Encouraging customers to mend worn clothes instead of buying new ones might seem like a self-defeating sales strategy. But in-store repairs and sewing workshops are becoming essential retail services for clothing brands as they try to appeal to young consumers who want to save money and the planet.

While luxury fashion houses and select specialty retailers like Patagonia and L.L. Bean have offered product repairs for decades, the concept has caught on. Jeans giant Levi Strauss & Co., casual wear chain Uniqlo and budget retailer Primark are a few of the apparel companies hoping to win over Generation Z shoppers with a needle and thread.

Levi’s created a handstitching course for high school students after determining that many members of Gen Z lacked the sewing skills to match their interest in thrift store shopping and sustainability. Employees spend 90 minutes instructing teenagers on four tasks: sewing on a button, hemming, patching a hole and fixing a tear.

The Wear Longer program, which the San Francisco-based company is expanding across the U.S., builds on the repair and customization services Levi’s offers at hundreds of stores worldwide.

“We think it’s important to empower the people who buy our clothes with the skill sets to maintain them, to get them to that second life,” Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of global design innovation, said.

Detroit resident Chloe Halprin, 25, is the kind of consumer retailers hope to attract with a “fix it, don’t ditch it” message.

In high school, Halprin shopped at inexpensive, trendy stores. Fixing a big rip felt beyond her limited sewing ability. If she damaged a top or skirt from Forever 21, “I might just throw it away.”

These days, Halprin buys most of her clothes secondhand. She recently learned to hem with a sewing machine and hopes to tackle projects like turning a skirt into a shirt.

“I try to be conscientious of my carbon footprint,” Halprin, a nonprofit grant writer, said. “I really don’t like waste. I’m trying to save money as well.”

A large franchisee for the fast-casual dining chain Moe’s Southwest Grill has filed for Chapter 11, becoming the latest chain restaurant operator to seek bankruptcy protection this year.

UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC believe that FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s recent plan to sell an interest in the World Cup was a “fundamental breach of trust” with the institutions world soccer’s governing body serves.

In an “open letter to the football family” revealed on Monday, UEFA, CONCACAF and the AFC also said that “when trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”

UEFA runs soccer in Europe, CONCACAF does the same for North, Central America and the Caribbean, while the AFC governs the sport in Asia.

The letter was co-signed by UEFA president Aleksander Čeferin, AFC president Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa, CONCACAF president Victor Montagliani and three general secretaries.

“Football is the world’s greatest shared passion. It belongs to no individual and no institution. It belongs to the players, the fans, the clubs, the member associations and every institution entrusted with safeguarding its future,” the open letter said. “It is in that spirit, as confederations representing its members, that we speak collectively today.”

Infantino is facing a revolt after his failed plan to sell stakes in the World Cup to private equity investors.

“It is not the conduct of a custodian of the game, but of one who believes the game is answerable to him,” the letter said. “These are not the qualities football deserves in its leadership. That is why we have taken this stance: not lightly and not alone, but together, and out of duty to the game we serve.”

UEFA previously issued a threat to boycott the World Cup and other FIFA competitions despite the governing body abandoning and apologizing for its failed plan.

Norway’s soccer federation called for Infantino to step down, while the English Football Association has also withdrawn its support for Infantino’s re-election next March.

“Football’s strength has always been its unity. We call for that unity to be honoured now,” the letter said. “For leadership that serves football, not seeks to command it.”

Last Wednesday, FIFA said it had apologized for errors made over the failed plan but that senior staff at a crisis meeting in Morocco “reaffirmed their full support” for his presidency.

However, the nature of the meeting was also met with criticism.

“FIFA’s own letter also confirms that only one elected official was present at the leadership meeting in Morocco,” the open letter said. “No FIFA Council members or Member Associations were invited to participate. Only the management committee, composed of FIFA-employed senior staff, was present.”

FIFA was also urged to go further than just acknowledging mistakes were made.

“It treats this as a failure of communication, when what football witnessed was a failure of judgment,” the letter said. “There remains no recognition that attempting to sell an interest in the FIFA World Cup was a profound failure of judgment — not just a procedural misstep, but a fundamental breach of trust with the very institutions FIFA exists to serve.”

In a statement Saturday, FIFA defended Infantino against what it called a “concerted and ongoing effort” to undermine his leadership of the organization.

That statement followed a report by British newspaper The Daily Telegraph raising questions about an exit package paid by UEFA to a female staffer who worked with Infantino when he was general secretary of European soccer’s ruling body.

UEFA confirmed that a “departure payment” was made to the employee and said it was “in line” with regulations at the time.

Infantino worked at UEFA for 16 years before being elected FIFA president.

7UP has reformulated its recipe, cranking up the lime flavoring so much it’s actually changing what it calls itself. The lemon-lime soda is now going by lime-lemon.

Could Spider-Man and Odysseus singlehandedly save the theatrical box office? Maybe not completely. But with the release of Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, they make a strong case for it.

Finance platform InKind has raised more than $1 billion in the past six months to invest in an industry many traditional lenders have long considered too risky: independent restaurants. 

As concerns around potential salmonella contamination escalate, an additional 20 jalapeño products are being recalled in an updated notice that includes products sold at several major retailers.

Crystal balls, reading the tea leaves, feeding quarters into Zoltar Speaks. None of these can predict exactly what lies ahead. Sometimes leaders can see shifts in the business landscape before others notice.

As organizations race to adopt AI, many leaders are asking the wrong question. Too many are using AI to optimize yesterday’s workflows instead of asking a harder question: should this process still exist? Using AI in small, incremental ways—like summarizing emails or automating tasks—may create some efficiency, but it rarely creates meaningful impact.

Here’s a tale of two movies.

Supergirl cost $170 million to produce and had everything going for it: the backing of DC Studios and Warner Bros., worldwide distribution, and a marketing budget over $115 million. By year’s end, however, the film is projected to gross around $100 million domestic and a little over $200 million globally. When all is said and done, losses could be as much as $120 million.

In the world of dating apps, every detail is curated. Photos are filtered, prompts are workshopped, and hobbies double as personality traits. Profile details tied to healthy living also shape many first impressions. But what if the swipe economy could also reshape public health while expanding personal connections?

Though the thought of toxic waste may conjure images of comic book monsters and neon green slime, the threat of hazardous pollution is unfortunately very real—and a new report shows it’s closer than you might think.

The car ride to school isn’t much fun.

OpenAI made a change to how ChatGPT links to websites in the spring, and barely anybody noticed. Starting on May 7, ChatGPT began sending considerably more traffic to websites. Referrals jumped 157% overnight and have stayed there, according to new data. On the same day, OpenAI also began rolling out advertising in AI answers, a move that had been in the works for several months.

A new chatbot billboard recently appeared in San Francisco. It looks almost identical to the dozens of AI advertisements that have popped up throughout the city in recent years: simple font, a black-and-white color palette, and copy that sounds like it was written by a robot. 

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. 

Who doesn’t love a gummy? Gummies packed with vitamins and minerals have taken over health and wellness aisles, giving consumers a wholesome way to embrace “little treat” culture. These days, you can have your nutrition and your sugar fix, too. Now, the supplement pioneer AG1 is introducing a gummy of its own to this increasingly crowded market.

A new “AI-proof” font was designed to be hard for AI agents to scrape, but you can’t tell by just looking at it. Unlike other anti-AI fonts that use letters that are difficult for bots to read, ShieldFont swaps out words behind the scenes to poison the data that automated scrapers take without permission.

ShieldFont was designed as part of a project created by a group of professionals including the Brazilian creative studio Seneda & Abrucio and the Danish type foundry PlayType. It shields text from large language models (LLMs) by garbling sentences in the HTML source code, leaving automated scrapers to sift through sentences filled with decoy words that make a sentence incoherent. Thanks to a custom font on a backend, though, the real text is displayed for a human reader to see.

Here is a truth: You are wrong about something. You have misunderstood a data point, been given bad information, or your memory has softened. Sometimes a bad actor is to blame—a podcaster spouting junk science, an influencer selling you on underresearched supplements, or someone who posts an AI-generated video that you’ll mistake for real footage. But, often enough, we deceive ourselves through long-held beliefs or superstitions. The closer that belief winds to your identity, the more likely you are to cling to it beyond reason—and the more it hurts to admit when you’re wrong.

Major League Baseball has some of the most recognizable franchises in the world. But a new league is coming for America’s pastime, letting women into the professional field for the first time in 72 years.