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.

Its new Frankenlogo is about as visually convoluted as the company’s name suggests. It shows the iconic Space X wordmark with an illegible “xAI” appendage tacked onto the end of it.

The SpaceXAI brand is the result of a confusing mashup of company interests. Musk founded xAI in 2023, in response to OpenAI and the other artificial intelligence startups making waves. Almost a year later, SpaceX bought xAI in a stock-for-stock merger. This deal integrated xAI into SpaceX as a completely owned subsidiary. But back in May, Musk said he would dissolve xAI into SpaceX and that the new company’s AI products would be branded as SpaceXAI.

Which brings us to this logo.

The SpaceX wordmark was the handiwork of New Jersey-based design and marketing firm RO Studio, whose portfolio includes designs for Tesla, Pink Tank Events, Lady Diane Designs, and Cera Wax Studio.

xAI designed its logo in-house in 2023. Toby Pohlen, who has a master’s degree in computer science and no professional design experience, mocked up the original design. Pohlen did a dreadful job with that wordmark, but whatever. He found it “amusing” that “tons of designers got triggered” by how bad it was.

“The ‘i’ in the first version was slightly slanted (loosely inspired by the columns of the Parthenon),” Pohlen wrote in a July 2025 post on X. “Because it rendered poorly at lower resolutions I quickly updated it [to] the current design.”

It’s not clear who designed the SpaceXAI logo. We reached out to RO Studio with questions but haven’t heard back. We also reached out to SpaceX for comment and will provide an update if we receive a reply.

Space mess

The new wordmark looks exactly like the one for SpaceX but replaces the lower end of the inverted slash that crosses the now-iconic rocket trail in its final X. Instead of that half, now there’s a slanted version of the AI in the original xAI logo tightly tucked under the rocket trail. The tiny, poorly rendered AI is barely readable at full size on my 15-inch MacBook Air.

The thing is so bad that I initially suspected Grok was SpaceXAI’s logo designer. Only an AI hallucination could explain the hodgepodging of two previous brands into such a low-readability logo. But judging by Grok’s own design critique, even Musk’s AI thinks it’s bad.

After I uploaded the new logo to the chatbot, it initially thought it was the original SpaceX logo. Then, “upon closer inspection,” Grok noticed the blotch under the rocket trail: “The right side of the X incorporates additional angular elements that almost form a subtle secondary shape (resembling a stylized “A” or wing-like structure merged into the X), giving it a more complex, almost abstract/techno-futuristic construction than the standard SpaceX mark.” 

For SpaceXAI’s own AI, that bastardized X is the main flaw. “The extra angular details on the X (the wing-like or “A”-ish extensions) make the letterform unnecessarily busy,” Grok said. “A good logo should be simple enough to remain legible and impactful at small sizes. This X starts to break down or look muddy when scaled down.”

The chatbot also pointed out that because the X is so stylized with multiple intersecting elements and the swoosh, it can be harder to recognize, noting, “At a glance, some viewers might see it as “SPACEXA” or an abstract symbol rather than clear lettering. The extra angles on the X add visual noise without adding meaningful symbolism. A stronger version would simplify the X while keeping the swoosh, or push the secondary shape into something more intentional and original.”

Thanks, Grok. Or SpaceXAI. Or whatever the hell your name is now.

Every day, I inhabit and interact with spaces and things—the tangible, built world assembled to achieve modern life—in the same way that all women do. Only because I am a designer, I am acutely aware of its shortcomings. When I try to respond to a text with one hand and I cannot reach the farthest keys; when I use a public restroom and wait in long, slow queues, then resort to throwing my coat over the stall and subjecting my cell to the flat lid of the sanitary napkin receptacle once inside; when I get into my car and have no place for my purse; the fact that I require a purse on my person in the first place, because my garments don’t have sufficient pockets to carry so much as a tube of lipstick. This is all without mentioning the gracelessness to which a woman must subject herself if she wishes to walk on cobblestone or subway grates in anything but a sneaker, or, more pertinently, brave the stairs up or down to the subway with a stroller in tow. And it goes without saying she would never do this alone and after dark.

I, like most women, feel tired by the end of the day for the same reasons a man does, but also with the additional lethargy that results from overcoming distractions related to bodily discomfort all day long, and from all the extra time and energy it takes me to anticipate and plan for a day in a man’s world.

Women and men inhabit the same world, yet it does not suit them both equally. Women may not always notice the extent to which their physical ecosystem is ill fitting, as they have never known it any other way—we have become so accustomed to discomfort that we have accepted as fact the pervasive, insidious, systematically manufactured design biases perpetuating a built world that makes it laborious for women to navigate their lives. We’re conditioned to accept the status quo, especially as it relates to our physical comfort—the way our bodies meet the built world. But we shouldn’t have to.

The commuting difference

Consider my commute to Harvard from my home in Boston. As I plan my trip, I consider the various transportation options, and normally I cannot choose the most efficient, time-saving one. First, I must consider the time of day. If it’s winter or early spring, I account for the distance I’ll need to walk outside as it is dark during my commute and not all the streets are well lit. I take the T (Boston’s subway system), needing to change trains along the route. I plan my trip around avoiding the transfer at one particular stop (the most convenient for me in time and proximity) because it is not safe for a woman to be there alone. As I exit the subway at another stop, I take a longer walk to exit the station, as the escalator that is the most convenient to my next bus stop is an unsafe passageway to the street. Considering Harvard Yard’s notorious lack of illumination, I avoid it altogether, tacking another few minutes to my commute so I can walk a better-lit path. I think about all of this before I even leave the house. My husband, in contrast, looks at the schedule, sees which option will get him there fastest, grabs his T pass, and is off to wherever he needs to go.

Adapting to a world that doesn’t fit is a distraction, and having to account for workarounds to avoid situations that are unsafe comes at a cost, both economically and physically. When the built world constantly ignores women, they disengage, ultimately diminishing their access to opportunities from high-paying jobs to health care, denying them a hospitable world they can navigate as easily and safely as their male counterparts.

Opportunities for inclusion

As a designer, I know that it doesn’t need to be this way. That there are endless opportunities for improvement, so that the world can work for people of all genders, all needs, and all sizes (because when we turn our eye to inclusivity, there are no bounds). We should no longer accept living in a world that has been designed by men, for men. We need to demand a hospitable, safe, and comfortable world that recognizes that one size does not fit all and that women are not smaller men.

Women represent over half of the global population and in the U.S., they influence nearly 85% of all purchasing decisions. Yet only 19% of practicing industrial designers (product designers), 25% of registered architects, and 14% of mechanical engineers in the U.S. are women. Female industrial designers account for just 11% of all design leadership roles. Although they graduate with degrees in design and architecture at equal rates to their male counterparts, within three to five years, the numbers of those still in the field drop drastically. This dearth of female designers creates a vacuum in which unchallenged male designers create products based on stereotypes of female consumers that miss their actual needs. And when female designers do make it through the systemic labyrinth, they face male decision-makers who ignore or push back on their ideas, making progress difficult. Data shows the design of everything from public bathrooms to default HVAC settings to the lighting on our streets too often leave women behind, as those occupying the seats of creativity and power continue to be primarily male.

I’ve learned just what that means during my own career as an industrial designer. For a pre-Title IX sports-loving woman, working in design at leading sports footwear and apparel brands was an amazing ride. It also provided me with a front-row seat to how the sector’s predominantly male echo chambers reinforced men’s preferences and biases in big and small ways every day. And those echo chambers span the spectrum of product design: Even today it is mostly men who design our cars, our electronics, our bicycles, our furniture, our appliances, our medical devices, and yes, our sneakers.

A more dangerous world

I have dedicated my career to design and have succeeded on the playing fields of major brands like Nike and Reebok, but there is still so much work to do. The female body is too often invisible. A world designed by men, for men, isn’t just a matter of style or preference for women. By not accommodating the female body in the design of products and places, we have created a world that is less hospitable to and more dangerous for women.

In the exam room, female patients subject themselves to routine checkups with their gynecologist, enduring a pelvic exam that centers around a medieval-looking tool called the speculum—a cold steel clamp that hasn’t been updated in 200 years, when it was invented by a man. This neglect of patient comfort and dignity is not without its consequences. With diminished adherence to preventive care, the percentage of women overdue for cervical cancer screenings increased from 14% in 2005 to 23% in 2019. Cervical cancer is a preventable disease given routine screenings, but today, advanced-stage incidence is on the rise.

In the military, female soldiers are five times as likely to fracture their pelvis as their male counterparts, due to the biased design of military boots and backpacks, and course requirements made with men’s anatomy in mind. In health care, where women make up the majority, personal protective equipment seldom fits them properly—gowns, gloves, goggles, and masks are too big, putting our female frontline workers at extra risk every day.

The driving dilemma

In the driver’s seat, women experience an egregious example of this problem. Car crash test dummies are 5-foot-9 and 171 pounds—the height and weight of an “average” American man in the 1970s, when crash test dummies were first put in use—meaning car safety isn’t designed with women’s body types in mind. The result is that car crashes are 17% more likely to be fatal for women than men, and 73% more likely to cause serious injury. Seat belt design ignores the female anatomy so severely that many pregnant women can’t even buckle up. Adding insult to literal injury, the “female” dummies are only tested in the passenger seat, not behind the wheel!

A designer is first and foremost an advocate for the consumer. Design is about making people’s lives better. Safer. Easier. More beautiful. I became an industrial designer because I loved figuring out how to solve problems for people. But in practice, I learned that design often creates more problems for women. At the culmination of my career, though I had a “seat at the table,” I found that male voices still dominated it. Without enough female voices influencing design, we’ll continue to design for a man’s world. We need more female designers, architects, engineers, planners, and policymakers at the table—because, as Caroline Criado-Perez said in her seminal book Invisible Women, “Women simply don’t forget that women exist as easily as men often do.”

From what women put on their bodies, to what their bodies interact with, to the environment that surrounds their bodies, this book will examine all the ways that women are left behind as a result of living in a physical world that is too often still designed without women in mind. It will lay bare the many reasons we are often left no choice other than to compromise the comfort and safety of our bodies to fit into a man-made world. I won’t stop there. I’ll also show the path forward, how we can incorporate equity in the process, from concept to execution. I’ll show that building a better world, one that doesn’t just include women but champions them, is possible.

Reshaping the world for all of us

Importantly, this book is not just for designers. I hope it will open many eyes to how gender bias in the built world speaks to us in ways big and small. Yes, it’s in the high-stakes moments, like a pelvic exam or an automobile accident, but it’s also in the extra time women spend every day to walk a safer path to work, school, or home. It’s in the need to schlep around multiple heavy bags throughout the day for the multiple what-if scenarios you encounter; it’s bleeding and not knowing if a restroom will be stocked with menstrual products, not to mention if you have a coin to purchase them; it’s pain at 3:00 p.m. from the sneakers that don’t quite fit because they were designed for a male foot; and it’s in trying, yet again, to find a place to hang your purse at a restaurant, in a waiting room, or at a concert. It’s the built world constantly treating women as an afterthought.

I’m a woman. I’m a designer. I’m an optimist. I believe that challenging the status quo can reshape the world for us all.

Imagine a world in which women don’t have to take these extra steps to be comfortable, where products and spaces don’t actively interfere with women’s safety. Imagine an environment designed first and foremost for female consumers, that accounts for the many overlooked needs and challenges, becoming safer, more accessible, more usable, and more relevant to an even broader population.

This is a book for people across demographics who are wondering, “Does it have to be this way?” It’s a book for young women considering careers in public service, as firefighters, policewomen, or in the trades; it’s for entrepreneurs, corporate executives, politicians, and college students of all genders to read and discuss. It’s for anyone with a body that interacts with the environment. The built world is not only the physical environment in which we exist. It’s also the products and tools we hold and use, it’s what we wear at home and to work and to play, it’s the equipment that allows us to do our jobs and engage with our hobbies. This book will change the way we all see the built world around us and challenge us to make it more inclusive, hospitable, and safe.

That change starts here.

Excerpted from MAN-MADE. Copyright © 2026 by Karen Korellis Reuther. Reprinted here with permission from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Fewer Americans named their children Donald in 2025 than any year in U.S. history going back to the 1880s, according to Social Security Administration data. But for kids born between 2025 and 2028, they’re now eligible for new tax-advantaged investment accounts for kids called “Trump Accounts.” Also known as 530A accounts, their official name in government communications and the law that created them is named for Trump, and that could prove to be a hindrance for parents turned off by the partisan association.

Just look to “Obamacare.”

After then-President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law in 2010, critics of the healthcare law began calling it Obamacare as a pejorative, but the nickname stuck and eventually was adopted by proponents too.

“I have no problem with folks saying ‘Obamacares,'” Obama said during a 2011 town hall. “I do care. If the other side wants to be the folks that don’t care, that’s fine with me.”

But what you called the law mattered when pollsters asked. A 2013 Gallup poll found that when respondents were asked about the ACA, it had a 45% approval rating. When it was called Obamacare, though, its approval dropped to 38%.

Regardless of party affiliation, majorities of Americans support ACA provisions like prohibiting private health insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition or to pregnant women. Calling it Obamacare, though, connects the law by name with a president some don’t like. Since Obama left office and the daily drubbing of partisan politics, though, the law’s approval has soared, reaching a high of 66% last June, per KFF Health Tracking polls.

Research shows citizens use partisan cues or shortcuts to form opinions, and naming programs after presidents creates an immediate shortcut that might turn off voters of the opposite party, even if they might otherwise show support under a different name.

Democrats have put forward their own ideas for investment accounts for kids before. A “baby bond” program under the proposed American Opportunity Accounts Act cosponsored by Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey would have been publicly funded and financially progressive, so the benefits wouldn’t most accrue to the wealthy who can most afford to fully fund the accounts to their maximum limits annually, as they can under the Trump administration’s program. (Though Booker’s proposal hasn’t passed, he has worked across the aisle with Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to urge CEOs to donate to the Trump administration’s new accounts.)

To get their own version of an account for kids passed under Trump, Republican lawmakers turned to flattery. An early proposal for the accounts called them “Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement” accounts to make an acronym for MAGA, but the accounts were renamed “Trump accounts” for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year.

Trump has long worked to take credit for government programs and spending (even if he had nothing to do with it), and the Trump accounts are the latest example. If he really wants them to have the best chance of success, though, the best thing he could do might be to rebrand the accounts by a less polarizing name. Parents aren’t naming their kids after Trump these days. Perhaps the federal government could follow.

The SNL UK mark is dynamic, and made from hundreds of photos of the letters S, N, and L that members of the Stink Studios team took of British signs in London and beyond. Letters were snapped from bus stops, sandwich shops, pubs, and other public places, and then vectorized (converted from a pixel-based image into a sharper, vector-based image) so they could be used in the variable branding.

“It was a labor of love,” Stink Studios executive creative director Rick Dodds tells Fast Company. “There are no shortcuts to it. You’ve got to go through the hard work of finding them, photographing them, vectorizing them, and working out which ones work best.”

These found S’s, N’s, and L’s were then combined with Serial B Neue, a rounded sans-serif typeface, to create a visual brand and typography that can be altered yet still maintains a sense of consistency—and the result is unabashedly British.

“Some of these letters that we photographed, they’re over 100 years old,” Dodds says. “Like the street signs that have been there for a very long time. Like road architecture that’s been there for a very long time. Signs on the road, or kebab shops and coffee shops that are decades and decades old and have never changed their signs.”

With so many letters to choose from, SNL UK has the luxury of not having to repeat itself. Each episode gets its own unique combination of the S, N, and L letters, a one-of-one logo for one night only.

The “UK” in the mark is set in superscript—with the rest of the letters shifting about on the baseline—“almost signifying the ‘UK’ as a stamp of approval or sign-off,” says senior designer Emma Judd, the lead designer on the project. The design system appears in the show’s opening title sequence, directed in collaboration with the show and the directing duo Burnermunde.

For American viewers, watching SNL UK can feel familiar yet foreign at the same time—with recognizable segments, like the cold open and “Weekend Update,” but a cast they’ve never seen before and references to British history, culture, and politics that Anglophiles will appreciate. (One sketch imagined Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury, and others having dinner together.)

“Everything about it was trying to not make it feel like an American entity that parachuted here in the U.K., but to make it feel like it was born out of British culture,” Dodds says.

It seems to have worked. The show, which Americans can stream stateside on Peacock, was renewed earlier this year for a second season, set to premiere this fall.

Consider the shopper on Walmart’s website loading up on the basics: a 12-pack of paper towels, a few boxes of mac ’n’ cheese, a gallon of milk—all from Walmart’s private label, all cheaper than national brands. Then, into the same cart, she drops a $627 pre-owned Louis Vuitton handbag that Walmart has certified as the real thing. The next morning she swings by Ulta for $12 Maybelline foundation and the $36 Drunk Elephant face wash she refuses to live without.

A decade ago, when the economy was humming, this woman—a six-figure earner—would have spent much of her money at stores built on aspiration and exclusivity, like Saks Fifth Avenue, Whole Foods, and Sephora. But in this turbulent economy, she’s willing to trade down on many products to save.

America is in a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation hit 4.2% in May, its highest in three years, driven by an energy shock from the war with Iran. Gas prices jumped more than 40% from a year earlier, and grocery items like tomatoes spiked more than 30%. Up and down the income ladder, people are scrambling to stretch their dollar—and even affluent shoppers are gravitating toward retailers that compete on price and value. 

“The upper end of consumers are trading down,” says Marshal Cohen, Circana’s chief analyst for retail. “Everyone is pulling back on spending.”

This didn’t happen overnight. Inflation has been creeping up since the pandemic, which is when higher-income shoppers first started defecting to lower-end stores.

The middle class—defined by Pew as households earning between $56,600 and $169,000 annually—are struggling to keep up with their upper-middle-class peers when it comes to housing, schools, and vacations.

Meanwhile, households a rung or two above the middle classes are getting significantly richer, thanks in large part to the stock market. The result is a tiered system of perceived (and real) scarcity, which has driven a larger portion of the middle classes toward retailers that help them save money on their everyday shopping expenses. 

The retailers winning right now are the ones that saw this coming. Walmart, Ulta, Costco, TJ Maxx, and Ross are all booming—with sales up by between 7% and 21% in the most recent quarters. They’ve turned the trade-down economy into an art form, courting the budget and deep-pocketed shopper in the same aisle by offering rock-bottom prices for the customer counting every cent, with just enough elevated merchandise (premium soda, prestige skincare) sprinkled in to keep the wealthy interested. 

At the same time, the department stores built on aspiration are sliding. Nordstrom, with its stock down 61% over five years and its full-line stores losing ground to its own off-price chain, was taken private last year; Macy’s is closing roughly 150 stores in a multiyear retreat; and Saks, the onetime temple of luxury, filed for bankruptcy in January.

“Walmart and Costco have become the new brands of the middle class,” says brand strategist Eugene Healey.

These brands didn’t win simply by slashing prices; markdowns are a race to the bottom. What sets the winners apart is how they’ve made value feel smart, even pleasurable. Their playbook breaks down into four lessons that any retailer can pull from.

In this story, we’ll lay out:

• The four iron principles that drive high-low retail success today
• 14 ways that brands can implement those principles
• What successful merchants have learned about the psychology of the current American consumer and how it’s changing the way you shop
• How markdowns can be transformed from a loss into an emotional win
• Walmart’s counterintuitive move to expand its “low prices” strategy

The Playbook in 4 Takeaways

1. The Lipstick Effect Is in Full Force

The lipstick index is a concept coined by Leonard Lauder, the former chairman of Estée Lauder, during the 2001 recession: When money gets tight and the big splurges—vacation, new sofa, designer coat—fall out of reach, people indulge in smaller luxuries instead. A premium lipstick won’t blow the budget, but it delivers a hit of luxury and reminds the customer there is still room for a little treat.

Retailers that are thriving right now are experts at capitalizing on the lipstick effect. Walmart and Costco stock their shelves with higher-end items, like San Pellegrino water and La Roche-Posay skincare. And at Ulta, this manifests in actual lipstick: A $53 Chanel lipstick sits a few feet away from a $9 E.l.f product.

Importantly, expensive items sit on the same shelves as far cheaper items. Retailers aren’t separating products by high end and low end since the same customer might buy both. For the wealthy shopper, it’s a routine repurchase, the lipstick she restocks every few weeks without a second thought. For the stretched shopper, it’s a treat—the consolation prize she buys for herself instead of the handbag she’d been saving up for. 

“We’re very focused on being inclusive, and we want to be a destination for everyone,” says Ulta CEO Kecia Steelman. “We can take care of your beauty shopping needs no matter what your budget is.”

The lesson for brands and retailers: Don’t sort your customers into tiers. Anchor the bottom with real value, leave room at the top for the occasional indulgence, and let the customer decide how they fill their basket. “If you open my own makeup bag, you’d see everything from NYX to YSL,” Steelman says. “This is how the consumer is shopping today.”

2. Engineer the Treasure Hunt

Many purchases these days feel like small defeats. Gas prices are skyrocketing, ground beef costs $9 a pound, the grocery bill creeps higher than it did last month. So when a shopper finds something she needs at a price that’s far lower than she expected, the payoff isn’t just financial, it’s emotional. It feels like a rare win in an economy that otherwise feels rigged.

Many of the retailers thriving in this environment are the ones engineering that feeling on purpose. At TJ Maxx, it’s the designer coat with the department-store tag still on it, marked down 60%. When the economy is doing badly, the chain gets access to even more premium merchandise that other retailers couldn’t sell. It’s a feeling TJX builds its business model around. And it’s working: TJX, TJ Maxx’s parent, grew sales 9% to $14.3 billion last quarter, with comparable sales up 6%, and every division—including the one housing TJ Maxx—posting gains.

CEO Ernie Herrman has said the company’s teams work to deliver “an exciting treasure hunt of merchandise at great value to our customers, every day.” 

At Costco, it’s the Kirkland batteries and coffee that are reportedly made by Duracell and Starbucks, respectively, at a lower price tag. Or the rotating “treasure aisle” where a $900 espresso machine or a designer handbag appears for one week only. 

Costco treats that unpredictability as a core asset. In a proxy statement, the company told investors that its merchandising creativity helps promote the “treasure hunt that our customers value.” In both cases, the unpredictable layout is an appeal to customers who relish the hunt. The strategy is paying off. Costco’s net sales rose 11.6% to $69.15 billion last quarter, with comparable sales up nearly 7%, excluding the swings in gas prices and currency.

The lesson for brands and retailers: Any brand can engineer a jolt of satisfaction that signals to shoppers that they’ve gotten more than what they expected. It might mean a surprise upgrade, an unadvertised markdown that rewards a loyal customer at checkout, a limited “found it before it sold out” drop, or simply pricing a high-quality product below what you can get elsewhere on the market. Pull it off, and you become the rare bright spot in a shopper’s week, and a place they’ll likely come back to.

3. Value Is the New Aspiration

For decades, aspirational brands promised that spending a little more was how consumers could show the world—and themselves—that they’d arrived. This economy flipped that instinct. Now the opposite is true: The savvy move is paying less for something just as good. The retailers winning have made thrift their entire brand. Just read their mottoes: Ross’s “Dress for Less,” Walmart’s “Save Money. Live Better.”

Take Ross. Where TJ Maxx dangles the designer label at a discount, Ross plays a different game: offering rock-bottom prices. Its core shopper isn’t hunting for merely good value; the win is in how little she paid. That instinct is showing up on the balance sheet: Ross’s sales jumped 21% to $6.01 billion last quarter, powered by 11% more foot traffic and 6% bigger baskets.

In an earnings call, CEO Jim Conroy frames the strategy in exactly those terms, describing the work as bringing in “branded bargains across good, better, and best.” And he ties the mission directly to the squeezed shopper, saying Ross wants to “deliver the absolute best bargains and best values for our customers, particularly those under pressure from the prices of oil or gas prices.”

The lesson for brands and retailers: Stop treating a low price as something to apologize for, because the customer no longer feels ashamed about getting a deal. Quality, however, is nonnegotiable. The affluent shoppers who are trading down are discerning, and they’ll recognize that a cheap product that falls apart is no bargain at all.

“Consumers today are willing to pay more for better product because they recognize it’s going to last, it’s going to be different, it’s going to allow them to stand out rather than look like everybody else,” Circana’s Cohen says.

So strip out the costs they no longer care about—the inflated branding, the fancy packaging—and pour the savings into what they do care about: the product. Then do what Ross and Walmart do: Tell the customer, plainly and often.

4. Court Everyone at Once

When inflation hit, Walmart’s obvious move was to go even cheaper. But instead, it did the opposite. It started to add more premium and name-brand products to its assortment.

“Walmart said, ‘We’re going to trade up. We’re not going to trade down,’” Cohen says. “We’re going to bring in better product so that we can get that middle-income consumer and the lower end of the upper consumer.” (This lower-end upper-middle-class consumer has an annual household income of $170,000 and higher.) 

Walmart’s grocery aisles stock the kind of assortment you might find at Whole Foods, including Rao’s pasta sauce, Graza olive oil, Goodles mac and cheese. On Walmart’s website, you can now find MacBooks, Air Jordans, pre-owned luxury handbags, and expensive collectibles.

Julie Barber, Walmart’s chief merchant, calls this strategy “access.” The goal, she says, is “giving people access to brands they didn’t know that we could offer them at an incredible value.” She describes the approach as moving customers “from essentials to the unexpected”—they come for the basics, then discover a La Roche-Posay serum or a Scoop blazer they didn’t know Walmart carried.

The strategy makes sense. Walmart had spent decades cultivating the low-income shopper. To grow, it had to tap into a new market. And it’s working. Over the last few quarters, the majority of Walmart’s market share gains have come from households making more than $100,000 a year. 

At a fireside chat with journalists during Walmart’s Associates Week, CEO John Furner described this shift. The company continues “to see the higher-income customers coming to Walmart . . . buying more; they’re coming in more frequently,” he said. “And I think that’s largely due to the flexibility of what we offer.”

The credibility, Barber says, is compounding. Brands once reluctant to sell to Walmart now see “a lot of growth in customers making $100,000 a year” and “a lot of growth in our Gen Z”—the cohorts those brands most want.

How did Walmart pull this off without alienating budget shoppers, who are still its core market? Carefully. It kept rock-bottom prices on essentials that bring people in, then layered the premium products on top—$35 Madison Reed hair dye next to a $6.94 Revlon box. Even as it leans into these premium brands, Barber says, Walmart “will never take out that value and the mission—everyday low prices—that is the heart of the company.”

Walmart poured money into parts of the shopping experience the affluent noticed, like cleaner store layouts, better lighting, an improved app, and fast delivery, while using its massive scale to negotiate for the lowest prices on the market. It has also avoided the cues that would alienate some customers: locked cases, snooty service, or sections devoted to higher-priced goods. 

“Walmart’s set up really well in any kind of economy,” Furner said. “If things are stronger, our assortment grows. If times are a bit tougher, we offer value.”

The lesson for brands and retailers: You can design a retail experience to be inclusive so that no shopper feels out of place. In an economy where everyone is stretching, the brands that win are the ones that make everyone—rich, struggling, and those in the increasingly blurred middle—feel like they belong.

During the ribbon cutting, which took place on an 87-degree day, the sounds of play could be heard behind remarks from city officials. “These young people—hear these babies enjoying themselves in the water today—this is what it’s all about: our future generations enjoying this space, understanding that they stand on the shoulders of those who came before, who have fought to make this happen,” said John T. Bullock, the city council representative for the neighborhood.

Greater Model had been closed since 2019, when the city was forced to shutter the facility because of disrepair and deferred maintenance—a common problem afflicting aging public pools across the country. Baltimore, whose network of neighborhood public pools was built up during the 20th century, is demonstrating how to get many of these facilities back online and with modern features that help these public spaces better serve their communities.

With the help of the architecture firm CannonDesign, Baltimore City Recreation and Parks (BCRP) is overhauling five aquatics centers using a kit-of-parts approach oriented around accessibility and multi-generational use. The idea is that well-functioning public pools for all are key to healthier cities from the perspectives of climate adaptation, social cohesion, and more. The collaboration shows how cities across the country could reinvest in this critical public infrastructure.

“So many individuals in this community depended heavily on pools,” says Reginald Moore, the director of BCRP. “Yes, it is a place for them to cool off during Code Red days, but it’s also a place where families go to connect.” 

The investment in these facilities comes at a time when cities have been pivoting to splash pads, which typically have lower construction costs and don’t require lifeguards, to address the need for public cooling. “We’ve seen a lot of cities remove their pools or close them and replace them with a splash pad,” says Monica Pascatore, the architect at CannonDesign who led the project. “I would challenge them to think about the difference between splash and immersion. The physiological relief of immersion on the body is very different than splash. And it doesn’t offer the opportunity to learn to swim, which is an equity issue where it’s really important to fill that gap.” 

Designing a better neighborhood pool

Beginning in the early 20th century, Baltimore built small neighborhood pools to help alleviate crowding at its larger aquatics centers. These were simple swim centers with a single pool and a capacity for 30 to 40 people. Today, the city operates five large aquatics centers and 12 smaller neighborhood pools.

The city’s pools were segregated until 1956. Because of white flight in the 1950s—a problem that affected many cities—Baltimore’s population dropped, lowering the tax base that funded the municipal budget. Unlike Baltimore County, which transitioned its public pools to private after integration, the city maintained its public pools and expanded the network when it could. The five pools CannonDesign renovated were constructed in the 1970s. 

Still, maintenance was a challenge. The city dedicated what money it had to larger central facilities and the neighborhood spaces suffered. By 2020, when CannonDesign began working on the project, these facilities had reached the end of their lifespan and were closed and sitting empty, becoming another symbol of vacancy in the city. After receiving funding to renovate the pools, the city decided to take a kit-of-parts approach to the redesign. This helps ensure consistent high quality spaces for the public, greater swim equity, and designs that can respond to their immediate community. Additionally, consistency across the facilities makes long-term maintenance more sustainable. 

CannonDesign and BCRP wanted the facilities, which cost between $5 and $8 million to renovate, to be as accessible to as many people as possible. Instead of a single pool at each facility, they determined that two bodies of water would ensure that the various constituents who come to swim aren’t competing with each other for space. More effective use of the sites enabled them to build two pools. For example, the architects shrunk the size of the locker rooms in order to allocate more room for recreation. They converted them to restroom-only buildings, eliminating lockers assuming that visitors would come ready to swim and would not need storage.

The shallow pool with zero-entry is tailored for young children and their caretakers, seniors and those with limited mobility, or anyone else who prefers the shallow end. The larger pool can be cordoned off for lane swimmers while leaving room for those who just want to play around. Then, CannonDesign integrated special features like massive pipes and sprinklers that drop water into the pools from above. 

“People like to experience water in different ways,” Pascatore says. “We took the approach of thinking of these as a retreat, a respite, a place for people looking for reprieve from the heat.” 

This approach also guards against the deferred maintenance issue in the future. “Having aging pool systems, every mechanical system is completely different—different pumps, different motors—and it’s like you beat your head up against the wall,” Moore says. “How do we maintain this system when I may have to go get a pump from California?”

Improving swim equity for all

The Greater Model Aquatics Center builds on lessons learned from the previous three pools that opened (they are the Walter P. Carter, Towanda, and Coldstream facilities). 

To make room for the two pools, CannonDesign shrunk the footprint of the facilities building. It turned out that visitors needed more space to store things, so they added lockers. Additionally, the design team learned that the community has a higher population of people with autism, so it integrated a small greenspace in one corner of the center to provide sensory comfort for visitors.

Initially, BCRP sought to avoid landscaping within the facilities because of maintenance (scooping leaves out of the water is laborious and clogs filters, plus it’s extra work for an already stretched-thin staff). However, residents asked for more greenery. BCRP struck up a partnership with a gardening group near the Walter P. Carter pool and is working with them to introduce landscaping. 

The final aquatics center that CannonDesign is redeveloping, the City Springs Park location in East Baltimore, was on a small site that wasn’t able to accommodate two pools. However, BCRP was able to swap locations with a community garden on the opposite end of the park in order to provide the same level of service as the other pools.

“We’ve learned that each community is different,” Pascatore says. “Even though the components of the pools are the same and they adapt to each site, what each community brings to it is unique and different.”

Part of the mission of the pools is also to address the racial disparity in drowning deaths: the drowning rate for Black people under 30 is 1.5 times that of white people in the same age group. Access to swim lessons helps this. In the United States, there are roughly 309,000 public pools and over 10 million private ones. “It’s bigger than just replacing pools,” Moore says. “It’s also about giving kids an opportunity to learn to swim.” 

He’s particularly concerned about making up for the time when communities didn’t have easy access to pools. “We have to reeducate the community on the importance of the pool,” he says. “In the many years without having a pool, how many of those kids that are now in the community have never been taught how to swim? So we have a lot of catching up to do because that pool has been down for so long.”

One component of a healthier city

Public recreation centers, like the renovated neighborhood pools, are a component of what Mayor Brandon Scott is calling the “Baltimore Renaissance,” an equity-focused approach to city revitalization. Reducing gun violence is a critical element within the framework. 

Mayor Scott is using a public health–based approach to achieve this goal. The thinking is: invest in community resources, affordable housing, and youth outreach, and crime will go down. To this end, the city launched a program called the Rec Rollout, a $120 million investment in parks and public spaces, in 2022. This included rehabilitating and building new basketball courts, playgrounds, and swimming pools. Early signs show it’s working. Between 2021 and 2025, the city’s homicide rate dropped 60%.

“Rec spaces are safe spaces,” Moore says. “It’s a place where our young people should go and connect and be kids.” He notes that while the parks and recreation department has opened youth-centered spaces like eSports and gaming labs, STEAM centers, and teen lounges, the aquatics centers offer a place to hang out without expectation of doing an activity. 

“Sometimes teens just want to come to a space, get out the heat, connect with friends, charge their phone, and not necessarily always come into a programmed space.”

BCRP also uses its paid lifeguard program as a positive incentive to help youth stay out of trouble. It provides free training, pays for certification, and offers a bonus for high attendance and not receiving any disciplinary action. A few years ago, the city struggled with a lifeguard shortage, and had to limit pool hours as a result, but, according to Moore, they no longer have a shortage as of this year.  

Some of the positive effects are harder to measure, but are still felt. CannonDesign began working on the renovations during COVID, when the importance of outdoor recreation space became extra apparent. “The mental health benefits associated with being able to go outside and be with their friends outside in nature is so critical,” Pascatore says. “It’s probably more important today than ever before.” 

Since the renovations, BCRP has seen attendance at the pools, which have over twice the capacity of their predecessors, increase 30 to 40%. Larger spaces and more lifeguards are part of the reason for this, Director Moore says. He hopes the momentum keeps growing, and that more funds become available to renovate more pools. “The last part of my dream is that I would like to see Baltimore City have inner city swim teams,” he says.

Suri, a London-based startup known for designing a sleek, easy-to-recycle electric toothbrush that quickly gained market share from legacy brands, now wants to change how consumers use toothpaste. The brand’s new toothpaste comes with a reusable, custom-designed pump and plant-based refills that the company says can be composted at home after use.

The gel toothpaste avoids common ingredients like palm oil and titanium dioxide and replaces fluoride with nano-hydroxyapatite, a NASA-developed ingredient that mimics enamel to strengthen teeth without affecting the oral microbiome.

“It was about how do we make that beautiful experience so that you wouldn’t mind having it on your counter, and if guests came over, you wouldn’t be hiding it,” says Gyve Safavi, cofounder and CEO of Suri (the name is short for “sustainable rituals”).

The company spent more than two years on the design, making sure the pump could work with the thick gel, deliver a perfectly sized “nurdle” of toothpaste with a pump, lock for mess-free travel, and last for years. While a handful of other companies have started making refillable toothpaste, Suri saw an opportunity to deliver a better user experience.

“The pumping experience is core. If you’re going to move to a refillable system, you can’t also move to a soppy toothpaste that comes out very weak because somebody didn’t spend time to make the pump strong enough,” Safavi says. The pump is airless, so there’s no straw inside to trap the product; instead, a plate pushes it upward so 100% of the toothpaste is used.

While Suri considered putting the refills in recyclable packaging, the team wanted to avoid petroleum-based plastic. (It’s worth noting that although conventional toothpaste tubes are finally recyclable in the U.S., consumers don’t actually recycle them, in part because most municipal recycling systems haven’t agreed to accept them.) Suri’s refill cartridges come in a plant-based material called Vivomer, which uses PHA to help it break down quickly when it comes in contact with soil in a home compost bin.

The company, which recently expanded its toothbrush sales into Target and expects to generate more than $63 million in revenue this year, aimed to make a toothpaste that people would want to use as much as its brushes.

“We’ve talked about building a minimum lovable product,” says cofounder Mark Rushmore. “In software, you can build a minimum viable product—if something’s wrong, you can iterate it, refresh the screen, and boom, it’s done. In hardware and consumer products, you really get one shot with the consumer for them to fall in love with it.”

The refillable bottle sells for $15; a single cartridge is $15; and a pack of three sells for $36.