Holland isn’t the only one opting for nonalcoholic options: approximately 30% of Americans are reducing their alcohol intake, and alcohol sales have plummeted since 2020.

Meanwhile, the nonalcoholic industry–and Bero–is exploding. Holland and co-founder John Herman’s brand made nearly $10 million in its first year of sales, and its 2026 revenue is projected to more than double as distribution expands and the brand launches new products, such as its shandy line and tie-in with The Odyssey.

“When we first started the company, if you would have said that we’d be closing a deal that opens over 3,000 doors in an evening, I would have laughed at you,” Holland says. “To be there today is super exciting.”

The rising sober tide

Whether protecting their livers or preventing a painful hangover, more consumers than ever are dodging alcohol’s harmful side effects. 

As Americans search for alternatives, the market for nonalcoholic beer, wine, and spirits is exploding. Between 2021 and 2025, sales of zero-proof products grew by 111% and dollar sales went up by 159%, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group representing small and independent craft brewers. 

Marten Lodewijks, president of drinks market analysis firm IWSR, attributes the growth in demand for nonalcoholic options to greater awareness of alcohol’s health drawbacks, inflation curbing spending on alcohol, and improving quality of non-intoxicating products.

“When they first started to really take off, I think there was a view that this might just be a short-term thing, that it’s a bit of a fad,” Lodewijks says. “What’s been probably more surprising to the industry is the consistency and the longevity.”

Beer leads the zero-proof market with over 500 brands in the US alone. Independent brands like Athletic Brewing and Best Day Brewing led the charge, with big names like Heineken, Guinness and Samuel Adams following suit.

To compete with “the big guys,” Lodewijks says dedicated nonalc companies need to focus on scaling their distribution efforts. With Bero, Holland and Herman have been intentional about scaling at retail while also stepping up presence in restaurants and bars.

Bero launched online in late 2024 before hitting the shelves of 1,200 Target locations nationwide. As its retail profile grew, the brand also expanded to bars and pubs across the U.S. and the U.K. While retail is still its key strength, Bero is widely available at New York staples like Soft Bar and Barfly.

Now it’s been well-positioned to be part of the World Cup experience for soccer fans who don’t indulge in alcohol but enjoy the experience of watching with others at the local bar.

“Football matches have a reputation for being a pretty boozy affair,” Holland says. “We can be present in those moments in bars, pubs, restaurants, hotels where people want to blend in and be part of that cultural, social experience, but don’t necessarily want to drink.”

A friendly neighborhood lifestyle brand

Bero’s presence alongside World Cup watch parties fits with the other ways Holland has worked to position it as a lifestyle brand for people who socialize around sports.

Since last year, Bero has hosted live events around sports like the first Bero Padel Classic in London in 2025. This year, as part of the brand and Holland’s partnership with Chase and its Sapphire Reserve for Business card, Bero brought the classic to Sherman Oaks, California, in April.

Outside events, Bero’s partnership with Chase has seen Holland take a starring role in ads about his journey as a founder for the business-focused credit card, which launched last summer.

“Our partnership with Tom Holland and Bero highlights the founder journey and what it really takes to run a business at scale,” Jenny Shum, general manager, small business card, at Chase said via email.

Whether through sports or casual sips, Holland says Bero is all about creating cultural moments of belonging.

“Bringing people together like that is exactly why we started the company,” Holland says. “The more events we can put on, the more people we can bring together and showcase our lovely beers, the better.”

The company has just unveiled Locale by Samara, an expansion into single family homebuilding. But these aren’t the typical single family homes, which now average nearly 2,200 square feet (204 square meters) in size in the U.S. Instead, the company is developing significantly smaller homes, ranging between 1,000 and 1,750 square feet, sited in urban infill sites in some of California’s most desirable cities, and built using the same modular, factory-based process that’s behind the company’s quickly constructed ADUs. It’s an attempt to counter the state’s extravagantly expensive and constrained housing market with homes that are sized and priced more like the starter homes of the past.

“It’s a missing form factor in California,” says the CEO, Mike McNamara. “The price points would be significantly lower on the back of the square footage. And we think it’s the right product, too, because more people want lower square footage, they want smaller yards, they want to be closer to the cities, not driving two hours to go to work.”

McNamara has led Samara since 2020, a few years after it was created as a research and development division within Airbnb. In 2022, it was spun out by McNamara and Airbnb’s cofounder, Joe Gebbia. (Gebbia, now the Trump administration’s chief design officer, is still involved with Samara as cofounder.) Since then the company has been selling backyard ADUs as products, handling the design, permitting, and construction for customers who want a turnkey additional unit on their property.

It’s a niche part of the housing market that’s grown significantly over the past decade, as municipalities and eventually the state have made ADUs legal and feasible to build. More than 30,000 were permitted statewide in 2024, a 20-fold increase from 2016, according to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development. Samara, which raised $34 million in Series B funding in late 2025, has 250 ADUs either built or in the works, with prices starting at $152,000 plus installation.

With Locale, Samara seeks to replicate that growth in small stand-alone homes clustered on lots that were once zoned exclusively for single family homes. Samara’s starter home focus comes on the heels of a recent amendment to California’s Starter Home Revitalization Act, which allows eligible lots to be subdivided for up to 10 small-footprint homes. The company has about 10 such cluster projects in various stages of development, and McNamara says Samara is using what it’s learned building ADUs in prefab housing factories to bring up the speed and bring down the cost of building single family homes.

“Our first product was an ADU, but it was never our objective to be an ADU company. It was always meant to be an infill company,” McNamara says. “We designed our entire system around that concept, around small form factor [compact] housing.”

Samara is playing the role of developer for these first 10 projects, buying the land, designing the clusters of homes to meet the site conditions, and going through the entitlement and permitting process. The company has permits to build in Los Angeles and in the northern California counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Sonoma.

The first Samara starter home projects are in Healdsburg, in the Sonoma County wine region. One project is two small homes, and the other is six. Each home has its own small yard and one-car garage, and abuts a shared paseo. The houses top out at 1,750 square feet. (The two-unit property is priced at $2.195 million, which the company contends is in line with similarly sized new construction in the area.)

McNamara says the projects are all designed specifically for their sites—partly due to the often oddly sized lots available for infill development, but partly to make the projects complement their surroundings. “We work really hard to find the right neighborhood where this slots in, where the neighborhood would benefit and the community would benefit by introducing some additional small form factor homes,” he says. “We want to make sure that we control what they look like because it’s really important for us to be received by the community and be attractive to the community and help that gentle densification that’s coming.”

Samara’s buildings tie into municipal grids for water, sewage, and electricity, and require a foundation. After the prefab modules are installed, the homes are ready for people to move in.

The first project is complete, and the second is expected to finish construction later this summer, using the same off-site building approach Samara has used to expedite the construction of its ADUs. “As soon as the foundation’s done, we can truck in our modules, put the modules on site, turn them into a home, and do that at a rate which is three times faster than what the traditional builders could do,” McNamara says.

That speed and the size of the homes will help bring prices down below the typically high cost of new housing in California. McNamara says it’s too early to say how much each home will sell for, but that they’re expected to be generally lower than the typical new home in each of the markets the company is targeting. “It’ll have a more approachable price point,” he says.

The houses are also designed with sustainability measures, including energy efficient utilities and appliances that can help make them more affordable to operate, as well as whole-house air and water filtration systems. Each will have solar panels and be prewired to run off batteries, and the exterior materials and forms were selected to reduce susceptibility to wildfire. McNamara expects to have more than 150 homes in the company’s development pipeline by the end of the year.

For now, Samara will be developing them on its own, but McNamara says there’s room for partnerships with other developers looking at infill development of a smaller variety.

“Densification is coming, and we’d like to help lead with that,” he says. “We think there’s a lot of opportunities.”

With a design informed by the trauma of war and a construction method optimized for a pressing need, Project Horizon is a modular, 15-bed pediatric hospital wing. It is located in Brody, a city of 150,000 people 50 miles from the border with Poland. Brody is far from the war zone in eastern Ukraine, but is nonetheless touched by the conflict, with an influx of internal migrants coming to the relative peace of the west.

Part of Brody Central City Hospital, the prefabricated hospital wing fills a deep need. Hundreds of hospitals and healthcare facilities across Ukraine have been damaged or destroyed during the war with Russia, adding extra pressure on the health infrastructure that remains.

Health care for a war-torn country

The wing received its first patients in late May. With private rooms, floor-to-ceiling windows, modern diagnostic equipment, and a color palette informed by studies on post-traumatic stress disorder, the facility is a light-filled space that softens the experience of going to the hospital for children and their families.

Sunflower Network, a U.S.-based nonprofit formed after the start of the war in 2022 to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians, instigated the project. At its inception, the nonprofit focused on raising money and sending medical supplies to healthcare workers on the front lines. But as the war dragged on and supply chains within the country adapted to the challenges of wartime, the organization identified a need for new infrastructure.

Aging Soviet-era hospitals made up the bulk of Ukraine’s healthcare system, and the facilities struggled to keep up with the strain caused by the war. “The human capital, the doctors and the nurses, are actually great, but the buildings are falling apart, and their equipment is substandard,” says Dean Ross, Sunflower Network’s executive director.

So the organization set out to build a new hospital. With support from the Clinton Global Initiative, Sunflower Network announced the project in 2023 and brought in high-profile collaborators to pull it off.

The hospital concept was developed in partnership with Ukraine’s Ministry of Health and New York-based Northwell Health, and was designed by Open Hand Studio, the public interest design arm of the global architecture firm CannonDesign; Pelli Clarke & Partners, another international architecture firm; and advisers from the real estate investment manager Hines. Sunflower Network raised more than $8 million to turn the concept into reality.

This budget proved enough for the modest size of the facility, but required creative planning to keep costs low.

Efficient and effective architecture

The design uses a modular approach, with the hospital wing built in an off-site facility and assembled on site. Construction took half the time of a conventionally built hospital.

“The approach we ended up fleshing out is not only going to deliver a facility that will exist in real life and save real children, but it laid a foundation for how rebuilding in a postcrisis context could be changed and done faster, cheaper, and more sustainably moving forward,” Ross says.

Off-site construction was the most important element of the project, for reasons beyond budget.

“We chose prefabricated modular technology because most of the able-bodied men were being conscripted to war, so there was a huge labor shortage, which would prevent us from being able to execute with confidence on time and on budget,” says Emma Bernstein, a Sunflower Network board member. “Being able to do this off site and in a controlled environment was something that we really felt like was going to increase our chances of success.”

The organization partnered with Climatic, a prefab manufacturer based in Poland, which was able to take on the project and truck the building’s modules to the site quickly.

Elisabeth Perreault, health practice leader at CannonDesign, says the company had just a 40-day timeline for turning the architects’ schematic designs into built modules, and then another 30 days for installation. “It’s incredibly rapid. So it’s very well suited to these types of projects and situations,” she says.

An environment of ‘normalcy’

Speed and cost were not the only concerns. Architectural experience was, too. This is a hospital for children growing up in a country deep in the throes of war, some of whom are enduring disease on top of the traumas of a war that has caused more than half a million casualties across Ukraine.

Mariko Masuoka, a partner at Pelli Clarke & Partners, says the hospital creates a welcoming environment, and also one of normalcy.

“It was important for us to have a lot of daylight in the facility with views outside,” she says. The exterior features soft colors and there’s a playground on site. Window treatments allow patients to see the trees outside while maintaining their privacy from passersby.

Perreault says the project used a trauma-informed design strategy that tried to account for the hospital’s unique clientele and their challenging conditions.

“We’re looking at the physical and emotional well-being of the providers, and the patients and their families,” she says. “What’s interesting here is with children, not only will they have post-traumatic stress disorder, they’ll also have separation anxiety. Having 100% private rooms not only is better from a health care perspective, but it also provides that private, secure space for families to be there in the room with the patients.”

A prototype for future hospitals

The hospital director, Tymus Myroslav Yaroslavovych, says the new hospital is a vast improvement from the previous facility, which was built 47 years ago. “I see it as a new approach to the treatment of children in Ukraine because the doctors are able to be next to the patients to provide them with all the needed help,” he says, speaking through a translator. “You feel the warmth inside. It will be for our children, and for our future.”

Sunflower Network’s Ross sees this as just the start of helping Ukraine rebuild the healthcare infrastructure it’s lost during the war. He says the modular design is intended to be replicated.

“Modular construction in a postconflict context has not been done, and that scalability is so attractive to all of us,” he says. “This model is more interesting than just the thousands of people that it can serve in a month. It’s the hundreds of thousands, or millions, across Ukraine and across the whole world.”

Psych! I’m not in Lincoln Park. I’m labeling and rating sidewalks from the comfort of my own couch in Los Angeles using Project Sidewalk, an online crowdsourcing platform dedicated to improving sidewalk accessibility.

Part immersive video game, part educational tool, Project Sidewalk allows people around the world to navigate down virtual streets using Google Maps Street View imagery, cataloging broken sidewalks, missing curb ramps, and faded crosswalks. That crowdsourced data, in turn, can feed powerful AI tools to detect and catalog sidewalk issues automatically.

Founded in 2012, Project Sidewalk was created to solve a fundamental problem: Cities don’t know the condition of their sidewalks. This spells disaster for pedestrians, especially people with disabilities.

The goal was initially to map every sidewalk, everywhere, all at once—but that’s shifted over the years.

“AI has never been better,” says Jon Froehlich, Project Sidewalk cofounder and professor of computer science at the University of Washington. “It’s certainly not good enough as an expert evaluator, and it most certainly can’t capture the perspective of lived experience.”

Instead, Project Sidewalk has become a powerful tool for community engagement and grassroots political action on the local level.

Starting in 2021, Girl Scouts and community members in Oradell, New Jersey, mapped nearly 36 miles and identified more than 11,000 potential sidewalk issues. The Scouts then presented their findings to the city council, advocating for adding missing curb ramps to improve accessibility.

Mapping sidewalks is hard but machine learning has shown great promise on one front: finding curb ramps. A recent mapping attempt found that a new ramp detection tool was more accurate than humans at 96.9% in Vancouver, Washington.

However, AI is not as good at finding things that are caused by nature, like sidewalk uplifts from tree roots, says Froehlich.

Where the sidewalk data ends

Many sidewalks in the U.S. are either missing or broken—but so is available sidewalk data. Part of this is due to a fear of liability, experts say.

If someone trips and falls due to a crack in the sidewalk and can prove that the city knew about the issue, could that mean an expensive payout in the case of a lawsuit?

“If only we had a nickel,” jokes Froehlich about the number of times he’s heard this.

To combat this fear, the Great Lakes ADA Center published a story map about ADA lawsuits. Part of the problem, says Yochai Eisenberg, site lead for Project Sidewalk at the University of Illinois Chicago and co-author of the report, is the lack of clear guidance from the federal government. Despite this, he believes data is an asset, not a liability.

“Having data, having a plan, making progress towards that plan is just the clearest way to defend against any lawsuit,” he says.

In fact, cities are required to develop and maintain an up-to-date ADA transition plan showing how they will make streets and sidewalks accessible to people with disabilities. Unfortunately, very few cities have a compliant transition plan.

Instead of being driven by data, sidewalk improvements are often driven by complaints. But with a dual approach of crowdsourced data and community engagement, some cities have won infrastructure dollars to improve accessibility.

In Mendota, Illinois, community members, including middle and high school students, mapped streets and won $3 million in grant funding.

“They’re an older city, they had a lot of missing sidewalks, a lot of missing curb ramps,” Eisenberg says. “So it was clear why they could make a clear case about why the funding was needed for receiving that grant.”

Sidewalk data alone isn’t enough to fix broken sidewalks, but without it, it’s impossible to do so equitably, believes Laura Messier, a researcher studying the relationship between public health and the public-right-of-way. (Froehlich is a member of her dissertation committee.)

“The inventorying of the sidewalks could very much show people, ‘Yes, we are moving toward improving these conditions,’” she says. “But again, only if combined with actual money and actual action.”

Compared to roads, sidewalks have historically been underfunded and treated as secondary transportation infrastructure. Many people are surprised to learn that sidewalk maintenance is often the responsibility of the adjacent property owner, further fragmenting governance of the public-right-of-way.

“Someone is also going to have to coordinate them and basically force them to do that work, because they’re not going to do it on their own,” Messier says. “It just seems, on its face, insane.”

Where control of the sidewalk ends

In Denver, voters passed a 2022 ballot measure for a special fee to fund sidewalks.

“For the first time, sidewalks will function more like streets, with ongoing citywide care, consistent standards, and dedicated funding,” reads the sidewalk program’s website.

To Messier, the path to better sidewalks lies in cities taking ownership of sidewalks as public space. This shift, from property owner discretion to public asset is long overdue—but not everyone wants sidewalks.

“In my own experience in Dallas, I definitely talked to people who did not want sidewalks in front of their house, because there was this perception of, ‘You’re inviting the public in,’” Messier says.

In Seattle, Froehlich was surprised to find that one of the wealthiest neighborhoods has very poor infrastructure.

“They have sidewalks on both sides of the street, but not a lot of curb ramps,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s a measure of closing off that peninsula because they already feel a little insular.”

The future of better sidewalks might be the next generation. An eighth grade student in Waltham, Massachusetts, told his teacher about Project Sidewalk and the entire class is now mapping sidewalks as a civics project. So far students have mapped nearly 18 miles or about 12% of the city’s sidewalks.

KiAnna Mckee-Steen, project coordinator for the University of Illinois Chicago, is developing K-12 curriculum for Project Sidewalk and has witnessed firsthand how it’s changed how students view the world.

“This wasn’t an issue that I was aware of growing up,” Mckee-Steen says. “I had streets that had sidewalks, I had streets that didn’t have sidewalks, but we just walked in the street. I didn’t realize how much people were impacted that couldn’t move like me.”

This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next City’s newsletter for its latest articles and events.

As the only American museum devoted exclusively to historical and contemporary design, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has collected more than 200,000 designs spanning from physical objects and prototypes to digital technologies and even a computer virus. However, relatively few of these objects are on public view at any given moment.

When the museum has exhibited objects from its collection it’s usually been to support special exhibitions or in limited thematic presentations. But, thanks to three years worth of efforts, the museum opened the doors to its first extended permanent collection exhibition: Design Across Time, which will be on view for at least two years.

“If you can’t see what the permanent collection of a museum is, you wonder what the museum is about,” Maria Nicanor, director of the museum, tells Fast Company. “This is a great introduction for people to understand that the country has a national collection and that it has all of these stories here—and then some.”

Peering into the archives

Cooper Hewitt is not the only institution reevaluating how to make its collections more accessible to the public, since many artifacts are on view only during show. For reference, experts estimate that around 95% of collections from museums are hidden and not available to the public, which has led to some museums opening up their collections entirely. Notably, the V&A Storehouse now allows individuals to book appointments to access its collection and view artifacts in storage.

But, while bringing accessibility to the collection is still top of mind for Cooper Hewitt, its approach has been a more complex and curated undertaking.

It took a team of around 10 curators and several partners to parse through the hundreds of thousands of items in the museum’s collection, narrowing down the collection to 125 items across multiple design disciplines. Some objects—like a recently acquired Toots Zynsky vessel—are on view for the first time.

“Everybody brought printouts of favorite things in their collection, perhaps things that have never been on view, a mix of recent acquisitions as well as old favorites,” says Julie Pastor, a curatorial assistant. “We tried to come up with a mix of things that felt familiar, but maybe things that felt surprising.”

Occupying the entire ground floor of the Carnegie mansion, the exhibition includes objects as old as ancient Egypt, like the Lotus-shaped cup from 1100 BC, or as new as the 2020s, like an interactive news story about the death toll of COVID-19 by The New York Times.

The objects are set up across axis vitrines across the first-floor galleries, with the exhibition design by the London-based architecture firm JA Projects helping the objects coexist with the surrounding Gilded Age architecture and decor. The exhibition is grounded with contemporary design from the creative agency Pacific, which came up with a graphic system that renders objects to silhouettes to help condense the visuals into one graphic language.

Rather than presenting the collection chronographically, curators opted to group objects into six themes instead. There is Repeat, which explores modularity and the use of standardized repeated for both scaling or aesthetic purposes; Transform, which highlights innovation, new applications, and unexpected materials; and Show Off, which celebrates craftsmanship and the lure of excess while questioning consumption. Set right across is Simplify, contrasting with the extravagance of Show Off and instead offering objects that distill designs to their essential elements. The other two themes celebrate the process of arriving at a design: Tweak, which explores iterative changes through prototypes, sketches and models; and Play, which highlights designs that invite user interaction. Together, the pieces weave a tapestry using threads of both history and modernity.

“We are walking around with 125 objects right now, but we’re walking around with thousands of ideas, and we choose to attach them to objects because we love objects,” says Nicanor, the museum director. “But we love ideas even more. These are just conversation starters, as are the themes, to talk about this much larger global conversations.”

Meeting the moment

From one gallery to another, each piece serves as its own story in dialogue with the rest, many of which reflect a reaction to a time of crisis.

For instance, many serve as creative records of events. From the Transform section, Oil and Water Do Not Mix, a framed screen-printed poster by Anthony Burrill and Tom Gale, is a reaction to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Contaminated sand mixed with an extender base comprises its shimmering ink.

“It’s all about how you look at the object and what story you choose to pick, because all of these objects have many stories in them,” Nicanor says. “We could look and talk about the beauty of this particular print and focus on it aesthetically, but there are so many more layers to it.”

A similar approach can be seen right across the room with Rare Earthware, a pair of vessels made from mud polluted with radioactive materials used in the supply chain of electronics. Made by Unknown Fields and also a part of the Transform theme, the piece features two vases, each reflecting the amount of toxic waste produced to create a phone (smaller vase) and a laptop (larger vase).

But beyond the stories each piece might tell, the exhibition manages to achieve something even more challenging: broadening the definition of design to more than just tangible objects.

“We also have things that speak to architecture, cities, and even older, more historical objects in our collection,” says Pastor, the curatorial assistant. “And that’s such an important way to think and work with design: something that we all experience every day, whether we are conscious of it or not.”

A civic purpose

Widening the definition of design helps recenter its importance on daily life, from spotting bad designs to calling for improvements.

For example, there’s New Urban Ground by Susannah Churchill Drake and ARO, which depicts a 2009 proposal for NYC’s Lower Manhattan waterfront that aimed to increase the city’s resilience even before the devastating Hurricane Sandy of 2012. The ideas in this piece remain relevant for urban issues today.

“In the end, if you know where your things come from and you know who made it and why and what their purpose was, then you’re charged with information,” Nicanor says. “You become a better citizen if you have knowledge. Design is not neutral. It’s also not a luxury. It should be your right to have good design in your life.” 

Between the two announcements, Meta and Alphabet were found culpable for teen addiction related to the design of their social media algorithms, verdicts that could open the floodgates for tens of thousands more. By then, localities across the U.S. had halted or delayed over $155 billion in new data center projects due to concerns about skyrocketing water use and electricity prices. 

The losses, lawsuits, resistance, and rein-ins reveal something the techno-optimist set keeps getting wrong. While technical breakthroughs open up new possibilities, breakthroughs alone—even well-resourced and/or well-intentioned ones—aren’t enough to create meaningful, lasting progress. True progress includes the decision about what to keep and what to refuse. True progress is built on constraints.

The word constraints conjures up images of limits: budgets, timelines, and resources. Those realities count, but the constraints that make things worthwhile are the ones we choose—the lines we draw about what to refuse and what to insist on.

The question isn’t whether or not we should embrace constraints. If things people build turn out to be harmful or useless, we almost always constrain them (eventually), like we did with breakthrough materials like asbestos and hydrogenated oils. The real question is when. And when makes all the difference. If we draw the line early, breakthroughs can create value for people. When we draw it late, they become a cost for society. And that’s not progress. 

Today we’re in the early stages of a new breakthrough with artificial intelligence, and it’s the right moment to take a good, hard look at what counts as progress. In short, progress should be judged by the fruit it produces, not simply by the pace of productivity. Breakthroughs naturally outpace our ability to make good use of them—that’s what makes them breakthroughs. But breakthroughs without constraints leave us sifting through a smoldering pile of what we can do (good and bad) instead of creating a world built upon what’s actually worth doing. Constraints are not antiprogress; they are key to it. 

Design is a field well acquainted with the value of constraints. The proliferation of the printing press in the 1400s spawned typography standards in the 1500s. Bauhaus principles of the early 1900s aimed to tame the industrial chaos of the late 1800s by reviving a sense of craft and humanity. The 1990s internet sprawled until UI/UX design brought order in the 2000s. Breakthroughs expand possibilities. Constraints turn those possibilities into the things we actually value. 

We’re in the same cycle now, with two distinct differences. First, the pace is picking up. So much so that even the people inventing and shaping AI aren’t able to plan more than three months ahead. (I’ve spoken to leaders at large language model companies who say they are on two-week timelines and others at software firms who count their cycles in days.) Possibilities—for better and worse—are expanding like mad. 

Second, with each breakthrough, we transcend our prior constraints. Old buildings look lovely in part because building techniques and materials were constrained to natural elements like brick and wood and stone. Architects of today have much more freedom, but the ones who create timeless structures understand they have to make highly restrained choices. Not only do we need constraints around emerging tech, we have to get better at choosing them. Progress by design is saying yes to some things and no to others. 

As technological breakthroughs continue apace, our ability to design worthwhile constraints has to catch up. It’s not hard to imagine; commitment is the issue. It starts with making commonsense choices that address effects, agnostic of tech—like say, don’t break things you can’t fix, sell things you wouldn’t give your own family, addict kids, or profit from despair. From there, it’s about developing tactics to anticipate side effects—like the confusion that AI-generated content and artificial personalities are likely to produce—and design constraints before they arrive. 

It’s helpful to look to the past for guidance and nuance. Like today, past designers had different relationships with breakthrough technologies of their era. Some, like Charles and Ray Eames, embraced emerging technologies and used them to make better things. In their words, to create “the best [products], for the most [people], for the least [cost].” Others, like Victor Papanek, rejected most technology in favor of simple methods to empower DIY counterculture. 

For those who choose to buy into the current round of breakthroughs, and want to improve on them, there is plenty of tuning to do to make these technologies more useful. Now is the time to design better UI for AI and—god forbid—help people collaborate rather than compete. Today’s ubiquitous, single-player chat window is like the blue links of the early internet: convenient, but nothing close to the potential. 

A skeptical approach brings attention to undesirable side effects that seem to be showing up almost instantly alongside AI breakthroughs, like AI-induced psychosis in people with no prior indications or the growing concern of ”human enfeeblement.”  Others are trying to reject the tech altogether, as in-person, digital-free experience design is already undergoing a renaissance and techniques for AI abstinence are also on the rise. Regardless of the approach (buy-in, skepticism, or rejection), each can create value via constraints. 

None of this is to say the build-and-breakthrough ethos is entirely wrong. It’s just incomplete. Allow me an allegory. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and his rival Belloq are racing to find the Ark of the Covenant. The key is a medallion that, mounted atop a staff of just the right height, refracts sunlight onto a map to reveal the Ark’s location.

Both men have a medallion, but Belloq’s is a copy, with instructions only on the front. Indy’s original has an inscription on the backside too.

Belloq builds his staff according to the front-side instructions which say the staff should be 6 kadams tall (about 72 inches). He shines the light, marks the spot, and starts digging. Meanwhile, Indy gets the backside translated. It includes another instruction, “and take away one kadam to honor the God whose Ark this is.” The proper height is 5 kadams, not 6. With only half the instructions, Belloq built the staff too tall. He’s digging in the wrong place! 

With their advocacy of breakthroughs as the one path to progress, hardcore techno-optimists are digging in the wrong place. They confidently—albeit naively, and often willingly—follow half of the instructions as if they have the whole picture. They believe technological breakthroughs are all that’s needed for progress. Actually, breakthroughs are necessary but not sufficient for progress. Real progress requires raising the bar and trimming it down. 

Constraints don’t need to be aimed at the tech itself (let development continue apace). They should aim at the effects (define what we don’t want now so if and when it happens, we have a ready way to rein it in). But to do so, we need to stop pretending technologists own the path to progress. Though breakthroughs may lay the groundwork, even the people helming the companies that are building foundational AI models readily admit they have no idea what they are dealing with. 

The job of inventors is to create new realms of possibility. We can love them for that. But we can’t leave progress in the hands of the technically savvy alone. Technical capability is not wisdom, engineering is not understanding, feasibility doesn’t guarantee desirability—and possibility alone is not progress. Most importantly, thoughtful constraints are not antiprogress; they are provalue. 

Build. Abundance. Sure. But, embrace constraints as a key part of the path to progress. Well-designed constraints don’t impede progress—real progress depends on them. 

Its newest collection features tiny, intricate leather flowers—cherry blossoms, sunflowers, and daisies—that clip onto a strap, adding a jolt of personality to an otherwise formal bag. There’s also a bumblebee and a snail to round out the garden themes. Last season’s collection included jewel-toned fruits and vegetables: snap peas, carrots, chilis, and mushrooms. A recent Pikachu capsule, timed to Pokémon’s 30th anniversary, sold out almost immediately.

What most customers don’t realize is that those charms are born on the cutting-room floor, from the scraps of colorful leather left from other bags. These offcuts are part of an ongoing “Sabrémoji” charm line that keeps Maison de Sabré customers coming back to the brand season after season. Since they’re limited-edition offerings—dependent on what offcuts are currently available—they’ve also become collectibles. It’s a waste-prevention strategy that generates sales and lets customers personalize a classic bag.

The clearest sign of how central those charms are to the brand’s identity is the newest bag in the collection. Maison de Sabré recently launched the Soft Trio, a crossbody deliberately designed with clasps and hooks to show off the charms. It’s part of the company’s broader ambition of building the next generation of luxury brand, where sustainability is a central value.

The New Rules of Luxury

Maison de Sabré was founded by brothers Omar and Zane Sabré, who grew up in New Zealand. They originally trained as dentists, but when their father got sick, they realized they didn’t want to spend their lives pursuing careers that weren’t emotionally satisfying to them. As they talked about the future, they discovered a mutual passion for building a luxury brand that would carry their family name and outlive them.

They poured $40,000 of savings into their new label, which launched out of Australia. Its very first product, a line of colorful, leather-wrapped iPhone cases, generated $2 million in revenue in its first year. After six years of selling directly to consumers, the company—entirely self-funded—has now expanded into retailers like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Saks, and Le Bon Marché in Paris. This has accelerated their growth over the past three years. Today, the U.S. is their biggest market.

The Sabré brothers have spent a lot of time thinking about what a modern luxury brand should be. Like older generations of luxury consumers, millennials and Gen Zers prize beauty, good design, and durability, but they also expect luxury to be joyful, sustainable, and fairly priced. (Maison de Sabré bags cost $400 to $800, which is between a third and a quarter of the price of brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel, even though they use similar-quality leather.)

They carefully designed a line of bags with classic silhouettes—a traditional structured work bag, a bucket bag, a tote—but make them in a wide range of hues. The leather comes in vibrant orange, sky blue, and bubblegum pink. “Our brand has a streak of childhood nostalgia and unexpected playfulness,” Omar says. “Color allows us to distinguish ourselves from our competitors.”

While many established luxury brands are now working to become more sustainable by lowering their carbon footprint and rethinking the use of scraps, Maison de Sabré has built a sustainable supply chain from the ground up. Every hide is tanned using DriTan, a modern method that uses net zero water, which means all water used in the process is reused.

This saves 22 liters of water per hide, which translated to more than a million liters last year alone. There is also no sludge produced in the tanning process. Wastewater from the tanning is treated and reused, while tannery by-products are turned into biofuel to power generators that run the tannery itself. “Sustainability is not just about carbon offsets,” Zane says. “It’s about thinking of how we make the products in the first place.”

Turning Scraps Into Keepsakes

The company has a target of using 95% of all materials, which is much higher than that of many competitors who leave a lot of waste on the cutting-room floor. This means being strategic about how the bags are made in the first place, creating patterns that reduce waste. But it also means turning whatever is left into something covetable.

Omar says the Sabrémoji line began as a solution to a problem five years ago. One of its material warehouses was sitting on excess residual materials from a production run, and given that Maison de Sabré uses high-end leathers, these were expensive scraps. The answer was to transform the leftover leather to an AirTag-holder product that the brand had already been testing. “The excess materials were in all these wonderful tones and hues,” Omar recalls.

Creating the charms is harder than it looks. The colors and quantities are dictated entirely by whatever Maison de Sabré’s designers have created for that season. Once they’ve assessed what scraps are available, they design intricate, multitone items that use slivers of leather.

Omar says the company had to work to find artisans who were skilled at this kind of leatherwork. And each charm must be able to hold an AirTag, so it’s functional, not just whimsical. “Everything is specialized,” he says. “We work with our production teams to teach them how to craft these products.”

Now the company is building entire product lines to highlight the Sabrémoji charms. The newest launch, the Soft Trio, is a crossbody that is built for customization. It has several metal rings specifically designed to attach charms. And it can also be paired with interchangeable straps and handles, also made from upcycled offcuts, to create more than 720 styling combinations. “The contrasting colors are meant to move people away from perfect matching colors, towards expressing something more personal,” Zane says.

What began as a fix for a warehouse full of leftover leather has become a design philosophy. And the Sabré brothers are betting that this is the key to holding on to the luxury customer of the future.

Characters on Norway’s 2024 jerseys were jagged, sharp, and not easily discernible. On the country’s home kits, they were beveled and even more difficult to make out, baffling plenty of first-time viewers. Plus, they didn’t adhere to FIFA’s rules for the typography of World Cup kits to be “clearly legible and distinguishable from a distance” for players, officials, spectators, and the media.

So for the 2026 World Cup, Norway’s first appearance in the tournament since 1998, Nike, which makes their kits, helped the team design a new font that balances readability with heritage.

The typeface used for Norway’s uniforms is called Taakeferd, a Norwegian word meaning “journey through the fog.” It nods to the country’s return to the World Cup for the first time in 28 years.

FIFA regulations also specify the sizing and placement of player names and numbers on uniforms, and they must be in Latin characters, though they can use diacritical marks, like accents and umlauts.

With Norway headed to the quarterfinals Saturday against England, it’s clear Taakeferd passed the test. The typeface is composed of vertical or diagonal lines, which makes for distinctive, triangular shapes on curved Latin letterform in letters like B and R.

The Nike design team designed Taakeferd in partnership with the Norwegian Football Federation; the goal was to create kits that felt unmistakably Norwegian.

Norway’s home kit is based on the country’s flag—a red, white, and blue Scandinavian cross—and its away kit is all black. A Viking-style font for the names, numbers, and “Norge” written on the inside back collar sure helped.

Nike says the typeface was designed after extensive research.

“We studied the Runic alphabet’s angular strokes and sharp geometry, then adapted those design lines to work within the modern Roman [Latin] alphabet, preserving the runic DNA, while keeping the typography clean, legible on broadcast, and unmistakably contemporary,” a spokesperson for Nike’s design team tells Fast Company.

“Numerous iterations of most letters and numbers were created before landing on the final version, and readability was clearly a driving constraint through that process, not an afterthought,” the Nike spokesperson says. “The result is a custom typeface that lets every player wear a piece of Norway’s history on their back.”

Runic alphabets were used by Nordic and other European peoples until about the 16th or 17th centuries, and their tall, angular letterforms still inspire type designers today. Noto Sans Runic is an open source Google font and sans-serif typeface for texts in the historical European Runic script, while contemporary typefaces like Notdef, Nordic, and Norse approach runic-inspired shapes in their own ways.

For Norway’s national team, Taakeferd keeps the runic style intact with sharp angles and unique characters you won’t find on any other team’s jerseys, translating this typographic history for the rest of the world.

How do you build a new tower on top of an old one?

On its website highlighting the midtown project, adaptive reuse firm Collaborative Construction Management says the nine-story building from 1909 will be “threaded through” with a new addition of about 30 stories of poured concrete.

Schafer, who is not involved with the undertaking, said the likely approach is to have the century-old building continue to carry its own weight while building a new structural system to support additions.

“My interpretation would be that they’re going to leave that building carrying its own load, and they’re just going to poke holes in it so that they can take the load from the building that they’ve put above it and bring it all the way down to the foundation,” Schafer said.

Schafer said construction on the other tower presents a different challenge: punching holes in the existing floor plate to bring light into apartments, while also ensuring that the steel frame can support the newly added loads.

City officials have not determined what caused the columns to buckle. But both Schafer and Emily Guglielmo, a San Francisco-based structural engineer, believe the failure likely resulted from the added load.

Spokespersons for MetroLoft, the project developer, didn’t respond to requests for comment Thursday. But Nathan Berman, the firm’s founder, acknowledged in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that the added weight from widening the top 15 or so floors of the building likely caused the damage.

Guglielmo thinks that either the original design assumptions were misunderstood, something went wrong during the design or construction process, or construction crews overloaded or weakened the structure.

Adding stories to existing buildings is common in dense urban areas where land is scarce, she said, but it requires reviewing original construction documents and inspecting the building before determining how additional floors will affect the structure.

“In cities and towns that don’t have that available geography, you’re going to see a lot more of this type of a design where there’s an adaptive reuse to an existing building,” Guglielmo said.

Why not just create a new building from scratch?

To many structural engineers, demolition should occur only as a last resort.

“Tearing buildings down is a terrible waste,” Schafer said, pointing out that buildings and the construction sector are responsible for about 40% of the world’s energy-related carbon emissions. “From a sustainability standpoint, that’s a disaster.”

Beyond the environmental costs, demolishing and hauling away the remnants of huge buildings is especially expensive in dense cities such as New York.

If an existing structure can safely be reused, engineers generally prefer that.

James LaFave, a structural engineering professor at the University of Illinois, said a steel-framed building from the 1960s, like the former Pfizer structure, would typically be a “very good” starting point for a conversion.

Does the scare in New York call into question other adaptive reuse projects?
In recent years, officials across the country have embraced office-to-housing conversions as a potential lifeline for downtown business districts that have struggled since the pandemic.

New York, especially, has embraced this push, as officials have made zoning changes and enacted tax incentives to spur housing production. A report from the New York City comptroller’s office last year noted there are 44 adaptive reuse projects in the city that, as of early 2025, had either been completed, were underway or could move forward.

Pfizer moved out of the building in 2023 after opening a new office near Penn Station, leaving the property vacant. Construction on the property began in 2024.

Joshua Harris, director of Fordham University’s Real Estate Institute, said office-to-residential conversions are a key part of solving the housing shortages in New York and other cities, even if they come with risk.

“In a certain sense, it’s not terribly surprising that this happened, and we should have a little bit of grace,” he said. “These are very, very complicated surgical procedures being done to very old buildings.”

“This is part of the reality of fixing the housing crisis,” Harris continued. “Things like this can happen. It doesn’t look as complex as putting a rocket into space, but, in a real estate sense, construction in an environment like Manhattan on 42nd Street and Second Avenue is very complex.”

Guglielmo, the California engineer, said a combination of building codes, inspections and experienced construction crews makes failures like this rare.

“We’re very fortunate here in the United States that we are not seeing these types of failures on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “We’re privileged to have really robust building codes that explain to us as engineers how to do our designs in a way that’s safe.”

Still, Harris said it is likely a gut check for the industry, as office conversions transform once sleepy business districts across the city into 24/7 neighborhoods, like parts of Wall Street in recent years.

“If this building has a problem, all the other projects that have been sort of greenlit, they’re going to want to review to make sure that it’s not something similar,” Harris said.

—R.J. Rico, Jessica Hill and Philip Marcelo, Associated Press

Fans tear open blind packs of seven stickers, hoping for players they haven’t found yet and trading the ones they already have. The stickers—each 1.9 by 2.5 inches and featuring a player’s photo—are then pasted into a 112-page sticker book with designated spaces for each player and team.

The goal? Find each of the 980 stickers.

Panini’s sticker craze has long been a FIFA fandom tradition, captivating fans across Europe and Latin America since Panini first partnered with FIFA for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Collectors swap anywhere from Italian cafés to English schoolyards. During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Argentina sold out of presale stickers in just one hour.

But much like soccer itself, Panini’s stickers have never taken off in the U.S.—until now. 

As the World Cup comes to America, Panini is capturing the opportunity to expand to a new audience with nationwide trading events and a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Coca-Cola.

“This year, we set our sights on something bigger,” says Jason Howarth, Panini America’s senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations. “We knew everybody would be paying attention, and not just die-hard soccer fans.”

Paste the feeling

In March, Panini America announced it would place FIFA stickers underneath labels on nearly 400 million 20-ounce Coke bottles. Collectors peel back the film to reveal their card, though a perfectly tilted angle and good lighting might give it away for cost-conscious customers. 

The special edition bottles are sold across retailers like Walgreens and CVS, and are available at World Cup matches and fan events. 

“It’s not simple, especially with the scale and the velocity of our production line,” says Miguel Saucedo, Coca-Cola’s senior director of marketing activation for the 2026 World Cup. “So we made sure this was perfectly executed, and it was done in a very fan-centric and consumer way.”

Saucedo says a priority was to include both international stars and players from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico—celebrating the diverse North American fandom.

Panini also partners with Adidas, Home Depot, and the personal health giant Unilever. At Unilever’s House of Fresh World Cup popups in New York, Miami and Mexico City, attendees made personalized Panini stickers. 

Transitioning tradition

For decades, sports trading cards have been a big American hobby and investment market. Topps, the exclusive producer of Major League Baseball cards, is valued at roughly $500 million.

Panini is trying to replicate the success that sports card collecting has seen in the U.S., but with stickers.

In 2022, the brand introduced different colored borders—white, blue, red, purple, green, and black—to their U.S. FIFA products. The borders signify the sticker’s rarity. While stickers with blue and white borders are relatively common, a black-bordered sticker is the only one of its kind. A 2022 black Lionel Messi sticker sold for a record $139,200.

But unlike American sports cards, which fans encase in plastic albums for protection and safekeeping, Panini customers peel and paste the sticker to a catalog. Once a sticker is stuck, it loses its value, so consumers need to be careful with rare stickers.  

Ensuring the stickers have as much value as possible is a game of prediction for Panini. Panini’s stickers go to press before the World Cup rosters are finalized. Panini releases another set of stickers to ensure the most exciting players have a spot in the catalog. 

An international phenomenon with a community focus

Panini hosted sticker swap events and gave out 10 million free sticker packs across the country to excite American collectors. The official Panini sticker truck parked at New York City’s Rockefeller Center on June 4. It will stay there during the NYNJ World Cup 26 & Telemundo Fan Village, which runs through July 19.

This year is the fifth World Cup with Panini for Howarth, the senior marketing VP, and he says he is amazed at how the trading culture has taken off. He loves seeing fans connect over soccer. 

“I’ve had some friends say how they have been carrying stickers on planes with them, and every time they see a little kid with a soccer jersey on, they’re handing them sticker packets,” says Howarth. “Those are just the things that, like, no one sees, but everyone loves, and makes the collection so much more special.”

UBTech is framing the U1 as a human companion and believes the future of the robotics industry lies in providing emotional support. The company’s chief brand officer, Michael Tam, describes the human-robot companionship economy as “the first essential scenario in human history with unlimited emotional value, boundless companionship, and full-life-cycle coverage.”

In a press release, the company said that 90 million people in China live alone, and spoke of hypothetical uses such as elder care, reception and hospitality, and “premium domestic service applications” (whatever that means). 

At last Tuesday’s launch in Shenzhen, representatives from the company touted the robot’s ability to hold conversations and maintain eye contact. It still has plenty of flaws—no one is actually mistaking this for a person—but think of it as Version 0.1 of the replicants from Blade Runner, an important leap for the future of embodied artificial intelligence.

A closer look at the U1

What we saw in Shenzhen last Tuesday is far from a perfect human robot. The U1 sits deep in what’s known as the “uncanny valley,” because the closer a machine gets to looking human, the more its flaws stand out, triggering an automatic sense of revulsion in your brain. It’s a byproduct of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that makes our brain quickly notice anything that feels off.

The U1 has silicone skin (those who’ve touched it say it feels just like human skin, “but cold”). It’s able to pick up on the tone of your voice, and processes emotions without sending data to an external server. 

But the illusion breaks during interactions. Critically, its joint movements still give away the motors hiding beneath that skin. Its physical abilities are limited, its muscles don’t move the way a human’s do, and its “emotional intelligence” is, at bottom, the product of pattern recognition and language-model prediction, not real feeling. 

It won’t take hundreds of thousands of years for these robots to become androids indistinguishable from human beings, straight out of Philip K. Dick’s fiction. Yet, given the current objectives of the robotic industry, we may not see it in our lifetimes unless more companies bet on it.

The business of humanoid robots

The U1 isn’t a delivery robot, a tablet assembler, or a wheeled assistant like the ones already working the streets, hospitals, hotels, and factories across China for months now. 

Right now, Chinese companies like Unitree or Xpeng and American corporations like Tesla or Figure AI are ignoring humanoids of this kind, focusing on more utilitarian designs. In fact, they are mostly ignoring the home market for the time being, designing robots with assembly lines and warehouses in mind. 

This is because putting one of these robots in a house is far more complicated than deploying one in an industrial setting, where environments are controlled and tasks are repetitive. A home has furniture that moves around, objects scattered on the floor, and kids, elderly people, or pets the robot simply can’t afford to trip over. 

There’s also the matter of human acceptance, a question with an answer that is far from settled. 

A 2016 study found that a partially human-looking design was accepted by people already familiar with gadgets, but others didn’t like it at all. A 2025 study went further by tracking physiological signals, heart activity, skin conductance, and gaze, and found that human-like faces provoked stronger negative emotional reactions than robotic-looking ones. On the other hand, a human-sounding voice had the opposite effect, calming users and shaping a more favorable impression.

Regardless of these unknowns and difficulties, UBTech believes that many people will want these human-like robots, not for purposes like household chores but for companionship. After all, a robot will always be loyal to you, the company says.

The technical hurdles

To enter the market, robots will first have to depart the uncanny valley. 

While these mass-produced androids may be the most realistic robots yet, watching them talk clearly shows how crude their movements are. The human face runs on 43 muscles, capable of producing an estimated 10,000 microexpressions. The subtle motion of facial muscles contracting and stretching are absent in the robot, and that level of detail will be required to truly behave like a human being. 

According to Jiao Jichao, UBTech vice president and head of its humanoid robotics institute, “One of the biggest challenges was making the robot look and behave naturally after fitting complex mechanical systems into a human-sized body, as well as ensuring its facial expressions matched speech and emotion and that it could deliver consistent performance at scale.” Thousands of tightly packed components sit inside a single head, and not one of them can fall out of sync with what the robot is saying.

Professor Shoji Takeuchi’s team at the University of Tokyo grew actual human skin cells over a robotic face and got it to hold a smile, which points at some of the missing details.

“We identified new challenges, such as the necessity for surface wrinkles and a thicker epidermis to achieve a more humanlike appearance,” Takeuchi noted, adding that the fix requires “incorporating sweat glands, sebaceous glands, pores, blood vessels, fat, and nerves.” 

And that’s just the physical side. The complexity of replicating the lip, tongue, and larynx motions to produce words (or just lip-synch to a synthetic voice) is still decades ahead. The software needed to run this may be closer than the hardware, as our understanding of how these muscles create expressions is good. Connecting the muscles to an AI as it simulates emotions, is an entirely different beast, however. 

It is important to remember that the U1 is just the first alpha version of a humanoid robot. Yes, it is rough and far from the end goal, but it is commercially available and that’s a big development.

A robot customers actually want to buy

The product page on the JD.com online marketplace racked up more than a million views the moment preorders opened, UBTech claims. Zhou Jian, UBTech’s founder and CEO, confirmed at the U1 presentation event that reservations—which are limited till July 15—had already topped 13,000 units, backed by a refundable deposit of 3,000 yuan (about $442).

The company’s first version of this robot comes in female and male versions. The former standing 5 feet 6 inches tall, the latter 6 feet. Both feature 88 servomotors distributed across the body’s joints, plus a dual-pivot biomimetic neck structure that UBTech says can replicate roughly 90% of common human movements. Prices range from about $17,650 for the Lite version up to $146,000 for the Ultra, with a mid-tier Pro model in between for around $25,000. 

The Lite ships as a compact, semitorso unit, while the Pro and Ultra are both full-body robots. The Ultra brings more advanced performance features and finish rather than a fundamentally different platform.

The company claims that your new robot companion will not spy on you. It doesn’t need an internet connection to read your emotions and act. A built-in chip handles everything on its own, inside the machine’s body. UBTech claims your personal data stays stored on the device itself rather than traveling to a server. In theory, that means your privacy stays protected. This is key in the home robotics market, where robots will be seeing and listening to you at all times. You don’t want hackers to be accessing your robot memories in a cloud space.

It remains to be seen what happens once early buyers unbox their companions when they start arriving to homes on September 15. The U1 is not pretending to be a replicant, however, and it’s not trying to completely replace a human. It’s the seed that wants to grow into that tree but, for now, it’s happy to stay still most of the time, giving a more human-like body to embodied AI. 

Zhou believes these human-like robots will eventually become the standard way people interact with artificial intelligence, and he’s betting on it. If that bet is successful and the U1 catches on in China, it’s easy to imagine other companies jumping into that market too, pouring billions in to accelerate this field of robotics. That may get us much faster than anticipated to the world envisioned by Dick or, if you are more the optimistic type, Isaac Asimov. Perhaps even within our lifetimes.

—Darlene Superville, Associated Press

AP video journalist Brooke Lefferts contributed.

—Andrew Dalton, AP Entertainment Writer

Before you judge us too much, this Play-Doh isn’t the same stuff that we all grew up swirling into snakes and accidentally leaving out on the counter. This is Blooms by Play-Doh, the brand’s first set purpose-made for adults in its 70-year history.

Blooms, which starts at $24.99 for a set, is one of Hasbro’s biggest swings into the “kidult” segment (the growing consumer base of adults investing in toys of their own) yet, and it follows a slew of similar moves by competitors like Lego and Mattel. Over the past several years, adults have become a key target audience for most of the world’s biggest toy companies—and they’re getting increasingly creative with how to draw that new base in.

With Blooms, Hasbro’s team demonstrates how clever product design and branding can elevate a toy that feels like it’s strictly for kids into something that even the least crafty of adults can enjoy.

How Hasbro is targeting kidults

Over the past few years, the stigma around adults pursuing hobbies previously reserved for children has markedly lessened—perhaps as a lasting ripple effect from the pandemic—and it’s transforming the wider toy economy. 

According to a June report from the market research company Circana, the global toy industry grew 8% in 2026 to $123 billion in sales, marking what Circana calls an inflection point “as play evolves into a cross-generational, cross-category behavior.” While kids under 10 remain the market share majority, accounting for more than 65% of global toy sales, their share is gradually declining as older consumers grab a larger chunk of the pie. The fastest growth is coming from those 15 and older, who now represent almost 20% of total toy sales and whose spending has more than doubled since 2020. 

One doesn’t have to look hard to find examples of how toy companies are playing to this shift. In the past few years, Mattel has doubled down on adult-centric releases like Lebron Barbies and Cybertruck replicas; while Lego has consistently churned out nostalgia-bait like a Gremlins-inspired set alongside artsy, display-ready renditions of works by artists like Keith Haring and Vincent Van Gogh.

Hasbro, which saw its revenue rise by 14% in 2025 after several consecutive years of decline, is similarly seeing returns from what it calls the “adults who play” segment. According to the brand, over 60% of its audience is 13 or older. In the first quarter of 2026, its largest revenue came from the card game Magic: The Gathering, which has a significant adult fan base. In addition to that existing property, Hasbro has invented several new ventures aimed specifically at adults, including drinking games like Monopoly Board Crawl, a collectors-edition animatronic of Grogu from Star Wars, and a series of board games made in collaboration with the popular romantasy series Fourth Wing.

With Blooms, Hasbro is taking that strategy and applying it to one of its most beloved products. 

“As we started seeing this insight and talking to consumers about what this could look like, we realized that our big differentiator is the Play-Doh itself,” says Kate Fakonas, senior director of design and innovation for Play-Doh. “Our compound offers that tactile, squishy, really in-the-moment play that people love.”

New Play-Doh, new tools

Play-Doh’s designers stumbled on the idea for Blooms while creating a flower caddy kit for kids. 

“When we made the early prototypes, we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, these are actually incredibly realistic and beautiful,’ and they were surprisingly easy to do,” Fakonas says. “We started putting all of those pieces together and thinking about how that could shape this new Blooms by Play-Doh line.”

The idea, Fakonas said, was to create a displayable line of flower bouquets made out of Play-Doh. Once the concept made its way into early ideation phases, Fakonas says, the biggest challenge was making sure that the flowers were easy and intuitive to make. While surveying potential customers, one common theme she heard was that adults were looking for crafting options with less of an intimidating barrier of entry. With Blooms, she explains, the team wanted to build something accessible.

Initially, the team experimented with building bouquets out of traditional floral supplies, like wire adjustable stems and real display blocks. That experience helped the designers understand the obstacles that they’d face with their own flower-building system—namely, that making and adhering flower petals by hand can be fiddly, especially given their small size and the thinness of the dough. To counteract that, they created a system of purpose-built, Play-Doh flower-creating tools.

Smaller Blooms kits come with a mini rolling pin and two hand-rolled wheels, which create scalloped and rippled petals when guided over a sheet of Play-Doh. The larger kits are equipped with what Fakonas calls “stacks”: a system of components that fit together in a tube shape, through which users can push Play-Doh to extrude petals of all different shapes and sizes. With both kits, the petals are arranged and stacked on a series of custom plastic stems, and finished with a spray that preserves them.

The spray “helps seal the Play-Doh and give it that final touch that really says, this is for long-term display,” Fakonas says. “That shift from ‘make and remake’ to ‘make and display’ is really a huge accomplishment that I think the team spent a ton of time on to get right.”

An adult-centric rebrand

Once Blooms became a real product, Hasbro faced another challenge: persuading adults that they’re allowed to play with Play-Doh. The solution came down to the branding.

At first glance, the consumer might not even realize that Blooms is a Play-Doh product. Its packaging uses subtle, pastel colors that are a far cry from Play-Doh’s typical primary scheme, and its core wordmark is a chic, lowercase serif font with a subtle “by Play-Doh” tucked away on a secondary line. Even the product photos, which show colorful Blooms arrays, look nothing like a typical Play-Doh display.

“We really wanted the finished creation to be the hero,” Fakonas says. “When we market to younger ages, we show a lot of parts, pieces, and tools, because we want to signal the value that mom and dad might be looking for. You’ll see a radical departure on these Blooms packages, because the creation is the center shot.”

This adult-centered design thinking continues inside the package. Most notably, the Play-Doh itself has been taken out of its classic red-and-yellow container and reformatted into colorful tubes. The dough has even been scented with a fragrance made in collaboration with a fragrance house and designed for a subtle waft of fresh flowers. 

Blooms is the same Play-Doh you knew as a kid, but with a new product and brand architecture, and Fakonas hopes that, eventually, it will represent a whole new chunk of the brand’s business. 

“We do see this as the beginning of something that is going to live at the intersection across creativity, home decor, even lifestyle—Play-Doh can now be part of that world and that conversation for adults,” Fakonas says.

The startup, which has raised more than $250 million since launching in 2020, is known for making a bin for home kitchens that dries and shrinks food waste. But companies like Whole Foods soon started asking for a version of their own. Of the 74 million tons of food that’s thrown out each year in the U.S., around a quarter comes from restaurants and grocery stores.

That’s both a major source of emissions and a significant cost for businesses with tight margins. But Mill is betting that better product design can help tackle the problem—and that unlike many climate challenges, reducing food waste can be relatively straightforward. “Food waste is one of those kinds of opportunities of massive scale impact that really is win-win across the board and is a solvable problem,” says Mill CEO and cofounder Matt Rogers, who pivoted to the challenge of waste after working on the original iPhone at Apple and cofounding Nest. “This is not fusion. This is not space travel. This is not putting food in the trash.”

The company’s new commercial product, under development now, tackles the problem from two angles. First, it turns kitchen scraps into a lightweight, non-smelly material that can be delivered to farms for use as chicken feed or composted. But the bins also use AI to analyze exactly what’s being thrown out—and help kitchens make changes to throw out less in the first place.

How Mill’s system works

Inside Mill’s sprawling office south of San Francisco, multiple prototypes show how the device works. Like the consumer version, it starts by dehydrating food scraps. “The first thing we do is we pre-process food waste,” says cofounder Harry Tannenbaum.

Tannenbaum says 25% of the landfill is food and 80% of food is water—an insight that shaped the development of Mill. “If you take the water out of food, it gets really small,” he says. You can quickly turn it into something that looks like coffee grounds and smells like spices, and it’s easy to manage and a valuable resource.”

That approach convinced Whole Foods to reach out to Mill in 2024 as it looked for ways to cut food waste in half by 2030. “The major differentiator between Mill Commercial and other solutions was the on-site processing…the grind and dehydrate process allows us to reduce the volume of our food scraps by 80% on average, which will make it easier for our team members to handle, store, and transport,” says Cameron Crake, circularity lead for Amazon’s worldwide grocery team, which includes Whole Foods.

Rather than just making a larger version of the consumer bin for commercial use, Mill realized that it could go a step farther. By adding cameras to the bin and using AI, it’s possible to identify the food scraps so a restaurant or grocery kitchen can get a detailed report of exactly what’s being thrown out. The team showed me how it worked on a test rig where they’re calibrating the computer vision system.

After someone dumped in a bucket of scraps, I watched the results show up on a computer screen—1.5 pounds of watermelon rinds, half a pound of potatoes, half a pound of grapes, and a metal fork. (Flatware is surprisingly common in restaurant trash; the new system flags it so it can be taken out and staff can be trained to stop dumping it.)

“We’re able to characterize the kind of food that’s thrown away in real time,” says Tannenbaum. “So think down to item level visibility into exactly what’s being thrown into a Mill. If you know exactly what you’re wasting, then you can attack it and triage it and it becomes much more tractable.”

The program is designed to connect to other software that kitchens use, such as meal planning programs. Eventually, managers could choose to let AI run some of the process; if a portion of a particular dish is too big, Mill’s tech can recommend how much to adjust the size and then connect with other programs to order fewer ingredients, notify the head chef, and adjust prep based on the menu change.

Designing technology that line cooks will actually use

The company isn’t the only one to design technology to help kitchens track what’s being thrown out. But other options require more steps—for example, holding food in front of a static camera for a few seconds, then putting it on a scale, and then using a touchscreen to confirm what the item was.

“We’ve heard from customers it’s too fragmented,” says Kristen Virdone, head of product at Mill. “It’s too hard to use, and it takes too much time. When that’s the case, then staff doesn’t use it and then they don’t get the data that they need.”

Mill knew that its product had to be as easy to use—or easier—than dumping food in the trash. To get there, the team has spent months researching what actually happens in kitchens to make sure they get the user experience right.

“The kitchen environment is incredibly hectic,” says Irina Kozlovskaya, Mill’s industrial design lead. “The pace is super fast, it’s hot, it’s humid, it’s really, really intense in there. What we saw actually confirmed our hypothesis: tasks that can be skipped really get skipped. This again put extra emphasis on how important it was for us to make this device really easy to use, and catering to that end user need.”

The process means spending a lot of time around trash, everywhere from university cafeterias to hospital kitchens to cruise ships. At one memorable point at the beginning of the research, Virdone stood in 100-degree heat on a loading dock behind a large hotel kitchen chewing gum to keep from gagging at the smell of rotting garbage in the trash compactor.

“[That was] my first real look at the contrast between pristine front-of-house dining and what happens behind the scenes,” she says. It was clear that Mill’s system could help remove some pain points for staff—the smell, the pests attracted by garbage, and taking frequent trips to haul heavy, dripping trash to the back.

They experimented with different sizes of the device to find the right balance between holding the biggest volume of food scraps possible while still being small enough to fit in a crowded kitchen—roughly the size of a dishwasher—so staff don’t have to go out of their way to use it. The angle of the bin’s opening is ergonomically designed to make it as easy as possible for someone to empty a heavy container of food scraps. The UX is designed to be intuitive, so someone can walk up to the bin and use it without training.

In one corner of Mill’s R&D facility, the design team is tweaking the final shape of the device. Across the room, engineers are working on a non-form factor prototype with all of the components exposed. The process is the same as the team used at companies like Apple. It “starts with this parallel track of what’s the ideal dream state that meets all those user touchpoint needs, and what are the engineering functional bits that need to come together,” says Adam Mittleman, who leads the engineering team and previously worked at Apple. “We start on these parallel tracks and as we get closer and closer to production, they come together into the same thing.”

Nearby, other engineers are working on the computer vision system that identifies the food, and on clear software to make the results usable. “We’ve learned from our customers that they’re tired of spreadsheets—there’s too much data, they just want to know what they need to do,” says Azita Sayadi, Mill’s commercial product lead. “There’s limited time. The metric that matters most is savings, because cost is really important as it relates to food waste.”

The screen shows the top five items that are being wasted, and how much could be saved with a recommended action like retesting a recipe or shrinking a portion size.

After more R&D, the new device will start rolling out to customers next year at a yet-to-be-announced price. Some, like Whole Foods, plan to use the dehydrated food waste in their supply chains; Whole Foods is talking to its egg suppliers about incorporating the material in chicken feed. Others may use the system to make it more affordable to ship food waste for composting or for use in fertilizer.

At the same time, the system has the potential to significantly shrink the amount of waste that goes out the door. It’s fair to say that it’s a problem that hasn’t gotten attention from former Apple engineers in the past. “This is one of those problem spaces that desperately needs a team like ours,” says Rogers. “About 10% of global emissions is food waste. About $400 billion of wasted food in the U.S. per year. But there certainly were not the crack A teams from Apple and Nest working on them.”

Andy Dunn hopes so. Dunn, best known as the founder of the menswear label Bonobos, which sold to Walmart for $310 million in 2017, has turned his attention to a trickier problem: friendship. Over the past five years, he’s been building an app that helps people to make real-life friends. In 2024, that idea crystallized into Pie, which helps users find local events and uses an algorithm to identify people they are most likely to click with. Dunn landed $11.5 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures, an early Bonobos investor.

Dunn has been testing the app in Chicago and Austin, but now he believes it’s ready to go nationwide. The app is slowly rolling out in cities across the country, and he’s just hired Nadya Okamoto, founder of the period care brand August, as his co-founder and CMO. The app currently has 300,000 active users.

“We’ve been building Pie with a lot of momentum for two years,” Dunn says. “Now, we need to start a movement and bring in an army of people who believe that getting people together is important.”

A DTC Pioneer

Launching an app is new territory for Dunn. He was a pioneer of the direct-to-consumer movement, launching Bonobos with his Stanford Business School roommate Brian Spaly in 2007. The company, known for its flattering men’s trousers, raised $127 million in funding, fueling rapid growth through its website and stores. After the Walmart acquisition, Dunn came on to help run the company’s growing stable of digital brands.

Building a disruptive clothing business was thrilling to Dunn in the 2010s, but he believes there are bigger problems to tackle today. While many DTC brands were focused on improving consumers’ quality of life with consumer products, he believes that today’s consumers are preoccupied with social issues like the growing wealth gap, the looming threat of AI to their careers, and loneliness.

Many other players in the DTC movement have also moved away from consumer brands to wrestle with other issues: The founders of Everlane and Allbirds have each launched supplements companies. Forerunner Ventures, which backed Glossier, Away, and Dollar Shave Club, is now investing in healthcare, mental health and wealth-building startups.

Tech for Friendship

Dunn recently learned firsthand how hard it is to make friends as an adult. He moved from New York to Chicago in 2021 to be closer to his parents, and in the months that followed, he realized that he had no one to call up for dinner.

Part of it comes down to the mechanics of making friends. When he read Dr. Marisa Franco’s book Platonic, he discovered the insight that friendships only happen when people run into one another repeatedly. Over the course of between five to ten interactions, people tend to open up to one another. That’s a hard thing to engineer in a modern world with fewer institutions bringing people together, but Dunn believes that technology can help with this.

“I got really excited about how to create a product that would foster social collision,” he says. “How do you create a product that lets you to run into someone in a group setting?”

Pie is far from the first app to tackle the problem of making friends. One recent example is Bumble BFF, the dating app’s effort at friend-making, which launched in 2023 and has since been folded into a new app. Okamoto herself has tried many platforms over the years, including Geneva, Discord, and Mighty Networks. “I’m not blind to the fact that there have been so many community tools,” she says.

For Dunn, the problem with these apps is that they’re focused on making one-to-one introductions, much like with a dating app. But friendships don’t work the way dating does. “A friendship match becomes a standoff, where neither person wants to make the first move,” he says. “A one-on-one friend date is kind of intense.”

In 2024, he pivoted to a new format: a feed of local events, like running groups and mahjong clubs, that appeal to a wide range of interests. But what separates this from another events platform like Meetup or Eventbrite is that it allows participants to take a psychology-based quiz to be matched with other people who will be attending the event. Then the app puts six compatible people together in a group chat. This simple tool allows people to begin to build bonds with people close to them, and over time, this can lead to sustained friendships.

“What we learned is that we actually need a social life operating system that takes you from the initial connection to the downstream interactions that turn into a real friendship,” he says.

Fixing What Social Media Broke

In some ways, Pie is meant to make good on the promise of social media. When Facebook first emerged in 2005, it was full of tools designed to help people maintain friendships, from sharing events to wishing friends happy birthday to sending messages. But over time, the platform became choked with ads, and shifted from chronological timelines to algorithmic feeds full of posts designed to hold your attention. This was partly a product of its business model, which was premised on keeping people spending time on the app so they would be exposed to more ads.

“It leads to wanting to addict users, rage-baiting, and rewarding polarizing content over wholesome content,” says Dunn.

For Okamoto, what sets Pie apart from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok is that it is built to encourage active participation—attending events, creating them, messaging other people. “The goal is not passively consuming content, which is what Meta has become,” she says. “We’re trying to create new habits around going to these events, so that people become active users; you find a cool event, you keep coming back, you build connections within Pie.”

That said, Pie currently doesn’t generate revenue and has no clear plan to. “There isn’t a monetization structure at the moment,” says Okamoto. “The beauty of where the app is right now is that we’re purely focused on growing our user base.”

Dunn is strongly against bringing advertisers onto the platform. Instead, he believes that with enough users, Pie can move towards a model where users can join the platform for free but pay to use certain features. But for the model to work, he believes Pie needs upwards of a million daily users, with 100,000 of them paying. “Our belief is that the next wave in consumer social media is freemium—like Spotify and Duolingo,” he says. “We’re not worried about that yet. We’re focused on building something big, and when the time comes, we’ll focus on monetization.”

Ultimately, Dunn believes that this app will appeal to a wide range of people, because there are many inflection points in life where you want a richer social life: When your friends start getting married or having kids, for instance, or when they move away.

“I think of Pie as an IRL social network,” says Dunn. “Pie is equipped with the functionality that Facebook had back in 2005, when it was actually where things happened.”

The “Jensen Jacket,” originally designed by Tom Ford, was put up for sale by Sotheby’s, which initially estimated the jacket’s worth to be between $40,000 and $60,000. Its current bid stands at $60,000.

It’s being auctioned as a “philanthropic initiative” by the venture capital fund Long Journey Ventures to benefit the Edge Institute, a nonprofit that, per its website, convenes people working in tech and science in “popup villages” to live together and “experiment towards a brighter future.”

The jacket’s sale comes as all eyes are turning to Sun Valley, the secretive annual retreat known as “summer camp for billionaires” that began on July 7. The conference will be a place for tech elites like Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Alex Karp to make deals behind closed doors—and to be endlessly photographed and analyzed for what they’re wearing, from their shoes to their hats. 

Huang’s jacket is a reminder that, whether it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s gold chain or Sam Altman’s gaudy glasses, accessories in the tech bro sphere have a tendency to transcend from mere style choices to personal branding statements. 

How a leather jacket became a symbol of the AI era

Huang’s black leather jacket, which he seems to own in many different cuts, has been a staple of his style for years. The jacket has appeared during Nvidia’s landmark product launches, at developer conferences, and even in one video of Huang eating noodles in Beijing.

Huang wore the jacket in question—which features his golden signature on the interior lining—during Hon Hai Tech Day in Taipei on October 18, 2023. 

In a flowery summary included with the jacket’s auction page, Sotheby’s wrote of the style: “Instantly recognizable to audiences around the world, the ‘Jensen Jacket’ has come to be a relic of a simple belief: that the future is built by people brave enough to journey into the unknown before anyone else can see what they see.”

Fashion has always mattered for tech moguls, even for the many years when “anti-fashion” (best embodied by Steve Jobs’ iconic turtleneck and jeans uniform) was in vogue with what felt like the whole world’s C-suite. Even a tee or a polo shirt, when donned by someone like Altman or Musk, sends a message (namely, that the wearer is trying to look casual in a $600 top). 

Recently, though, several tech giants have eschewed fashion minimalism to embrace the impact of their physical personal branding, including Mark Zuckerberg, who pivoted from hoodies to hypebeast t-shirts, gold chains, and a more on-trend hairdo, before landing in the front row at Prada; and Jeff Bezos, who’s swapped out his fleece vests for tailored suits and leather bomber jackets. 

Huang is an example of a tech mogul who, perhaps inadvertently, has always had a recognizable style. Now, just as Jobs’ black turtleneck immediately evokes memories of a bygone 2000s tech era, the Jensen Jacket, Zuckerberg’s chain, and Bezos’ suits have turned into one of the standout visual symbols of the AI revolution.

As Sotheby’s put it, for both critics and fans alike, “This is not just a jacket.”

Fears of collapse prompted evacuation orders

The building, which is the former headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, is located just down the street from New York City icons like the Chrysler Building and the United Nations headquarters.

Leila Bozorg, one of Mamdani’s deputy mayors, said it was “encouraging” the building did not appear to be shifting as officials went up into and past the damaged floors on their way to the 37th floor — the top floor — of the building.

From the street below, a badly bent structural column could be seen through a large glass window on the 21st floor. The fire department, which also posted images of the column, said they found multiple cracks and sagging floors as well.

Asked earlier in the day if there was concern of a collapse, Fire Chief John Esposito said the way the steel-framed building is constructed, “it would not be a total collapse, it would be more of a localized collapse.”

Nearby buildings and streets remained evacuated for much of the day, including a school and the Israeli consulate just across the street. The former Pfizer building itself was empty at the time, other than for the construction workers.

Ramesh Yallappa, a tourist who was among those evacuated from a nearby hotel, said he initially feared it was a fire in the hotel when an immediate evacuation was ordered Tuesday morning.

“That moment, we were really really scared,” he said.

Developer says new addition led to damage

With more than 1,600 units, the developers say the project is the largest office-to-residential conversion in the city’s history. Gensler, the architectural firm leading the project, says on its website that it is transforming a pair of 1970s-era office buildings by adding more than a dozen stories and redesigning an adjoining tower.

Building department records show the project has been fined by the city for several safety violations, including glass and metal falling off the building, along with an incident where a worker fell off a ladder.

Spokespersons for Gensler and MetroLoft, the project developer, didn’t return messages seeking comment.

But in a statement to The New York Times, MetroLoft stressed that the building itself is not at risk of collapse and that no debris fell from the building.

Nathan Berman, founder of MetroLoft, told The Wall Street Journal that the added weight from widening the top 15 or so floors of the building likely caused the damage. The two columns that buckled may not have been properly reinforced, he told the newspaper.

“Why those particular two columns and nothing else? We don’t know,” Berman told the Journal. “We’re investigating that.”

He maintained the building’s integrity wasn’t compromised.

“Ninety-five percent of the building, the structure is sound and intact,” Berman told the Journal. “There is no way that this corner of a small extension all of a sudden topples this building.”

Experts say more extensive repairs likely needed

Emily Guglielmo, a structural engineer based in California, said the buckled columns are likely not repairable and will need to be removed and replaced.

“A lot of these things — cracking, deflections, sagging — those elements are probably not salvageable,” she said.

Replacing the columns will require rigorous analysis, and the repairs will be expensive, experts said.

The short-term solution is shoring up the structure and the floors, said Abi Aghayere, a professor of structural engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Shoring involves installing four-legged scaffolding to temporarily carry the load that the structure is supposed to carry until the columns can be replaced, Aghayere said.

Yi Bao, associate professor of civil engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, said the building could be damaged beyond the buckled columns, which could have forced the loads to be redistributed to different parts of the building.

Ed Miller, an area resident, said he walks under the building’s scaffolding several times a day, but will find other routes home going forward.

“The building was pretty old,” said Miles Grant, who said he used to work at the building. “It definitely needed a lot of work to become ready for residential.”

This story has been updated to correct that city officials revised the building’s height to 37 stories, not 38.

Associated Press reporters David R. Martin, Jessica Hill, and Hallie Golden contributed to this story.

—Philip Marcelo and Anthony Izaguirre, Associated Press

The wallpaper is just one of many decorative flourishes competing for my attention as I sit at a Chili’s restaurant, already on my fourth free iced tea refill. Technicolor tiles blanket the tables and bar, patterned like Mexican ceramics. Neon-light chili peppers and a framed illustration of a cheese pull (that thing that happens when you bite into a gooey mozzarella stick) hang on the walls.

There’s even a chalkboard-style drawing of a bright-red chili pepper at the host stand, just like the one that greeted Chili’s diners throughout the 1990s. In fact, it was made by the same artist, who came out of retirement for the commission.

This restaurant, in the McMansion-filled Dallas suburb of Richland Hills, Texas, looks and feels a helluva lot like the Chili’s of old. You may know what I’m talking about: That salt-crusted gathering place from the days before GLP-1s and inscrutable Uber Eats fees. A place where the Tex always rhymes with Mex, ranch is practically a food group, and no one will judge you for being a grown-up and ordering a dinner that consists solely of appetizers. The spot where your plate of sizzling fajitas snaps necks at other tables when it arrives at yours with a loud sszzzhhhhh.

But it’s actually a prototype for the Chili’s of the future, featuring a retro redesign that will roll out across the company’s more than 1,200 North American restaurants over the next decade, beginning this fall. (Richland Hills is a short drive from Chili’s headquarters in Dallas.) Instead of the cold, industrial interiors that have dominated Chili’s design in recent years, these will be filled with an exuberant mix of color and texture, including that toile wallpaper, which was designed in France.

This shift back to the brand’s maximalist roots is the brainchild of Kevin Hochman, who became CEO of Brinker International (parent company of Chili’s and Maggiano’s Little Italy) in 2022. A veteran of Procter & Gamble and Yum Brands—where he pulled double duty as president of both KFC North America and Pizza Hut—Hochman has spent his tenure at Chili’s executing what Evercore analyst David Palmer calls “the best turnaround story of all time in restaurants.”

Chili’s had been a brand lost for at least a generation. In the years before the pandemic, it was, like so much of the casual-dining industry, bleeding customers to newer fast-casual brands, like Chipotle, and trying to stanch the wound by lowering prices. After COVID-19 hit, its kitchens were so underutilized that Brinker enlisted them for a virtual concept, It’s Just Wings, and dedicated much of the Chili’s marketing budget to the soulless ghost kitchen brand while cutting back on human waitstaff.

Today, Chili’s is on fire. Same-store sales have ballooned 50% over the last three years (and 43% in the last two), while revenue was up by nearly a billion dollars between 2024 and 2025 to reach $5.34 billion. The company has boosted margins from 12% in fiscal year 2023 to a projected 18% in 2026. The brand’s traffic, meanwhile, has grown for two consecutive years as Gen Zers, millennials, Xers, and boomers all make their way to a place that suddenly feels vibrant again.

While casual-dining competitors like Applebee’s are struggling and TGI Fridays may go extinct, Chili’s has courted young diners who fill social media feeds with videos of its dishes. The brand’s Margarita of the Month program—a rotating menu of seasonally inspired $6 drinks—has become such a sensation that it has its own line of merch. Meanwhile, the chain flexes its affordability, needling McDonald’s and other fast-food brands with its 3 for Me deal: a near-half-pound burger, fries, a refillable drink, and endless chips for $10.99—less than a Big Mac meal in some cities.

Nothing about this turnaround was foretold (except by Hochman, who—at his first annual conference as CEO of Chili’s—showed off a mocked-up, aspirational 2025 issue of Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc., with the cover line “Chili’s Is Back, Baby”). And there’s no single trick that created this success.

Instead, in an era when cash-strapped Americans are getting fewer chips in bags and less cacao in their candy, when they’re feeling thinner cotton in their sweatshirts and seeing fewer characters at Disney World—when every damn thing seems to have gotten a lot more expensive and a little worse—Chili’s has reintroduced the lost sensation of middle-class abundance.

“A lot of folks thought casual dining was dead, that people just don’t eat out anymore. That young people just want to order online,” says Hochman. He’s proving critics wrong—and filling dining rooms—by restoring so many of the small details the past decade had stripped from hospitality.

The cheese pull looks scandalous. As mushroom-haired TikToker Dylan McArthur (aka dylaneatss) cracks the breadcrumb shell of a fried mozzarella stick, an elastic band of dairy fats stretches from his lips. His eyes widen. He dangles the strand from his mouth—then consumes the dish with a loud slurp.

This was February 2024. Within days, McArthur’s video had ricocheted around the internet (it’s now been viewed 4 million times). Soon, young people were coming into Chili’s just to order its Triple Dipper combo, which lets you mix and match appetizers like sliders, chicken crispers (aka tenders), wings, and fried mozzarella.

At first, Chili’s wasn’t sure what was happening—were the youths really hungry for cheese pulls? “We were like, I guess it could be this thing on TikTok,” says George Felix, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Brinker International. “It felt weird for us to be like, ‘Guys, it’s definitely the cheese!’”

Big brands go viral all the time. What’s rare is when they manage to keep those customers around. Chili’s reports that these newbies have been returning two to three times a year, on average, mimicking long-term customer behavior. “We’d made a huge investment to make our restaurants better, so we were ready when our moment came,” says Felix. Or, as Hochman puts it, Chili’s had “gone to the gym.”

As a new generation enters Chili’s dining rooms, they find that the cheese really does pull, that the refills come fast. What’s more, when the Triple Dipper arrives on the table, it feels big. That’s not just because it can exceed 3,000 calories; it’s because dippers are served in an elevated basket. The serving piece works so well as a stage, making food appear more opulent and photogenic, that the director of culinary, Brian Paquette, has transitioned most of the menu to this basket.

It also helps that Hochman and his culinary team have been reformulating and retooling much of the Chili’s menu for better flavor. The burgers have been upgraded with bigger brioche buns. The chicken crispers come in more consistent sizes, thanks to renegotiations with poultry suppliers. The fried items taste better because Chili’s swaps out the oil more frequently, and the fries themselves are cooked longer so they’re crispier. (To get food out faster, the culinary team has even enlarged the holes in the seasoned-salt shakers, cutting the number of shakes needed to season a bowl of fries from 30 to 10.)

The chicken for fajitas, meanwhile, has a marinade that took a full year to develop, and instead of being cooked via a conveyor pizza oven for eight minutes, it now roasts in TurboChef ovens in just two and a half minutes. That means the chicken can be made to order instead of batch-cooked in advance. And that means Chili’s can cut out preservatives and excess sodium. This higher-quality meat is also the foundation for Chili’s new breaded chicken sandwiches.

Felix explains much of this to me in the Richland Hills restaurant. Alongside Chili’s VP of marketing, Jesse Johnson, we’re eating our way through the stars of Chili’s menu. The menu still has weak points, they acknowledge. Chili’s needs to give attention to the long-neglected salads and is eyeing an expansion into a new food category. Competitors have tried sushi, Johnson scoffs. Chili’s is thinking along the lines of tacos.

In the meantime, Chili’s is keeping the Triple Dipper buzz going. Shortly after McArthur’s video took off, chief supply chain officer James Butler suggested coating the fried mozzarella in Nashville hot sauce, like a buffalo wing. Nashville Hot Mozzarella launched as a secret menu item via social media within months of Triple Dippers going viral. “It was like, ‘We already have the sauces. We have the cheese. We should take a swing,’” Felix says.

In 2022, Triple Dippers constituted 6% to 7% of Chili’s sales, but in recent quarters, they’ve accounted for 16%—driving the company’s mozzarella consumption from 12 million pounds in 2022 to 65 million pounds annually today.

“Everyone [in the industry], when they talk to us, is like, ‘Yeah, we haven’t unlocked our stunt food yet,’” says Johnson. “We’re like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t what that was. The Triple Dipper has been on the menu for a decade!’ It’s not like we manufactured this. We just paid attention to how people were eating our food and shined a light on it.”

For years, at every Chili’s restaurant around the country, one lucky prep cook would spend the first hour of their shift counting shrimp. To ensure that no extra crustaceans made it onto a plate, the cook would apportion exactly six into little baggies, prepping bag after bag for the coming meal service.

Hochman learned of this chore on a restaurant listening tour that he took shortly after becoming CEO. In the hours before opening, servers and managers would gather in dining rooms. He’d ask for their advice: If you were the CEO of Chili’s, what’s the first thing you’d change?

Employees were hesitant to complain about leaking roofs and stifling hot kitchens. Who was this exec taking his own notes on a laptop? Would he actually care what anybody said? Would they lose their jobs for speaking up? But at some point, someone brought up the shrimp, saying they could save time by just counting out the shrimp before firing up a dish.

Hochman liked the idea and told his colleagues about the new plan. Some wanted to test it. What about shrimp waste?! He insisted they simply make the change. And it was fine: There was no “shrimp waste.”

“Everybody laughs about that story,” he says. “But one hour of that portioning every day, times 1,100 restaurants, is 46 years annually of counting that could just go away.” Many of Hochman’s early changes bubbled up from the frontline staff as they pointed out operational pain points.

Servers told him that orders sometimes disappeared after being typed into their tablets. They’d only realize the problem when they brought meals to the table and someone was missing their food. When Hochman took the problem to his now former chief information officer, he was told: No technology is perfect. But auditing proved that one out of 20 orders was affected. At a restaurant pushing 300 tickets a night, that’s 15 plates that never came out.

This wasn’t just a problem for diners, says Hochman. It was demoralizing for staffers. “At some point, you’re just like, ‘I did everything right. Screw it. I’m done.’”

Hochman’s team fixed the bug—updating both the ordering code and Wi-Fi routers inside Chili’s. It’s part of the $100 million on repairs and maintenance over the past three years that he’s invested in stores—which has nothing to do with the redesign.

He rolled out new tablets for tables so diners could self-check-out and redesigned the point-of-sale tablets carried by servers to save them hundreds of millions of taps a year. He also eliminated around 50 menu items (fried pickles, a turkey club, even chili), while increasing staff by 30% to 40% per store. (Without having to pay minimum wage to servers who earn tips in most states, Chili’s, like much of the industry, relies on customers to help subsidize this extra manpower.)

Hochman no longer has to coax employees for complaints. Stores have a list of items flagged for his attention before he shows up: “80% to 90% of the ideas of this turnaround have come from these restaurant teams,” he says. “And they’re phenomenal.”

It’s Friday night in the Chicago suburbs, and I’ve brought the fam to Chili’s. The place is already buzzing at 5:30. I can barely find a parking spot. Inside, we grab one of a few open tables.

The scene could be a Chili’s commercial: I walk past a joyful 5-year-old celebrating her birthday party, emo teens sipping on Cokes, several tables of young women, and a twentysomething couple on a frugal date night. I note that they’ve opted to course out their 3 for Me meal—starting with free chips, enjoying salads as a starter, and then rolling into quesadillas for their main. They each drink a giant, $6 Lemon Drop, the current Margarita of the Month.

I had arrived at the restaurant with fantasies of using the $10.99 3 for Me menu to feed my family of four for under $45 before tax and tip. (You can spend up to $17 on the 3 for Me menu.) That plan quickly went off the rails. Between margaritas for me and my wife, a Triple Dipper and fries, fajitas, sliders, and a breaded chicken sandwich, I wind up spending $117, with tax and tip. But looking around the table, everyone is happy. And uncomfortably full.

Palmer, the Evercore analyst, laughs when he hears my story, knowing I’d been honeypotted by the Chili’s value proposition, which he dubs “smoke and mirrors.” On the company’s January earnings call, Hochman reported that Chili’s was not only the most visited casual-dining brand of 2025, it was also the most affordable, with a per-person checkout average more than $3 less than its direct competitors and more than $4 less than the entire casual-dining category, according to data from Black Box. But even so, checkout totals have been steadily rising.

In a December 2024 analyst presentation, Hochman noted that while 38% of Chili’s sales had once been tied to “some kind of deal,” including coupons and value-menu items, he’d gotten that down to 30%. Today, despite the company’s marketing of 3 for Me, the value menu accounts for just 18% of sales—and most people order its more expensive options. Otherwise, the company’s “math doesn’t continue to math,” Hochman said on a recent earnings call.

Notably, the 3 for Me menu sits at the very end of the Chili’s elaborate menu, in a drab white box. When I flag this design decision to the Chili’s team, no one wants to admit they’re burying the deal, but it has that effect. The most generous interpretation is that Chili’s isn’t deceiving the frugal customer so much as offering them the license to indulge.

Chili’s has been far less shy with the Margarita of the Month. Served in a comically oversized martini glass—and concocted in eye-catching hues—the beverage promises a party that never ends. But the glass’s sharply tapered edge and an ample serving of ice ensures the drink actually hovers closer to 4 to 6 ounces. The beverage team artfully tunes the alcohol by volume up or down, depending on the costs of spirits.

Chili’s sells more margaritas than any entity in the world. It set a record by moving 1 million Lemon Drops in 2025, and then broke it by selling 2.5 million twin turquoise and fuchsia margs later that year, paired with the launch of Wicked for Good.

The company keeps experimenting. In April 2026, it introduced peach-popping boba margaritas along with a mocktail version to bring younger, or just drier, customers into the mix. (Chili’s is treading carefully with mocktails to preserve its reputation as a place to drink: Its January 2025 margarita was dubbed the Resolution Breaker.)

I’ve tried different Chili’s margaritas over the past few years. Few registered as a margarita on my tongue, and all were far too sweet for me. But halfway through my meal—watching my fellow diners enjoy their giant glasses—I cracked and ordered a Lemon Drop. That’s what happens to a lot of best intentions at Chili’s.

As the World Cup 2026 steadily advances to its inevitable conclusion (my crystal ball says it will be Argentina winning it again), let’s look into how the teams now playing the Round of 16 knockouts got their kits… and discarded others.

Argentina vs. Napoleon

Let’s start with Messi’s team. Argentina debuted its first documented kit in 1902: plain white with a light blue horizontal band. It wasn’t until 1908 or 1910 (depending on the source) that the team switched to the vertical sky-blue-and-white stripes that have defined the “Albiceleste” ever since. The deeper roots of that pale blue go back much further though, to 1771, when Spanish King Charles III used the color for a royal honor connected to the Virgin Mary, a palette later adopted by Argentine revolutionaries resisting Napoleon’s grip on Spain in the early 1800s.

But it’s Argentina’s away kit that has the most bizarre story: In 1986, manager Carlos Bilardo worried the squad’s official heavy cotton away shirts would leave players exhausted in the Mexico City heat before their quarterfinal against England. With no time to source a replacement through normal channels, staff bought cheap polyester shirts from a local sporting goods store, then spent the night before the match hand-stitching on crests and numbers. Diego Maradona wore that improvised, store-bought shirt when he scored both the “Hand of God” and the “Goal of the Century” in the same game.

Brazil’s bad vibes

Brazil is already out of the tournament, destroyed by Erling Haaland and his Vikings history, but the team is marked by superstition, starting with its jerseys. The team wore white until the 1950 World Cup final, where a home defeat to Uruguay was so devastating it became known as the “Maracanazo,” after the name of the stadium they played in, the legendary Maracaná. The white shirt was permanently associated with the loss.

It was a national trauma, and many Brazilians turned against the color. The rejection was widespread enough that in 1953, the newspaper “Correio da Manhã” ran a contest requiring a new design that used all four colors of the flag. A 19-year-old illustrator named Aldyr Garcia Schlee won with the yellow shirt, green trim, and blue shorts still worn today. It’s the yellow of the jersey that gave the team its nickname: the “canarinha” or “little canary,” like the yellow of that bird.

Brazil’s blue away kit has its own improvisational footnote, like Argentina’s. At the 1958 final, both Brazil and host nation Sweden were set to wear yellow, and Brazil ended up needing an alternative on short notice. With the white kit still considered unlucky, officials bought plain blue shirts from a shop in Stockholm the morning of the match. According to team folklore, blue was chosen because it echoes the robes associated with Our Lady of Aparecida, Brazil’s patron saint. Staff sewed the crest onto the shirts by hand only hours before kickoff, and Brazil won its first World Cup wearing them.

England’s cricket

England’s white shirt exists largely by accident, which is a curious fact since it’s the country that invented the sport. For the country’s first official international match, against Scotland in 1872, the English side didn’t have a dedicated football kit and instead wore the white cricket uniforms already available to the players. The look was never formally replaced. England’s navy shorts were later chosen specifically to distinguish the kit from Germany’s all-white uniform, and the red away shirt, worn most famously during the 1966 World Cup win, comes from the red cross on the national flag.

Flags and revolutions

Portugal’s red and green tell a similarly political story: before 1910, the country’s colors were blue and white under the monarchy, but a republican revolution that year replaced the crown, and a new flag using green and red—colors already tied to Portugal’s republican movement since the 1890s—was formally adopted in 1911. The football team took on this post-revolutionary palette when it formed in 1921.

Colombia wears yellow, blue, and red, colors that trace back to a single 1801 flag created by revolutionary Francisco de Miranda for the short-lived state of Gran Colombia.

Paraguay’s red-and-white striped shirt developed alongside the Paraguayan Football Association, founded in Asunción on June 18, 1906, with the red stripes sometimes linked to the tierra colorada, the reddish clay soil found throughout the country.

The kit of Mexico (now out of the tournament) is the same as its 200-year-old flag, which on itself is the result of the peace treaty that followed its independence war from Spain. Back in 1821, when the Plan of Iguala finally ended the fighting, whoever designed that flag wasn’t thinking about soccer at all, they were thinking about survival. Each stripe had a job to do: green stood for independence, white for the Church, red for the fragile truce between Spanish loyalists and Mexican-born Creoles who’d just spent a decade trying to kill each other. 

The Spanish kit is a direct translation of its flag, which has red as its dominant color. Originally, that was not the country’s flag but its Navy’s flag. From that came the team’s nickname, ‘La Furia Roja’ (The Red Fury), which took hold after the team’s physical performance at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. The phrase itself is older than the tournament—it echoes “la furia española,” a term used centuries earlier to describe Spanish troops during military campaigns in Flanders. The Olympic run simply reattached that old phrase to a red shirt that already existed because of the flag.

In Africa, Morocco’s straight-up green and red, red base with green trim, borrowed directly off a flag anchored by the Alaouite dynasty, the same royal family that’s been running the show since the 1600s.

And Egypt’s red jersey, white shorts, and black socks combo wasn’t the first kit they played with. Back in 1934, the year the Pharaohs became the first Arab and African team ever to qualify for a World Cup, they used a green long-sleeved shirt with a small red patch on the chest—the colors of Kingdom of Egypt’s flag. That changed to the current tricolor kit in 1953, after the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 deposed the king and took the Arab Liberation Flag.

Switzerland’s kit is also a direct translation of the flag, the flat red with the white cross that predates the country’s flag by centuries: Swiss soldiers began sewing white crosses onto their uniforms ahead of the Battle of Laupen in 1339 to identify friendly troops in the chaos of combat. That battlefield practice eventually became the national flag and, later, their national football team’s jersey.

U.S. soccer was a rarity when it started in the early 1900s, so the ragtag bunch of amateurs first who suit up for the national team just grabbed the flag and stapled it to a shirt. You would imagine the same will be true to our northern neighbors but no, team Canada actually wore royal blue with a single red maple leaf on the chest in 1925, like the Canadian Red Ensign flag. The country didn’t lock its red and white flag until 1965, which was the reason why its team changed its kit to the current one.

Born from a nickname

Belgium’s “Red Devils” nickname has a more specific origin than most people realize. In 1906, journalist Pierre Walckiers described the Belgian team’s red-shirted, aggressive play in a match against the Netherlands, and borrowed the nickname from Camille Jenatzy, a Belgian racing driver known as “The Red Devil” for his fiery red beard and daredevil driving style. The federation later built the kit identity around that borrowed nickname, anchoring it in an all-red jersey.