least $60 for an official Knicks shirt, an entire ecosystem is taking shape beyond the Garden.

Stepping out of the 34th Street station on a subway entrance painted blue and orange, a vendor draped the metal fences commonly used for street closures with $20 Gildan T-shirts printed with the Knicks logo and “NBA Finals.” 

A block over, outside the entrance of MSG, at least four different vendors had small black carts filled with at least 60 shirts each, all around the $20 mark. When asked about how they managed to secure a large number of championship-themed shirts, despite the Knicks reaching the finals less than a week ago, an anonymous vendor put it simply: Go online, find a design, and “print that shit on a T-shirt.”

The options ranged from bright orange shirts to white and black options, but a common thread among all of them was that they seemed to be AI-generated.

On social media, users noticed the phenomenon as well.

“I think … A.I. has zapped the power from bootlegs,” a user said on X about the shirts. While many seemed to be collages of stock photos of the Knicks logo with similar typeface, one particular design featured an image of the team resembling the hyper-saturated AI style, with a busy background featuring the Garden and Batman.

“It’s made them more efficient actually, and lets them have more designs now,” a user noted.

The AI merchandise has been spotted in Bed Stuy, Union Square, and even the West Village. While vendors agreed the technology was in part responsible for their quick response to Knicksmania, the use of AI is also becoming a differentiator between merchants in the bootleg economy.

“My cousin Lorenzo makes rad bootleg NY sports shirts, all human-designed, no AI. US Open, Liberty, Mets, Knicks, and World Cup designs,” a user advertised on X.

In Harlem, a separate artist has gained attention for his 2000s airbrushed designs, painting bootleg Knicks merch in real time.

Regardless of the origin of the designs, Knicks fans are fully embracing the offshoot product lines emerging throughout the city, seeing bootleg fashion as a physical representation of the city’s DNA, one in which anyone can hop on a trend and make it their own—as well as a quick buck along the way.

“NY is so back. $25 for Bootleg Knicks Finals shirts outside of MSG,” a user said on X. “NYC has never been more alive.”

Sold out

Down on Canal Street, a retail corridor usually filled with faux Goyard Saint Louis GM Bags and unofficial AirPod Maxes, sports jerseys draped the awnings of various gift stores. But no Knicks merch was to be found.

Speaking with five different vendors, it became clear that Knicksmania has already ravaged the area: Only five XL shirts were left on the entire street. Store workers, who wished to remain anonymous, told Fast Company that, because no one could have predicted the Knicks making it to the finals, they ordered their usual product amount, which quickly sold out as the team advanced. 

One store owner who has been on Canal Street for more than eight years said he typically sells at most one to two Knicks ball caps a week—with tourists usually opting for Yankees merch. But this season, his Knicks caps were gone within a week.

The same vendor estimated he has sold at least 200 jerseys in the $60 range within the last two weeks, and while he is trying to order more from what he claims is an official licensed supplier, that source is sold out as well.

Left hanging in all the stores instead are soccer jerseys, a nod to the upcoming FIFA World Cup, but vendors say they are simply not selling well.

The design, which leaked last month before its formal reveal, would encase the circular form of Madison Square Garden with a classical-style, square-shaped station that’s designed to let light in. Inside, narrow walkways would be expanded and low-slung ceilings raised. Architects estimate the redesigned platforms will reduce egress time by more than a minute.

More details about the plans reveal a design blends a modern classical look with retro-inspired art deco forms that architects looked to for inspiration. The ceiling in the main hall is decorated as a map of Manhattan streets with a clock hanging in the middle where Penn Station is located on the map, and as a callback to the clock that was once displayed in the main concourse of the old Penn Station. The New York City skyline is depicted in decorative reliefs in the main entry space, and four original eagle statues from the original Penn Station would be placed at the building’s corner entries. Architects are using the original station’s foundations as much as possible.

“This is geeky but it’s really important because building new foundations at Penn when a train’s coming in every three minutes during the day is incredibly complicated and costly,” Vishaan Chakrabarti, the lead design architect and founder of PAU, said during a press conference. “So we’re trying to reuse and recycle foundations wherever we can.”

One entrance features a large display showing President Donald Trump’s name and a presidential seal. Criticism over it, Chakrabarti said, is “much ado about nothing.”

“This couldn’t be more commonplace. Federal buildings everywhere have presidential seals,” he said.

PAU and HOK are leading the architectural plans, and they worked with developers Halmar and Skanska and other partners including Severus Associates, ME Engineers, Lerch Bates, HNTB, and CBRE. Pentagram was named as the agency behind the station’s way finding, signage, and graphic design, and L’Observatoire would do the lighting design.

The proposed plan calls for removing the Infosys Theater at Madison Square Garden and turning that space into a grand entrance. In addition, there would be loading space inside for trailers so they no longer have to unload on the sidewalks outside. Sidewalks would be widened outside the station, creating what designers hope is a new public space.

“We think about how architecture and the city engage constantly,” Vishaan said.

The proposal is estimated to cost somewhere between $7 billion to $8 billion and be paid through federal grants and loans.

“There will be no fare hike to pay for this project, that’s not going to happen,” Andy Byford, special advisor to the Amtrak Board, said.

Byford denied the procurement process for project was corrupt after elected officials including Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York said it lacked transparency. Byford said the finalist design was selected from four letters of interest that were whittled down to three.

“This was without question the best technical proposal of the three they received,” Byford said.

Then, the uproar began.

“This hurt more than, like, most of the breakups I’ve had,” Andy Young, a film and TV editor in Los Angeles, told The New York Times. The actor Elijah Wood tweeted that the new experience was “truly awful.” The Alamo Drafthouse subreddit exploded with backlash. Employees at one location in Denver held a strike to protest disruptions to their work. A Change.org petition, which now has over 10,000 signatures, emerged to call for a reversal of the new policy.

The vocal response was almost entirely negative—and it largely stems from the fact that the Alamo has long established itself as a distraction-free movie viewing space with its “Don’t Talk” marketing campaign. To many loyal fans, the Alamo was one of the last bastions of the phoneless world, and this new mobile ordering system represented the downfall of that ethos for a corporate check. 

Alamo Drafthouse’s executive leadership sees things differently. Multiple sources told Fast Company that, in many ways, Alamo’s previous operational design was broken—causing more interruptions for guests and more work for employees behind the scenes. The results of the new mobile ordering system, they say, simply don’t match up with the backlash: Alamo is having its best year for box office revenue since 2019, employees are netting higher take-home pay on average, and guests are placing more in-theater orders than ever before. 

“Alamo Drafthouse has always been focused on delivering the best moviegoing experience possible,” CEO Michael Kustermann says. “Technology has evolved, and we want to embrace the ability to evolve with it if it improves the cinematic experience. We believe it does.”

What’s happened

Alamo Drafthouse began in 1997 in Austin as the brainchild of Tim and Karrie League, a husband and wife team. The initial location showed specialty programming not available at other theaters, hosted themed events, reunion screenings, and director retrospectives, and served a limited in-house menu. Since then, Alamo has grown into an enterprise with around 40 locations nationwide, and it was acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2024 for an estimated $200 million.

Today, the brand programs more films than any other circuit every year, still hosts events, and serves food and drinks (though now with a much more expansive menu). And, until recently, Alamo relied on a purely analog system to take customers’ orders. Viewers would look at physical menus placed at their seats, write their orders on a slip of paper, and use a call button to let employees know that their order was ready to be collected. At the end of the night, receipts were doled out by waiters and payment was collected from the aisles. 

Behind the scenes, though, Alamo had been working on a new mobile ordering system for years—one that uses a scannable QR code menu and digital ordering interface rather than pens, papers, and call buttons. The new system officially rolled out in February, and is now the standard across the company’s locations.

Why Alamo Drafthouse is in hot water with fans

It’s not difficult to see why Alamo’s new mobile ordering policy has ruffled so many feathers, considering how staunch the brand has been about preventing viewers from using their phones in the past. 

From its second month of operation to the present, the chain has invested in hundreds of “Don’t Talk” public service announcements (PSAs) informing viewers of its no talking or texting policy, assuring them that violators would be permanently banned from theaters. The people delivering the message varied—from Jamie Lee Curtis to Ryan Coogler—but the takeaway remained the same: Do not, under any circumstances, take your phone out during a movie. 

To be clear, phones were never actually banned in Alamo locations—in fact, it’s been standard protocol at many locations for years for guests to show waiters their digital tickets from their seats. Still, Alamo’s decades-long “Don’t Talk” campaign has undoubtedly caused guests to view Alamo theaters as phone-free spaces—and, for many fans, that meant that the new ordering system felt like a betrayal. 

One statement on the matter from the Austin Film Critics Association reads, “‘Don’t talk. Don’t text’ has been the Drafthouse’s mission statement since its earliest days as a single-screen cinema in Austin. Its growth into a national cinematic institution has been in no small part due to audiences knowing they can have a disturbance-free experience, and that staff will intervene to prevent the distraction of cellphone usage.” 

That sentiment is echoed by dozens of posts on the Alamo subreddit, many of which express a belief that the change reflects a broader loss of Alamo’s identity after its Sony acquisition. Under a post titled “Never coming back,” one commenter wrote, “Any business that’s remotely good in this capitalist hellscape will inevitably be bought up and ruined by one of 5 insatiable conglomerates (sorry ‘investment firms’ via the conglomerates they control) or else gradually succumb to enshittification on its own due to the endless compounding factors that are killing third spaces.”

In online discussion forums, horror stories about the rollout of the mobile ordering system abound. Alamo has said that it’s listening to feedback and working on some minor updates to the interface, like fixing bugs, updating the text message reminding guests to close their tab, increasing font size, and reordering the navigation. 

Broadly, though, sources at the company tell Fast Company that the online backlash against the new policy stands in stark contrast to in-theater results. 

Why Alamo scrapped pen and paper

As Alamo’s new mobile ordering system has rolled out, it seems as if the old pen-and-paper ordering system is being viewed through rose-colored glasses—when, in fact, that system came with its own host of problems. According to an Alamo spokesperson, the company has received complaints from fans for years about the design of its food delivery system.

To start, analog ordering meant that, any time a viewer pressed their call button for refills, silverware, napkins, or a dessert course, an employee would need to return to the theater and walk through the aisles in front of other guests to collect their paper. In order to apply add-ons like season pass discounts or loyalty rewards, guests would need to talk directly to a concierge or waiter. Then, during the third act of the film, employees had to print out and organize physical receipts for every seat and complete each transaction face-to-face—a process that often landed during the movie’s climax. 

“We’ve always innovated as much as we could around the paper, pen, and server model,” the spokesperson told Fast Company. “Our teams had to invent really complex and very manual order management systems—literally sorting paper—to balance their own capacity. They’d also have to do a last call check-in three-quarters of the way through the movie, and then a check drop often close to the climax—two distractions that guests didn’t love. Technology has enabled us to substantially improve the system to limit disruptions and increase operational efficiencies.” 

The new mobile ordering system is built to reduce the number of times that employees need to walk in front of guests during films as well as eliminate time-consuming receipt-printing processes behind the scenes. Now, employees are able to see all orders digitally and drop off refills and silverware in one stop, rather than making repeated runs through the theater to collect paper orders and again to deliver the items. Eventually, the spokesperson adds, guests will also be able to save favorite orders, order ahead, and schedule items throughout the film to better pace their experience. 

While some fans have raised concerns about how this new system might impact employees (especially after Sony’s 2024 acquisition led to a wave of layoffs), Alamo says that it hasn’t laid off any employees due to the QR rollout, and hourly workers are retaining their base wages. In fact, the spokesperson says that the system has allowed employees to manage high volumes of attendees more efficiently, contributing to higher average hourly take-home pay for the majority of workers.

And, despite the online backlash, mobile ordering doesn’t seem to have dented Alamo’s business results. Subscribers to Alamo’s season pass have jumped, and food and beverage orders are up since the new system rolled out. The spokesperson says any claims about guests constantly pulling out their phones during films are hyperbolic. The company’s data shows that 85% of orders are placed before the movie, and only 15% come during the run time.

Kustermann stresses that, ultimately, food and drink ordering is only one small part of Alamo’s business. He’s focused on maintaining the brand’s other core pillars—like its diverse film line-up, custom ad-free preshow, screening events, and annual festival—and, for those reasons, he says, “We need Alamo Drafthouse to be strong in an industry filled with volatility.”

It’s clear that mobile ordering has taken a toll on some fans’ perception of Alamo’s brand—but, ultimately, it might just be the right choice for the brand operationally.

“We believe it’s worth it because it makes our business model more sustainable, puts more money in the pockets of our hardworking hourly venue team members, and can create less distraction for our guests,” Kustermann says.

But zoom in from those skyline views, and you’ll see that SOM‘s designs were more encompassing than the buildings themselves. Taking a total design approach, the firm designed the buildings and their interiors, but also their furnishings and even objects like ashtrays. Specific to the project, these furnishings and objects were never made commercially available.

Now, those bespoke objects are getting a chance at a larger audience. SOM has opened its archives and collaborated with the furniture maker Teknion’s IkonStudio to create production versions of some of its deep portfolio of corporate furniture from the past.

“When we realized that we should do this, we actually opened up the archives and said let’s pull everything out of the cupboards and look at it holistically,” says Chris Cooper, a partner at SOM.

SOM and Teknion worked to curate a group of items for broader release, combing through archival images, designs, and even preserved pieces of furniture to find items that felt both timeless and relevant to the needs of people today.

“We did this culling down from hundreds to maybe 80 to now there’s probably a dozen pieces that are going into production,” Cooper says. “It’s a very privileged position to be in looking back at 100 chairs and seeing which ones percolate to the top as being exceptional.”

The first items to be announced are a sofa and easy chair designed for IBM’s headquarters in the late 1950s and a tubular chrome table and chair set designed for the American fashion designer Halston in the ’70s.

“We had a trove of really interesting designs that emerged in this very fertile mid-century period where furniture systems were emerging to meet post-war needs and new production methods,” says Julia Murphy, another SOM partner. SOM’s approach back then was to take a holistic view of a project, and design the furniture to meet the specific needs of the client and mesh with the look and feel of the building. “It’s been an interesting process to pick out the pieces that are enduring and uniquely SOM,” she says.

But these aren’t just reproductions of old designs. SOM painstakingly reviewed each piece to determine where new materials, ergonomic designs, and structural forms were needed. Sometimes that meant identifying foams that were not toxic like the originals, or coverings that are less harmful to the environment, or seat widths that are slightly wider or deeper to match modern expectations. The results are archive-based furnishings made with modern user needs in mind, and also furniture that can be mass produced in the manufacturing facilities that exist today.

“This isn’t trying to replicate authentic, historic pieces. This is trying to leverage good design forward,” Cooper says.

The newly released SOM archive furniture pieces are now available from Teknion, and more items will be released soon. Given SOM’s decades-long archive, there could be more to come.

The lamp by the Australian designer Joanne Odisho is named to emphasize the fact you can configure and stack its modular system yourself, but the material it’s made from is more noteworthy—it’s an eggshell composite.

Odisho began working with eggshells after she was assigned to create a new material for furniture design using food waste while studying at RMIT University in Melbourne, and it’s since evolved into an ongoing exploration.

“The process of transforming discarded materials into something valuable and functional immediately resonated with me,” she tells Fast Company.

Odisho creates the composite by finely crushing shells sourced from local cafés that are set aside for weekly collection. She cleans, sterilizes, and dries them, then processes the stuff into a fine powder that’s mixed with a biopolymer. The resulting material retains the neutral color of the eggshells, which also happens to be perfect for a lamp shade, and it has a texture she describes as similar to an aerated ceramic. Unryu paper made from mulberry fibers and coated in a biodegradable bioplastic diffuses the light, and the top and base components are made from plywood.

There are three sizes: small, medium, and large. Lit up, the lamp looks like a building, but it also feels organic and sculptural.

Using eggshells to make a lamp is novel, and it fits a wider trend of designers experimenting with waste as a raw material, like human hair used to make a fabric, or corn waste as a 3D-printable building material. The practice also exemplifies circular design, which takes a material that would otherwise be destined for a landfill at the end of its product life cycle and instead makes it the building block of something new.

Eggshells are a miracle of natural engineering, formed to be strong enough to distribute force, but made to be broken eventually. It turns out they also make a great bioceramic once the shell is ground into dust. The Argentine artist Cynthia Nudel used eggshells to make vases and pots, for instance, and Odisho’s lamp won the 2026 Australian Furniture Design Award.

Odisho has experimented with other food waste, like coffee grounds, avocado peels, and onion skins as natural dyes. She also incorporates paper waste and timber shavings that she collects from local manufacturers to develop bio-based materials and sustainable design applications.

“Sustainability is a core part of my practice and design ethos, and I am particularly interested in creating earth-to-earth objects with a circular life cycle,” Odisho says.

She estimates each individual eggshell block she makes for the Mod-u contains about 200 eggshells. Since the small lamp contains 10 eggshell blocks, the medium 35, and the large 65, each lamp repurposes thousands of eggshells that would otherwise end up as waste.

The three racetracks—Churchill Downs in Louisville, Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, and Belmont Park in Elmont, New York—are all in various stages of renovation, each with a design led by the sports-centric architecture firm Populous. They’re getting new grandstand configurations and infield access improvements, fancier suites, a broader range of luxury experiences, and, importantly for growing the sport, a closer connection between spectators and horses.

The overarching theme of this work is hospitality, and it’s reconfiguring these historic racetracks at a time when horseracing is facing deep consolidation and persistent concerns about the humane treatment of the horses themselves.

Some of this work is a response to the changing nature of horseracing, which was transformed in the 1990s by the widespread adoption of racetrack simulcast betting, turning the experience of going to the racetrack into one in which a spectator may be watching horseraces on a screen rather than outside on the track. “What happened starting about 30 years ago, the operators became very focused on the wagering side of the business and, in a way, forgot that they were providing hospitality,” says Todd Gralla, senior principal and director of equestrian services at Populous.

For the historic racetracks of the Triple Crown, arguably the three most popular and important races in the sport, the redesigns and renovations underway now are an effort to reorient the industry. Within a few years, these three racetracks will complete projects that could set a new standard for how horseracing can continue on as a sport and an experience.

Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby

The highest profile horserace is undoubtedly the Kentucky Derby, which recently had its 152nd running. Famous for its pomp, fashion, and mint juleps, the Derby is now part of a two-day mega event in Louisville, where tickets can run upwards of $20,000 per person. Rich in tradition, the Derby’s racetrack, Churchill Downs, has spent the past decade working with Populous to upgrade its facilities and its spectator experience to make it worth that high price.

The biggest project has been a complete reworking of the paddock, the pre-race area where horses and jockeys prepare and spectators on the edges can get relatively close views of the horses. The $200 million project expanded the area from 5,000 square feet to 12,000 square feet, and added more room for people to watch as the horses get their final inspections before heading onto the track.

“We do surgery, so to speak, on all the parts of the facility. But when you equate it to the human body the paddock is really like the heart,” says Sarah Contardo, senior vice president of sales and strategy at Churchill Downs. “So it was really important that we got that particular project correct.”

The new paddock includes standing room only spaces right on the fence, allowing any visitor to Churchill Downs, no matter the ticket level, the ability to get up close to the horses. The renovation project, which completed in 2024, also created the opportunity to rethink the spaces along the paddock. Contardo says that led to the creation of bespoke club spaces that look out directly onto the paddock or into the stalls of the horses preparing to walk out onto the paddock.

Luxury experiences are an increasingly important part of the plan at Churchill Downs. A more recently completed project is the renovation of the finish line suites, the high-end private boxes that look out directly onto the track’s finish line. Mason Paoli, a senior principal and interior design director at Populous who led the project, says every suite had an established customer, so the redesign was all about giving longtime Derby fans a new, upgraded experience without taking away the things they liked.

“We had to reimagine them to bring them up to date, but we had to take a little bit more of a traditional lens, without being tired,” she says. The design leans into the race’s history, but also added a few new features, including an ice cream and coffee bar. “That has been a huge hit,” says Contardo.

Deciding where to inject something new is a challenge, though. “Our entire job is that dance between holding onto history but renovating,” Contardo says. “People want modern amenities. We need specific things in rooms today that they didn’t need 150 years ago.”

Belmont Park, home of the Belmont Stakes

The modernization underway at Belmont Park in New York is much more of an architectural revision. The former grandstand structure is being replaced with a soaring and swooping new seating facility, with a compact section of outdoor stadium seating backed by a five-story building block of suites and amenity spaces, all covered by a white roof canopy that looks like a hotrod’s rear spoiler. It’s expected to fully open in the spring of 2027.

The size of the building is big, but it’s actually a downsizing for Belmont Park, which averages around 7,500 spectators on a typical race day. “Belmont had more than a million square feet of physical plant. We’ve reduced that by two-thirds in the new facilities,” says Meg McWilliam, a principal and senior architect at Populous.

But the project is also an expansion, in a way. That typical raceday crowd of 7,500 balloons to 50,000 on the day of the Belmont Stakes, and the new design has opened up more space for special event facilities, extra seating, and more overflow areas, particularly in the track’s infield. Previously, you couldn’t get to that donut hole in the middle of the tracks at Belmont, and now you can. Part of the work at Belmont Park has unlocked the infield and increased the total green space by almost five-and-a-half times.

McWilliam says that opens up more opportunities to flex for different crowds, and to offer different experiences for the variety of races and other events the site can host. And when it comes time for the Belmont Stakes, the facility can accommodate the very unique nature of the race and its crowd.

“People interact with racing facilities for a much longer period of time than other sports facilities. You’re not showing up for two hours or three hours. You might be showing up when the gates open at 8 a.m. and leaving after the last race and the post-race concert at 8 p.m.,” she says. “There are so many more touch points that we have to consider as a result. And that’s where these kinds of differentiated experiences and differentiated price points really start to come into play.”

Pimlico Race Course, home of the Preakness Stakes

Baltimore’s Pimlico Race Course, opened in 1870, is getting the most extensive revision of the Triple Crown venues. The entire facility, save the historic oval race course itself, has been demolished. Populous is now working with the project’s lead architect, Ayers Saint Gross, to make Pimlico’s clubhouse more experiential.

The look of the project is still taking shape and won’t open until 2028, but Gralla says it is being inspired by the original clubhouse that burned down in 1966, a multi-terraced and highly ornate building designed in the steamboat gothic style. The original 1870 grandstand survived that fire, though, and the wood structure was preserved during the recent demolition, making it possible for that wood—itself over century old at the time of original construction—to be repurposed. “We are literally reusing timber that’s 240 to 250 years old in our new facility,” Gralla says.

Like Belmont, Pimlico is a smaller scale racetrack that happens to host a few high-profile and high-attendance events. So even though Pimlico’s Triple Crown race, the Preakness Stakes, draws international attention and large crowds, most of the other events it hosts do not. “It is not practical for us to go into Belmont and Pimlico and build a 60,000-seat brand new venue, financially speaking, when the average daily attendance is between 5,000 and 10,000 people,” Gralla says.

As an alternative, Populous focused on rethinking Pimlico’s infield—the hole of the racetrack donut—to make more room for spectators and hospitality services. “When we have the Preakness roll around or the Maryland Million at Pimlico, we’re able to scale from that less than 10,000 seat permanent venue up to 30,000 or 40,000 people,” Gralla says.

Outside lessons

The renovations and changes coming to the Triple Crown racetracks are intended to support the American horseracing business, but they take their lessons from beyond the sport, and beyond the U.S.

Contardo at Churchill Downs says her company closely monitors other horse racing tracks around the world, as well as the venues for other major sports and team, like Wimbledon, Formula One racing, and the New York Yankees. They even reference the guest experience at Disney parks.

The most direct lesson Churchill Downs has applied from outside horseracing comes from the NBA. “Every NBA team at this point has a tunnel where the players walk through the club in order to get out to the court. And that is essentially what we did with our Paddock Club,” Contardo says. For fans inside, there is an up-close view of the athletes they came to see perform. “You have a behind the scenes view into the horse stall, just like you might have in one of these other three letter league clubs.”

Gralla of Populous says there are even lessons to learn from within horseracing. Long a global sport, horseracing remains popular in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, and none of those places allows the kind of wagering that so deeply changed American horseracing. Populous has experience with equestrian projects in these places. How they keep bringing in spectators can be informative for the future of the sport in the U.S., says Gralla.

“At those tracks, it’s all about hospitality and the fun. A day at the horse races,” he says. “We have that experience of what does it take to attract people to horse racing when there’s no betting, and we offer that experience back to reinvigorate the hospitality experience here in the Americas.”

Bad Bunny borrowed the house design and called it “La Casita” (“the little house” in Spanish). He used it in Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos), a short film he created to protest the rapid gentrification, displacement of locals, and cultural erasure taking place on the Caribbean island. Then he built a replica, which he has been hauling into massive stadiums on his ongoing world tour. La Casita takes over the center of the stage and, in theory, gets filled with people from the audience, who dance in the last segment of the concert as the people in Puerto Rico do. 

Bad Bunny says La Casita is a tribute, a love letter to the people, to the neighborhood, to the island, to inclusion, and all things good and nice. It seemed like a great idea.

Then the problems started. 

First, Carrasco Delgado sued Bad Bunny in September 2025, alleging that the singer’s representatives “fraudulently” used his signature in “two different contracts” and caused him great emotional distress for using his home without permission. 

Then, on May 30, the lights came up at the Riyadh Air Metropolitano Stadium in Madrid. Standing on the balcony of this monument to Puerto Rican working-class life were famous footballers like Kylian Mbappé, billionaires like Inditex heir Marta Ortega, VIP influencers, and dozens of beautiful young white women. The little house had become a Playboy mansion and a symbol of privilege, which hit especially hard in a country with a big housing crisis. A firestorm of fan criticism started with the power of a thousand suns.

People accused Bad Bunny of taking the most potent architectural symbol of Puerto Rican communal identity—a structure whose flat roof and shared porch were designed for collective neighborhood life—and repurposing it as the most exclusive, entry-controlled space in a global stadium tour. As Spanish writer Pedro Torrijos put it, the balcony, the porch, and the communal threshold of a typical Puerto Rican house are elements built around shared presence, around the open porosity of neighborhood life. In Madrid, those same elements became a velvet rope.

You didn’t get in because you were from the neighborhood, poor, unknown, and ugly. You got in because you were famous, wealthy, or—if you were a regular fan—because Bad Bunny’s people decided you were pretty enough.

Machismo casting

That last part is where the controversy gets uglier, and more revealing. As they’ve done since the little pink house became part of Bad Bunny’s concert staging, from the opening nights of his Madrid residency the singer’s team deployed scouts to the stadium floor to select fans to join the fun at La Casita. The pattern that emerged—documented in attendee videos, social media posts, and eventually national wire coverage—was not subtle: They were overwhelmingly young women conforming to a narrow physical standard: slim, conventionally attractive, styled in line with the album’s aesthetic.

People got very angry. TikTokers like @hellobynour denounced the objectification of women: “It’s not normal to have scouts going through the floor scouting girls, women specifically, all fitting one single beauty prototype.” It was not a random fan lottery but a production decision to select women by how they look, and it happened inside a structure supposedly built to honor the dignity of ordinary Puerto Rican people.

By June 1, every Spanish media outlet had a full-blown cultural flashpoint on their hands. National radio network Cadena SER echoed the feminist critique in a phrase that was repeated everywhere: “Young women with normative bodies.” Newspaper El País published an article titled “We want fat women!” describing the team of scouts recruiting women from the audience to stand onstage, who were then seen competing for Bad Bunny’s attention and a second of fame on the stadium’s big screen.

“What are we telling these generations? That they must conform to a standard in order to be accepted,” proclaimed Laura Barrios, president of the Spanish Federation of Young Women. The singer, who has been both defended and attacked for his sometimes feminist, sometimes misogynistic lyrics, didn’t do himself any favors with La Casita’s casting policy. But after the first two nights of documented criticism, someone apparently got the message.

By the third concert on June 2, the selection was visibly more diverse: broader range of ages, racial backgrounds, and body types.

Bad Bunny has issued no statement directly addressing the controversy, which still echoes through social media. Perhaps one day he’ll explain why a production this carefully conceived—a world tour with a replica house that traveled from Puerto Rico to the Super Bowl to 10 consecutive nights in Madrid—never stopped to ask who was being let in, and what that said about everything the house was supposed to mean. La Casita was built to honor a community defined by its exclusion from wealth and power. In Madrid, it reproduced exactly that exclusion.

Yes, you read that right. It’s 2026, and the Russian army is slapping a paint job on its logistics trucks that would look right at home on a 1918 battleship.

The British started to paint ships with this type of “dazzle” camouflage during World War I in an effort to confuse enemy ships. The theory was that the angled, sharply contrasted patterns would trick German navy crews into miscalculating physical properties of British ships, making them miss when firing their weapons against them. 

This time it has nothing to do with hiding trucks from the human eyes of military sailors and officials. The new drone-safe paint job is an attempt to break the artificial intelligence guiding Ukrainian autonomous strike drones. The revival of this old technique, which has been practically abandoned by navies across the world, also reveals how desperate Moscow has become to protect its supply lines.

As The War Zone reports, new photographs published on X show Russian trucks wearing two distinct geometric treatments: one built from sharp directional bands, the other from rounded irregular blotches, both mixing white with black or factory green across every surface including the tires.

The intent is to confuse the computer vision algorithms inside Ukrainian strike drones so they can’t identify their target. That may or may not work, as autonomous drones can be trained to recognize these patterns too, but it opens them wide to drones controlled by humans, as the paint makes the trucks far more conspicuous to any human pilot watching the front lines with the drone video light or night sensors. The dazzle camouflage is also useless against thermal imaging sensors, so a drone equipped with those will just hit any truck or target, regardless of their paint job.

Old school

Marine artist Norman Wilkinson is the alleged inventor of dazzle camo. Previous camouflage methods were inspired by how animals use natural countershading to blend with their environment. Wilkinson’s approach was different: rather than concealment, he wanted to induce error. His designs planted fake bow waves on hulls and painted contradictory geometric shapes on smokestacks to break the dual-lens optical alignment tools inside German submarine periscopes, forcing commanders to misread a ship’s course and distance.

University simulations have since confirmed that the underlying mechanism is real—the intersecting lines create what researchers call the “horizon effect,” a geometric illusion that causes the brain to misjudge the true heading of a moving object.

Whether it saved ships is a question the wartime data never fully resolved. The British Admiralty’s 1918 analysis found dazzle ships were attacked in 1.47% of sailings versus 1.12% for bare ships—worse, not better—yet among vessels actually hit by torpedoes, 43% of dazzle ships sank against 54% of unpainted ones, and 41% were struck amidships versus 52% of the un-camouflaged fleet.

This hinted that submarine commanders struggled to judge where to aim, but not by a large margin. American analyst Harold Van Buskirk found a cleaner signal in U.S. data: Between March and November 1918, 78 un-camouflaged American merchant vessels over 2,500 tons were sunk against only 18 camouflaged ones, and no dazzle camo U.S. Navy ships were lost in the same period.

The tactic survived into World War II as a standardized program across the British, American, and German fleets, before the widespread adoption of radar and aerial targeting made it obsolete. Attempts to extend it to combat aircraft failed every field test.

Today, the Russians think they know better. The trucks rolling through Ukraine face a threat Wilkinson never imagined: autonomous aerial vehicles that hunt without a human pilot, processing camera feeds through onboard software to classify, track, and strike targets independently. By altering the standard visual outline of a vehicle, Russian forces are betting the drone’s computer vision algorithms will fail in target recognition.

The logic is sound on paper. Machine vision identifies objects the way a person finds a constellation—by connecting a predictable pattern of shapes into a recognizable whole. Coat a Kamaz in contradictory stripes and the pattern breaks down. Academic research has demonstrated that carefully designed visual noise—adversarial inputs—can cause neural networks to misclassify objects with high consistency.

What the paint is really attacking is the confidence score—the internal probability rating an AI model assigns before committing to a target. If the dazzle pattern degrades the model’s certainty below that programmed threshold, the drone passes the truck by. Schuyler Moore, the first chief technology officer of U.S. Central Command, explained the underlying principle at a Center for Strategic and International Studies panel on AI in September 2024.

“A sort of classic unclassified example that exists is like a picture of a plane from the top, and you’re looking for a plane, and then if you put tires on top of the wings, all of a sudden, a lot of computer vision models have difficulty identifying that that’s a plane,” she told the audience.

The dazzle trucks join a catalog of Russian sloppy low-cost countermeasures in this war that includes timber armor defenses, welded metal caging on vehicles, netting, and rubber tires laid across aircraft fuselages. Each new trick forces Ukrainian AI engineering teams to spend resources to retrain their targeting algorithms, but they quickly find the way to counter the countermeasures in a war that is innovating at pace never before seen in history.

Why it’s likely to fail 

Even discarding any upcoming developments to neutralize the dazzle camouflage, this old school scheme carries a self-defeating flaw baked into its design: It works only against autonomous targeting. Ukrainian drone operations keep a human operator in the loop with override authority. A soldier watching the live feed will see a truck painted in stark black-and-white geometric patterns standing out against the landscape much better than a traditional camo vehicle, painted in greens and covered in vegetation.

The pilot will easily find this sore spot on the ground and simply take the shot manually, no AI required. And that’s only until autonomous systems can be reprogrammed to specifically lock onto these unique paint schemes, turning the camouflage into a target identifier.

On top of that, all camouflage is useless against non-visual sensors in the battlefield. Thermal cameras register engine heat and chassis temperature regardless of what pigment sits on top of the metal—a dazzle-painted truck is thermally identical to any other.

Night-vision systems will also clearly show the patterns against natural backgrounds. Russia learned this lesson with its Black Sea fleet. Imagery analysis tests demonstrated that AI running on synthetic aperture radar data—radio waves that map physical structure and care nothing about paint—identified camouflaged Russian warships at their base in Novorossiysk with over 90% accuracy. Which is why the Ukrainians dominate those waters—the only part of the war they have won so far—and why Putin’s fleet rarely venture outside port at the risk of being attacked and sunk by the Ukranian water drones that constantly patrol the sea in search of prey.

It seems that the Russian Army has not really thought this through and their revival or Wilkinson’s dazzling idea will be as short lived as those supply trucks.

Following a public consultation last year, the Bank of England has decided its next series of £5, £10, £20, and £50 bills will feature wildlife instead of historical figures. The financial institution is letting the public vote on which creatures will star on the paper currency.

The central bank released a shortlist of 18 species divided into three categories—mammals; birds; and amphibians, insects, and fish—with a public vote open from June 3 to July 3. The chosen animals will replace the former designs, among them one that includes the divisive former prime minister Winston Churchill.

Voters can choose one animal per category of species, with candidates including the gray seal, red fox, great spotted woodpecker, and the common frog. The selected animals—all native to the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland) and chosen by a panel of wildlife experts—will replace current human figures on the banknotes.

The winners will be announced by the end of the year. The central bank has stated that winners will not necessarily be the most-voted-for animals, but public feedback will be used in the decision process. Fear not: Humans aren’t disappearing entirely. The designs for the series will also include a portrait of the monarch.

Despite the adorable nature of the wild subjects, the decision to redesign the bills is more of a practical than stylistic one.

“To ensure our banknotes remain secure, we periodically issue a new series which incorporates the latest security features to help prevent counterfeits,” the Bank of England said on its website. “When we issue a new series, we also usually update the imagery on banknotes to help the public easily distinguish them.”

While the redesign is under development, individuals shouldn’t expect to see the animal-themed banknotes in circulation anytime soon.

“It will be a number of years before the next series is launched,” the bank said. “It is a detailed, multiyear process to design, test, and print the notes, ensuring they are high quality, resilient, and accessible, and incorporate the latest anti-counterfeiting technology.”

Cute creatures on currency are far from an aberration. One in six countries prominently feature animals on their money, often because of their widespread cultural appeal, in order to raise awareness about conservation efforts and to avoid historically controversial people. When done well, the currency can become a collector’s item.

In 2021, Mexico redesigned its 50-peso bill to feature an axolotl, a salamander-like amphibian whose face looks like it’s always smiling. The aquatic creature replaced José Maria Morelos (1765–1815), leader of the Independence movement, on the banknote. The design was an instant icon. Residents refused to spend the pinkish-purple bill, and the Bank of Mexico estimates that people are hoarding $26 million worth of the currency.

One country, however, seems to be resisting the trend: the United States. The Trump administration has pushed for a $250 banknote featuring the president’s portrait to commemorate the U.S.’s 250th anniversary—despite federal law prohibiting living figures from appearing on currency.

The U.K.’s announcement has sparked strong reactions, with some individuals sharing their discontent over replacing historical figures with the beauty of nature. Nigel Farage, the conservative leader of the Reform Party, called the decision “the definition of woke.”

But the news has mostly been well received, with one user saying on X: “Churchill getting replaced by a dolphin would be one of the biggest glow-ups in banknote history.” Another commenter on X remarked: “Putting a red fox on the banknote is the perfect choice. At least the cunning nature matches the people running the banks.”

The $25 pearlescent wand features a light green faux gemstone at the center of its star-shaped tip, and it’s small enough to clip to a key chain.

With 10,000 wands in the initial drop, the gadget is part of a broader line of Cash App tags. Users connect the wand to their Cash App Card, which is linked to their Cash App account. According to the company, users can expect more tags to be dropped throughout the summer.

“The starting point for us was simple: The card form factor is limited,” Thomas Templeton, the hardware lead at Block, Cash App’s parent company, tells Fast Company. “Even the best card lives in your wallet, tucked away, hidden. We wanted to build something for moments when reaching for a phone or wallet is inconvenient—a festival, a comedy show, a coffee run—but also something people would actually want to be seen using. Visible, expressive, a little playful.”

Although the Cash App wand looks fun and magical, some users are concerned that such a small gadget could easily get lost.

“How cute, but man, I’d put it down to go [get] something, get distracted & forget it,” a user said on X.

Still, the company says that because each tag is linked to a customer’s Cash App Card, users may monitor transactions and lock or unlock a tag using their phone.

While seemingly ingenious, the idea is not entirely new. On social media, dressing up a credit card as a magic wand has become a long-running trend. Often given as a gift to partners and children, these customized cards allow the user to pay by simply waving (or tapping) the wand over a reader—just like Glinda from Oz casting a spell.

Some of the original iterations were handcrafted using paper, like how one DIYer made a yellow star wand with pink ribbons as her card cover. These days you can buy them on Amazon.

“As a cashier, you’d make my day if you came in and paid with a wand. I love this idea,” a user commented on the TikTok video.

Still, Cash App claims it arrived at the idea before those crafty TikTokkers.

“We actually landed on the wand concept a while ago. So when that trend took off, it was more like validation than inspiration,” Templeton says. “Customers independently arrived at the same idea we did, which tells you something real about what this generation finds worth carrying.”

Designing the tag brought unique challenges. The company wanted users to have multiple tags and cards to mix and match, as if accessorizing with jewelry. Additionally, the near-field communication (NFC) technology had to support various shapes and materials while preserving reliability. Through trial and error—including putting a tag through “hundreds of cycles in the washer/dryer” to test durability—the team arrived at a functional and whimsical design.

But beyond just a gimmick, tap-to-pay wands symbolize a push toward bringing a little fun to daily life.

“There’s this idea of ‘whimsical living’ that’s taken hold—the sense that even practical parts of daily life should feel personal and playful,” Templeton says. “Tags tap directly into that. We’re giving people a way to bring personality into something as routine as paying.”

Customers in select markets can now order a Subway meal directly through the Walmart app or Walmart.com and have it arrive in half an hour—on its own or tucked alongside the groceries, prescriptions, and household staples that are already available through the retailer’s Express Delivery service. This marks Walmart’s first restaurant integration inside Express Delivery, and if it succeeds, it could expand to include food from other restaurant chains.

The rollout is live in select stores across Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, and Walmart says it will expand to roughly 1,400 locations by the end of the summer. Orders carry a flat Express Delivery fee, which is $10 for Walmart+ members and roughly $20 for nonmembers. Subway’s prices match its in-restaurant menus.

The average shopper, Walmart estimates, makes around 21 meal decisions a week. “Sometimes they want more convenient options than are available even within our stores today, especially for delivery,” says Tracy Poulliot, EVP of e-commerce and marketing for Walmart U.S.

Subway makes sense as Walmart’s first restaurant partner. It’s Walmart’s largest in-store restaurant tenant, with a relationship dating back to 2004 and more than 1,400 counters operating inside Walmart stores. “It was just a natural partnership and starting point for us on this journey,” Poulliot says. “Together we serve millions of customers across the U.S.” Orders are made fresh at those in-store locations—the same Subway you’d pass while walking through the retail giant’s front doors—and then picked up and dispatched with the rest of a customer’s Walmart run.

How AI makes the 30-minute sandwich possible

Getting a hot sandwich to a customer’s door in half an hour is no small feat. A sandwich that’s assembled too early goes soggy; a delivery driver who arrives before the food is ready wastes precious time.

But Walmart, which has spent years building out its delivery operations, is confident that it can get the timing right. “Our driver network and our last-mile delivery capabilities are scaled nationally, and we’ve been doing this for long enough that we’ve been able to refine the experience,” Poulliot says.

The company is now using artificial intelligence to fine-tune the system further. For restaurant orders specifically, Walmart is using AI-powered technology to “coordinate prep times for the restaurants, how long those orders will take to pick up, [and] how long the delivery will take to bring to the consumer,” Poulliot explains. This ensures that the sandwich is made, bagged, and on its way at the right moment.

This new restaurant-delivery option marries Walmart’s delivery knowledge with Subway’s understanding of how to keep food fresh in transit. “When we combine those two ecosystems of data together, we’re able to make really informed decisions,” Poulliot says. And they’re able to make them quickly: The company moved from concept to launch in about nine months.

Taking aim at the delivery giants

The launch nudges Walmart into a business dominated by DoorDash and Uber Eats, and it deepens the retailer’s rivalry with Amazon, which offers a free Grubhub+ membership as a perk for Prime subscribers.

Walmart is approaching the category from a different starting point. It isn’t building a restaurant marketplace so much as adding prepared food onto its existing app, which already delivers a wide variety of products. (Its $10 minimum delivery fee means that most people will use the Subway meal service in conjunction with other orders they’re placing.)

Customers who shop via the app, Poulliot says, will see Subway surface on the homepage or as a “contextual nudge” mid-order. In pilots, early demand has been strong, she says.

If this experiment works, Walmart may consider partnering with other restaurants. Poulliot declined to commit to specific partners but left the door open. “We have additional tenant locations that we plan to expand to over time,” she says. “What we do [with] locations outside our stores is really going to be driven by how our customers respond.”

If Walmart can move hot food across the last mile as reliably as it moves a gallon of milk, it won’t just be competing with DoorDash and Uber Eats—it will have turned its 4,600 stores into a delivery network that’s hard for any company (Amazon included) to match.

It’s less a story about burgers and more a story about trust. Specifically, it’s a story about the promise McDonald’s has made its customers for decades. It’s also about the trust problem the company created entirely on its own when its customers decided it was no longer keeping that promise.

The actual story here is that McDonald’s rolled out its new McValue menu, featuring items that are all “under $3 each.” It’s built around what the company calls “predictable everyday low prices.” There are no more complicated app-only promotions, no more buy-one-get-one deals, no more dollar menu nostalgia. Instead, you get prices that are, depending on how you do the math, roughly two and a half times what customers remember paying not that long ago.

The backlash has been immediate and, honestly, a little brutal. There are Reddit threads full of people reminiscing about 99¢ McDoubles. Customers are publicly mourning the death of the “buy one, get one for $1” deals that used to anchor their lunch routine. The general sense is that McDonald’s has lost touch with what its customers actually perceive as a value.

Here’s the thing: None of this is actually about the $2.50 cost of a McDouble.

McDonald’s built its entire competitive position on one very specific idea—that value and convenience are more important than anything else. If you were hungry, McDonald’s was fast, and the price was low enough that evaluating your options felt like a waste of time.

Which is why a $2.50 McDouble isn’t being evaluated against inflation-adjusted commodity prices or franchisee labor costs. It’s being evaluated against what McDonald’s itself promised for 30 years. The company ran dollar menus and two-for-one campaigns long enough to wire a specific expectation into an entire generation of customers. Unwiring that expectation requires a lot more than a press release about a “value platform.”

The timing makes it worse. Airline fees, streaming price hikes, hotel “resort fees” at places with no resort—Americans have spent the past few years watching every affordable convenience slowly get more expensive and less generous. Fast food was one of the last categories that still felt like a safe, cheap, low-stakes decision. That feeling is gone now, and McDonald’s is the most visible symbol of its disappearance.

There’s also a threshold problem the company may be underestimating. Once fast-food prices climb close enough to fast-casual prices, customers start asking the one question McDonald’s has never wanted them to ask: Is this actually good? For most of the restaurant’s history, that question never came up because the price made it irrelevant. When you’re spending closer to $10 once you add fries and a drink, you start comparing the experience against options that might be slightly more expensive but noticeably better.

McDonald’s never needed to win that comparison in the past. It just depended on customers not thinking about it at all.

To be clear: The economics here aren’t crazy. Wages are up. Ingredients cost more. Franchises are businesses, not charities. Selling burgers for a dollar wasn’t going to last forever.

But what companies can’t control is how customers emotionally process the moment the change arrives. McDonald’s didn’t just raise prices—it disrupted the unconscious habit that made it indispensable. And once people start treating a fast-food run as a calculated purchase instead of an automatic one, McDonald’s puts itself in a completely different business than the one it built its brand on. That’s something no company should ever do.

—Jason Aten

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

“We are New Yorkers. We are Knicks fans. We know this didn’t feel right,” Gene Ribeiro, deputy chief customer officer for the MTA, tells Fast Company. “We just wanted it to be absolutely perfect.”

It turns out achieving perfection wasn’t as easy as pulling a Pantone swatch. It required a late-night search to find just the right shade.

This isn’t the first time the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has made creative changes to facilities for special events. It’s often used Easter eggs across its system to celebrate occasions like Valentine’s Day or Pride. For St. Patrick’s Day, for example, station signage was adorned with shamrocks.

For the Knicks’ first trip to the finals this century, Ribeiro’s team conceptualized a station entrance decked out in team colors—something they’ve never done before.

The MTA typically paints its standard station entrances in a shade of green, so for this use case, new paint was in order. Since the beginning of the franchise, the Knicks have used a blue-and-orange palette that draws from the colors of the New York City flag, though the exact shades have changed over the years.

The team’s orange is a saturated pumpkin color that is rich but bright, and a perfect complement to the blue. But when the MTA painted the station entrance, the first coat of orange paint didn’t look like a match. It was too yellow.

“We use the actual color codes, the Pantone color codes and the CMYK,” Ribeiro says. “But when you convert that into the actual color, sometimes it’s not an exact conversion. So this is where you have to use a bit of judgment.”

The paint job came together quickly, starting as an idea late Thursday that made its way swiftly through the approvals process and was executed and ready to go by early Monday morning. Getting an exact color match was tough, though.

Two MTA employees, senior promotions manager Jen Carlson and assistant director of promotions Jen Chung, had to visit the Nuthouse hardware store on Manhattan’s East Side—the city’s lone 24-hour paint store—to find a better shade of orange in the middle of the night. Ultimately, a shade called carrot did the trick.

The repainted station entrance has since gone viral (“Some people didn’t even know if it was real or not,” Ribeiro says). But it’s not the only Easter egg the MTA’s creative team has planned for the NBA Finals. The agency changed its social media avatar to team colors, electric signage on the train cars reads “Go Knicks,” and comedian-actor Tracy Morgan recorded a message encouraging fans to take the train to the games.

There’s more planned, too, though Ribeiro wouldn’t spill any details. “I think we’re doing some pretty fun things, and we have more in store for sure, so keep an eye out,” he says.

With 10,000 digital screens as well as other digital, print, and physical platforms, the MTA still has plenty of space to “Knicks-ify.”

That’s the start to Charmed to Meet You, a scripted microdrama that launched in February on the ReelShort app. Apparently inspired by a true story involving a Crocs employee, it chronicles a flirty dialogue told across five short-form episodes. So far, it’s attracted more than 10 million views.

Microdramas—serialized episodes that run less than two minutes—have seemingly taken over the internet of late. Some data: The specialty apps that stream microdramas, including ReelShort and DramaBox, are outpacing traditional streamers in app store downloads. In 2025, ReelShort was downloaded 38 million times in the U.S.

TelevisaUnivision’s Spanish-language short-form vertical videos have 900 million social media views and 6 million daily users. And according to Variety, microdrama revenue in the U.S. reached $819 million in 2024 and is projected to hit $3.8 billion by 2030. 

Whenever a new entertainment trend starts showing these kinds of numbers, inevitably brands are eager to jump on the bandwagon. TelevisaUnivision, for example, created a series for JCPenney, while other brands, including Starbucks and Maybelline, are also experimenting with the format. 

Marketers, I know what you’re thinking. You’re dying to jump into the trend feetfirst. Those microdrama numbers! They’re just so mesmerizing. But that digital engagement oasis could well be a metaverse-style mirage. Or worse, an NFT-style one. 

Before you take the plunge, read on to learn:  

• Why one brand entertainment exec is actively discouraging clients from making microdramas 

• Intel from Crocs’s CMO on how the brand found its footing in this new entertainment format

• The chasm between what brands want to create and what audiences want to see

Algorithmic sameness

Microdramas started coming to prominence in China about eight years ago on a ByteDance-owned app called Douyin (launched a year before its sister app, TikTok, was released worldwide). The stories were known for their almost exaggerated soapy-ness, with ridiculous plot twists, scandalous storylines, and emotional cliffhangers.

Take Forbidden Desires: Alpha’s Love. Based on the Chinese web novel, it starts with a college student named Chloe accidentally finding her semi-naked professor, Adrian, in the shower. Adrian is also her stepbrother. And a werewolf. With more than 160 million views, this microdrama series has become one of the most popular examples of the biggest trend in entertainment.

With sticky storylines served in short bursts that keep people coming back, it’s no secret why brands are interested. Like many brand entertainment trends, there are successful examples that can inadvertently encourage more marketers to get in on the action. Undoubtedly, any number of CMOs or agency leaders have pointed to Crocs, Starbucks, and P&G as beacons to follow. 

Starbucks got a foot in the door back in 2024, when it launched a microdrama on Douyin called I Opened a Starbucks in Ancient Times. In the six-episode series, a barista travels back in time, opens a wildly successful coffee empire, becomes a wealthy tycoon, and finds romance along the way. The show reportedly attracted more than 60 million views, and helped boost the chain’s seasonal drinks sales in China.

Crocs CMO Carly Gomez says the brand’s experimentation with the microdrama format is directly tied to the viewing habits of its primary audience. Gen Z voraciously consumes content. Today, the 14-to-29-year-olds who comprise the generation account for 40% of all North American moviegoers and are driving the overall box office. And they are spending even more time online, where vertical video rules.

“I think that this snackable content is going to be more and more of what we’re going to be seeing just across the board,” Gomez says, noting that given the early stage of new platforms like ReelShort, she doesn’t measure success against more established platforms like YouTube or TikTok. Rather it’s a contained competition, where she tracks Crocs’s success against other branded content on the microdrama platforms.

Charmed to Meet You dropped on Valentine’s Day, and out of more than 250 programs it quickly climbed the ranks to the fourth-most-popular series. “It’s exciting to see that on a new platform,” Gomez says. “It’s doing really well right out of the gate and we’re really proud of it.” 

The company worked with CAA’s Media and Entertainment Partnerships team on this initiative, and the content was produced by ReelShort. The goal for Crocs was to step away from what it calls “imitation and algorithmic sameness” to tell a fun story on an emerging platform and attract the attention of the brand’s biggest fans.

Part of Crocs’s success with this format comes from the fact that, at least as far as brands go, it was relatively early to the game. Its microdrama work felt like a novelty to viewers. But as the market and platforms become more saturated, marketers need to be careful not to turn microdramas into the next “witty” Brand Twitter banter. 

Anjali Bal, associate professor of marketing at Babson College, tells me that microdramas are going to make sense for some brands, but certainly not all. She says these short, serialized videos are effective at capturing and sustaining attention thanks to their narrative-driven content. When done right, they can deepen emotional engagement and encourage continued consumer attention.

When done wrong, they seem like a shoe on the wrong foot. “Its effectiveness depends on strategic alignment with a brand’s identity, category norms, and audience, rather than adoption driven primarily by trend participation,” Bal explains. “For example, not every company benefits from spending on a Super Bowl ad, but for some companies a Super Bowl ad is the best expenditure.” 

The disconnect

One brand entertainment executive who agreed to speak off the record told me that the phone is ringing off the hook about microdramas. But even clients’ own definitions of the format can differ wildly. 

“There’s this disconnect between what audiences know these things are, and why they love them, and how marketers and advertisers took that label and made it mean something for ourselves,” the executive said. “We had to talk some clients out of this because they just didn’t understand it, and it wasn’t for their audience.”

If it’s not a soapy, cliffhanger-type story, then call it what it is: episodic vertical video. 

One example is Marc Jacobs. In April, the fashion brand created a short film called The Scene, which follows Rachel Sennott through a chaotic day that leads to an invitation to the Met Gala. But while the brand called it a microdrama, it lacked the serialized episodic format and the cliffhanger hallmarks of the format. It has fewer than 2,000 likes on TikTok and fewer than 5,500 likes on Instagram. 

If a brand wants to tap into the microdrama trend, it has to commit to making an actual microdrama. And there are a few considerations when doing so. First, they’re serialized, so they have to be seen in order. If episodes are just dropped on a brand’s TikTok or Instagram feed (à la Marc Jacobs), viewers get served episodes at seemingly random by the almighty algo.

This means marketers need to stick to dedicated platforms like ReelShort or DramaBox, or set up separate feeds for these shows on the traditional social platforms. If you’re not willing to build the infrastructure around your story, it won’t hit audiences like a true microdrama, which will defeat the purpose of trying to tap into the trend in the first place. 

Crocs’s approach works because it took the microdrama format seriously, and created a fun story in which its product is central. This goes back to something I’d consider the golden rule of brand entertainment, based on what Eshan Ponnadurai, Meta’s head of consumer marketing, told me on Fast Company’s Brand New World podcast last year. For all the award-winning films they’ve created with WhatsApp, they never set out to make a film. The first priority was to find a story with the product at the center, and then decide what the best format for that story should be. 

Part of deciding on the format is knowing if, as a brand, you’re willing and able to make the best possible version of your story in a way that serves the audience as much as it serves your marketing needs. The result can be a film like Netflix’s The Seat, a top sports doc on the streamer that resonates with F1 fans and just happens to have WhatsApp at its core. 

The potential for the right brands to do very well in microdramas is there. But just know that if you wade into the latest marketing trend, you’ll likely be among a horde of other brands that are simply there to ride the biggest wave until it peters out. Blatant trend-chasing without the right commitment results in garbage content that will inevitably get quickly scrolled as just more feed pollution.

Or as my executive source said, “There are a lot of people willing to do it. There aren’t a lot of people willing to do it right.”

“Camp Crew” debuted on June 2 in a series of Instagram posts and a 40-second video on the brand’s website. The ad campaign combines new pieces that feature Camp Crew branding, like a red-and-white ringer tee and cream baseball cap, with items from J.Crew’s general summer collection, like a lightweight version of the brand’s iconic roll-neck sweater and plenty of beachy apparel. The entire campaign revolves around the nostalgia-packed setting of Camp Crew, which is operated by a cast of “camp counselors” pulled straight from a dream scenario—including models Jasmine Tookes, Martha Hunt, Taylor Hill, Sara Sampaio, and Josephine Skriver.

The campaign is the embodiment of a marketing formula that J.Crew has spent the last several months perfecting. It’s an approach that turns each launch into its own retro-inspired storytelling platform, populated by familiar faces who elevate J.Crew’s apparel into the uniform of a fictional universe you can never visit, but wish you could. 

Inside J.Crew’s winning marketing playbook

J.Crew’s winning new playbook has been slowly taking shape since Libby Wadle, a 20-year veteran of the company, stepped in as CEO in 2020. Wadle has since been focusing on the brand’s broader turnaround, including a return to its aesthetic origins (preppy, vintage Ivy League style) and a greater focus on strategic partnerships to boost its cultural relevance. 

We first saw J. Crew’s new approach to marketing this past October, with its wildly successful roll-neck sweater campaign, which was spearheaded by new CMO Julia Collier. (Collier previously led marketing at Skims.) The campaign, for a reimagined version of the iconic sweater, included talent like actress Molly Gordon and singer Maggie Rogers. It looked like a modern take on The Breakfast Club—complete with ’90s lacrosse sticks, an ’80s soundtrack, and character traits assigned to each of the brand partners.

It also elevated brand marketing into what Fast Company described at the time as “brandtainment”: an approach that doesn’t just sell items, but also creates compelling stories that stand on their own—and that viewers will actually stop to watch and engage with online. After the campaign debuted, the roll-neck sweater fully sold out.

J. Crew took a similar approach this winter when it created an apparel collection in collaboration with the U.S. Ski & Snowboard teams for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics. That campaign, called “Alpine People,” saw six athletes take to the slopes in a campy ’70s-inspired, Wes Anderson-style brand film. Like in the roll-neck campaign, the short video gave each athlete his or her own fictionalized characterization, such as “the gear head,” “the snowball bandit,” and “the local legend.”

“One thing we’re increasingly interested in is building worlds rather than simply presenting products,” Collier says. “The strongest brands today create a point of view and are generous with their role as entertainers, creating content that customers can participate in, not just shop from. This is how we also celebrate our cultural legacy and heritage in a wider way that resonates in popular culture but allows us to have some fun.”

These campaigns blend real vintage props and aesthetics with zeitgeisty people and storylines, and Camp Crew brings that formula to the height of nostalgia-core settings—the summer camp.

Welcome to Camp Crew

Summer camp is an almost universally nostalgic setting, not only because plenty of Americans of all generations have had their own experiences at camp, but also due to its evergreen popularity in media (think movies like Moonrise Kingdom, Wet Hot American Summer and, more recently, Fear Street: Part Two–1978). For J.Crew, it offers the perfect playground to mix and match various retro aesthetics. 

The brand film for Camp Crew is an amalgamation of different throwbacks—from preppy ’50s-style swim trunks and sweaters to ’90s Baywatch-esque red one-pieces and ’70s ringer tees. Collier says that the campaign took inspiration from J.Crew’s own catalogs and imagery, “particularly the aspirational storytelling and sense of adventure that defined the brand in the late ’80s and ’90s.” Classic camp ephemera—like vintage pennants, patches, camp handbooks, old athletic uniforms, and souvenir graphics—were other key touchpoints that add a hearty dose of Americana to the visuals. 

“Camp naturally invites a sense of fun, so we experimented with color, scale, proportion, and graphic treatments throughout the campaign,” Collier says. “We wanted the visual identity to feel more spirited and collected, almost like something you might discover on vintage camp signage, merit badges, pennants, or a well-loved camp handbook.”

That playful spirit even extends to J.Crew’s wordmark, if only for the season. As part of the launch, the brand created a version of its logo with a star as the period between “J” and “Crew,” as well as added a star to its profile picture on its socials. Collier says it’s a wink to camp aesthetics that quickly became a unifying element across product, marketing, social media, and experiences.

As for the choice of cast, each starring role is filled by an era-defining supermodel from the 2010s, which creates an interesting interplay between familiar faces and an unfamiliar brand world.

“At its core, Camp Crew is about being young at heart. So telling the story through a reunion of these iconic supermodels, who helped define a generation of fashion imagery, allowed us to bring a different perspective and confidence to those same feelings of adventure and possibility,” Collier says. “That tension between nostalgia and evolution is what makes the campaign feel contemporary.”

In episode 2, one of the main characters, Shane Hollander (played by Hudson Williams), wore a Team Canada fleece jacket, seen just for a few moments on-screen. But it was enough to make fans start clamoring for one of their own. Soon, a grassroots #ReleaseTheFleece campaign picked up speed across social media. Fans started @-mentioning Province of Canada in posts, even going so far as to point out specific fabrics the company already uses.

Watt took notice, and his team started to engage with the “ReleaseTheFleece” campaign. In one post, the brand gave viewers a taste of what a real-life jacket might look like. Then, on a whim, Watt sent a direct message to Hanna Puley, the show’s costume designer, throwing Province of Canada’s hat into the ring for bringing “The Fleece” to life.

Now, a few months later, the results of that DM are finally launching into the world, as Province of Canada opens up preorders for the viral fleece.

Made in Canada

Watt started Province of Canada in 2014 with his wife, Julie Brown. The idea was to create a lifestyle brand with products made entirely in Canada—but without the usual stereotypes. His “feverish passion” for Canadian-made products, however, started years before that. When Watt was growing up in Ontario, his parents were avid supporters of Canadian brands because there were so few of them. “They were always the type to be, like, ‘If there’s something Canadian, we should support it,’” he says.

In college, Watt and Brown both majored in graphic design, but neither has worked a traditional graphic design job. The dream was always to create a business together. By 2014, it reached a point where Watt realized that if they didn’t do it then, they never would. And so, Province of Canada was born.

The lifestyle and apparel brand offers everything from shirts and outerwear to accessories, focusing on high-quality textiles and a dedication to authentic Canadian craftsmanship by sourcing and manufacturing exclusively within the country.

The road to fleece

When they first opened up shop, Watt’s ultimate goal was to outfit Team Canada for the Summer Olympics in 2024, a full decade away. Back then, the Winter Olympics were held in Sochi, Russia—the same setting where Heated Rivalry’s Hollander sports the now-famous fleece. 

While that dream didn’t come to fruition for Paris in 2024, “seeing this fictitious version of an apparel piece like that really sparked something,” Watt says. He describes the Heated Rivalry collaboration as symbolic of a potential future Olympics partnership, and says he knew that Province of Canada needed to be part of the conversation. 

When the initial social media post was made, Watt didn’t really think the show’s team would pick Province of Canada to create The Fleece. It’s a relatively small outfit, and he anticipated they might need a bigger brand for mass production to meet demand. But Watt bet his company’s dedication to creating an entirely Canadian product would resonate, and he was right. On the call, Tierney said, “If I had to dream up someone to bring this to life, it would be you guys,” Watt recalls. 

Watt says the ongoing trade conflict between the U.S. and Canada is a reminder of why his company is willing to stick to their made-in-Canada principles. “Made in Canada” can “easily slide off people’s tongues as a little detail,” he notes. “But for something like this—and the importance of it as it relates to the values of the show, but also the challenges of it—it’s a really important part of it. That should be the thing that’s appreciated most about this, because typically, something like this would not be made in Canada.”

Watt is approaching the challenge of taking The Fleece from screen to reality by considering what Puley could have achieved if she had more time. Heated Rivalry was completed in just over a month of production; what Puley created served its purpose, but mass-producing the jacket is a different undertaking.

Manufacturing entirely in Canada creates its own challenges, especially when it comes to sourcing and how fast the company can realistically produce something. But Watt says even if the fleece were being made overseas, it wouldn’t happen overnight. The entire project is “an awesome design problem to solve,” he says.

Releasing The Fleece

Since the announcement, Watt has received messages from people who identify deeply with Heated Rivalry’s story. For some of them, The Fleece is an important symbol, something that allows them to connect with their identity. Watt says he tries to avoid trend-based product creation, but this is more than a trend.

“There’s a lot of compassion in that story, if you’ve watched the show all the way to episode 6,” Watt says. Episode 6 sees Hollander officially get together with rival hockey player Ilya Rozanov (played by Connor Storrie) after years of hiding. Tierney and Brady have spoken about the quiet nature of the season 1 finale and the importance of leaving the couple happy and in love.

“Even though this could be just a blanket or a piece of clothing, we are trying to create that episode 6 moment for everything that we do in this lifestyle brand,” Watt continues. “The whole thing wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the storytelling, and for Hanna, the costume designer, understanding the storytelling, leading with compassion and empathy and understanding.”

Ten percent of the proceeds from The Fleece will go to You Can Play, an organization focused on safety and inclusion in sports, especially for LGBTQ+ athletes, coaches, and fans. The National Hockey League and NHL Players’ Association will match contributions up to a combined total of $50,000 CAD. Watt calls this part of the collaboration the “icing on the cake.” He wanted the partner charity to have a sports aspect to connect even further to the message of the streaming TV series. 

“It’s important to the show and important to the community and important to us that we pick an organization that is in alignment and an organic part of the story of the community,” he says.

Now, a new documentary film directed by Emmy-award winner Robert Alexander shines another spotlight on the 24-year-old. Bukayo Saka: The Time is Now brings Saka together with another Arsenal great, club legend Thierry Henry, for a candid conversation about what it takes to perform at the highest level, the pressure, the resilience required, and making sure to still get joy from the game.

We also get a look inside a pivotal moment in Saka’s career, when a WhatsApp message from Henry helped shift his perspective following his missed penalty shot against Italy in the Euro 2020 final. Throughout the film, Henry acts as the Yoda to Saka’s young Jedi, breaking down his motivations, asking him tough questions, and providing the kind of perspective only someone who has already lived that life could. 

The new doc will be streaming on Disney+ in select international markets from June 5, and in the U.S. later this month, along with the ESPN App. The film will also air on Fox in the U.S. on June 7 at 1:30pm ET, and will be available on Fox One.

It’s also—and stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a WhatsApp commercial. The film is produced by the Meta-owned messaging app, and is just the brand’s latest masterclass in creating brand entertainment that is actually just entertainment. The story is real, the characters compelling, and the product just happens to sit naturally within it all. 

Here, the story catalyst is the fact that Henry and Saka first connected over WhatsApp. In 2023, for the award-winning film We Are Ayenda, it was the Afghan women’s soccer team’s use of WhatsApp to coordinate their escape from the Taliban. And last year’s The Seat, it was the Mercedes F1 team’s use of WhatsApp to discuss how they would replace legendary driver Lewis Hamilton. In each instance, all created with brand entertainment agency Modern Arts, WhatsApp played a real role and fit seamlessly into each film. 

Real stories, real impact

WhatsApp’s global head of brand Jennie Morel says that the goal for The Time is Now is to use the occasion of the World Cup to grow its user base in the U.S. by showing how a superstar like Saka actually uses the app in his real life.

“Soccer is having such a big moment right now, we wanted to tell a story that really resonated with this fandom because we know that WhatsApp’s going to be so integral to their experience as they’re watching games and connecting with their fellow fans and group chats,” says Morel. “So it was really important for us to find a story that would be relevant to this time.”

When WhatsApp created The Seat, about Mercedes F1 replacing Hamilton with youngster Kimi Antonelli, many fans had no idea who Antonelli was. Fast-forward a year since the film’s release, and Antonelli sits atop the F1 rankings and the doc is still one of the top sports docs on Netflix. Morel says that telling stories like this gives them a much longer shelf life than traditional brand work.

“I’d be remiss to say that we don’t experience the long tail effect of it,” says Morel. “It’s absolutely one of the reasons why we’ve decided to do this. It’s not about just telling this story at this moment in time, but being relevant to [Saka’s] career as he continues to grow.”

Last year, Modern Arts’ CEO Brooke Stite told me an evergreen insight into what works for brand entertainment: Every brand wants to tap into culture. But to tell stories people really want to hear, you need to find the stories in culture that authentically include your brand instead of trying to force-feed your brand into culture. It sounds so simple, and yet few brands can truly make it happen. 

Morel agrees and says that the key to this type of project is just how natural the brand fits within it. “When we identify our partners, whether it’s Giannis or Bukayo or Kimi, WhatsApp is an inherent part of their everyday lives, so it’s not forced, she says. “And that gives us the opportunity to resonate deeper with feelings.”

At a growing number of stadiums in the United States, your beverage cup isn’t made of flimsy plastic you’d toss into a bin on the way out. It’s a sturdy, reusable cup, designed to be handed back, washed, and ready for the next customer.

This isn’t hypothetical. Coldplay served drinks in reusable cups during its Music of the Spheres World Tour, and Billie Eilish went a step further, writing reuse into her tour rider, from refillable bottles and mugs for the crew and water refill stations for fans.

Getting that cup into your hand is enormously complicated—a tangle of collection hubs, wash facilities, digital tracking, contracts, and standards almost no one in the crowd will ever see. And today, consumers will become acquainted with a new icon that identifies a product as reusable.

The symbol is being launched by an organization called PR3: The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse. It arrives amid mounting pressure over the plastic and climate crises and a growing recognition that recycling alone can’t solve a problem of this scale.

Today only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled, while the rest is landfilled, burned, or lost to the environment. Reuse addresses this problem by keeping packaging in circulation, which could ultimately reduce the production of single-use packaging as well as the carbon emissions required to make them.

It will take time for reuse to become as widespread as recycling. “I believe we’re close to a tipping point,” says Amy Larkin, PR3’s cofounder and director. But a crucial step to getting there is building awareness that these new systems exist— and the new symbol is instrumental to creating this new reality.

A spiral, not a loop

To find its new symbol, PR3 hosted a design initiative in 2025 with an open call to crowdsource designs—a call that drew 236 submissions from 29 countries.

The winner came from Epigrama Studios, a creative practice in Bogotá, run for nearly two decades by the cofounders Juan Navarrete and Nicole Ascanio Rodriguez. Their design was chosen after multiple rounds of jury review and market testing with roughly 1,275 people across 17 countries.

Epigrama heard about the competition through one of its own clients, Xiclo, a software platform that manages returnable packaging, so the designers came into the process familiar with the psychology of getting people to bring products back for reuse.

The shape reads as a spiral, but when you look closely, you see the letter R. The spiral, Navarrete says, is a tribute to the philosophy of the Global South, which understands time not as a straight line but as something that returns on itself. Consumer culture, in contrast, treats time as linear. We’re always chasing the next thing: a new phone every two years, a new car, new clothes each summer.

The spiral is supposed to represent the opposite: that some answers for the future lie behind us, in older ways of living with materials. For Navarrete, it’s also a symbol of resistance to the status quo that has been largely perpetuated by the consumer culture in the Global North.

The designers studied the recycling symbol closely and admired its universality, but felt it had curdled into something institutional and faintly shaming—you recycle because you feel bad. They wanted the reuse mark to read as an invitation instead: the visual equivalent of we’re in this together. Crucially, they didn’t pitch it as the recycling symbol’s rival.

“We want to be its evolution,” Navarrete says. Instead the R nods to both reuse and recycle, part of the same spiral.

Where you’ll start seeing it

The symbol is already showing up in reusables. Larkin points to Solo, the cup brand, which has built a reuse program with the Portland, Oregon-based operator Bold Reuse and is putting the new mark on its reusable cups. Stadiums are the early proving ground, in part because venues don’t have to build anything themselves.

Reuse service providers handle the washing, pickups, deliveries, and inventory, with a shared digital standard tracking cups across the whole chain. “It’s a very low lift for the venue, because service providers are managing the logistics,” says Larkin at PR3.

Larkin expects to see reuse turning up at major sporting events, such as NASCAR races and FIFA fan zones around international soccer matches. It is also going to be common at stadium concerts, particularly as musicians advocate for reuse as they write it into their tour riders.

The mark is being piloted across more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. Unlike a vague recyclability claim, the symbol is tied to specific criteria in PR3’s Marking & Labeling Standard, soon to be published through the American National Standards Institute. It can appear only where there’s a system to collect, transport, sort, wash, and reuse.

The long road to a tipping point

The history of reuse is littered with elegant pilots that never scaled. Years ago I wrote about CupClub, the London startup founded by the architect Safia Qureshi, whose cups were engineered to be used 132 times, tracked by radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, and dropped at collection points around the city before being run through industrial dishwashers and sent back out. Around the same time, Loop—backed by giants like Procter & Gamble and Unilever—promised to deliver brand-name shampoo, mouthwash, and condiments in sleek refillable containers. While these systems were well designed, they never reached mass market in the U.S. (Loop has found a foothold in France, where its products are in grocery stores across the country.)

What’s different now, Larkin argues, is that there’s a global effort to build the standards and logistics required to create a reuse system at scale. PR3 has been hammering them out over the past three years, convening a panel of more than 80 organizations spanning informal waste pickers, multinationals, plastic producers, cities, and environmental-justice advocates. Three national governments, she says, are now considering the standards for draft policy, and a certification program is coming, anchored by a washing standard to ensure that reusable containers are clean when they land in the consumers’ hands.

Larkin believes tipping points can happen only after a lot of work has already been done. For more than a decade, many people have been working towards reuse systems, including entrepreneurs, multinationals, scientists, and city governments.

“You open every door you can,” she said, “and then one of them opens, and overnight there it goes. A tipping point.”

She’s convinced the cultural moment is turning too. “After a long stretch of cynicism, people are looking for ways to do good,” she says.

One thing that’s basically the same, though, is their logo.

Designed by Michael Doret and unveiled in 1992, the Knicks logo shows the team’s name written out in bold, blocky letters above a basketball and on top of an inverted triangle. Though the blue-and-orange color palette has since been tweaked and an all-caps “New York” was added in 1995, the form of the logo is the same today as it was then.

That’s something of a rarity in professional sports, where things like city and mascot changes, extended losing streaks, or just a desire for something new can prompt semiregular rebrands.

Not for the Knicks, though.

“I think that that logo and I think that the team itself has become so iconically New York,” Doret tells Fast Company. “I just love it.”

Doret grew up in New York City near Coney Island and was inspired by its rich graphic environment. He would say New York is in his bones, “but it’s more like it’s in my brain,” he says. And though he’s since moved cross country to Los Angeles, he’ll still be rooting for the Knicks.

The birth of an NYC icon

To hear Doret tell it, the logo emerged to him like a sculptor taking his tools to a block of wood.

“I have to sit down and just start playing with forms and shapes and colors and so on,” he says. “And every time I put a piece of tracing paper over another sketch, I’m whittling more into that wood until I find the form that’s pleasing to me.”

When the NBA creative director, Thomas O’Grady, hired Doret for the Knicks job, he was given hardly any direction aside from a request that the logo incorporate the Empire State Building. Because of legal concerns, however, the building wasn’t included in the final draft.

The finished logo doesn’t reference any New York City landmarks directly, but it does use the colors from the city flag as well as a 3D perspective to give it a unique point of view. The shadowing and shape of the letterform in “Knicks” makes it seem as if you’re looking up at the logo from below, like a building. The Empire State Building may not have made it to the final product, but the experience of looking up at the Empire State Building is there.

In a city with no shortage of icons, from skyscraper silhouettes and subway signage to logos like Milton Glaser’s “I Heart New York” and the “NY” monogram of the Yankees, the Knicks logo has emerged as a distinct mark representing New York pride that’s especially salient as the team plays for the NBA championship. When Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, used a parody version of the logo in his 2025 electoral campaign, Doret was amused.

“I actually loved it,” Doret says. “It’s become so pervasive that everybody wants to be a part of that.”

Knicks evolution

Doret’s other logo drafts for the Knicks have found a second life. Since 1995, the team has used a “NYK” insignia he designed as a secondary logo, and in 2024, the fashion house Kith released a collection using alternate logos from his sketches and concepts. Still, the team’s long-running logo remains.

“Sports brands are often tempted by the same forces that affect every brand, which is the pressure to stay modern,” said Sunny Bonnell, cofounder and CEO of the branding agency Motto. “Some updates work. Many age quickly because they’re responding to a trend rather than expressing a timeless idea.” The Knicks, though, show how familiarity can be a strategic advantage, she says.

Most teams would have rebranded at some point between two NBA finals appearances nearly three decades apart. By sticking with their longtime logo, though, the Knicks made an investment in their brand that paying dividends today.

In addition to being a significant piece of architecture representing the work and legacy of a president, the Obama Presidential Center is also one of the more environmentally ambitious large urban development projects to emerge in the U.S. in recent years.

From the microorganisms at the roots of its trees to its carbon-free operation to the citywide benefits of its stormwater management system, the Center is performing on a lot of different levels. When it opens to the public June 19, the Center will generate more power than it uses, balance its heating and cooling through an underground network of geothermal wells, reuse or recycle nearly all of the rainwater that falls on it, and blend most of its built footprint so thoroughly into its site in Jackson Park that it will actually create a net increase of parkland.

For all the pieces of the project that make it unique—the signature obelisk-shaped tower at its core, its location in a public park on Chicago’s South Side, and the decision by former President Barack Obama and his foundation to eschew the conventional presidential library model—its most impressive aspect may be its deep focus on sustainability.

The sustainability measures put in place at the Center and across its 19-acre campus are, in a way, a representation of Obama’s presidency. Improving the environment and combating climate change were key elements of his agenda, and the Center is a built extension of what he sought to achieve while in office, according to Valerie Jarrett, a longtime senior adviser to Obama and now the CEO of the Obama Foundation, the developer of the Center.

“We’re maximizing the opportunity to showcase how you can do a large-scale development with a deep appreciation for sustainability, prioritizing it not as an afterthought but as central to our mission,” Jarrett says. “Our expectation is that this will be a template for others to follow.”

It was a given that the Obama Presidential Center would be a “green” building, but the foundation was looking far beyond earning a certification or slapping a plaque on the wall.

Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (TWBTA), the project’s most visible element is its 225-foot tower, which houses the four-story Obama Presidential Museum and a Sky Room observatory on the top floor. Through an underground base level, the tower connects to an events space called the forum and a branch of the Chicago Public Library. A separate community center and gymnasium, designed by the architecture firm Moody Nolan, sits farther afield.

The all-electric campus spreads across four buildings covering 276,000 square feet (6.3 acres), and it sits atop a campus-wide geothermal heat pump system that uses the constant temperature of the earth to regulate its heating and cooling. On a day-to-day basis, even in Chicago’s cold winters and humid summers, the Center will operate without any fossil fuels.

The tower is a rare large building in this region that’s able to operate using just electricity, but its aesthetics are divisive. It’s a gray granite chunk of a building that’s been carved like an imperfect gem. Some have taken to calling it the “Obamalisk” for the blocky outline that gradually tapers out as it rises to its mid-point, then gently leans back in.

At the top, one corner is wrapped with a load-bearing screen of text from an Obama speech delivered on the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. From some angles the tower resembles a molar that’s slightly exposed at the gum, grit-worn and chipped.

Obama, with the prerogative of someone who was both the client and a president, offered the architects some sketches during the design process. “Very, very few,” Tod Williams says, not seeing it as an overreach. “But for sure he was deeply involved in it and pushed us to always think on what was there in front of us.”

Mostly that meant the site itself, Jackson Park. The nearly 600-acre park was designed by the venerable 19th century landscape architecture firm Olmsted, Vaux & Co. in 1871 right on the lagoon-filled edge of Lake Michigan. The park had slowly degraded over time, suffering from regular flooding. Nonetheless, the decision to use part of this public space for the foundation’s project rankled many in Chicago.

The architects tried to soften the blow by putting the two tower-adjacent buildings and the entire parking garage underground, their sunken walls only showing themselves in cleanly sliced courtyards on the lakeside of the project. For anyone coming into the park from the neighborhood and looking out to the lake, the view is only slightly changed from what it once was.

“It was really important to create porosity from one side to the other, but then also to use as little parkland as possible for the buildings,” says Paul Schulhof, a longtime partner at TWBTA who left the firm in 2023.

A center, not a library

TWBTA interviewed for the project at the White House during the tail end of Obama’s second term. The Obama Foundation had just been formed in 2014, and ideas were still evolving for what the project could be. There was a time when the Obama Presidential Center was going to follow the established, if relatively new, model of the presidential library as a building set up mostly to house the physical paperwork of presidential administrations for posterity and future scholarship.

Under the guidelines of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the site was going to include a fortified and secured research library where millions upon millions of paper documents would be held and made accessible upon formal request. But in the waning and very online years of the Obama presidency, a vault full of filing cabinets was being seen by many as archaic.

The format of a president’s “papers” had drastically changed since the Presidential Records Act of 1978 made the ownership of those documents public rather than private. With so much of the record in digital form, the thinking went, why not digitize the whole collection and make it available online instead of in real life?

(On top of this, the Obama Foundation was facing endowment requirements established by the Presidential Libraries Act of 1986, a law amended in 2008 to bump the foundation’s responsibility from 40% to 60% of the cost of building the NARA facility, its operations, and its ongoing maintenance.)

Facing the prospect of so much of the project’s budget going to build a limited access paper vault on what is still the public space of a large urban park, the Obama Foundation pivoted, opting for a more open, public-facing facility. Instead of becoming a cloistered presidential “library,” the project essentially ditched the library and became a presidential center.

A cohesive system

Williams, the architect, says the idea to make the project not just a single building but a campus came early on. “As a campus, it’s like the space between two people, it’s the energy that occurs for a dialogue between people,” he says. “We felt that would bring forward the idea of the landscape being a critical part of the project and the process.”

This was partly an effort to reduce the impact on the park itself. “We wanted the park to flow through and around the structures, not just land a large object in the park and the park would be around it,” says Rourke Frankel, director of planning and delivery for the Obama Foundation.

The integration of building and landscape also had sustainability implications—and new potential. Once the Williams-Tsien firm was selected to design the project, the architects worked closely with the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) to weave the buildings and the landscape into a cohesive system that limits resource use and engages natural systems to enhance the park.

All the stormwater that falls on the site is redirected away from the city’s combined stormwater-sewer system, reducing the risk of flooding in the park and in surrounding neighborhoods during heavy rainfall. Much of the water is infiltrated back into the landscaping that surrounds the buildings and takes up much of its 19-acre site.

The site also collects some of this water for reuse in irrigation and for flushing toilets within the campus. The Obama Foundation estimates these efforts will result in an 89% reduction in building water use, a 75% reduction in irrigation demand, and more than 1 million gallons of potable water saved annually.

Matthew Bird, a principal at MVVA, says the interweaving of native plantings, three miles of walking trails, and the buildings of the Center is intended to bring people face to face with the natural systems at work on the site. “The goals of sustainability aren’t just about making the building function a little better. It’s also teaching people and making them see how they can contribute to combating climate change and taking small steps to make our environment better,” he says.

Some parts of this approach are more obvious than others. The project’s site was chosen to sit on top of Cornell Road, a six-lane street that sliced this section of Jackson Park. A large section of that road was removed, its car traffic rerouted out of the park, and the six lanes partly replaced by a bike trail and walking path. This had the benefit of adding more acreage to the park than the Center displaced.

The landscaped roofs of the underground portions of the Center add more space, while also demonstrating the possibilities of rethinking how a building should sit on the land. Water in a reed-lined wetland on the edge of the nearby lagoon rises and falls as rains come and seasons change.

Less visibly, the landscape architects also took pains to preserve the native soil microbiology of the park. Before trees were removed to make room for the construction site, the landscape architects worked with an ecologist and a mycologist to analyze the soil around trees at the park and preserve the most biodiverse parts of it. Years later, when the site was planted with 1,000 new trees—more than double the amount that were removed—that same carefully preserved soil was reintroduced.

“We were able to cultivate those in a way that would keep the microorganisms present and have them be a part of the future of the campus,” says Bird at MVVA. “It’s keeping the heritage of the ecology of the site alive.”

Compared with other major urban developments, the Obama Presidential Center has taken an unusually holistic approach to its design, and let its environmental ambitions carry much more influence than in a typical market-driven project. “It can be really seen as one system that works together and is deeply integrated with the surrounding park,” says Nico Kienzl, senior executive director of the environmental design firm Atelier Ten, which worked with the rest of the design team to integrate sustainability measures throughout the project.

Jarrett, the Obama Foundation CEO, says the sustainability side of the Center is one of its most powerful messages to the community, the city, and the country. She says the positive benefit to the immediate neighborhood, whether measured in reduced flooding or increased parkland or broader economic benefits, should outweigh some of the concerns people had when the project was announced.

“People loved what they had and there were folks who really wanted to leave it in its original state. And we spent a lot of time meeting with folks, explaining how this would actually be better for those who cared about the environment and sustainability,” she says. “And I think judging from the reaction that we’re seeing, we’ve achieved our goal.”

The real reactions are still to come, after the Obama Presidential Center fully opens to the public June 19. By its nature, and the nation’s current political climate, the center will be a divisive space. But for those willing to look beyond the politics, they’ll see an ambitious project that’s working hard on multiple fronts to have a positive impact on the environment.