The only problem was that just days before the Coachella kicked off on Friday, she didn’t have a ticket — at least, not yet.

Mintesnot is a content creator, and she was seeking an invitation from a brand to join them at the annual festival in Indio, California, that is sometimes called an “influencer Olympics.” She posted across her social media platforms about her ticket-less journey in hopes of landing a pass to Coachella in exchange for posting videos about the brand and experience.

“You never know what’s going to happen,” she said. “There’s so many opportunities out there.”

Coachella, rife with Instagrammable moments, is a mutually beneficial opportunity for creators and businesses alike. The social media content that comes out of the sprawling music festival screams spontaneity, but industrious planning is often buzzing behind the scenes weeks, or sometimes even months, in advance. Securing brand partnerships, lining up sponsored content opportunities, and building out a content calendar require patience, strategic thinking, and business acumen.

Content creators are often the butt of jokes online for enterprising habits like shamelessly requesting access to events or free merchandise. But for some — including Mintesnot — it works. She received an invitation to the festival from YouTube on Wednesday, just two days before the two-weekend-long event began.

Monetizing music festival attendance

Coachella, in its 25th edition this year, has been an annual mainstay of internet culture. Both weekends of the festival are sold out, but global audiences can view a livestream on YouTube to see performances from headliners Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, and Karol G, along with dozens of other artists. The video-sharing platform offers fans livestreams of seven stages simultaneously as well as creators’ videos and other Coachella-related content.

Creators capture not only performance clips but everything else about their Coachella experience, from the glamorous brand events and freebies to the more mundane bathroom lines and food options.

The festival is the largest marquee livestream music event YouTube does, said Matt McLernon, the company’s head of artist partnerships who has helmed its relationship with Coachella.

“Seeing how much the creator side has breathed this whole additional life into it — what’s on the stage, the creators, the fans, the kind of intersection of all of them, of what happens from there — it’s really truly magical,” he said. “There’s as many cameras pointed at the actual artists on stage as there are amongst the crowd.”

The monetization paths for creators vary. For fashion and beauty influencers, shopping tools that are built into platforms like TikTok and YouTube offer a way to earn commissions. This is a reliable route to a big payout for something like Coachella, where swaths of people are seeking outfit and makeup inspiration, or are just curious about the year’s trends.

Magdaline Janet, a beauty YouTuber, said YouTube Shopping has allowed her to become a full-time content creator.

“It’s huge because Coachella essentially is a beauty and fashion show along with music,” she said.

For some creators, it pays off to purchase a ticket and travel independently for the festival, even without a brand invitation. The engagement they get from Coachella-related videos — in the buildup, in real time and in retrospect — often translates to a net profit.

Sydney Morgan, a content creator known for her special effects makeup, bought her own ticket. She is staying in a rented home with her friends who are also content creators — the Airbnb was specially selected to look good in videos and she created an itinerary to accommodate the group’s respective filming plans, she said.

“Me and my friends like to joke that Coachella’s our favorite holiday,” Morgan said. The group was traveling to Indio on Wednesday to have a full day devoted to content creation before the musical sets kicked off. “We talk about it all year and we romanticize the crap out of it, and I know that our audience does the same thing, especially those that can’t be there in person.”

Audiences are curious, so creators ‘keep ’em fed’

Morgan mapped out extensive plans for a long-form video focused on her festival fashion and several short-form videos.

Like Morgan, many creators go in with a plan for content they want to film during the festival, but as entertainment news host and content creator Louis Levanti said, the key to mastering the festival is a “willingness to adapt.” Levanti is a full-time content creator but previously worked in digital video production and media, and he said he takes those skills into his content planning now.

“It’s important to tell the story from your lens as quickly but as accurately and efficiently as possible,” he said. “I do really think of it as a newsroom. I do look at every story as like, ‘How do I build this into more than just a headline?’”

Levanti is also attending Coachella this year with YouTube, but he said there’s value in using this year’s festival to build relationships with other brands for future festivals and opportunities. Some brand deals, like Levanti’s past Coachella collaborations with Coca-Cola and Absolut Vodka, can come with restrictions on what content creators can and cannot post and what other brands they can work with.

“It’s a great opportunity where there’s no constraints or stress on me to make content, which makes it easier for me to do that while also appealing to more brands,” he said.

While the brands at the festival, the fashion trends and artist lineups change with each year, the constant at Coachella is an insatiable appetite online for any and all festival-related content. And these creators are eager to let their prep work pay off to meet that demand.

“We want to feed the audience, keep ’em fed, give them good content and have fun while doing it,” Morgan said.

—Kaitlyn Huamani, AP technology writer

One of the first dockless micromobility companies, Lime launched in 2017, eventually filling the streets of major cities across the U.S., Europe, Australia, and the Middle East with its bright-green two-wheelers. Now the company has introduced an alternative model to its standard Gen4, designed to reach riders—particularly women and older adults—who may have found its original model challenging or intimidating.

“The new vehicle builds upon the strong foundation of what is already working well,” Jason Parrish, Lime’s senior director of product management, tells Fast Company.

Lime piloted its new design in July 2024 in Atlanta, Seattle, and Zurich, with an official release in April last year. The model, called a “LimeBike,” is not meant to replace the Gen4, but rather serve as a complement to the company’s bike-share services, offering an alternative for riders.

LimeBikes are currently in circulation domestically in Atlanta, Seattle, and Nashville, and globally in Munich, Paris, Berlin, and other cities.

A rider-friendly redesign

The LimeBike model came about based on feedback from riders and city officials from around the world who said they wanted bike sharing to feel more approachable and accessible to a wider range of riders, especially those who are shorter in stature or have more restricted range of motion.

Compared to the original model, the LimeBike feels lighter, has a more compact frame, a lower step-through, and smaller, 20-inch tires. The designers also moved the bike’s battery under the seat to shift its center of gravity, and introduced an ergonomic seat clamp to ease height adjustments. These details make the bike more comfortable to get on and off of, steer, and ride.

“We wanted to keep the great ergonomic ride feel that our riders love about the Gen4 bike, but do it in a new way that makes the vehicle feel more approachable and accessible,” Parrish says. “The result is that while the frame changed, the rider geometry of the bike [distance between seat, pedals, and handlebars] was maintained from the Gen4.”

The redesign also addresses safety concerns.

As the blog London Centric reported, a number of Lime riders in the U.K. have suffered broken legs, which some attribute to the Gen4 e-bike’s heavy design. Some riders are pursuing legal action against the company.

The redesign features details that will improve trips for all riders, like a new phone holder, wider front basket, and advanced location-recognition accuracy so they don’t accidentally leave the bike in a no-parking zone.

“The updates focus on making the LimeBike more approachable, intuitive. and practical for everyday use,” Parrish says.

Longer-lasting bikes

The redesign doesn’t solve only rider pain points. It also extends each bike’s lifespan by featuring modular elements that make replacing parts easier and quicker. Additionally, the bike is made with some of the same parts as the LimeGlider, the company’s e-scooter, making inventory management more efficient.

“By building the two vehicles together, we were able to create a unified product experience for riders, simplify spare parts management and maintenance, and release two vehicles at once to drive innovation in our fleet,” Parrish says.

As the fleet and offerings continue to expand, so do options for sustainable urban travel. According to UCLA Transportation, swapping a car ride for a bike ride can lower an individual’s emissions by 67%. Accessible scooter and bike designs are providing a greener option for riders regardless of their body type.

Amy Errett thought that was absurd. “There was no prestige product that a woman could buy for at-home use,” the founder and CEO of hair color startup Madison Reed tells me. “Just because you color at home does not mean you can’t afford good color. That was, in my opinion, a very elitist viewpoint.”

Errett established Madison Reed in 2013, right as the direct-to-consumer wave was cresting. But while brands like Warby Parker and Dollar Shave Club were mostly rethinking distribution—taking existing product categories online and cutting out the middleman—Errett wanted to do something more fundamental. She wanted to reformulate hair color from the ground up, rethinking how it reaches consumers.

The result is a company that is profitable and has raised approximately $250 million in venture capital. Across the U.S. Madison Reed operates 98 Hair Color Bars—which exclusively offer hair coloring services—and sells through Ulta, Amazon, and its own website. The brand is now poised to take market share from competitors that have been around decades longer, like L’Oréal, Schwarzkopf, and Wella.

“A lot of the DTC models were picking off a very narrow aspect of something and trying to build a commerce brand,” says Jon Callaghan, cofounder and managing partner of True Ventures, which has backed Madison Reed since 2013, along with Norwest Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, and Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures. “Amy’s tackling something substantially larger—a fundamental activity in beauty and wellness that women do every four to six weeks.”

Callaghan describes Madison Reed as a classic disruption story. “The industry was dominated by large incumbents, very low innovation, poor-quality product,” he says. “Amy sort of flipped the script on every aspect of that.”

Anthropological research

Madison Reed’s origin story begins with a woman and a bathroom.

Errett, a serial entrepreneur and former venture capitalist, recorded about 50 women at home doing their hair with drugstore box dye and observed them. The experience left a lot to be desired. The instructions were unreadable. The smell was off-putting. The shade ranges—often only eight or so colors—bore no resemblance to the complexity of actual human hair. “Dark hair has a multitude of colors,” Errett says.

Her first breakthrough was upending the product itself. Errett set out to reformulate home hair color without ammonia and other harsh chemicals that were standard across the category. Madison Reed’s boxes, which retail for $35, contain hair dye made in Italy using a production process the company controls end-to-end. Today, the brand offers roughly 90 shades of color, 55 of which are available to consumers as permanent color.

The second breakthrough was matching the right color to the customer. Half of American women color their hair at home, Errett points out, but the fundamental challenge of the at-home market is that you can’t see the customer. “There’s a lot of science in hair color,” she says. “I have to know what her natural color is, how gray is she, the texture of her hair.”

From the beginning, Madison Reed developed AI to bridge that gap. Customers answer an 18-question quiz, then the system recommends two shades most likely to suit them. The process is working. The company now has roughly 17 million profiles, which gather data points about the color and texture of consumers’ hair. Customer retention rates, Errett says, run at 70% and above, which matters enormously in a business predicated entirely on repeat usage. “If I don’t get you to come back, this doesn’t work,” she says.

Errett had always suspected that many women dyed their hair in salons not out of preference, but because there wasn’t a high-quality at-home hair dye they trusted. But when COVID-19 hit and the world shut down, many women scrambled for an alternative. Madison Reed offered a solution. The brand touted its high-quality, less-toxic ingredients. And the boxes provided everything needed to do the job at home, from plastic gloves to wipes.

Madison Reed received an influx of new customers during the pandemic. For many, it was a revelation that they could have an enjoyable experience doing their hair at home—at a fraction of the cost and time of a salon visit. Many never went back.

A multichannel business

The DIY customer is only part of the market. Many women prefer to have someone else dye their hair, and Errett wanted to make sure Madison Reed was serving them, too.

Shortly after launching the at-home color part of the business, Errett debuted a new concept called a Hair Color Bar. Optimized for speed, these salons specialize in color only (no haircuts), so customers are in and out as quickly as possible. Most women don’t even opt for a blowout; they dry their hair when they get home or use hair dryers provided in the salon.

Before COVID, there were just eight of these locations. But after the pandemic, Errett invested in growing the network of storefronts exponentially. “There was a pent-up demand to get out of your house and go into a store,” she says.

What makes Madison Reed unusual is what Errett calls the “blurring of lines” between channels, which gives women the flexibility to dye their hair in many different ways, depending on their lifestyle and schedule, all while achieving consistent results.

The company assumes that women may choose to pop into a salon sometimes, and use an at-home box at other times. Every color applied in a Hair Color Bar is logged in the company’s backend system and linked to an email address. A customer can walk into any of the brand’s locations and get the exact color that was applied at a different bar previously. She can go online and order that same box delivered to her door.

“She owns that color,” Errett says. “It’s hers. She can do it wherever she wants, whenever she wants.”

The company also sells products through big-box retailers, which is another way to offer convenience for customers—and an opportunity for the brand to continually introduce itself to new consumers. While the conventional wisdom is that a brand’s sales may cannibalize those of third-party retail partners, Errett has found that the opposite is true. In markets where Madison Reed has more than two locations, nearby retail sales at partners like Ulta run 20% to 30% higher out of brand recognition.

“You walk by the [Madison Reed] store at the Oakbrook Mall in Chicago, you see it’s full, then you pop into Ulta eight stores down and you see Madison Reed on the shelf,” Errett says, noting the effect is, “‘Oh, I recognize that. That must be good.’” The Hair Color Bars function, in Errett’s framing, as permanent billboards: 98 stores, 1.3 million services expected this year, all generating awareness that no marketing budget can replicate.

Running three businesses simultaneously—direct-to-consumer subscriptions, nearly 100 physical service locations, and a wholesale presence at major retailers—is, Errett acknowledges, operationally brutal. “You’re running three completely different businesses,” she says. But the hero of all three is the same product, which is what makes the model defensible rather than just complicated.

Thriving in the trade-down economy

The current economic moment has turned out to be well-suited to what Madison Reed sells. Consumer confidence is shaky. People feel the pinch of inflation. Many consumers, even those who are affluent, are eager to stretch their budget. A $300 salon appointment can feel hard to justify when a $35 box—or a $45 Hair Color Bar visit—delivers comparable results.

“People want quality, but they want value,” Errett says. “They’re not trading going out to dinner all the time to McDonald’s. They may not be going to the five-star restaurant, but they still want a great meal.” (She notes that the household income of Madison Reed’s Hair Color Bar customers averages $150,000 and above; in some markets, it’s closer to $175,000.)

It’s a profile that maps closely to what retail analysts have watched unfold across other categories: Walmart’s stunning turnaround among middle- and upper-middle-class shoppers, Ulta’s resilience, the durability of TJ Maxx. The brands winning right now aren’t the ones promising pure luxury or pure value; they’re the ones that have found the gap between the two.

Madison Reed has real estate studies suggesting it could support 700 to 800 Hair Color Bars in the U.S. alone. It’s currently only in 15 markets, so it has a lot of room for growth. But Errett says she’s created a business where 72% of revenue is recurring, through a combination of membership plans to the Color Bars and subscriptions to the at-home product. Errett likes to think of her company as generating “SaaS-like revenue,” even though it’s a consumer business.

When Errett describes the nature of the business to me—heavy physical assets, low obsolescence, a service too intimate to be automated—she also articulates something broader about what it takes to build a durable consumer brand right now: You need a product that solves a problem. You need to meet customers wherever they happen to be. And you need a reason for them to come back. “Hair is confidence,” Errett says. “It is a relatively inexpensive way to feel good about yourself.”

In a moment when people are squirrelly about their dollars, that’s a powerful thing to be selling.

Researchers at the New York Botanical Garden have created a new interactive map of the city showing the areas most at risk of flooding. They’re calling them “Blue Zones,” places where water is, used to be, or will be due to climate change. More than one-fifth of the city is in a Blue Zone, according to a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

“Everybody was startled, including us,” Eric Sanderson, vice president of urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden and an author of the paper, told The City.

The hope is that this information will help city officials, planners, and residents better prepare for the effects of climate change. While resiliency infrastructure has hardened the coastline, some of the most disruptive and deadly floods have happened in inland areas where aging infrastructure isn’t able to handle heavy rainfall.

To identify the Blue Zones, researchers studied more than 500 years’ worth of flood data and integrated intel from 311 service calls and flood maps from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Critically, they also examined maps of the city’s natural hydrology. Even though urbanization paved over ponds, streams, and salt marshes, these geographic elements continue to influence flooding today.

“Understanding the historical ecology—particularly the geographic distribution of streams and wetlands prior to the construction of the city—can help reframe the way we see the current urban landscape, promote ideas about how we adapt to current realities, and prepare for future contingencies,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

Some areas identified as Blue Zones may seem surprising, especially those that are far away from visible bodies of water.

“It shows how large scale this is and it lets you look at the city as a landscape,” Lucinda Royte, manager of urban conservation, data tools, and outreach at the New York Botanical Garden and coauthor of the paper, told The City. “We currently view the city through its political boundaries. We care about neighborhoods and zip codes, but water doesn’t care about those boundaries.”

There are some people who argue that we have “saved” the bees, while others say honeybees never needed saving in the first place. In truth, the problem hasn’t gone away.

“Our losses have been getting higher and higher over the last few years,” says Zac Browning, a fourth-generation beekeeper from North Dakota. This winter, he lost more than half of his bees. Nationwide, commercial beekeepers lost an average of 62% of their colonies last winter.

While honeybees aren’t likely to go extinct, commercial beekeeping may one day no longer be economically viable—and the same environmental pressures facing managed bees are also pushing wild pollinators toward collapse.

The situation isn’t quite the same as it was in 2006, when beekeepers started reporting a strange new phenomenon: Adult bees were suddenly disappearing from their hives. That became known as colony collapse disorder. That specific scenario is rarer now, but scores of bees have been dying off every winter since then.

“We’re still seeing unsustainable losses,” says Christina Grozinger, an entomology professor at Penn State University. Over the last two decades, beekeepers have often lost up to 30% to 40% of their colonies over the winter, and that’s “very difficult for beekeepers to manage,” she says.

They are managing their populations by “splitting” a hive to produce more bees, or by purchasing more bees when there’s a large loss. But it’s hard to keep going.

“Generally, when you lose 50% of your hives, it’s a sign that the operation is weak,” Browning says. “It’s suffering from some sort of disease or other malady. And so that’s not a recipe for having healthy bees that split well. From an economic perspective, it’s absolutely not sustainable for a beekeeping operation to lose more than 25% of its hives in one year.”

With inflation, and the interest on money borrowed to repeatedly rebuild hives, “everything compounds,” he says. “The general economic viability of the industry, and certainly the operation, is less and less. You see operations failing if they have more than 25% losses year over year. You can certainly rebuild, but you can’t sustain rebuilding every year.”

If beekeepers lose too many bees, it also makes it challenging to provide pollination services. At an almond orchard, for example, insurance companies require two hives per acre to make sure that trees are fully pollinated. (California’s almond crop uses an estimated 1.7 million hives, with 80 billion bees.) Beekeeping companies have been forced to partner with others to meet the obligations in their contracts. Browning says that’s why, so far, farmers are still able to produce crops that rely on honeybees for pollination, from almonds to blueberries.  

The question isn’t whether honeybees will disappear, but whether the business model that supports them can survive.

For wild pollinators that don’t have support from human managers, the situation is more complex. A recent Washington Post article argued that we’ve been worrying about honeybees when we should have been worrying about wild bees. All bees are dealing with a reduction in habitat and less access to the flowers they need to survive, along with more exposure to pesticides. Climate change is also affecting when flowers bloom.

Honeybees experience stress when they don’t get the nutrients they need from feeding on flowers from a single crop, as well as when they travel long distances to provide pollination (some colonies are trucked 2,000 miles to pollinate almonds). They are also vulnerable to Varroa mites, a pest that causes disease. Both managed and wild honeybees face clear challenges, and most of the problems overlap. “It’s not a helpful narrative, because they’re really facing the same issues,” Grozinger says.

When colony collapse disorder first made the headlines, it helped bring more attention to other bees—though it’s true that the spotlight was still on honeybees. “I think the first thing it did was to wake up a lot of people to the fact that pollinators were really important to both agriculture and to ecosystems,” says Scott Black, executive director of the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. “So that’s number one. But number two, everyone thought, ‘Pollinators equal honeybees.’”

Some “solutions” that became popular to help the bees were misguided—like bee hotels, which some scientists have called “beewashing,” or adding hives to corporate rooftops. But this doesn’t do anything to help farmers. Since honeybees aren’t native to the U.S., having them in the wrong places can mean that they overgraze flowers. Consequently, not enough pollen is left for native pollinators, Black says. (In an ideal world for native bees, maybe honeybees shouldn’t have been imported to North America in the first place. It’s inarguable, though, that they’re a necessary part of the food system as it currently exists.)

All of the various plans to help honeybees can help wild pollinators as well. This includes reducing pesticide use—both on farms and the 40 million acres of lawns in the U.S.— and restoring wildflowers, Black says. Whatever the solution, the lack of focus on bee health isn’t because the issues are fixed: Both managed and wild bees clearly need help. Hundreds of native North American pollinators are now at risk of extinction. The question isn’t whether honeybees need saving. It’s whether we’re willing to fix the conditions that are hurting all pollinators.

Bait is a six-episode series that debuted on Prime Video on March 25. It stars Ahmed (who also created and cowrote the show) as Shah Latif, a struggling actor whose leaked audition to play James Bond incites a media frenzy. Each episode tracks Shah’s exponential spiral as his private life is made public, forcing him to contend with his own identity, belonging, self-worth, and the cultural narratives mapped onto him as a British-Pakistani actor competing for a historically white role.

To create the show’s title cards, its creators tapped the London branch of the design firm Pentagram. Firm partners and brothers Luke Powell and Jody Hudson-Powell used a system of color filters and letterforms to encode multiple different words and messages in each sequence. These practical effects create a visual language that mirrors the show’s core theme of an identity in flux—and cleverly invite the viewer to do some soul-searching of their own.

A system of secret messages

From the beginning of the brainstorming process, Luke and Jody’s team knew that they wanted to explore the idea of being “under the spotlight” as a visual proxy both for the classic James Bond opening sequence and Shah’s public spiral.

“This led us to explorations around spotlights vs searchlights, color scrollers and black light—different graphic methods at the boundary of spy thrillers, acting and theater—trying to find a space that could talk to the complexities of the shifting inner and outer perceptions of Shah’s identity,” says Alice Sherwin, a senior designer at Pentagram who worked on the project.

Ultimately, they landed on a system that combines color filters with with a series of what Sherwin describes as “secret message reveals.” The base of every title card is the same: a white background with a myriad of multicolored letterforms and numbers layered on top of each other. Then, in each episode, a different colorful filter—similar to the gel scrollers that are commonly slipped in front of theater lights to quickly change their hues—is applied over that base, bringing certain messages to the forefront and relegating others to the background. 

As these filters are shifted into place, new layers of meaning to the show’s title, Bait, are revealed. In one instance, the Urdu symbol for “bait” appears directly above the word loyalty, which is how the word is defined in that language; in another, the word troll appears beside “provo” as a subtle reference to the British slang interpretation of “bait” as a provocation; and in a third, disparate letters come together to spell “of a trap,” i.e., bait as an incentive. 

These hidden messages serve as a clever way of hinting at the series’ connection to iconic spy media, alongside the monospace font, ABC Rom Mono, which was chosen for its blocky, code-like setting. Below the surface, they also work to subtly foreshadow Shah’s struggles with the definition of “bait” in the context of his career and identity. The repeated hiding and revealing of information reflects Shah grappling with both being in the spotlight and trying to control it at the same time.

“All of the show’s titles exist in a single typographic layout, and information is concealed and revealed each episode through the filters, reflecting how all identities the protagonist has as a British-Pakistani man, and the versions of these that others project onto him, exist at once,” Sherwin says.

The real genius of Pentagram’s treatment is how it not only visually captures Shah’s struggles to untangle his identity, but also invites the viewer into the process. By pausing on the title cards, hunting for double-meanings, and finding new details, the viewer themselves becomes a part of the decoding.

It’s a meta concept for a show that embraces nuance and complexity rather than attempting to deliver clear conclusions.

Škoda, a Czech automaker, calls its new DuoBell an analog solution to a digital problem. It’s a mechanical bell, but the company says its the first to engineer a sound that specifically tricks a headphone’s algorithm.

The Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) technology employed in headphones works by detecting outside sound and playing back an inverted signal that cancels it out. The DuoBell works by emitting two sounds the headphone can’t cancel. One sound is designed to be within a frequency in ANC’s narrow blind spot that it can’t invert, and another is too fast and confusing for ANC to process.

Škoda partnered with researchers at the University of Salford in England to develop the DuoBell. The company also worked with creative agencies AMV BBDO and PHD on the concept, and production company Unit9 helped build the prototype. Škoda says it plans to make the underlying findings of its research for the project public.

“Bicycle bells have remained almost unchanged for over a century, but the world around them has not,” Ben Edwards, an executive creative director at AMV BBDO, said in a statement.

The team determined DuoBell’s frequency using acoustic testing that found headphones with ANC had a hard time scrambling sounds in a narrow frequency range between 750 and 780 hertz. An additional resonator (which is why the bell is named DuoBell) produces an even higher-frequency sound at a rapid but irregular rhythm to further confuse headphone algorithms.

The need for a smarter bike bell comes as cycling and noise-canceling headphone use grow simultaneously. Škoda cites a 24% increase of cyclist-pedestrian collisions in London in 2024, where up to half of pedestrians wear headphones. In the U.S., injuries to pedestrians wearing headphones more than tripled in six years, researchers at the University of Maryland found in 2018, while elevated gas prices today are pushing more Americans to travel by bike or scooter.

Škoda, which is known for cars like its best-selling Octavia, a compact hatchback, actually started as a bike manufacturer, and today it’s a Tour de France partner. The company says it designed the look of the bell as a tribute to its design language, with colors, materials, and finishes inspired by its cars.

Researchers found the bell had a reaction distance of up to 22 meters, or about 72 feet, giving pedestrians crucial time to realize they’re stepping into a bike’s path. The DuoBell also underwent real-world testing trials with Deliveroo, a U.K. delivery app, and Škoda says couriers asked to keep it after the trial. Cyclists might not have to keep shouting at zoned-out pedestrians for long.

So, like reportedly half of American consumers using LLM search today, I recently opened up a chatbot and asked it to help me find a new car. My opening prompt was simple: What is the best vehicle for a family of four, that has to deal with daily commutes, winter weather, all in the $50,000 price range?

According to ChatGPT:

• Best overall: Mazda CX-90 Hybrid
• Best for reliability and resale: Toyota Highlander Hybrid
• Best for commuting and family size: Toyota RAV4 Hybrid / Honda CR-V Hybrid
• Best for space and comfort: Toyota Sienna AWD Hybrid (Wouldn’t you know it?)

According to Claude:

Top pick: 2026 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid AWD

Plus, four “strong alternatives”:

• 2026 Kia Telluride
• 2026 Hyundai Palisade XRT
• 2026 Subaru Forester
• 2026 Honda Passport

From the same prompt, two LLMs came up with 10 vehicle suggestions and only a single model in common. That, in a nutshell, is one of the newest, most compelling challenges facing major brands and marketers right now. 

Those LLMs’ results didn’t happen just naturally. They’re the result of everything the brands did, intentionally or unintentionally, and what was written about them online. And each LLM interprets and prioritizes all of that information in its own special way, so figuring out how to get to the top of every list—and knowing what each LLM is saying about your brand—is now a key task for every brand’s marketing department.

Welcome to the GEO speedwagon. 

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and overall LLM visibility are in the midst of a gargantuan hype cycle. According to an October 2025 McKinsey report, 50% of Google searches already have AI summaries, and that’s expected to rise to more than 75% by 2028. At that point, $750 billion in U.S. revenue will funnel through AI-powered search. The McKinsey report says brands that are unprepared could see a decline in traffic from the traditional search channels by as much as 50%.

Gaggles of startups are pitching AI slop factories as a solution: promising to quickly create hundreds of pieces of content with key information about brands that will get picked up by LLMs and regurgitated in their responses. What’s proving more useful, however, are tools—like Profound, Bluefish, Scrunch, and Emberos—that help marketers monitor, track, manage, and influence how LLMs find their brands. Profound announced a $96 million investment in February at a $1 billion valuation. 

Brands and marketers who may be feeling a bit behind on all of this need not panic . . . yet. Sources I’ve talked to describe this moment in GEO as 1998 for search, or 2006 for social media—the very beginning stages of a transformational moment. The biggest difference is the pace of both technological development and audience adoption. Now is the time to be building the foundations onto which a bigger part of your business will be built. 

Brand executives and CMOs are on a sliding scale of acceptance of this messy new world of AI discoverability, ranging from diving in headfirst to dipping their toes to going full Lloyd Christmas and trying to ignore the whole thing. GEO and the services and tools surrounding it have been labeled everything from snake oil to THE FUTURE. 

The reality is, of course, somewhere in the messy middle. 

For this story, Fast Company spoke to major brand executives, leading ad agencies, and startup founders to detangle the hype from what really matters. Here we’ll break down:

• The unexpected power move that will make your brand more visible on LLMs 
• Why GEO is a racket, and the reasons it’s not
• How major brands and agencies are approaching GEO right now (and their plans for the future)

Consider this your no-BS guide to GEO.

First up: Your foundation matters

From talking to executives across brands, agencies, and startups, it’s clear that GEO is not a short-term game you can win. The brands that will dominate LLMs are the brands that are already owning their paid, owned, and earned media. These are brands with consistency and clarity across their brand content, website, and social channels, not to mention their outside media coverage. 

Public relations veteran Jim Prosser recently argued in a piece titled “GEO is a Racket,” that GEO is really just about having a good overall communications strategy while monitoring how your brand is showing up in LLMs. And he’s right. That old chestnut of everything your company does is a brand action has never been more true. Except now, all of these brand actions aren’t simply spread across the internet but distilled down to answer a single LLM prompt. All the good, the bad, and the ugly is right there, in an instant. 

When you ask an LLM about a product or brand, it sources material from everywhere it can, prioritizing the most credible and most high-profile sources. It utilizes what your execs say on LinkedIn, what your customers and employees say on Reddit, what major publications and meaningful influencers say about you, and what you say about yourself in your own advertising and content. These have always been important factors in a brand’s overall identity. What LLM search does is make everything accessible all at once. 

“There’s a lot of hype around it, but at the same time, it has basically confirmed marketing fundamentals,” says Meghan Signalness, global head of media, marketing planning and operations, and agency leadership for Philips’s $4 billion personal health consumer business. “In some ways it’s just SEO sped up.”

Signalness says her team has done plenty of GEO audits, and that the biggest thing that moves the needle is simply showing up consistently. “LLMs are looking at what words are most associated with your brand. That’s old-school marketing,” she says.

Set up your content for success

Chris Neff, global chief AI officer at award-winning ad agency Anomaly, says brands must optimize their own digital assets—particularly their websites—since roughly 60% to 65% of AI citations can derive from the brand’s own content. This has led to a resurgence in value of brand landing pages because they have the citable assets and structured architecture that bots require to reference a campaign. 

This extends to a brand’s FAQs, says Brad Nunn, vice president of media at ad agency Gale, noting that clear, factual, one-sentence answers are the single most effective way to ensure LLMs do not make incorrect assumptions about a product. “You’re not creating vagueness,” he says. “You’re mentioning the brand up front, and you’re saying exactly what it’s solving. You could add more after the fact if you want to be cute but you want the first sentence to be super clear, super tight, and factual.”

According to James Cadwallader, cofounder and CEO of AI-native marketing platform Profound, owned content gives LLMs the best opportunity to talk thoughtfully about what your brand does. “You’re trying to give AI the opportunity to understand your business better,” he says. 

To make sure all of this content is working, Ally Financial CMO Andrea Brimmer says her team is constantly auditing and correcting how the brand shows up online. They use a tool called Scrunch to look at where and how the brand is showing up in LLMs. They analyze the findings with what Brimmer calls weekly “scrums” of multidisciplinary teams made up of PR, tech, HR, and a dedicated AI team within the marketing organization. 

From there, they work to build and maintain the brand’s presence through new content that shows up in the right places. When they find that LLMs are citing outdated or incorrect information, they intentionally create new content and work with PR to correct the original sources being cited by the bots. 

Then comes the more intangible art of making sure all the ways a customer sees, hears, and experiences the content are aligned in order to make your brand’s online presence as clear and consistent as possible for the LLMs to find and understand. 

“We’ve come to realize really quickly that brand has never been more important than it is now,” Brimmer says. “And when I say brand, I don’t mean just the marketing part of the brand. You better have really damn good customer experience and PR around your products, you better have a strong reputation in the marketplace, you better show up as a good citizen of the world, and you better treat your employees really well because all of those elements of what makes a great brand are more important now than ever before.”

Build a spiderweb of authority

For now, LLM search still prioritizes sources high in expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. But things can be complicated when one of those sources has wrong information. Brimmer describes this moment in marketing as a “Wild, Wild West” phase where brands must engage in “hand-to-hand combat” to ensure they show up accurately on probabilistic LLM chatbots. Her team has experienced the unpredictability of LLM search firsthand. 

When Ally announced in December that its customers could now deposit cash into their Ally checking accounts in person at Walmart, it was a big deal for one of the largest online-only banks in the U.S. But the brand had a problem: Major LLMs were still telling users the bank didn’t offer this feature. Fixing that misinformation was a long-term content play. The brand began creating more specific content to highlight the feature on its own site and elsewhere, as well as trying to correct sites where there was information saying it wasn’t a feature. 

Google, Meta, TikTok, and other major search and social media companies have robust brand liaison departments to help marketers better utilize their platforms. So far, AI companies don’t seem to be following that model, leaving brands to chart their own paths. This will undoubtedly change once there is advertising of some kind integrated into LLMs. But for now, companies must fend for themselves in making sure the source information is accurate.

Getting the correct brand information into the world means showing up where people—and LLMs—are looking for information. On Reddit, for example, Philips conducted an “Ask Me Anything” event with credible engineers and doctors to provide high-authority, factual content on a platform AI models heavily scrape to see how providing credentialed human expertise there would impact the brand’s visibility in LLM models. 

The results were encouraging, but Signalness is quick to acknowledge that it’s far from an exact science. The rules can change suddenly, as when Reddit began limiting AI companies’ ability to scrape comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial purposes. Philips has done similar LLM visibility testing with its influencer strategy. 

“While we know there’s a role for influencers, in the context of an LLM there’s not as much of a role for that 20-year-old with a cellphone as there is for a doctor, a dentist, or another professional,” Signalness says. “So it’s stripping away a lot of noise, which is really refreshing.”

Make a human fingerprint

Forget churning out never-ending content to feed the algorithm. Quality still beats quantity. All of my sources said brands should avoid using anything resembling AI slop, because people are increasingly seeing that as (shocker!) creepy and inauthentic. Taryn Crouthers, CEO of agency Big Spaceship, highlights a significant “trust gap” between marketers and consumers. Marketers may be all in because they see the value of how AI can help make work more efficient, and more personalized at scale and all of that, but when consumers hear AI, they tend to tune out or get actively repulsed. 

“So now brands need human fingerprints or evidence of effort,” Crouthers says. “You can make something using AI and make sure that the GEO attributions are all there, but you need to also show the human side of that storytelling, how hard it was to make it, why you made it, how you made it. That helps people be more comfortable with it and more open to the message.”

Ndidiamaka “Ndidi” Oteh, CEO of Accenture Song, says that if strong SEO was rooted in product attributes and specific description, LLM visibility goes beyond that by its conversational nature. “Take a black crewneck sweater,” she says. “We are now moving to the attributes that are connected beyond just that it is a black crewneck. It is about the flow, it’s about how it’s perfect for an afternoon ski trip—things you would never have had as part of your traditional attribute criteria because it’s not specific to the product.”

What’s next

After search comes agentic commerce, which will revolutionize e-commerce and require seamless integration between all aspects of a business. But we’re not there yet. Oteh says that link between commerce and LLM search, for example, where you’d find something you like and buy it right then and there within the LLM, is not quite ready for prime time in new agentic channels. 

“Even in rudimentary examples where the tech can sort of do it but not at scale, we’re finding that a lot of companies’ supply chains and order management systems just aren’t set up in a way where they can take signals from anywhere,” she says. 

Signalness also points to LLMs’ lack of readiness for providing the data brands need in order to responsibly utilize their platforms and justify the investment. “We know this is the step we need to take, but ‘Dear LLMs, let’s partner to take the step,’” Signalness says. “Some of us in the brands are saying, ‘Okay, let’s go start testing, but here’s our list of questions.’ And the answers to those questions aren’t coming back clearly.”

Healthy brands will be healthy with just a few moves, primarily around monitoring. According to McKinsey, only 16% of brands currently track AI search performance systematically, which is key to identifying misinformation or visibility gaps. So while there is snake oil in the hype around how to build, grow, and maintain LLM visibility, for many major marketers its importance is very real. 

“This is the direction of travel,” Signalness says. “So get comfortable.” 

Just like a ride in a brand-new minivan.

At $4,500, it is not a casual purchase. But Neighbor, the 5-year-old brand that creates it, has found that many consumers are looking to invest in outdoor furniture that is as beautiful and thoughtfully designed as the pieces within their home.

Neighbor was founded in 2020 in Phoenix by three friends—Nick Arambula, Chris Lee, and Mike Fretto—who had previously worked together at the direct-to-consumer mattress brand Tuft & Needle. As they surveyed the furniture industry, they realized that outdoor furniture tends to be an afterthought for many companies, rather than something they ask their best designers to tackle. At Neighbor, the team would focus entirely on the design of outdoor sofas and lounge chairs, concentrating their energies on making the pieces as beautiful and durable as possible.

The company launched during the pandemic amid an already crowded market, when Americans were flush with stimulus checks and looking to spend more time in their gardens and patios. Its revenue grew elevenfold from 2020 to 2021. In the years since, the brand has found that Americans have continued to want to invest in their outdoor spaces. Particl, a third-party e-commerce tracking firm, estimates that Neighbor did around $24 million in e-commerce sales over the most recent six months.

The furniture maker’s pieces, which tend toward minimal aesthetics and natural materials, stand out in an industry that is replete with the same synthetic wicker textures, sprawling sectionals in neutral tones, and faux wood that is obviously made of plastic.

The reason for this homogeneity is partly because many furniture brands aren’t designing the pieces themselves, but instead are ordering from the same manufacturers’ catalogs. Arambula believed Neighbor’s competitive advantage was that it has a distinct point of view. “We tried to take a pretty strong perspective on design from the very beginning,” he says. “We didn’t want to just be slapping our brand on something someone else had designed.”

Aaron Whitney, Neighbor’s VP of design, is trained as an architect, and it shows. He begins with the materials, most of which are natural, including real wood, aluminum, and stainless steel. Neighbor uses Grade A FSC-certified teak, an unusually dense hardwood with a high oil content that has made it the preferred wood for boatbuilding for centuries.

The brand’s steel is 304 or 316 stainless wherever possible, not mild steel with a powder coat that will eventually chip. When using synthetic materials, including for a rattan collection, Neighbor chooses ColorCore high-density polyethylene (HDPE) that’s dyed all the way through, so there’s no surface degradation.

The design philosophy that has emerged from all of this is not a distinct aesthetic—like mid-century or Scandinavian—but a discipline. “My goal is usually just to simplify things,” Whitney says. “It’s less about style and more about utility, but it is certainly not boring.” His goal is to pare down the design as far as it will go, then add life back in through function and color. The result is furniture that customers describe as versatile, and that can work in a hyper-modern home as well as a more vintage-inspired one.

The Totem, for instance, looks like outdoor fireplaces that were popular in the 1960s and ’70s. Its design came out of Whitney’s own experience. He had been renovating his house and hunting for one of the cone-shaped hanging fireplaces, known as chiminea, that were produced by brands like Malm and Preway in the 1960s—the kind you see in mid-century California ranch houses or in movies set in that era. The vintage market for those pieces was thin. The modern market was thinner. “Everything else you see for a chiminea is just like a really minimal, cheap metal cone basically.”

At the same time, Whitney observed that throughout the Southwest, traditional clay chimineas are everywhere. The design of the fireplace includes a narrow flue that draws smoke upward. The wide base radiates heat outward, a passive engineering solution that predates the smokeless fire pits that are very popular right now. “Chimineas have been solving that problem for centuries with a very straightforward design,” Whitney says.

Neighbor took the traditional chiminea’s logic, modernized it with clean lines and distinct colors, and made it out of steel with a porcelain enamel finish—similar to the durable coating on cast-iron cookware—which won’t blister, peel, or fade from heat. It also has functional features to ensure it works well, including stainless steel legs that keep it level on uneven surfaces. The whole thing disassembles for storage; the tall chimney pieces pack back inside the firebox.

Whitney imagines it as the focal point in an outdoor room. “I see this piece for people that truly want an outdoor living room setup,” he says—less a portable fire pit and more an architectural object that the rest of the furniture arranges itself around.

Neighbor has found that people from all across the country are drawn to its products. Roughly a third of the brand’s customers come from California and the Northeast, which Arambula attributes to the fact that people from the coasts tend to be quicker to adopt new brands. But a growing number of its customers come from the Sunbelt states, where people spend nine months of the year outdoors. More recently, the company has seen a significant boost in revenue from the trades, including interior designers, architects, and hotels.

In December 2024, historically one of the company’s slowest months, Arambula received an inbound call from a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas Strip for a $500,000 order. That’s when the company decided it made sense to start developing products specifically for the commercial market.

The Totem, though, is very much designed for the homeowner. It’s an architectural statement piece that is slightly retro—the kind of thing that makes your neighbors wonder where you got it.

The company announced this week that it’s beginning to roll out an option for users to stack their tabs in a panel on the left side of the browser instead of horizontally at the top.

For tab hoarders like me—who get lost in a million tabs while trying to remember which favicon went with which website, or who have multiple websites open with the same favicon—vertical tabs will give us more information to determine which tab is where. It even works when you have so many open that you have to scroll to reach the end.

The vertical tab interface has two modes: a collapsed version with just the favicons, and an expanded version that shows the full text of the page titles too, no matter how many tabs are open at once, unlike in the horizontal view.

“This layout is perfect for multitasking, saving you time by making sure you never lose a tab,” Chrome product managers Alex Tsu and Jess Carpenter wrote in a blog post.

To turn on vertical tabs, users can right-click on a window and select “Show Tabs Vertically.”

Chrome is also introducing “reading mode” in its latest update, which is a full-page text interface that removes visual distractions. Google is pitching reading mode as a tool for deep focus.

Many of Chrome’s most recently shipped updates are targeted at one of two aims: either adding AI functionality with Google’s Gemini or keeping up with alternative browser competitors. The Browser Company’s Arc browser launched in 2023 and had vertical tabs and split view before Chrome did. Google did not respond to a request for comment.

While Chrome might not get to features like vertical tabs first, when it ships them, it reaches a mass audience. Chrome is far and away the most popular browser, with about 66% market share worldwide, according to Statcounter GlobalStats, a web analytics firm.

So while Chrome isn’t the first to market, as the industry leader it can adopt the best innovations from smaller competitors after the fact to discourage platform switching among its existing users. (Think of how Meta rips off features like Snapchat’s filters and stories for its own apps, for instance.)

Regardless, the update meets an urgent need, as tab hoarding is common. A 55% majority of respondents have trouble closing tabs, and 30% call their habit a “problem,” researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found. Plug-ins like Skeema can help rank tabs by priority, and with vertical tabs, the UI to do it yourself is now built in.

That’s why he begins his new documentary with a self-deprecating medley of clips featuring him being introduced as such. It’s a disarming transition to the film itself, which is a dire warning about what he views as possibly “the largest Ponzi scheme in history.”

When the pandemic hit, and acting work vanished, McKenzie, who majored in economics at the University of Virginia, began a now six-year-long quest to understand the crypto industry, a research odyssey that he developed into a 2023 book, Easy Money.

Now he’s turned that book into a scathing new documentary that he wrote, directed, stars in, and funded called Everyone is Lying to You for Money. It hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles on April 17, followed by Boston, Washington D.C., Austin, San Francisco, Portland, and more.

The movie depicts McKenzie’s journey toward trying to understand crypto, one that took him from Miami to London to El Salvador. It includes footage from interviews he did with victims and fraudsters alike, including the industry’s now-fallen hero, Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried spoke with McKenzie in July 2022, months before being arrested and consequently beginning his 25-year federal sentence for seven counts of fraud, including stealing $8 billion from customers. Since Bankman-Fried’s conviction, decentralized digital currency has risen again, and McKenzie believes that his movie is even more relevant now.

The documentary’s basic thesis is that no matter what crypto can make possible in theory, in practice it is barely a currency; it is used for digital payments far less often than crypto boosters claim. Rather, it’s just a form of gambling. Cryptocurrency is a “weird” investment because “you don’t own anything,” McKenzie tells me when we meet at a Brooklyn café in March. “You own a piece of code.”

What’s more, he says, the crypto companies know this and exploit the individuals buying in, like a classic pyramid scheme: People are paying to have their real money turned into magic numbers. The industry’s “entire existence depends on misinformation, hype, and fraud,” McKenzie says.

Beer, Matt Damon, and an airport in El Salvador

McKenzie is aware that the concept of cryptocurrency can be complex to the point of brain-boggling. To make it accessible to filmgoers, he includes light moments with dark humor, such as a scene of him not being able to buy beer with Bitcoin at the Bitcoin conference, and a bit where his wife, actress Morena Baccarin, asks him if he’s just mad at Matt Damon—who did a TV ad for Crypto.com—because he’s more famous. (“And taller?” she adds.)

He also makes effective use of real victims’ often touching stories, such as those who invested in Celsius in order to set up a passive investment for retirement or spend more time with their kids. (According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Celsius was found to have “artificially inflated” and “illegally manipulated” the value of its coin; the company froze user account access in June 2022, and customers lost billions.) He also speaks with an El Salvadorian citizen kicked off his land after the country’s pro-crypto president, Nayib Bukele, decided to build an airport for his so-called Bitcoin City.

And then there are the simply outrageous moments, such as when Alex Machinsky, the CEO of Celsius—who was later sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud and market manipulation—justified crypto scams by saying, “If you left money on the street, do you expect it to be there in the morning?” (That footage, which McKenzie captured at SXSW in March 2022, is what gave him the idea to turn the project into a film in the first place.)

But what stands out as the movie’s tense climax is McKenzie’s candid, one-on-one interview with Bankman-Fried.

Seeing Sam Bankman-Fried squirm

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto exchange company FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, was on a high in July 2022—”on top of the world,” as McKenzie says now. Bankman-Fried had just hosted a crypto conference in the Bahamas, with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as guests, and Fortune had proclaimed him “the next Warren Buffett.”

The crypto market had just started to crash, but Bankman-Fried, with a reported net worth of $20 billion and the full attention of the media and Capitol Hill alike, seemed golden. “The PR machine was in full blast,” McKenzie says, which may be why he accepted McKenzie’s Twitter DM invitation to meet.

McKenzie was astonished at how open Bankman-Fried was—and how trusting his PR representative was, staying outside the hotel room during the video interview, and letting it go on for a full hour. (She was a fan of The O.C.)

“In retrospect, I would have been more aggressive,” McKenzie says, but he certainly applies the pressure. Their conversation—which runs for six minutes in the film—makes for awkward viewing. “He’s very hard to edit,” McKenzie says, “because he talks in a very long-winded, circuitous way, [with] lots of caveats, lots of clauses.”

Bankman-Fried is visibly perturbed. He admits that crypto has little public utility thus far as a real currency, that “the majority of people today are using it as a financial asset,” and that there needs to be more oversight. He gets particularly squirmy when McKenzie asks about his political donations and admits, after some prodding, to contributing “in the tens of millions” of dollars.

McKenzie didn’t know at the time of the interview that Bankman-Fried had ordered a line of code that allowed Alameda to “withdraw effectively unlimited amounts of cryptocurrency” from FTX, according to the DOJ. “His empire was collapsing,” McKenzie says. “They were really in shit’s creek already.”

Two days after Bankman-Fried’s arrest, in December 2022, McKenzie testified to the U.S. Senate, recommending that cryptocurrency be reclassified as a security, and be regulated as such. (After having seen Congress host pro-crypto hearings, including with Bankman-Fried, McKenzie had approached multiple representatives about sharing his perspective. It wasn’t until after the arrest that they acquiesced.)

McKenzie also attempted to reach Bankman-Fried in jail, via a note, but received no reply.

“They’re clinging onto hope”

Even after writing a book and making a film, McKenzie feels powerless to change people’s minds: “I was more right than I thought I’d be, and I had less of an effect.”

All the Celsius victims he interviewed—bar none—were still pro-crypto. To them, Celsius itself was just an anomaly. Most are invested in Bitcoin. “They’re clinging onto hope,” he says. “They’re so invested in the idea” that abandoning it would be painful.

Since shooting wrapped in the fall of 2024, he’s grown even more disappointed. Despite the crypto market crashing in 2022, and Bankman-Fried’s sentencing to federal prison, no broader change has come. Partly, that is because Donald Trump was re-elected.

Trump took in a reported $18 million in inauguration donations from crypto firms, passed the first-ever crypto legislation, and has pardoned crypto leaders including Binance founder CZ, who pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. He also launched the Trump meme coin, which House Democrats have called a “pump-and-dump scheme.”

Meanwhile, crypto recovered and surged again; in 2024, Bitcoin’s price had increased more than 400% compared to where it was in 2022. Crypto “is going to be with us for a while,” he says.

Most ironic is how the resurgence affects selling his own documentary. It played at half a dozen film festivals over the past year, and indie film distributor The Forge is helping with the theatrical release. But he knows that a streaming deal will be crucial in getting people to see the film.

Although he won’t name specific streaming companies, he says he’s had meetings with multiple, it’s “crickets.” He senses that they don’t want to touch it given the administration’s crackdown on the media, with the FCC investigating networks, cutting funding, and pressuring for the reshaping of editorial content.

Other movies have struggled in that environment, including 2024’s The Apprentice, about Trump himself and his relationship with lawyer Roy Cohn, which initially couldn’t land a distribution deal. And even after winning an Oscar, Palestinian documentary No Other Land had to self-release after the major streamers declined.

“I think people were afraid,” McKenzie says, adding that “That’s the death of art. That’s the death of free expression.”

For now, McKenzie is looking to get back into acting (especially after having just watched crypto investor and former FTX ambassador Kevin O’Leary appear in an Oscar-winning movie. “It’s a fucked-up world when [he] has a hotter acting career than me”). Still, he knows he’ll be paying attention to crypto “potentially forever.”

The best he can do, he continues, “is say what I saw to the people who are willing to hear it.”

My favorite character was Molly McIntire, a 9-year-old living through World War II in Illinois, whose father had been sent to the front lines and hadn’t written home in months. What I loved about the books was that they trusted children to process difficult things—slavery, mortality, war—that adults typically shielded us from. American Girl stories were meant to illustrate that difficult things might happen to us in life, but we will be all right.

In the four decades since, American Girl was acquired by Barbie’s parent company, Mattel, for $700 million and drifted steadily away from what made it special. The historical characters were retired, replaced by contemporary dolls reflecting girls’ lives today—dolls that look indistinguishable from other dolls on the market. Millennial mothers who had once begged their parents for American Girl catalogs were no longer buying the dolls for their own daughters.

This week, in a 40th anniversary collection, American Girl announced it is bringing back eight of its most beloved “Historical Characters,” whose stories were set between 1764 and 1943, and were first released in the 1980s and 1990s. These include Addy Walker, who escapes slavery; Kaya, a Native American whose village is attacked by enemy raiders; and Josefina Montoya, who is grieving the loss of her mother in colonial New Mexico. The dolls are bundled with their original outfits, accessories, and books, and come in packaging modeled on the original 1986 design. They’re now available for preorder and will ship in May.

“This collection is our love letter to the original fans and a tribute to the women who formed such meaningful connections with these dolls as kids, [while also] introducing a new generation to the stories and characters that helped define the brand,” says Jamie Cygielman, global head of dolls at Mattel.

Mattel has been working to revitalize the American Girl brand, which has posted five consecutive quarters of sales growth heading into its anniversary year. Revenue, however, remains well below its mid-2010s peak. In Mattel’s most recent earnings, American Girl was called out as a bright spot in an otherwise mixed dolls category—sales for its flagship Barbie line actually declined.

One of Mattel’s strategies is now to target adults, not just children. By late 2024, spending on toys by adults 18 and older had surpassed that for children ages 3 to 5, according to market research by Circana—and that cohort continued to drive industry growth into 2025.

The relaunch might also be a reaction to a misstep. Earlier this year, American Girl unveiled a “Modern Era” collection, featuring redesigned versions of the historical characters with contemporary styling. Molly turned up in chain loafers and miniskirts that would have outraged society in the 1940s. Addy, the formerly enslaved girl, now has locs and a shift dress. The internet responded with something between outrage and grief. “Kirsten didn’t endure six weeks on a boat across the Atlantic and lose her best friend to cholera for you to give her the Ozempic treatment and space buns,” went one widely shared post.

A company representative acknowledged what seemed to undergird the backlash: While adult fans vocally prefer the historical dolls, sales data indicate that younger consumers—the actual target audience—prefer dolls that look more fashion-forward and contemporary. It seems that Mattel’s new strategy is to create separate products for adults and children. The 40th anniversary collection appears to be targeting millennials now in their thirties and forties who remember the catalog arriving in the mail. These women will buy the dolls for themselves, but also as a way to bond with their daughters.

Cygielman says the historical characters are here to stay. The anniversary bundles are a celebration, but the characters themselves are permanent fixtures in the line, not a limited run. When American Girl did a smaller relaunch for its 35th birthday in 2021, nostalgic fans reacted with glee, making plans to buy replacement dolls for well-worn childhood originals. That collection sold out. This one probably will too.

But a sellout is not a strategy, and American Girl has been here before, hoping that the emotional residue of the original brand can substitute for a reinvention of it. Whether the 40th anniversary collection can reach today’s 7-year-olds—or whether what’s really being sold is a mother’s memory—is an open question.

Liquid Death just announced its newest collab, this time with sunglasses brand Pit Viper, to make what it is calling “Sunglasses for Dead People.” According to Liquid Death, 87% of people who have near-death experiences report seeing a blinding, bright light. That’s not an exact science, but the canned water brand isn’t letting that get in the way of a good bit.

Available on Pit Viper’s site for $119, the limited-edition shades feature shatterproof, durable lenses with 100% UVA/UVB protection. And every pair comes with what the brand calls a 100% after-lifetime guarantee: If the sunglasses break or fail to protect your eyes from the light that (allegedly) awaits us all, Pit Viper will replace them, no questions asked.

The shades, which may or may not make you look like a cool outfielder, are just the latest mortality-themed project from Liquid Death being pitched as a product for the afterlife. In February, the brand dropped a $495 urn with Spotify that features an internal Bluetooth speaker in order to play your ashes an “eternal playlist.”

Both ridiculous products perfectly embody Liquid Death’s overall brand collaboration strategy that, above all, values comedy you can touch and feel. At the Fast Company Grill at SXSW in March, Liquid Death’s vice president of creative, Andy Pearson, told me: “It’s not funny to say, ‘Hey, what if we made something.’ It’s funny to make the thing,” Pearson said. “It’s funny to make adult diapers that are made of pleather so you don’t have to go to the bathroom at a rock concert, or a Bluetooth-enabled urn so you can play music into your ashes forever. It only becomes truly funny when it actually exists in the world. So we’ve put a lot of stock into making real things.”

The brand’s entertainment-driven, social media-focused approach has been credited for its strong appeal among young consumers, amassing more than 14.5 million followers across TikTok and Instagram. In 2024, new funding valued Liquid Death at $1.4 billion, and last year the brand expanded into iced tea and energy drink categories.

Deadly collab strategy

When I spoke to Liquid Death’s vice president of marketing, Dan Murphy, about the Spotify urn, he outlined three key pillars of the brand’s overall collab strategy.

First is the Liquid Death universe filter. Murphy said that at the core of every collaboration is a simple creative question: “If you take another brand or celebrity into the Liquid Death universe, what is the one right answer?”

Second is mutual business value. Does collaborating with other brands offer specific business advantages that working with individual celebrities does not? “We find a lot of brands that are interested in our unique audience value, our creativity,” he said. “We do everything in-house—film, produce, direct—so we’re seen as a bit of an agency and production company. Partners see that value, and then we’ll find brands that will cover some production hard costs and allow us to extend our marketing budget, bringing what they do best to the table.”

And the third pillar is quality and quantity. Going back to what Pearson said about actually “making the thing” is what makes it funny—then making something of quality makes the joke even better. In terms of quantity, limited runs have been successful in driving demand and awareness, with each collab often having between 200 and 500 pieces available. “We want to do enough that people can have them, but we also realize some of these very specific things have become more collectible when they’re not a mass product,” Murphy said. “Many things that we do, they sell out in less than a day, and you see them on eBay immediately.”

While always amusing, these collabs serve to bring Liquid Death to a broader audience, whether it’s Pit Viper shades, Spotify, or E.l.f. beauty. In exchange for Liquid Death’s creative muscle, collaborating brands typically invest in the production costs and media spend behind it.

With Spotify, for example, it custom-programmed the Eternal Urn playlist on its platform, tapping into users’ Spotify history and likes. That not only customizes it for each user, but gets Liquid Death on Spotify in a way it never could on its own.

First we get an urn, and now a pair of shades. What could be next for Liquid Death’s “deceased” demographic? Maybe a collab with Ring on a coffin cam, or Scott’s Miracle-Gro on composting yourself, or maybe a Hugo Boss “Last Suit You’ll Ever Wear.” The possibilities may never die.

Coachella 2026 takes place over two weekends: April 10 through 12 and April 17 through 19. And while billboard advertising has been a hallmark of the lead-up to the festival almost since its inception, it’s become increasingly intense in recent years. In a 2025 interview with The New York Times, one executive responsible for renting out the billboard space said, “This year was an absolute explosion.” So far, 2026 is looking similarly promising: Advertisements for Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter, Addison Rae, Katseye, and Karol G have already appeared along the coveted strip of highway.

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For fans, these physical expressions of artists’ sets serve not just as advertising but also as a preview of where music branding is headed in the year to come. This year’s billboards are all about distinctive fonts, cryptic messaging, and niche aesthetics—and they show that though Coachella may be overrun with influencers, at least its creative direction is alive and well.

Attention-grabbing visual choices

On this year’s Coachella billboards, font choice is front and center. 

In years past, artists’ teams have clearly chosen fonts that pair well with their overall message—like, for example, Lil Yachty’s 2024 billboard, which featured the phrase “It took Coachella 8 years to book me” in his own handwriting, or Omar Apollo’s 2022 billboard in the style of a call to action with the bolded phrase, “Heterosexuality can be cured.” In 2026, though, the font choice is the message.

Take, for example, one billboard for Katesye: The entire composition is the phrase “Sahara’s Gnarly” on a black background. The image pops because those words are rendered in a gooey, dripping, neon green font that’s a reference to Katseye’s hit song “Gnarly,” which embraces a kind of glitzy, sterilized grossness in its music video (which has been viewed almost 172 million times). One glimpse at this design, and Katseye fans are sure to have an intuitive understanding of what it’s trying to convey—and maybe even an outfit to match.

Other artists are similarly relying on ultra-specific fonts to capture their aesthetics. Karol G opted for a close-cropped shot of a blinged-out necklace with the word Bichota (a slang term the Colombian singer invented as an equivalent to “boss babe”) in a swirling, feminine script, styled after the cover art of her single of the same name.

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The French artist Oklou chose an image made entirely out of emoticons to reflect her cyberpunk style. And one of this year’s headliners, Justin Bieber, commissioned a billboard with his album name, SWAG, displayed in a simple serif font on top of a trippy, swirling background, calling to mind the record’s bubbly refrains. 

Some of these billboards include small mentions of the artist’s names, like Katseye and Oklou. Others, like those for Justin Bieber and Karol G, rely solely on viewers to make an instant connection between the imagery and their work. 

These decisions feel like a reflection of how artists today are cultivating their images online: In a post-Brat digital world, where microtrends on TikTok are constantly shifting, every letterform, color choice, and aesthetic throwback helps artists carve out their own recognizable niche.

Music has always been about personal identity, and these strong graphic choices emphasize that. In place of universal appeal, the billboards create if-you-know-you-know brand signals for stans, teasers for fans, and, one hopes, online conversation for everyone.

When Coachella 2026 attendess can recognize Katseye’s branding based on two gooey green words, all of those creative efforts have done their job.

“I was very dedicated to music for a very long period of my life,” says Crisan. Now, as Chief Design Officer at Figma, Crisan says her musical training has informed her relationship with her work in ways she never expected. “If we are successful, we make people feel something as a result of our work,” she says. Here, she shares how her relationship with creativity has been informed by growing up with the iPhone, her love of cross-disciplinary work and the fight against burnout. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

I studied classical piano. As a teenager, I actually rebelled against classical music and picked up techno and other types of music production. This is Romania, like, transitioning from communism to actually being open to Western music and other types of things coming into the country. That was my first exploration phase. That career in music production actually brought me to the United States, where I worked in recording studios as a sound engineer and as a producer. And I did this in San Francisco, coming from Romania to the United States. When I realized that San Francisco was not the recording industry, I realized I had two options in front of me: move to L.A. or join a startup. Again, my exploratory bent was like, “Let’s join a startup, and figure out what this thing is about.” So I joined a startup called Lexy as a sound engineer to prototype audio interfaces for an assistant-like experience. 

I was not a visual designer, but what I knew was what it feels to be comfortable creating in a medium. That created this really deep desire for me to learn pixels and be as comfortable with pixels as I was with sound. The only way that I know how to do this is through apprenticeship. You dive in and you learn how to see, just like with piano, you dive in and you learn how to hear.

I’m big into neuroscience. I think about how my brain reacts to different environments that I create for it. If you just go for a walk without any stimulation at all, this thing in your brain that’s kind of like always active, just comes through the surface. Ideas come from there.

Burnout is real. Oftentimes what I focus on is like making sure that people have the time to breathe. I actually have a framework for how I lead teams that I come back to often: purpose, progress, and community. All of these have to be in great balance for work to be meaningful and for people not to burn out.

I am very fortunate that at Figma, my seat is across disciplines: the product design team, the research team, the branding team. It allows me to think across all of all parts of the product development because research obviously helps us understand what we want to build next and what the market wants from us. Design looks at what shape that might take. And of course, we collaborate with PMs and engineers. And then on the brand side, we talk about our purpose, how we communicate and what the narrative is about the products that we build. I really thrive in the ability to look across things. 

Being a musician and being a designer, you are focused on your audience. When you’re playing music, of course it’s for you, too. It’s something that you want to feel, but you’re transmitting something. And great design also transmits something. If we are successful, we make people feel something as a result of our work. And so that translation always felt very, very smooth to me. 

I work out daily, and that’s one of my foundations. The first thing that I do when I wake up is a strength training session. This kind of helps set the day and during that, I’m often listening to podcasts, so there’s a lot of inspiration coming in. I’m very deep into neuroscience, so some of the podcasts that I listen to are about how our brains process the world. As a leader, that’s quite helpful. I try to start the day with somewhat of an agenda. I get into the office and start working with people. This might mean anything from bringing designers together to talk through some problems, or looking at work that they’re proposing. It could be spending time with the leadership team exploring strategies.

Collaboration is so important. The more people end up finishing each other’s sentences, the more they have rituals in place where they don’t have to overthink each other and the process by which they work together. I always think about the teams and the environment around them and the longevity of their relationships. That’s really important. Bringing different points of view into the mix always makes the product better. Building rituals can be as simple as the times that the teams come together. On Mondays, do they come together to decide what the week is gonna look like? Do they wrap it up on Friday with a reflection? Getting the team together, putting them in front of users to ask questions to really build shared language has been really successful. 

The cutting board has to do a lot of work: It needs to absorb knife marks, soak up onion juice, and be big enough to hold vegetables and scraps. On a daily basis, home cooks are forced to confront the logistical problem of where to put the parsley they just chopped when they move on to the carrots. By the end of meal prep, the kitchen counter is littered with food waste and crowded with mismatched bowls of ingredients.

It seems like a minor inconvenience, one that most of us manage every day. But Tom Palmer believed the humble cutting board could be improved. Palmer had spent eight years as an automotive engineer at GM who led a team of 54 employees working on the Cadillac Escalade. But on the side, he was an obsessive woodworker. “As soon as I bought my house I wanted to make furniture for it,” he says. “And one of the first things you start making are cutting boards.”

He made one for his parents and added a little waste tray to the top that connected through magnets. They kept telling him how useful it was. So Palmer continued to tinker with the design, adding bowls on the side and rethinking the materials.

Two years of development later, he’s launching Prepwell. It’s a modular cutting board system called the Chef Station that has four different trays that can be attached to three sides of the solid wood board with magnets to hold ingredients and scraps. The set comes with silicone liners for the trays that can be thrown in the dishwasher, as well as stainless steel liners that are oven-safe for cooking.

You can also buy a supplemental board that clips to the top to separate vegetables and meat. “If we could create a system that was good for cooking, serving, and storing, we could have something that people would want,” Palmer says of his thinking for the design.

There’s a catch, though. The full Prepwell system costs $545, and if you want the supplemental board or lids, that’ll cost you another $75 and $35, respectively. This makes Palmer’s product roughly 10 times more expensive than the average cutting board on the market—and significantly more than even high-end cutting boards like Boos Blocks, whose most expensive boards cost roughly $300.

When I tested the Prepwell Chef Station, I was impressed by how thoughtfully it’s designed for everyday use. The board and the trays all snap together perfectly, which allowed me to create a neat workstation. As I cut asparagus, tofu, and green onions, I slid them into separate trays. When I started cooking, I was able to throw them into the pan at the right time. The supplemental board was a game-changer for me. I’m used to doing a shuffle between meat and vegetable boards. But this system made the process seamless.

Palmer admits that his product is expensive, but he says he’s found a market for it. To fund the initial inventory, he turned to Kickstarter, launching a campaign that ran last fall. The campaign garnered 1,380 preorders, which he’s just shipped out, and the brand’s website is now up and running and ready for new customers.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that an ultra-high-end cutting board is seeing success. Americans are spending more on their kitchens than ever. The U.S. kitchenware market is forecast to grow from $20.37 billion in 2024 to $37.19 billion in 2033. Our pandemic-era obsession with upgrading domestic life never entirely subsided, and many people have kept up the cooking habits they cultivated during lockdown.

Add to that the fact that younger generations care a lot about how the products in their kitchen look, and the growth of aesthetically pleasing cookware brands like Caraway and Our Place makes sense. These trends shaped Palmer’s approach to Prepwell’s design. “If you were going to have friends over for dinner, would you leave this out, or would you want to hide it away?” he asks.

Palmer says his target customer is anyone who has ever tucked a cutting board in the pantry before guests arrived. As he’s studied the customers who have purchased his Chef Station so far, he’s found that they include design obsessives, serious home cooks willing to pay for a better system, and newly married couples investing in outfitting their first home.

A year ago, Palmer decided to focus on Prepwell in earnest. He went to his manager at GM and asked for a 12-month leave of absence to see whether he could make this business work. His manager agreed. And his training has turned out to be a big asset throughout the R&D process.

Palmer has spent his career managing factory relationships, holding suppliers to time and quality requirements, and designing for manufacturing at scale. All of this came in handy as he worked with overseas partners to go from his original handcrafted prototypes to mass production. “When you’ve gone through production,” he says, “you learn about the failure points in the system. Whatever I’m designing needs to be foolproof.”

For instance, when designing for cars, Palmer knows it makes more sense to choose specialist factories for each component, even though it’s easier and more streamlined to find a single factory that can make all of them. For Prepwell, he’s found separate factories for steel and wood. To learn about their quality-control processes he visited the factories in person.

In the past, many direct-to-consumer brands would raise venture capital to launch a product like this. But Palmer has chosen not to go that route. For anyone who observed the DTC boom of the early 2010s—the mattress, luggage, and towel startups that burned through VC cash on Facebook ads without ever turning a profit—Palmer’s approach seems like a deliberate correction. Prepwell is running paid ads on Meta, but the math is simple: Sell more than you spend, and scale from there.

A few weeks after launching Prepwell’s website, Palmer says the company is already profitable. “We’re trying to postpone a fundraise as long as possible,” he says. “Just bootstrap it as long as we can.”

Reframing a narrative from oppression to protection doesn’t change the facts, it changes how people feel about them. Successful NIMBY activists are excellent marketers, whether they realize it or not. They lead with character, cohesion, heritage—appeals that feel collective and protective rather than selfish and restrictive. The frame doesn’t just soften opposition, it recruits people who might otherwise stay neutral.

This works because human psychology responds more powerfully to emotional and symbolic appeals than to literal descriptions. Negative frames highlight control, loss, or exclusion. Positive frames emphasize protection, belonging, and shared identity. In local politics, where home feels deeply personal, a protective-sounding narrative turns what could be seen as selfish restriction into principled guardianship.

Nothing changes but the story 

In 2008, Shreddies was a square wheat cereal that had flagging sales. A young intern at an ad agency came up with an idea that added intangible value without changing the cereal recipe at all. Rotate the squares 45 degrees, and rebrand them as diamonds. Real people who thought they were part of focus groups described how the texture and taste of new Diamond Shreddies were better than the original squares. Sales surged for what became marketed as “45 more degrees of delicious.”

Red Bull’s early consumer tests essentially pitched people an odd taste in a tiny can at a high price. Rational analysis predicted failure, but the brand reframed every liability as a feature. The small can meant concentrated power, and like some type of medicine, the strange flavor told your brain that the drink was working. Red Bull is a multi-billion-dollar icon built entirely on perception.

Nothing changes but the story, and rejection becomes enthusiastic support. You might not like it, but that’s how our brains work.

Public policy rhetoric is no different. “Keep out new families” sounds harsh and even embarrassing, but “defending neighborhood character” sounds noble. The underlying policy is identical in either case, but the narrative frame transforms how people feel about the policy. 

This framing advantage explains why housing shortages persist despite broad agreement that more supply is needed. NIMBY activists dominate the emotional, identity-based narrative. Pro-housing voices, by contrast, tend to default to terms that carry stigma or abstraction: “affordable housing,” “increased density,” and “upzoning.” These phrases describe policy accurately, but they don’t make anyone feel anything worth protecting. The asymmetry is stark when only one side in terms of values. 

New narratives

Until urbanists find equally resonant frames, the better marketers will keep winning. People who want to see their community become stronger might consider narratives like these:

• Legalize the kind of community where young families can put down roots
• More neighbors means more local businesses, more sidewalk conversations, more community.
• Build communities where teachers and nurses can live near the people they serve.
• Restore the kind of walkable, connected neighborhoods people love.

The facts don’t need to change, but the stories absolutely do. Reframing is perception magic. 

Understanding NIMBY success as marketing, not merely as grassroots sentiment, is the first step toward opening the doors to new homes in communities that so desperately need affordable places to live. The goal isn’t to out-argue opponents on policy details, it’s to out-story them. Until pro-housing advocates learn to speak in the same emotional register, they’ll keep bringing a spreadsheet to a storytelling fight.

Then, in 2021, she pivoted to work in luxury as one of the few female CEOs in the luxury watch business when she took the helm of Audemars Piguet Americas. During her tenure, she prioritized marketing to women, raising the percentage of women purchasing watches for themselves from 14% to more than 30% in just over four years.

Now back in the beauty industry, Wright is using her knowledge of the luxury consumer to find new areas of growth for Orveon’s premium brands. In particular, the company is moving quickly in India with prestige brand Laura Mercier.

At a recent summit at Harvard University’s Loeb House—organized by The Shift, a media platform devoted to women shifting culture—Wright spoke to Fast Company senior staff writer Elizabeth Segran about discussed what she learned from the male-dominated luxury watch industry, how young people should think about their careers and what beauty consumers are looking for now.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

You spent a long time at L’Oreal—what was your trajectory to the beauty industry, and what led you to shift to luxury watches?

I thought I was going to go into politics or become a lawyer. I started down that path for about a year, and then I wanted to be a press secretary. I’ve always been the kind of person who hears something interesting and thinks, “I’ll try that road.”

I moved to Atlanta and worked in PR for a while. One of my clients was [consumer product conglomerate] Georgia-Pacific, and I remember pitching Walmart to the Today Show and thinking, “There has to be more to life than this.” That’s when I realized what I was really passionate about: luxury and beauty.

So I found an MBA program in Paris sponsored by L’Oréal and LVMH. I told my husband, who I had just married, “We’re moving to Paris.” He said, “Cool. I don’t speak French, but we’ll figure it out.” So we did.

After that, I was fortunate to get hired by L’Oréal. Eventually I moved to New York, rose through the ranks, and after COVID I was serving as president of Kiehl’s, which is such an amazing brand.

Then I got a call from an executive recruiter about a high-end luxury firm looking for a CEO. It turned out to be Audemars Piguet. I literally made the decision to take that job while on a SoulCycle bike during COVID, wearing a mask and listening to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” During the line about “you only get one shot,” I decided to do it and leave the beauty industry for watches.

The watch industry has traditionally been very male-dominated. A big part of your work there was appealing to women—how did you make women less of an afterthought in that industry?

It’s interesting, because many of the great innovations in watchmaking trace back to women, including figures like Queen Victoria. Women wore pendant watches, and early watchmaking involved extraordinary craftsmanship.

Over time, watches became associated with men as they became status symbols. In more recent years, men really got deeply into watches. Women, on the other hand, were never really marketed to in the right way.

The messaging was often something like: “Here’s the real watch culture for men—and women can join too.” [The marketing message] was never truly built for women from the start.

I wanted to change that. I knew that brands like Audemars Piguet and Rolex watches often retain or increase in value, and I didn’t think women fully understood that. At the same time, the economic shift toward women is massive. Women now make up the majority of undergraduates and a huge share of postgraduates. Wealth is shifting, and brands need to be ready for that.

So I focused on women entrepreneurs, founders, and executives. We also worked more intentionally with Serena Williams. Men didn’t always understand her value after retirement, but I did. She’s not just an athlete; she’s a mother, philanthropist, investor, and entrepreneur. She represented the full modern identity of a powerful woman.

By the time I left, we had increased self-purchasing women from 14% to over 30%.

What was it like being a woman in such a male-dominated industry? Were you treated differently?

It was brutal. [Luxury is] one of the most brutal industries outside of tech in terms of gossip and scrutiny. The watch world treated executive moves like a soap opera, and it was mostly men driving that culture. More women did come into senior leadership while I was there, which helped. But yes, it was harder. If you’re a Swiss or French man in that world, it’s much easier.

People questioned whether I could do the job, especially because I came from beauty. They didn’t understand that beauty is actually an incredibly complex industry. But I had a strong retail background, and the brand was shifting from wholesale to direct retail, which was exactly where my strengths were.

Watches aren’t just about the product. They’re about access, experience, and emotion. There are only so many watches in the world, and many more people want them than can have them. So we built extraordinary experiences around the brand—private dinners, intimate events, unique access. That became a powerful new kind of luxury. 

Then beauty came calling again. What led you back?

I was at a Baby2Baby event in Los Angeles and ran into Artemis Patrick from Sephora North America. I’ve known her for years, and her whole team was there saying, “We miss you. You need to come back to beauty.”

I don’t know whether that was manifestation or coincidence, but after that I started thinking: I’ve been here four and a half years, I’ve done what I came to do, the strategy is in place, and I’m ready for something new.

I knew I wanted to do private equity, and I knew I wanted to do beauty. Then several opportunities came up at once, and Orveon really stood out. It had three heritage brands, all founded about 30 years ago and all created by women: Laura Mercier, bareMinerals, and Buxom. I felt these were beloved brands that had lost some attention, and I love reviving love brands and helping them grow again. Laura Mercier especially felt personal to me. It was one of the first prestige beauty brands I ever spent my own money on. I felt like this was my calling.

You’ve worked in ultra-luxury and in beauty brands aimed at a broader market. What do those experiences tell you about the economy right now?

There’s clearly a huge wealth divide right now. At Audemars Piget, our clients were recession-resistant. No matter what happened, they were willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a watch. That’s very different from asking someone to spend $68 on foundation or loose powder. What I’ve learned is that people will still spend—but they’ll spend on brands they trust and products they believe in. That matters even more in uncertain times.

At BareMinerals, for example, there’s a very strong repeat customer base. The challenge is bringing in new customers while continuing to serve the loyal ones. We’re deliberately targeting women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s—professionals who have their own money and some level of disposable income. That aligns with the brand and gives us some resilience.

I think it would be much harder right now to build a brand that relies heavily on Gen Z consumers who are just coming out of school and dealing with financial uncertainty.

It sounds like today’s shopper is very focused on value. Does that favor established brands?

Yes, absolutely. For years, the direct-to-consumer movement was great at grabbing attention. Now, in a tougher environment, people don’t want to waste money on something untested.

That gives established brands an advantage because people know what they’re getting. They know the products work. If they’re going to spend, they want confidence in the purchase. We haven’t grown consistently in recent years, so I want to be honest about that. But now we are growing again, and that’s exciting. We’re positive in March, which is fantastic. I’m really proud of the team.

You made a major pivot in your 20s and early 30s. What advice do you have for people who realize the path they chose may not be the right one?

If your heart isn’t in it, get out. That doesn’t mean your earlier work was wasted. I started in PR, and I still use those skills every day. I learned how to communicate, influence, manage clients, and evaluate messaging. Those abilities carried forward into everything I’ve done since.

No experience is wasted if you learn from it. But you can absolutely tell the difference between waking up excited to do your work and waking up dreading it. If you feel that difference, pay attention to it.

The houses are the first two iterations of OurStory, a housing system envisioned as a replicable, accessible, and above all affordable approach to building homes. Using hyper-efficient spatial layouts and quickly manufactured prefab parts, the houses are designed to be built fast and inexpensively for anything from an age-in-place forever home to a backyard accessory dwelling unit (ADU) to a remarkably enticing option for a first-time homebuyer. They’re resetting the standard for starter homes in the U.S.

The OurStory houses are a collaboration between the nonprofit Partners for Livable Omaha and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Architecture’s FACT studio, which engaged architecture students to design and build the first two homes. Construction is expected to wrap up by August. The larger house has already sold for just $190,000­—$90,000 less than the median sale price of homes in the city. The smaller house will likely be even more affordable.

Not just more housing, more variety

Omaha, like many cities, has a shortage of affordable housing. The city estimates that it needs 30,000 new homes for low- and middle-income residents by the end of the decade. The OurStory project was launched partly to fill that gap, but also to address another kind of housing shortage: the low variety of housing types on the market. Of the 48 building permits issued for single family homes in the last month in Omaha and surrounding Douglas County, only six are smaller than 2,000 square feet, and none are smaller than 1,000 square feet.

Jessica Scheuerman, executive director of Partners for Livable Omaha, says there’s a need for a wider range of housing types, from smaller footprints to homes designed for aging in place. Scheuerman realized the extent of the need after seeing her mother struggle to find appropriate housing on a fixed income, and thought there should be a bigger range of options. “When you design and plan for the aging community, everybody benefits,” she says.

In 2024, she reached out to architect Jeffrey Day, a practicing architect and professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln College of Architecture, to think about what a solution could look like. The two had worked together before on other projects, and they agreed that a modest aging-ready house could be a good assignment for the university’s design-build students. The project could also have legs.

“The goal has always been to think about this project as a prototype that could be replicated multiple times, and in different configurations,” Day says.

For Scheuerman, making the houses suitable for aging in place was one priority. Before founding Partners for Livable Omaha in 2020, she’s been a longtime vice president of Partners for Livable Communities, a Washington D.C.–based nonprofit that has worked for nearly 50 years to improve urban planning and design to create places where people can thrive. Aging in place is one of its main focus areas. So when the design of the OurStory houses got started, Scheuerman stressed the need for the design to include some of the basic tenets of aging-ready housing, from a zero-step entrance to wheelchair accessible hallways and doors. “We need to stop treating older adults like they’re invisible and the built environment is not for them,” she says.

A flexible kit of parts

Those aims were just the start. Under the guidance of Day, who runs his own Omaha-based architecture practice, Actual Architecture Company, the University of Nebraska design-build students expanded on the brief to turn the project into a shape-shifting and highly refined version of a small home. The team also decided the houses should be designed using a kit of parts, with prefabricated structural insulated panels making up the walls of the homes to speed up the construction timeline and bring down costs.

Inside, the students dialed in on the least flexible parts of a house, the kitchen and bathroom. Requiring a lot of plumbing and electrical work, these rooms can make up a significant amount of the cost of construction depending on where they’re placed. So the students placed the spaces right next to each other, sharing a wall where all that infrastructure could be concentrated. “It has a lot of the electrical and all the plumbing in that one 10-foot wall,” Day says.

This wall, along with the house exterior walls and room dividers, can all be built in a factory, and students are now doing some of that prefab construction work themselves. “Someone could be putting a foundation in while the interior components are being fabricated in a shop,” Day says. “Everything comes together on the property to reduce construction time, and therefore cost.”

Taking this approach lent flexibility to the house design, which evolved in a major way from its earliest inklings. Originally planned as a single house for that corner lot in northeastern Omaha, the project got an unexpected alteration when a visiting official from the city’s planning department suggested subdividing the lot and making it into two houses. “And we’re like, ‘I didn’t know you would let me do that,'” Scheuerman says. “Like, ‘you’re gonna let me do that?'”

Now a two-house project, the students used their kitchen-bathroom wall as the central point of the designs and worked their way out from there. The larger house became a two bedroom, and the smaller a one bedroom. One has a peaked roof and the other a single slant, with extra room in a loft area. “The system has certain components that can be configured in different ways,” Day says.

That means the design can be more than just the aging-in-place housing Scheuerman initially set out to create. “Everyone puts an overlay on it,” she says. “People see this product, and they see artist housing, or they see rental income with an ADU. Or they see a solution for a problem that they have.”

Scheuerman envisions the first two houses as prototypes but they also prove that this approach is financially viable. The homes have been partly funded through philanthropy, including from the Lozier Foundation, material donations from window and door manufacturer Pella, and grants from the state of Nebraska’s Middle Income Workforce Housing Investment Fund. The local nonprofit community bank Spark Capital provided financing to complete construction, with up to $100,000 in forgiveness for nonprofit developers like Partners for Livable Omaha.

Scheuerman says the total cost to build both homes will be about $540,000. That exceeds their total sales prices but still manages to pencil out due to the loan forgiveness and grants that helped offset land and development costs. Without taking those offsets into account, the homes are still more affordable than the median home in the city. Scheuerman says future builds will likely be less expensive, based on lessons learned with these first two homes.

“At the end of the day, this project is pointless if the numbers don’t work,” Scheuerman says. “So we had to spend a ton of time being educated by the lending community, and by the appraisal community, and by the mortgage community. And they had some notes for the students, which ultimately made the design better.”

Into the developer’s seat

Scheuerman says proceeds from the sale of the two houses will be reinvested in land to build more. But she doesn’t want to build alone. Getting others to follow the model is a central part of the project, according to Scheuerman, and she says the combination of small size and prefabricated construction puts these houses at a price point where they can be feasibly financed by a wide range of people.

“There is a segment of the population that can come to market right now. They have high home equity or cash on hand,” she says. “We know people are ready to go, and we want to meet that market.”

To open that door, Day’s students are developing a catalog of different designs using this system, offering them up as pro-bono plans for people to apply to their own small house development projects. Funding from the American Institute of Architects and AARP helped start that work, and the Nebraska Department of Economic Development’s Nebraska Affordable Housing Trust Fund is supporting the catalog’s ongoing development. It should be available online this summer, and Scheuerman says it will be like a modern-day version of the housing that once appeared in the Sears catalog: affordable to build and easily accessible.

“Real estate development is our shared responsibility, and communities need to be empowered to get into the developer’s seat,” Scheuerman says. In less than two years, the OurStory houses have gone from idea to nearly completed homes. It’s a scalable approach that could start to chip away at the housing shortages plaguing Omaha and cities like it. “I double dog, triple dog dare you to build one,” she says. “That’s how easy we’re trying to make it.”

Product tagging would finally reduce the friction that comes from asking followers to click into a profile before tapping another link to find what they’re looking for. The feature will roll out this spring first for select creators in five markets before expanding to 22 countries, and it will allow up to 30 product links per post, Meta announced at the retail and e-commerce conference Shoptalk Spring, according to the trade publication Retail Dive. Meta did not respond to a request for comment.

“For creators, when it comes to highlighting products, this means that the era of link in bio is finally over,” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of the global business group at Meta, said at the conference.

The link in bio call to action started a work-around on an app that was long designed to keep users inside of it. Instagram used to offer users only one spot to add a link—on their profiles—so “link in bio” or DM automation became standard operating procedure for influencers and marketers looking to move their followers along a sales funnel.

As Instagram has grown into a social commerce hub, it’s slowly added more optionality for links. Meta added links for Stories in 2016, and in 2023 it gave users the ability to add up to five links to their profiles. Linkable product tags in Reels will let creators include links in content for the first time directly in the newsfeed, and it also will give them increased discoverability as Instagram’s algorithm pushes suggested content.

This and other design tweaks to the app come amid growing scrutiny of how social platforms are designed after a $3 million judgment against Meta and Google in a social media addiction trial last month, as well as amid a boom in creator advertising spend that reached $37 billion in 2025.

Meta sees product tagging in Reels as a way to let creators more easily monetize, but it also could be the beginning of the end of an era. The company is testing links in captions for Meta Verified subscribers, showing that old walls meant to discourage links to outside websites could soon be coming down.