This could describe Nike’s classic 2002 “Cage” ad, Adidas’s 2006 “José” ad, Nike’s 2014 “Winner Stays” spot . . . You get the idea. But it’s also a broad summary of Adidas’s newest World Cup commercial, “Backyard Legends,” which launched on May 7 via star Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram.

The five-minute advertising epic opens with Oscar-nominated actor Chalamet trying to put together the greatest street soccer team ever, starting with Team USA star Trinity Rodman, Jude Bellingham of Real Madrid and Team England, and Spanish teen sensation Lamine Yamal of FC Barcelona. 

Turns out there is a legendary street soccer crew that hasn’t been beaten since 1996, and Chalamet is determined to end their streak. We get a peek into the mysterious street ballers’ past, as they upset ’90s stars including David Beckham and Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane. Bad Bunny and Lionel Messi are there to take in the action. 

Lola USA—a new Omnicom franken-agency forged in April when the holding company combined 180 and Adam&EveDDB New York—created the spot. The magic trick it pulls off is how it manages to take a less-than unique story device (famous players, unexpected game, etc.), and give it a new spin in a way that lives up to both the hype and the occasion of the world’s biggest sporting event. 

It might just be the best World Cup ad from the Three Stripes in 20 years. 

Historical precedent

Like I said, the fantasy draft football squad device is nothing new to mark a World Cup. In 2002, Nike put Manchester United legend Eric Cantona in the Chalamet role, recruiting star players to participate in a secret street ball tournament on a container ship in the middle of the ocean. The swoosh was back at it again in 2014 with “Winner Stays,” in which teens pick teams from a ridiculously fun player pool.

Adidas itself helped originate this concept back in 2006 with “José,” in which two kids—on a remarkably familiar apartment-lined street pitch—pick their ultimate teams, with the help of impressive VFX to bring back luminaries of the past like German legend Franz Beckenbauer and French star Michel Platini. 

Since then, Adidas’s World Cup advertising has been a bit of a mixed bag of concepts. 

Its “Cantina” spot for the 2010 World Cup is easily the most original, somehow seamlessly mixing soccer stars with Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Jay Baruchel, and the Gallagher brothers of Oasis fame into the Mos Eisley cantina scenes from the original Star Wars.

Epic. 

In 2014, “The Dream,” directed by City of God’s Fernando Meirelles, starred Lionel Messi with the requisite laundry list of Adidas-sponsored stars from various countries, including Dani Alves, Luis Suárez, Robin van Persie, Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Xavier “Xavi” Hernández. It’s a pretty intense, dramatized look at the training and pressure on these stars. No laughs here.

For the 2018 tournament, the spot was called “Creativity Is the Answer,” which sounds like the name of a panel at an advertising conference. This was a mishmash of soccer stars (including Messi, France’s Paul Pogba, and Egypt’s Mo Salah) with the likes of supermodel Karlie Kloss and multihyphenate artist Pharrell Williams in what looks like a mix between a concert and a soccer-themed bloodsport kumite. Frankly, it’s a bit of a hot mess—an insanely expensive hot mess. 

Four years later, in 2022, the brand simplified and found its sense of humor with “Family Reunion.” Narrated by award-winning artist Stormzy, this spot imagined a collection of football stars (including, once again, Messi, along with Bellingham, Karim Benzema, and Son Heung-Min) as a goofy group of housemates (or cousins?) meeting up to go enjoy the tournament like some elite soccer social club.

Adidas’s best ever?

If you combine the concept of “José” with the goofiness of “Family Reunion” and the ambition of “Cantina,” you land on “Backyard Legends.”

Here Chalamet is at his Marty Supreme-esque manic best, and the footballers are also believably natural and funny. (If you’ve ever seen Messi’s work for Michelob Ultra or Lay’s, you know what an accomplishment that is.) Plus, the VFX-generated flashback looks of players like Zidane and Del Piero, not to mention Buzzcut Beckham, Blond Beckham, and Mohawk Beckham, are funny enough to ignore the whiff of uncanny AI.

As a celebrity star, and pseudo-avatar for everyday fans, Chalamet nails it. He’s no celebrity mercenary—he’s a real soccer fan. Anyone who cheers for Ligue 1 side Saint-Étienne is no run-of-the-mill bandwagon rider.

He also recently posted a social video supporting the girls’ softball team at his former high school, NYC’s LaGuardia (on a soccer field for some reason?), while rocking a Manhattan Kickers jacket (that’s the youth club he once played for, with whom he even competed against Liverpool’s Joe Gomez). As Men in Blazers founder Roger Bennett has said, he’s America’s ultimate football hipster, and here he truly earns that title. 

The world-building and lore that Adidas manages to craft in five minutes is impressive, as is how genuinely fun it feels for everyone involved, not just the viewers. But perhaps its best move of all is that it ends before the supposed epic game even starts. We get a callback to 2006’s “José” with Auntie up in the apartment supplying the ball, and just as it’s all about to kick off, “Fin.” 

Here’s hoping the brand leaves us excited and wanting more. 

The 2026 World Cup will generate an extra $10.5 billion in global ad spending in the second quarter of this year, a gain of 1.1% compared to non-tournament years, according to a projection by marketing research firm WARC Media. That’s all just the cost of buying ad space, and doesn’t even account for the cost of actually making the ads and other brand work. 

Much like they do for the Super Bowl, World Cup advertisers often appear panicked by all that extra spending and attention, making ads that reek of more money than sense. Exhibit A for this year’s World Cup is Lay’s “Most Epic Watch Party.” 

For “Backyard Legends,” it’s clear that Adidas has put a ton of cash on the screen, but the story’s clarity, characters’ energy, and brand’s creativity to evolve a familiar concept makes it a shrewd investment. 

Joining the widely celebrated freeway-capping Klyde Warren Park, which opened its first phase over a stretch of a recessed downtown freeway in 2012, Halperin Park is a community-centric model for addressing the divisions wrought by highway building.

Reconnecting a neighborhood

Designed by architecture firm HKS and landscape architecture firm SWA, the cap park reconnects part of Oak Cliff, a South Dallas neighborhood cut up by the 1950s-era highway-building boom.

At the time I-35E was constructed, Oak Cliff was home to a thriving Black community. As in many other non-white neighborhoods in cities across the country, the community was shattered by highway construction and the decades of disinvestment that followed.

“While it’s a park to reconnect communities, it’s also a park that we wanted the communities to feel like they helped design; they helped influence the programming,” says Todd Strawn, managing principal for SWA’s Dallas studio and lead designer on the project.

During the planning process, a “community-first plan” was developed through extensive outreach, focusing the project on outcomes like improving access for schools in the surrounding area, increasing shade, and reducing the heat island effect in the neighborhood.

Balancing recreation and economic development

As it officially opens, the 2.8-acre park is forging a small but meaningful reconnection in the area. Its design honors the neighborhood’s history while also encouraging the economic development it needs.

The park features a mixture of uses. Kids can scramble up the jungle gym or cool off on the splash pad. The band shell can host concerts and performances, while the lawn serves as a place for picnics or just relaxing with a book. SWA and HKS also thought of the park in relationship to the rest of the city, designing an elevated terrace walk and seating area that gives visitors a new vantage point.

“You get up on top of that and you’ve got these fantastic views of downtown, over the zoo, and over South Dallas, which is super lush with the tree canopy,” Strawn says of the elevated area. “There’s a lot of green space that you see that wasn’t really perceived previously.”

This elevated section doubles as the roof of a multipurpose pavilion that can host events and house pop-up vendors. There’s space nearby where food trucks can park, and an enclosed building for fully indoor events and activations.

Russell Crader, global practice director for arts and culture at HKS, says these spaces give the park flexibility for both recreational and economic activity. “We basically have a tool kit,” he says. “I think those are what will allow the most change over time as the neighborhood starts to say, ‘I want a different type of program.’”

A technically challenging design

The park is also a pioneering example of the use of mass timber, which is still rare in the Dallas area. Three sections of the park have mass-timber elements, including the curving band shell. The material, which is more lightweight than traditional steel and concrete, helped reduce the overall weight of the park—a critical detail as it spans the interstate.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, this is a park, and you just get to do your whimsical gestures however you want to,’” Crader says, noting the reality is that the many technical challenges involved with capping a freeway required rigorous engineering studies. “There’s a real balance of science and art that coalesces here in the park.”

Nearly a decade in the works, the project was driven by the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation in partnership with the city of Dallas and the Texas Department of Transportation. This is just the first phase of the project. A second phase now in the design and engineering stage would bring the park’s total area up to 5.3 acres. Fundraising is still underway.

As ambitious as the project is, the future of freeway cap parks is looking dim. The Trump administration has targeted such neighborhood reconnection projects by rescinding more than $2 billion worth of unspent funding that had previously been established for efforts like freeway cap parks and highway-to-boulevard conversions.

Strawn contends, however, that there is every intention of completing Halperin Park’s phase two. “There are a lot of hoops and loops to jump through,” he says. “The goal right now . . . is somewhere in the next five or six years that phase two would come online.”

Just one problem: No one seems to want a data center in their backyard. Communities oppose them because they consume massive amounts of energy and water and pollute the environment. Another concern? Data centers are major eyesores.

These complexes can span hundreds of acres and usually feature uninspiring, windowless concrete facades. Built quickly, efficiently, and as inexpensively as possible, their design is determined by practicality, not aesthetics.

As more and more continue to pop up, fed-up observers of the trend are turning to social media to propose fantastical AI-generated renders of what these structures could look like.

Could and should a data center resemble the Shire? An Alpine spa? A castle? These are just a few of the ideas circulating.

Venture capitalist Joshua Kushner sparked the conversation with a post saying, “make data centers aesthetically beautiful,” though he didn’t offer any specific visual suggestions.

One X user who created an AI rendering of a data center tucked into a hillside, just like the hobbit houses in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, posted: “Genuinely if datacenters looked like this, the nimby angst around them would drop by half.”

The ideas are far out. One armchair designer (who also happens to be an editor at The Economist) shared a data center dressed to look like a medieval stone castle, writing, “Many people do not seem to want data centres built near them, despite the fact that they don’t cause that much traffic and often generate a lot of local tax revenue. I suspect it’s partly because they’re ugly!”

He also posted a render that imagines a data center done up to look like the Parthenon, captioning the image: “This is not beyond our abilities.”

While those proposals might be more joke than reality, others are finding a lesson in the discussion about data center aesthetics.

“To me, the opportunity here is not greco-or-techno-futurism,” designer Joshua Puckett said on X. “It’s to create a regionally inspired form that settles into the land rather than stand in defiance of it.” He also shared renders of a hypothetical data center in three different cities: Sydney; Denver; and Columbia Basin, Washington. The design features an undulating, serpentine roof that blends into its surroundings.

Sure, these are social media gimmicks. But for those in the architecture field, the AI renderings also illuminate tensions about what is actually buildable and why.

Architect Sean McGuire didn’t mince words. “Every day I open this app to another bird-brained take: ‘Why won’t designers make it pretty, look what I cooked up in 0.0003 seconds in ai,’” he posted on X.

The issue isn’t necessarily designers’ will; it’s the policy around construction. “Begging people to spend five seconds learning why buildings look the way they do,” he wrote. “It is code. It is financing. It is policy. Aesthetics are downstream of all of it (unless mandated in zoning! which usually fails!). Your AI rendering is a screensaver. Infrastructure CAN be beautiful, we need to set our expectations at a reasonable target.”

But is beauty really the main problem?

Discourse around data centers is not only on their rather boring exteriors, but also how energy-intensive they are to run. No matter how beautiful we make data centers on the outside, these core problems remain.

But still, more data centers will be built. Regardless of whether the new structures will look like something out of a movie or more grounded in reality, the rapid expansion does present a blank canvas to build beyond just practicality.

“The warehouse design approach of most data centers is the architectural equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand,” Fast Company’s Nate Berg argued in December last year. “The boring design of data centers is a missed opportunity to counter their negative externalities with at least a little upside.”

It’s associated with job losses, cheating, dubious advice, excessive energy consumption, and a variety of doomsday scenarios up to and including the eradication of humanity. In March, 57% of respondents to an NBC poll said the risks associated with the technology simply aren’t worth the potential benefits.

There are plenty of reasons for this, but one is surely the messaging coming from some of the biggest AI brands themselves, particularly from their leaders. Last month, for example, AI giant Anthropic announced it would limit access to its new Mythos cybersecurity tool because it was just too powerful for wider release, which might put it in the hands of criminals or other bad actors. Sam Altman, CEO of rival OpenAI snarked that this was “fear-based marketing.” But not long after, OpenAI released its own new security tool—and restricted access to it.

That’s just a recent example of an odd element of the entire category: AI firms seem intent on reminding customers at every product drop how the technology might ruin our lives. Sure, it’s part of the hype cycle. And to some extent the big AI brands are performing a responsibility flex. 

But maybe the public’s increasingly sour response to AI suggests these CEOs’ insistence on telling us how dangerous their product might be is not a winning brand strategy. (Altman’s home being literally attacked with a Molotov cocktail is probably not a great sign.)

This noisy pessimism isn’t isolated, or new. When it rolled out GPT-4 back in March 2023, OpenAI published a technical report that, alongside descriptions of a historic leap in capability, included a section dedicated to its potential for misuse to make bombs or mix dangerous chemicals. Soon after, hundreds of AI researchers and executives, including figures from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI itself, signed an open letter warning that AI posed extinction-level risks comparable to nuclear war. 

Many AI executives have claimed to want government oversight. As Elon Musk’s current legal battle with OpenAI is reminding us, the company was actually founded as a nonprofit precisely because the technology was perceived as too risky to be shaped solely by the move-fast-and-break-things profit motive.

Obviously, these companies should not suppress the potential dangers and risks of their products, but at some point you have to wonder whether the companies’ marketing pros are letting fear and doom define their brands. 

While there was a slew of AI-related advertising in this year’s Super Bowl, much of it was so big-picture about AI’s potential (“You can just build things”) that it didn’t really stick. Meanwhile, on a more day-to-day level, the specific consumer benefits we hear about don’t seem transformative—summarized meeting transcripts, improved chatbots, tools that make it easier to generate an image of yourself as a superhero, and so on. 

Around the time OpenAI and Anthropic were warning us of the dangers of their cybersecurity tools, I got a promotional email from ChatGPT suggesting uses that included having the chat tool “draft a kind text asking to reschedule” a meeting. A little short of insanely great.

Surely there is a bigger, better, yet still relatable story to tell. Usually Silicon Valley is good at balancing a hyped-up version of its own existential importance against offering an authentically appealing vision of the future. But with AI that balance seems off. 

Imagine if, at the launch of the iPhone, Steve Jobs had dwelled on the possibility that it might one day help destroy attention spans or undermine democracy. The brands that have historically transformed public behavior—Apple, Google, even Netflix—led with wonder, not worry. They sold a vision with a positive emotional outcome, not better chatbots in exchange for never-ending ambient dread

AI companies presumably have the raw material for exactly that story. AI tools are assisting in early-stage cancer detection. Researchers at Google DeepMind won a 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work using AI to predict protein structures. Startups are using AI to accelerate drug discovery timelines. These are good stories.

Again, none of this means AI’s risks and downsides should be minimized or go unmentioned. A complicated and transformative industry can hold more than one truth. But right now the ratio feels out of whack, and the companies best positioned to fix it seem to be trying to out-warn each other.

Pew’s polling found that 56% of “AI experts” believe the technology will have an overall positive impact in the long run, compared with 35% among the public in general. The big AI brands would be wise to focus less on fear, and more on helping the rest of us see what the “experts” do.

A new Burger King logo font generator lets users customize the red, rounded letters that sit between the logo’s burnt-orange-colored buns. It’s by Pixel Frame, a website that makes album cover and logo text generators for everything from Drake’s discography to Dragon Ball Z and Donkey Kong.

Just a few words will render big and bold in the logo generator, but the text will become increasingly squished and stacked as you add more text, with one line stacked on top of the other like hot-off-the-grill patties between the buns.

There are customization options as well. You can add a custom tagline below the logo, generate your text as a wordmark on a plain tan background, or set it in a pair of promotional-style graphics for the Whopper, the burger chain’s signature sandwich.

In a Reddit thread, users shared mock-ups of their own creations, like “Are you the child of divorce?,” “Are we the monsters?,” and “Our patties are circles.”

Burger King introduced its current logo in 2021 as part of a rebrand by Jones Knowles Ritchie that modernized the brand’s original 1969 logo, and the burger chain has since followed it up with marketing efforts aimed at bringing customers back. It’s paying off at a time when other fast-food chains are under pressure due to rising inflation and labor costs pushing up prices and depressing sales.

Burger King’s rebrand has helped it reposition itself in the fast-food landscape. Where industry leader McDonald’s is known for its iconic Golden Arches—the Nike Swoosh of fast-food logos—and Wendy’s, the No. 2 burger chain in the U.S. by sales, is best known for its character-led, modernized heritage brand, Burger King takes a more literal approach.

Burger King’s refreshed visual identity made the burger central to the logo again. It uses colors inspired by the Whopper and a squishy font that evokes the food itself. It also reins in the typography of the original logo and gives its top bun a little more volume. The rebrand fits into the company’s broader strategy of evoking Burger King’s ingredients, as its marketing is focused in large part on elevating its core menu.

The quick-service-restaurant (QSR) category is undergoing its fair share of shake-ups, as Wendy’s shutters stores, McDonald’s chases Starbucks with an expansion into dirty sodas and drinks, and Whataburger upgrades its packaging with a happier version of a Happy Meal. Burger King, meanwhile, is doubling down on burgers to great effect—first with the launch of this logo five years ago, and now with its menu items. The chain launched an Elevated Whopper this quarter with premium ingredients like a glazed bun and creamy mayo, while its $3.99 King Junior meals also drove growth.

Burger King’s parent company, Restaurant Brands International (RBI), said in its earnings call on Wednesday that Burger King saw its U.S. same-store sales grow 5.8% over the quarter, outperforming the rest of the burger QSR industry. RBI CEO Josh Kobza said it was the result of disciplined execution to welcome back guests and reengage latent fans.

When the business model for every other social platform revolves around your attention and time spent as their primary product for brand advertising dollars, this may feel like a counterintuitive strategy. 

“If you listen to Gen Z about why they come, they say . . . ‘Pinterest is where I can figure out who I want to be, not who the internet tells me I’m supposed to be,’” says Pinterest CMO Claudine Cheever. “That sentiment resonates with a much broader audience. The opportunity with the brand campaign was to take a much more pointed, clear stance on that the internet should be there to help you, and it should be about time well spent, not a lot of time spent.”

Of course the real motivation is to pitch time on Pinterest as quality over quantity, not just to users but also brand partners. Cheever says 96% of user searches on Pinterest are unbranded, which means people are looking for inspiration, and brands have an opportunity to supply it. 

“This is a platform where people look for brands, they don’t scroll past them,” Cheever says. “It’s actually an incredibly ripe place for advertisers. So it’s about sharpening both of those narratives on the user and the commercial side.”

And it’s working. On May 4, Pinterest reported that revenue for Q1 2026 was up 18% year on year to $1.008 billion, and global monthly active users up 11% to 631 million.

Consistency is key

At Coachella in April, as many complained the festival had devolved into the influencer Olympics, Pinterest’s presence encouraged people to be phone-free for the event. Model and creator Quenlin Blackwell was the face of this work, somehow making not scrolling on your phone at a marquee music event sound like a cheery episode of Naked and Afraid.

As corny as the Coachella campaign may be to anyone over 30, Pinterest’s commitment to differentiating itself from other social platforms when it comes to monetizing attention is consistent.

In 2019, then-CMO Andrea Mallard told Adweek that the brand positioned itself as a refuge from the toxicity of social media. “We believe that Pinterest is one of the few truly positive corners of the internet,” Mallard said. “We actively work to cultivate a space that’s firmly about inspiration. . . . It’s more important than ever to continue to protect this vision, because we’ve seen that technology has a powerful role to play in shaping culture, opinion, and politics.”

Pinterest CEO Bill Ready has publicly supported teenage social media bans, while in March, Meta and Youtube were found negligent for design features that made their platforms addictive. 

Cheever says the long-term consistent message and brand positioning around quality time over quantity of time, which the new campaign is building on, is reflected in how Pinterest is reaping the rewards of the 80 billion monthly searches users make on its platform. 

“Even though we’re there to help you get offline,” she says, “you’re going to plan things, you’re going to buy things, and you’re going to be making a lot of decisions before you go live that life offline.”

Fisher said in April that experts consulted by the government could not guarantee that an exterior cleaning would improve the condition of the building.

But the proposal has alarmed preservationists, architects, historians and others who argue that granite is not meant to be painted and that paint would trap moisture, deteriorate the stone and not solve problems the administration wants to fix.

There’s also scant public support for the paint job.

Hundreds of pages of public comment submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission and available on the agency’s website were overwhelmingly against the plan on the grounds that the granite would be harmed by being painted and that problems would remain, at great expense to taxpayers. Others suggested improved landscaping, lighting and other steps to improve the building’s appearance.

Members of the Society of Architectural Historians sent a letter this week to Will Scharf, a top White House aide and chair of the planning commission, outlining why the project “will adversely and permanently alter this important part of American heritage and should be rejected.”

A report by the planning commission’s staff recommends that commissioners support cleaning the building but said more information is needed to evaluate the proposals to paint the exterior.

Staff also recommends asking the White House to provide information about the type of paint to be used, including where it has been successfully used on exterior granite facades in other projects. It also recommends the White House summarize other ways to achieve the goal, including cleaning the building and/or lighting.

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building is a National Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A lawsuit against the proposed paint job is working its way through federal court.

The Eisenhower building sits across a driveway from the West Wing, and its granite, slate and cast iron exterior makes it one of America’s best examples of the French Second Empire style of architecture. It was the original home for the State, War and Navy departments, and it currently houses ceremonial offices for the vice president and offices for the second lady, the National Security Council and other White House components.

At its April meeting, the fine arts commission directed White House officials to return at a future date to present more information, including the results of paint testing.

—Darlene Superville , Associated Press

The competition called on designers to imagine a new public restroom for the Gropius House, the family home of the late German architect Walter Gropius. Gropius founded the famed art and design school the Bauhaus (1919–1933), which defined an entire era of modernist design through its innovative approach to technology and almost reverent obsession with materials.

His self-designed home is now preserved and made open to the public by Historic New England, a non-profit that oversees 127 privately owned historic properties in New England. On May 7, the organization announced Isabel Strauss as the winner of its call for submissions.

The Gropius House’s actual on-site restrooms are not available to the dozens of visitors that stop by every day, given the property’s age. Instead, according to Vin Cipolla, CEO of Historic New England, visitors had to use a single porta-potty propped up against the property’s visitor’s center. “Our visitor experience team estimates that about 4,000 people a year use the porta-potty,” Cipolla says. “We’re considering this a somewhat urgent matter.”

Last fall, Historic New England decided to share its bathroom design process with the public by turning it into a competition open to designers around the world. So how does one create a commode worthy of literally standing alongside Gropius’ work? Strauss says the answer is all about materials.

A bathroom on a famous site

The bathroom competition came with a list of guidelines and two main goals: to represent research and reflection on Bauhaus design principles, and to offer a creative design solution to a decades-long infrastructure problem.

Submissions needed to be situated as either an extension of the visitor’s center, which is located inside what was once Gropius’ garage, or a separate structure nearby. They had to be ADA accessible and include two toilets and two wash basins.

Finally, they needed to reflect the intense care and thought that Gropius put into the construction of the actual home and its grounds. From its Bauhaus furniture to its local construction materials, modern fixtures, and gleaming white exterior sandwiched snuggly in a transplanted copse of trees, every part of the Gropius House was deeply considered.

“Gropius House combined traditional elements of New England architecture—wood, brick, and fieldstone—with innovative materials including glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the latest technology in fixtures,” Historic New England’s official webpage on the site reads, adding, “He designed the grounds of the home he built for his family in 1938 as carefully as the structure itself.”

Strauss, who is a graduate of Harvard’s School of Design and currently works as an assistant professor of architecture at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, had already visited the Gropius House several times given her proximity to the site. Last year, on a bike trip with her husband (who also works as an architect) to the nearby Waldon Pond, she first learned about the bathroom competition.

“My husband was going to do the competition, and then he didn’t have time because he had too many other projects,” Strauss says. “I was like, ‘I’ll give this a try.’”

A humble—yet design-forward—commode

Strauss’ first step was to turn directly to Gropius’ own work. She used his original sketches of the Gropius Home’s garage to design the bones of a bathroom that would mimic the garage’s exact dimensions, standing just a few feet off to the side—like a modern reimagining of Gropius’ original structure. 

The bathroom is nearly square, with two equally-sized rooms on either side of a central divider, similar to something that one might find at the start of a hiking trail. Strauss says she was inspired by the “classic outhouse typology” for the building’s lay-out, but its similarities to a toilet in the woods end there.

Nearly all of the materials making up the bathroom are pulled directly from the same sources as the Gropius house: the outside, for example, is clad in layers of fieldstone, which serves as the house’s foundations; the ripple glass in the transom windows also appears in the house; and even the simple white tiles in the stalls are recreations of the original bathroom tile. 

Strauss’ Bauhaus bathroom is so simple and organic that it almost slides into the background of the natural wooded environment. Cipolla says that, amidst hundreds of other designs his team received, the competition judges were continuously drawn back to her humble-yet-grounded approach. 

“It’s quiet—it doesn’t call attention to itself,” Cipolla says. “It sits within the fabric of the site in a rather unobtrusive way, drawing on vernacular materials, a naturalistic solution, and reflecting the materiality that already exists.” Now that the competition is closed, he adds, the Historic New England team hopes to get construction underway within the next couple of years and finally put the porta-potty to rest.

Strauss’ bathroom is evidence that, in the hands of a dedicated artist, even something as quotidien as a pair of stalls can become a reflection of design history.

“What I hope the spirit of my interpretation of Bauhaus design captures is taking materials that are ordinary or industrial that are not necessarily luxury, and, with careful design, elevating them so that everyone has access to beautiful and functional design,” Strauss says.

Trump last used a Vance-less version of a MAGA Box logo during the 2024 campaign, but it reappeared in April in fundraising emails for an “Official Midterms Patriot Roster.” It’s one of a dozen or so logos used in fundraising emails over the past month by Never Surrender, Trump’s leadership PAC, which manages the mailing list from his most recent presidential campaign. 

While variations of the Trump-Vance logo remain in circulation, a growing number of alternative logos and email header graphics don’t mention Vance at all. It’s a subtle branding shift that puts the sole focus on Trump, and comes amid growing questions over who the president might back as a successor in the 2028 race.

Trump-only logos started appearing in fundraising appeals as early as Trump’s first month back in office in January 2025, but their number has grown. The percentage of logos in Trump’s fundraising emails that are branded solely for him and not his VP has risen from 25% in March 2025 to a high of 42% in March 2026, according to a review of the Archives of Political Emails, a database. In April, it was more than 30%.

Some of these logos say Trump in all-caps letters. The campaign seems to favor the “Memo from Trump” header to visually frame emails as personal appeals, which is valuable to connect the fundraising request as being from the man himself. The “Trump 47” logo variation puts Trump’s name inside a shield.

At the same time, Trump’s PAC stopped sending emails branded for Vance. Last year, the president’s mailing list received eight emails with solo Vance logos signed by the vice president. This year Never Surrender hasn’t sent an email signed by Vance since January, and it didn’t get its own logo. The PAC’s treasurer, Bradley T. Crate, did not respond to a request for comment sent through Red Curve, his political consultancy.

Oftentimes, Never Surrender’s small-dollar email fundraising efforts on behalf of the president are manipulative and bizarre. One email threatened to sic officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement on supporters who didn’t take a survey to prove they’re U.S. citizens. Another offered access to private national security briefings in exchange for donations.

Increasingly, custom logos are used to communicate all this. Brand variants for recent promotions like “Elite Swamp Drainers for Trump,” “Trump Inner Circle,” and “Trump Platinum” give potential small-dollar donors the illusion of access to the president with a logo for a made-up group.

“Sitting presidents can and do continue to fundraise, usually for their own party as a whole, particularly when they’re popular among their voters,” SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Virginia, tells Fast Company, noting that President Barack Obama held fundraisers for down-ballot races during his second term in office.

“The Trump-specific brand of these emails is super interesting—and someone like Trump whose entire career is really built on branding, not building, I think it’s right to assume that all of these decisions are very strategic,” she says, noting the shift away from Vance indicates to her that Trump wants to “leave the door open” for a successor, whether that’s Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or even his eldest son, Don Jr.

Never Surrender keeps more than three-quarters of the money it raises and splits up the rest with the Republican National Committee and Working for Ohio, Vance’s leadership PAC. That means even when Trump sends an email that leaves out Vance’s name in the logo, the VP’s group still gets 5% of whatever it raises.

By omitting Vance’s name, however, Trump is leaving room for people to question his allegiance to the vice president. Trump has sent mixed signals about whether he’ll back Vance in the 2028 Republican primary, should Vance run. “I think you have a lot of very capable people,” Trump said last year when asked, noting it’s still early.

Perhaps the return of Trump’s Vance-less logo was inevitable. As the first president since Richard Nixon to have two different vice presidents while in office, Trump isn’t known for loyalty to his running mates.

And to Trump’s biggest supporters, it doesn’t really matter whether Vance or former Vice President Mike Pence are mentioned at all, as long as Trump is on top of the ticket. As a small-dollar fundraising strategy, Trump’s PAC is doubling down on the reason people subscribed to the mailing list in the first place.

Trump’s fundraising focus on himself is a reminder of who’s at the center of his political movement. MAGA is held together less by a coherent, consistent ideology than it is by fealty to a single man. The proof is in the logos.

Within months, the AI giant promised, we would be able to ask ChatGPT for Mother’s Day gift ideas or top-rated lightbulbs, and then click to buy products instantly. Shopify’s president, Harley Finkelstein, declared this the “the new frontier” of retail.

But if you’ve tried to shop on ChatGPT recently, you know that this future never arrived. OpenAI quietly killed Instant Checkout in March. The official story, according to OpenAI’s blog post, was that the checkout feature “did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide.” 

The unofficial story is that OpenAI and Shopify were unprepared for the level of complexity it requires to build an AI-native checkout. Fewer than 30 of Shopify’s millions of merchants went live with Instant Checkout.

This is the state of AI shopping in 2026. The same company reportedly being trained to guide drone strikes in active conflict zones cannot build a working check-out.

My interviews with executives at Google, OpenAI, Stripe, Walmart, and a long list of AI-focused startups, revealed that the technology powering AI — large language models — was never designed for commerce, and that bridging the gap between LLMs and existing e-commerce infrastructure would take longer than anyone anticipated.

Behind the scenes, there’s a massive effort underway in the retail industry to build the infrastructure required to make AI shopping possible. The commerce leads at Google and OpenAI, the two biggest players in the space, say that we’re months—not years—away from a tipping point where agentic commerce really will become commonplace.

Whoever makes the shopping experience consumers want to use will own one of the most lucrative pieces of real estate in the history of retail.

In this story you’ll learn:

• The knotty problem that forced OpenAI to pull back on instant checkout
• How frontier labs are rebuilding commerce infrastructure from the ground up
• Which company is most likely to win the AI shopping war

OpenAI’s false start and new vision

Last year, as AI became the fastest-adopted technology in history, AI companies realized they needed to turn their attention to commerce. There’s a lot of money hanging in the balance. According to McKinsey, AI-driven commerce could generate $1 trillion in U.S. revenue and up to $5 trillion globally by 2030.

As we entered 2026, the retail industry’s newest buzzword was “agentic commerce,” which refers to AI agents shopping autonomously on the user’s behalf. “Nobody has figured it out, but everyone has FOMO,” says Emily Pfeiffer, principal analyst at Forrester, who covers AI and commerce. “Everyone is prematurely rushing to market.”

Case in point: The botched Instant Checkout roll-out. When they announced the checkout feature, Shopify and OpenAI had promised that it would be possible to check out directly in the chat when shopping from millions of Shopify merchants alongside Etsy sellers and Walmart in ChatGPT. A tiny fraction of the integrations were built. Today, you can discover some of these Shopify merchants in conversations and click to buy products through pop-up window that takes you to the merchant’s website. But native checkout — where ChatGPT manages the cart and payment — has still not happened at the scale promised.

“Shopify has major egg on their face,” says Omar Qari, the CEO of Logicbroker, which helps brands feed product data into LLMs. “If you go back to late last year, OpenAI said, ‘We’ve solved it. We’re connecting all the world’s products inside ChatGPT and it’s going to be an amazing shopping experience.’ But they literally couldn’t even get it live.” (Shopify declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Neel Ajjarapu, who leads commerce at OpenAI, admits that building a checkout was more complex than the company had envisaged, and ultimately, merchants were best positioned to build these tools.

“It’s not enough to have a basic checkout page,” says Ajjarapu. “You need to think about things like loyalty points, in-store pickup, basket promos, and dozens of features that are specific to the geography, category, and merchant type.”

Rather than try to build all of that from scratch, OpenAI decided merchants should own checkout themselves. “Merchants are already optimized this part of the funnel,” says Ajjarapu. “We’re going to make it really easy for them to bring that into ChatGPT.”

But even without Instant Checkout, consumers are already turning to ChatGPT for their shopping needs: According to Pew, roughly 2% of queries to the chatbot—about 50 million a day—are shopping related. Ajjarapu says that ChatGPT is good at helping users figure out how to buy products that require a lot of research, like electronics, appliances, and sports gear. OpenAI has every intention of transforming ChatGPT into the world’s personal shopper.

“The goal is for ChatGPT to be a super assistant,” he says. “When it comes to shopping, it should be able to help you find products, optimize carts, and buy things. It will be able to help you discover things that you never knew before, but are tailored to your personal circumstances.”

The Google advantage

Predicting taste is precisely where ChatGPT is at a disadvantage. The chatbot only has access to information you share in conversations to tailor product recommendations to your needs and taste. But its biggest competitor—Gemini — has access to a much deeper trove of knowledge about you thanks to all the information you have shared with Google over the years.

In March, Google rolled out a feature called Personal Intelligence, which lets the Gemini app’s 750 million monthly active users tap into their data in Gmail, Photos, and Drive when answering queries. Once you give Google the permission to access this data, the model will be able to search your emails or photos when trying to find responses to your queries. For instance, if you ask Gemini what you should do during your upcoming New York trip, it will look through your emails for flight and hotel information, to give you more helpful answers. Google hasn’t shared how many users have switched on Personal Intelligence.

“Once the model has the opportunity to learn about you, it can start at a better point than starting from scratch and expecting that you will tell us everything about you,” says Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president and general manager of advertising and commerce. “Because it is much easier to give Gemini five pictures of clothes you like than to describe your dressing style.”

Without years of data about the people using ChatGPT, OpenAI is in a much weaker position. It must gather crumbs from the details you happen to share in your conversations.

“ChatGPT is starting to learn so much more about you as a user, not just in your retail taste, but everything else happening in your life,” says Ajjarapu. “We can start using that data to help make extremely well-personalized recommendations that match your taste.”

But user data isn’t Google’s only advantage. It also has better access to product data. The Shopping Graph—Google’s real-time database of product pricing, inventory, and merchant relationships—traces its origins back to Froogle, a shopping platform that Google launched in 2002. That graph has been refined, expanded, and integrated with every part of Google’s ad and merchant infrastructure ever since.

“We’ve had decades of experience with the Shopping Graph,” Vidhya Srinivasan. “We’ve invested a lot in having the repository of products that has the diversity of merchants, but more importantly, it’s updated every second, every minute of every day.”

Building the plumbing of agentic shopping

One reason AI companies have struggled so much to build shopping tools is that their underlying technology wasn’t designed for commerce. Large language models are trained by scraping the entire textual archive of the internet—learning to predict the next word in a sentence or the next fragment of code. This has proven remarkably effective for drafting a college term paper or writing an app.

But a product page is different from a web page. A lot of crucial product information—like inventory, shipping costs, and when it launched—does not appear on websites. “OpenAI’s first attempt at trying to get products into ChatGPT was to screen-scrape Dick’s Sporting Goods or Ulta and show their products,” says Qari. “And you can’t blame them, because that’s how they trained the model.”

AI companies now realize they need to build the plumbing for agentic commerce from scratch. There’s currently a race to create a new standard to make retailers’ real-time product data readable by LLMs.

OpenAI and Stripe co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), which they open-sourced last year. Google, Shopify, and a coalition of two dozen retailers and payment companies—including Etsy, Wayfair, Target, Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe itself—launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January. UCP is more robust, since it can handle complicated things like scheduling and returns. But, for the moment, Quari is recommending that retailers support both.

In a sign that Gemini is pulling ahead of ChatGPT in retail, Google has been announcing a string of new features over the last few months. Real-time pricing and inventory are already live on Gemini, as are in-chat checkout via Google Pay. As of March, Gap became the first major fashion retailer to allow shoppers to complete a purchase entirely inside the chat and in April, Ulta Beauty announced it would be doing the same thing.

What happens next

Today, shopping via chatbot means you’re ultimately shopping via the traditional web, with tabs that mushroom on your screen. But a few years from now, it’s likely that the ingredients I need for dinner will be ordered the moment I share the recipe with my AI agent.

Christmas gifts—which currently eat an entire December weekend—will be handled in the time it takes to drink a coffee: the agent knows that my mother likes gardening books, that my daughter’s best friend is obsessed with slime, that I always overspend on my husband and should probably have a hard limit.

When a wedding comes up, the agent will see it on my calendar and suggest appropriate dresses I like. Some purchases I’ll sanction with a tap. Others will simply show up, correctly, without my having asked.

The infrastructure to make this happen is being built slowly, in fits and starts, with the occasional embarrassing pullback. But there’s a lot of money on the table, which is incentivizing AI companies to pour resources into building shopping tools. Whoever builds the best agentic commerce platform is going to have the first mover advantage and lock in a generation of consumers.

Right now, the smart money is on Google. It has both the merchant relationships and deep knowledge of users, if they opt in to Personal Intelligence. And the protocol that Gemini’s checkout runs on— UCP—looks like the stronger foundation.

But as with everything in AI, things are moving fast. And OpenAI is not out of the race. And the field is changing so fast, nobody can call the winner yet.

“Every couple months, we just see such massive changes to what our models are able to do,” says OpenAI’s Ajjarapu. “It is impossible for me to predict what’s going to happen on what timeline.”

Castomize, the Singapore-based startup behind the product, says that it’s also easier for doctors to use. To apply the cast, the medical team first heats it up to become soft and flexible. Then a doctor wraps it around the arm and clips it together with small built-in buckles. As it cools, it hardens in place.

The traditional process, by contrast, takes 10 different steps and multiple materials, and it’s easy to make mistakes. “Clinicians need to avoid wrapping casts too tight or too loose, where both scenarios would cause healing complications such as pressure injuries,” says Abel Teo, the company’s CEO. If there are problems, or as the cast loosens over time, patients have to come back to the doctor for a recast—with the hospital or clinic footing the bill. If the new cast needs to be adjusted as the patient heals, a clinician can instead remove, reheat, and reuse it.

While the cast is around 30% to 50% more expensive to make than a traditional fiberglass version, the time savings—and the fact that it’s possible to avoid redoing the cast—can mean that clinics end up with a lower overall cost. In one trial, a hospital in Singapore has had an average of 25% cost savings, Teo says. In the future, the company plans to offer a sanitization process so that the casts can eventually be reused repeatedly for different patients.

Castomize calls its process “4D” printing, since the final product involves the fourth dimension of time and it changes shape after it comes out of a 3D printer. Unlike a related product called ActivArmor, which uses 3D scanning for a custom fit, the Castomize product comes in standard sizes for adults and children and isn’t customized, helping reduce time and cost.

The design started as a student project at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2017. One of the cofounders, Johannes Sunarko, revisited it as a master’s thesis in 2021, and then partnered with another former student, Eleora Teo, along with Abel Teo (no relation), to launch a startup to manufacture it.

After clinical trials showed that it was effective as a replacement for a traditional wrist cast, the product got approval as a medical device in Singapore and came to market last year. It’s also approved for sale in Australia, South Korea, and Taiwan. Castomize is working on FDA approval and the CE (European Conformity) mark in Europe.

The company also recently introduced an ankle model and elbow model. Each body part requires a new design. “We needed to work closely with clinician experts in ankle fractures and casting, along with researching and experimenting with different geometries and material combinations,” Abel Teo says.

After all, we live in the end of reality.

“Deepfakes are a dangerous tool, because they can deceive, manipulate, and hit anyone,” Meloni said on X. “I can defend myself. Many others don’t.”

She is right, even though the image is not technically a deepfake. It’s a fully AI-generated photo that features her face. Unlike early deepfakes, which simply switched the face of one human in a base source photo with the face of another human, generative AI can use different components—like real faces, bodies, places, voices, and sounds—to create a 100% new synthetic media.

This process makes its true nature virtually, if not completely, undetectable: Since you can’t reverse-search and match the base image to an original source on the web, you could believe it is original (and real).

Meloni has already sued two men for creating a deepfake porn video of her in 2024. This time around, she joked that the fakes look “a lot” better than she does and posted the image as a very 2026 PSA. “This is why a rule should always apply: Check before believing, and believe before sharing. Because today it happens to me; tomorrow it can happen to anyone,” she wrote.

Meloni showed courage by putting herself out there, but more must be done than doling out advice. We are way past the point of education. The world needs action.

Generative AI poses an existential danger to humanity. It can weaponize our psychological biases, effectively destroying our shared sense of objective reality.

Just look at what’s happened over the last few months. There’s Jessica Foster, an AI-generated, pro-Trump military influencer who amassed a million followers in just three months to funnel men toward an adult fetish site (her account was later deleted from Instagram). And even though Foster’s digital persona was riddled with obvious rendering glitches and absurd scenarios, unlike Meloni’s images, her followers willfully ignored them because the mirage perfectly satisfied their ideological fantasies.

When a legitimate video was released proving that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was alive following assassination rumors, the internet—aided by hallucinating AI chatbots—instantly and falsely dismissed the footage as a deepfake. Even after independent analysts and fact-checkers provided irrefutable proof that the video was authentic, the evidence failed to sway those who preferred their own conspiracy theories.

Every politician must act now

Trapped in this unreal dystopia where the perimeter of objective truth has been completely vaporized by tech giants, society needs more than an X post. Public awareness and educational campaigns are no longer sufficient to combat the huge human and economical cost that this is already causing.

The only remaining exit strategy to save our shared reality is for global governments to aggressively intervene and force technology companies to adopt hardware and software that can authenticate real photos, videos, and audio beyond any shadow of a doubt. 

In March, a team at ETH Zurich proposed the only solution that feels serious enough for the scale of the threat: sensors that cryptographically sign an image at the exact moment that light and audio hit them.

Unlike today’s systems, which stamp authenticity via the device’s main processor—leaving them vulnerable to interception and tampering—this design locks verification directly into the act of capture itself.

In plain terms, it would make it vastly harder to pass off synthetic media as real, because the proof of authenticity would be born inside the hardware, not added afterward by software that can be spoofed. That way, people can look for the “stamp of truth” in any media published everywhere, from publications to social networks.

And anything without that stamp, like Meloni says, should be automatically doubted and disregarded.

States must also act to give tools to their citizens to take down any image that uses their faces, by enabling laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S. But rather than forcing regular people to copyright themselves, they should be able to  easily take down any unauthorized AI versions of themselves in any public web or social network.

Right now, only the Danish government has done this. In an effort to offer protection against AI cloning of its citizens, last year the country rewrote its legal code to guarantee that residents strictly own the rights to their biological faces and natural speaking voices.

Danish Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt summed it up perfectly back then: “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes, and I’m not willing to accept that.”

The Meloni case, one of millions, shows once again that the Danish minister for culture is 200% right when he declared the urgency of the law his government passed. We need to stop this problem decisively with those tools and any others that lawmakers and engineers can come up with.

Fake images—as long as they are within existing legal limits—can coexist with reality just fine. But the tech giants profiting off of this problem have to act now.

According to its developers—Shuanglin Group and Tsinghua University—this massive 17.1-foot-tall robo-truck is the first of its kind and they believe it will forever change the mining industry.

The vehicle represents a structural shift toward replacing human operators with digital systems to improve extraction logistics and workplace safety, its inventors claim. But that’s yet to be seen. The machine now needs to prove it can solve the problems in the real world.

The Shuanglin K7 measures 45.2 feet in length and 18.7 feet in width, weighing 110.2 short tons when empty. This machine’s AI brain constantly analyzes its sensors to calculate direction, speed, and routing without any human safety driver, and with, allegedly, full awareness of other vehicles and humans around it.

Provided it stays within the mapped geography of an excavation site, that is. While cars from Volvo, Mercedes, or Tesla have Level 2 autonomy—requiring the attention and hands of the drivers—the K7 can fully and safely drive autonomously through the site, recognizing all the elements typical of open pit mines.

Level 4 is not the only wonder in this steel giant. Utilizing an 8×4 drive configuration, the truck employs a distributed electronic drive-by-wire system at every wheel corner. Instead of utilizing heavy steel shafts to transfer mechanical power from an engine to the axles, this works more like a digital nervous system, sending beams of electrons to command distinct motors located at each tire.

Each motor moves independently from each other, so the vehicle—which weighs 273.4 tons when fully loaded—can drive laterally, like a crab, and turn around on its vertical axis with no maneuvering whatsoever. This means that mining sites no longer require dedicated road space just for vehicles to turn around and do their operations.

Professor Huang Jin—a professor at Tsinghua University’s school of vehicle and mobility who worked on the project—told the state-sponsored newspaper Science and Technology Daily that this extraordinary mechanical ability “can greatly improve operational flexibility and site adaptability in complex environments.”

According to its manufacturers, the machine supports a continuous 24/7 operational schedule thanks to its battery replacements, which only take 5 minutes to change. The truck also “saves” energy: While descending pit inclines, the braking system captures the physics of the falling mass much like a Formula 1 car captures its inertia when braking. In theory, according to its developers, this mechanism converts up to 85% of that kinetic energy back into stored electricity, extending the working time of the truck.

Computer models predict that all these features will yield a 35% output increase, a 90% reduction in site accidents, and a 25% drop in lifetime maintenance and tire costs compared to diesel machinery.

The many shapes of embodied AI

The Chinese government—which depends on minerals to keep its control of the global supply chain—needs this vehicle to fully automate Chinese extraction by 2030, a goal already materializing in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia with other less capable fleets.

At the Yimin coal site in Hulunbuir, a publicly funded utility named Huaneng Group deployed 100 driverless electric haulers called “Huaneng Ruichi,” with its own artificial intelligence and 5G-Advanced communication. That deployment is just a fraction of the largest rollout of uncrewed extraction vehicles globally. 

But these are only promises. The K7 currently lacks multi-year fleet data. Industry experts like Haultrax claim that without correct procedures, automated systems “may be less productive than a manned fleet” because of poor operational protocols that introduce the “potential of severe safety incidents occurring.” Haultrax identifies the wireless network as “the most critical aspect” for stability.

Other industry groups also warn about how GPS interference ceases production entirely. Physical degradation of open mining sites is equally problematic. Plus, the Saint Petersburg Mining University points out how dust and vibrations destroy electrical traction systems. These problems can all lead to fatal accidents. Last August, Reuters reported that workers at the world’s largest copper mine in Chile protested over the use of self-driving trucks after multiple accidents. 

But those trucks aren’t level 4. While we will have to wait and see if any of these robots leviathans can survive the rigors of actual 24/7 work—keeping its human and humanoid colleagues safe at the same time—I have no doubt that the revolution its makers are talking about is already underway.

Whatever kinks they may encounter, they will be ironed out and the K7s will become the first of many machines designed and manufactured to further optimize China’s seemingly unstoppable manufacturing operations.

Every day, with every piece of news like this, it looks more and more clear that Beijing is pushing its plan to become the dominant superpower in the world using embodied AI. It’s not only biped and wheeled humanoids relentlessly doing the dangerous jobs that humans no longer want, but a future powered by specialized sentient AIs taking on many physical shapes and forms.

The Texas-based burger chain just relaunched its Kids Whatameal with a new focus on an engaging packaging experience over a singular plastic toy. In a sense, the packaging is now the toy: The meals come in a bright, white-and-orange box with a handle on top, an interactive maze printed on the side, and one of five collectible sticker packs inside.

“We wanted to build something that was a bit more intentional and experience-led,” Scott Hudler, Whataburger’s chief marketing officer, tells Fast Company.

But the experiential strategy is first visible in the food options themselves—essentially by providing kids with choice. “Kids are more likely to eat that full meal when they can have some control of the entrée, the sides, and the drink,” Hudler says. As such, kids can choose from a burger, grilled cheese, and chicken strips or bites, plus french fries or Mott’s applesauce, a drink, and a treat.

The packaging came out of extensive user research that took place online and in person at Whataburger’s innovation center, which found that while food is a big driver of the decision, so is agency.

The team adapted its design with those findings in mind. Whataburger considered several different formats for the kids meal packaging but ultimately decided on a box with a small handle that’s easy for kids to hold and carry—a handled box tested best because it gave kids a sense of independence and ownership.

The packaging is also fun to play with. Whataburger’s research found that while traditional character-based plastic toys are “a nice to have,” sensory toys or activities outperformed plastic toys and even desserts.

“In testing, tactile, sensory-driven items performed better,” Hudler says. “Kids consistently gravitated toward things they could actively touch and manipulate,” like stickers, games, activities, and fidget-style pieces. (For a limited time last year, McDonald’s launched blank Happy Meal packages kids could draw on, later returning to its classic red.)

Ultimately, Whataburger sought to make its packaging “unmistakably Whataburger” by emphasizing visual brand assets like the orange-and-white stripes and the flying W. The box also shows the smiling face of Whataguy, the chain’s superhero mascot who first appeared on kids meal bags in 1999. Actress Eva Longoria, a longtime Whataburger fan, stars in a campaign promoting the kids meals with her son.

The redesign better competes with McDonald’s brightly packaged Happy Meals, but it also serves much the same function as a butcher paper table covering and crayons for the kids at a sit-down restaurant. Sometimes the best toy is the box it comes in.

For the next few years, Target will be replacing its fleet of half a million shopping carts with an even beefier model that promises to hold more stuff while making it easier to maneuver around the store. It’s the first all-plastic design Target will launch nationwide, while paradoxically being more sustainable than Target carts of yore. 

And yes, it’ll even hold your big dumb cup.

“The cart for us is the first touchpoint that the guest meets right when they walk in the store,” says Sarah Deuth, VP of store design at Target. “It’s the most used item in our store, and then also it’s that item that carries you throughout the store.”

In recent years, Target has seen its share of troubles. It has faced boycotts after reversing course on DEI, and watched its stock price tank as consumers swapped Target’s ever-so-more premium retail brand for Amazon’s ease of ordering and Walmart’s clean UX and commitment to affordability. Target’s new CEO, Michael Fiddelke, plans to turn things around by going back to the company’s roots in an affordably chic retail experience. That alone might not work.

But customer experience will always be an important differentiator in retail, and since introducing its iconic red cart in the 1970s, Target has been refining that cart’s design. Now the company is rolling out its latest version, the Series 3, informed by its last 20 years of consumer research and a few more modern trends. It’s an investment in the most literal touchpoint of shopping possible.

What’s new in Target’s shopping cart?

As Target considered the latest iteration, which it designed in-house, it focused on the one thing it had heard and observed to be the most important part of any shopping cart: how it drives.

“You’ll see guests, they’ll have their phone in one hand, beverage [in the other], and they’re pushing it with their elbows. Or they’re pushing it with one hand,” Deuth says. “We are doing a million things while we’re shopping, so maneuverability and what they called ‘ease,’ ‘smooth ride,’ and ‘a cart going straight’ was more important than anything.”

A decade ago, Target had already addressed part of this issue by swapping out its polyurethane wheels for rubber, which grips floors better. But a lot of controlling the cart has nothing to do with the wheels, casters, or bearings. If the frame bends, it stops steering predictably.

This insight led Target to reconsider its “hybrid” cart design that had been in use since 2014, which, like most shopping carts, used a metal frame—but wrapped that frame in plastic components. This seemed like a good idea: Metal is durable and plastic is durable. But metal is more prone to bending. And when fused together in Target’s shopping cart design, it was common for plastic and metal components to get misaligned at their junctions.

So Target built the Series 3 completely out of plastic (save for a few components in the wheels)—which stays rigid so the cart should always drive straight. It also has modular components that can be swapped in and out if one breaks.

Truth be told, Target dreamed of an all-plastic cart 20 years ago, with a model it crafted in 2006, but it wasn’t considered good enough to scale. Its latest cart iteration has optimized the plastic build, with geometries and ergonomics Target insists make it easier to steer. Its handles look something like Theragun grips. 

Notably, the plastic used in Target’s carts is recyclable for a cart’s end of life. Also, overall, it’s more durable than the older metal designs, according to the company, which has seen cart lifespan increase two- to threefold in early testing.

No doubt about it, the cart’s thick plastic frame gives it borderline maximalist proportions, but the overall sensation that this is a bigger cart is more than a visual trick. Target increased the cart’s payload by a “slight” amount because “guest behaviors have changed,” according to Deuth. 

“In some instances, they are looking to buy more bulk,” she notes, hinting at the budget-minded nature of shoppers today. “And so that was important for us to look at that average basket of the guests and design into that.”

Other creature comforts

Beyond durability and payload, the new cart is full of improved ergonomics. Anyone who has taken a child to Target knows that the child seat in front is a standout feature. Customers complained, though, that the seat’s incline was too shallow, making it hard for a child to sit up straight—while possible for them to climb out. The new version features a steeper backrest and a deeper bowl. 

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Around the seat, the cart now features two prominent cupholders. Before, the cupholders were nothing but round holes, designed to catch a Starbucks drink. These holes have been replaced with fully molded cupholders (complete with edges and bottoms). Their capacity is also supersized for snacks and beverages that no longer fit in a rapidly shifting drink vessel culture. And a squared-off design ensures they can accommodate cups of different shapes and sizes.

“Yes [it’s for] the Stanley Cups and the Starbucks,” says Deuth with a laugh. “Those are important, and sometimes both of those at the same time.”

Call it an SNL punch line, or call it knowing your base. In any case, Target’s new cart does seem to demonstrate the company’s ongoing obsession with its customer experience. But for Target, it’s also time to lock in on every other aspect of its retail business, too.

Arnell has worked with a multitude of well-known companies, including PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Apple, Reebok, and Disney. His work spans disciplines from photography to digital interfaces and physical products, often embracing a creative direction that is simultaneously simple, clean, and bold.

In his new position with the U.S. government, Arnell will serve under Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb and President Trump’s pick for chief design officer of the National Design Studio, which was created in January 2025 with the mission of improving the “usability and aesthetics” of federal digital services. So far, that’s included creating new websites like TrumpRx, a federal pharmaceutical provider; redesigning the food pyramid to prioritize protein; and turning the official White House website into a fan reel for the president.

Arnell’s role will entail leading “strategic and creative development of a unified design and brand system for the U.S.” and ensuring “every interaction that people have with the government is clear and consistent,” starting with rethinking the Social Security system and the passport acquisition process, Gebbia explained in an interview with Dezeen.

An overhaul of the federal government’s digital presence has actually been in the works for years: The Biden administration began working on it in 2024, after data collected in 2023 showed that of more than 10,000 federal websites, 45% weren’t mobile- friendly and 60% had possible accessibility issues.

At the time, experts estimated that the redesign effort would take around 10 years. (It’s unclear exactly how many federal websites are operational today, though Arnell has put the figure closer to a whopping 27,000.)

What is clear is that Arnell’s new role has a huge scope that’s likely to touch thousands of digital experiences. He’ll bring 30-plus years of design experience to the job, including dozens of projects for iconic American brands, one epically bad rebrand, and a penchant for ruffling feathers. (Arnell did not respond to a request for comment by the time of this writing.)

Three decades of brand work

In 1993, Arnell founded his own design firm, Arnell Studio, where he worked as chief creative officer until 2011. In 2012, he founded a multidisciplinary firm called Intellectual Capital Investments, where he currently serves as a designer and CEO. 

Over the course of his career, Arnell has worked with a vast portfolio, developing dozens of products for Home Depot, putting the dog on the Mug root beer can, creating exhibitions for Jeep, designing glasses for Disney, and making ads for Apple, among many other projects. 

One line from a 2009 i-D magazine profile that’s now posted on Arnell’s website still holds true almost 20 years later: “He’s known for working across multiple disciplines (design, branding, marketing, architecture, and photography are among the skills in what he calls his “large, powerful toolbox”); for probing how these disciplines can entwine to create new forms, strategies, and products; and for occasionally rubbing people the wrong way.” 

A rebrand fail for the marketing textbooks

Given Arnell’s portfolio of products and marketing campaigns, it’s likely that almost every American has come across his work at one point or another. For better or worse, though, arguably his most iconic project is also his biggest misstep. 

Arnell famously led a 2009 rebrand of Tropicana orange juice, taking away the distinctive image of an orange pierced by a straw, then simplifying the logo and flipping it vertically. Customers hated the effort so much that Tropicana pulled the new packaging from shelves altogether.

In the wake of the backlash, Arnell attempted to defend his choices at a PepsiCo conference: “We thought it would be very, very important to take this brand and evolve it into a more modern state,” he said at the time. “Emotionally, it was very, very difficult—and it remains difficult—for people to grasp the importance of that change, because it’s so dramatic.”

Unfortunately, that commentary didn’t stop the Tropicana rebrand from being widely panned and becoming so notorious for missing the mark with consumers that it’s now a cautionary tale in marketing textbooks.

Arnell ultimately acknowledged the rebrand was a miss. “Regarding what would I have done different, I probably would’ve just said, ‘This thing isn’t for me,’” he said on the Design Matters podcast in 2023. “Because at the end, if you really look at what we did with Tropicana, it wasn’t a great design. There was nothing magical or innovative about any of it.”

Yes, that Mike Tyson ad

Prior to his appointment as chief brand architect, Arnell had already worked with the National Design Studio on one of its most high-profile campaigns.

As part of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, Arnell partnered with the NDS on a 2026 Super Bowl ad featuring heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. In the ad, Tyson is shown in an extreme close-up black-and-white shot, recounting his own experience with obesity and encouraging viewers to “Eat real food” (a MAHA slogan).

The ad immediately stoked controversy among viewers and commenters, some of whom found its language caustic and fatphobic.

“I was so fat and nasty, I would eat anything,” Tyson says in the ad over a dark piano track. “I was like 345 pounds. I ate a quart of ice cream every hour. I had so much self-hate when I was like that, I just wanted to kill myself.” Immediately after that statement, the ad cuts to two quick shots of Tyson biting into a carrot and an apple.

In a LinkedIn post, Arnell described the ad as “just Mike, raw and real, sharing what he’s been through and what’s at stake,” adding, “This isn’t advertising. It’s truth-telling.”

Based on Arnell’s roller coaster of a career, in his new role as America’s chief brand architect he won’t be afraid to make big decisions and take a risk or two—whether the public likes it or not.

Chamberlain was wearing a custom-made Mugler gown by creative director Miguel Castro Freitas. But what lay on top of the dress’s expert construction is what turned it into a head-turning spectacle: The entire piece was painstakingly hand-painted, from hem to neckline, by artist Anna Deller-Yee. She relied entirely on real fine-art supplies to achieve the final look, a process that took 40 hours of painting, four days of drying time, and a 6-foot-long shipping crate to transport the resulting gown from Paris to New York City. 

The theme of this year’s Met Gala, which took place on May 4, was “Fashion Is Art.” The concept was inspired by “Costume Art,” a soon-to-open exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that celebrates the “centrality of the dressed body” through depictions and interpretations of the human form. Several celebrities took this theme to its most logical endpoint by directly recreating works of art, including Lauren Sánchez Bezos as John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, Gracie Abrams as Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Block-Bauer I, and Madonna as Leonora Carrington’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, Fragment II.

Chamberlain took a different approach. Rather than reinterpreting a single piece of art, her garment pulls inspiration from a wide body of Impressionist and Expressionist works, aiming to capture their focus on visible brushstrokes and atmosphere. The final product turned Chamberlain into a kind of canvas, transforming each detail of Deller-Yee’s craft into a statement in its own right.

Building on a history of fine art and fashion

Deller-Yee began her career as a print designer for the Italian apparel brand Marni in 2021. She specializes in hand-painted prints, alternating between creating works that can be digitally scanned and painting directly onto finished garments, depending on the project. 

The artist’s uniquely analog process has since catapulted her work into the global spotlight, including through partnerships with Nike; Nicki Minaj, whose 2024 Met Gala outfit she designed in collaboration with Marni; and Vogue legend Anna Wintour herself. Deller-Yee is now represented by the creative agency Hugo & Marie as part of its artist bureau. 

For her second-ever Met Gala project, Deller-Yee says Castro Freitas, who she’s worked with as a Mugler collaborator since 2024, approached her directly. 

“When Miguel arrived [at Mugler], we started to work together on prints, and the work became more and more elaborate, and also more and more intimate, in terms of really sitting down with him and understanding his vision for the brand,” Deller-Yee says. One day, she recalls, she received a message from the Mugler team about an upcoming opportunity to collaborate on a gown for the Met Gala. 

“I was, like, ‘Wow, that’s a huge amount of trust to place on somebody that you’ve only known for a few seasons.’ But I could already feel that we were getting along very well,” she says. “[Castro Freitas and I] are very close in a lot of ways that we think about creativity. This collaboration felt very natural—there was nothing in it that felt forced.”

Finding inspiration

On the red carpet, Chamberlain’s dress looked like it had just been pulled from an artist’s grasp, with its glistening, three-dimensional swatches of paint, visible brushstrokes, and almost wet-looking hem. According to Deller-Yee, that was part of the original design remit.

“There was a lot of materiality in the work, and that’s what Emma wanted: to literally feel like she’s a painting,” Deller-Yee says. 

Castro Freitas’s vision for the dress was crafted in collaboration with Chamberlain and Jared Ellner, her stylist. They pulled artistic inspiration from Impressionist and Expressionist paintings; archival Thierry Mugler looks like his glittering La Chimère and Butterfly dresses from 1997; paintings made by Chamberlain’s father, who is an oil and watercolor artist; and Deller-Yee’s own portfolio. “They wanted to have this specific look that I have in my own work, which is this contrast and clash between very watery, runny paint, and extremely thick and almost sculptural-looking impasto brush strokes,” Deller-Yee says.

To achieve a truly painted look, Deller-Yee opted to use only traditional fine-art supplies on the dress. But the first—and most daunting—challenge, she says, was to actually spread the dress out in her Paris studio, given that it’s made of hundreds of meters of fabric.

“When it arrived, I was, like, ‘Oh my God, that dress is so giant,’” Deller-Yee says. “Up until that point, I had only seen renderings of it, and it was just the front view—I didn’t realize that it had such a long train on it, too. And I was, like, ‘This is so much fabric—this is the largest thing I’ve ever painted before.’”

Giving Emma Chamberlain’s gown 3D texture

Her first step was to mount the dress on a large cardboard form that helped separate the skirt into workable planes. From there, she sprayed down the entire lower half of the gown with water and began applying highly pigmented acrylic ink with light brushstrokes, starting with lighter hues and building up to the darker shades. In between layers, she continuously sprayed the whole piece again, creating the illusion that each piece of the skirt was melting into the next.

Once the skirt was complete, Deller-Yee moved on to the upper half of the garment. For this piece, she switched to acrylic paint mixed with a thickening gel, which she applied in a chunky, yellow-blue swirl up the flank of the gown and over the chest. The very last details were a series of small, almost imperceptible white flowers at the neckline of the gown, as well as delicate sleeves of fringe painted in a dark blue.  

When Chamberlain finally arrived on the runway, the dress felt like a celebration of the uniquely human joy to be found in the evidence of an artist’s craft.

“One of the things that people have said to me is that the dress deeply touched them—they were really just in awe of it,” Deller-Yee says. “To me, in the specific times that we live in right now—which are extremely turbulent and bring so much ugliness with them—it’s beautiful to be able to make people dream and show them a sense of wonder.”

The GOP bill released late Monday would designate the money for the U.S. Secret Service for “security adjustments and upgrades” related to the ballroom project, which Trump and Republicans have been pushing since Cole Tomas Allen allegedly stormed the April 25 media dinner at the Washington Hilton with guns and knives. The legislation says the money would support enhancements to the ballroom project, “including above-ground and below-ground security features,” but also specifies that the money may not be used for non-security elements.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle praised Republicans for including the money for the “long overdue” project, saying it would “provide the United States Secret Service with the resources they need to fully and completely harden the White House complex, in addition to the many other critical missions for the USSS.”

The money is part of a larger bill to pay for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, as Democrats have been blocking funds for both agencies since mid-February. Congress passed bipartisan legislation to fund the rest of the Homeland Security Department on April 30 after a record-long shutdown, but Republicans are using a partisan budget maneuver to push through the ICE and Border Patrol dollars on their own. The House has not released its bill yet, but the Senate is expected to start voting on its version of the legislation next week.

It is unclear exactly how the $1 billion would be used, and the amount far exceeds the proposed $400 million for construction of the ballroom. The White House has said in court documents that the East Wing project would be “heavily fortified,” including bomb shelters, military installations and a medical facility underneath the ballroom. Trump has said it should include bulletproof glass and be able to repel drone attacks.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued to block construction of the project, but a federal appeals court said last month that it can continue in the meantime.

The White House has said that private money would pay for the construction but public money would be used for security measures. Some Republicans have suggested that public money pay for all of it, arguing the security breach at the dinner shows the president needs a secure place to host events.

“It would be insane” to hold the dinner at a hotel again, said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who introduced a bill to pay for the ballroom’s construction with Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL).

Democrats have said they will oppose any efforts to pay for the ballroom.

“While Americans are struggling to make ends meet as a result of President Trump’s failed policies, Republicans are focused on providing tens of billions of dollars for the president’s vanity ballroom project and cruel mass deportation campaign,” said Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the U.S. Secret Service.

—By Mary Clare Jalonick, Associated Press

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

Under a full moon, the strains of harp music

After guests made their way up the carpeted steps to the museum, they entered into the Great Hall, which had been transformed into “a Northern Italian garden,” in the museum’s words. There was a huge moon hanging and swaying from the ceiling, and below it a floral centerpiece surrounded by cypress branches.

A half dozen harpists serenaded the guests, who waited to shake the hands of the gala co-chairs — Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, and honorary chair Lauren Sánchez Bezos — but not, for now, the late-arriving Beyoncé.

The receiving line was a long wait, reported Sarah Paulson.

“I waited 45 minutes,” the actor said, explaining why she hadn’t made it yet to the Conde M. Nast Galleries to see the fashion exhibit, “Costume Art,” which examines the dressed body through centuries of art history. Her feet hurt. “You could cut my legs off at the ankle,” she said.

Lobster crostini and tomato-mozzarella pillows

As the Engelhard court gradually filled, guests milled about snacking on lobster crostini or tomato and mozzarella “pillows.”

Zoë Kravitz, who headed the host committee, greeted Storrie — did we mention he was a top attraction? — and complimented him on his work. Bradley Cooper and Gigi Hadid sat quietly chatting on the sidelines, hand in hand.

Near them, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster did the same. Jackman stood up when skier Lindsey Vonn came by, giving her a hug. Vonn, who suffered a traumatic leg injury at the Winter Olympics, used only a cane and sparkled in a Thom Browne gown.

Billionaires, he’s seen ’em before

Ever since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos had been announced as honorary chairs, there had been anti-billionaire backlash in liberal New York City. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he would not come. A group called Everyone Hates Elon — a reference to Musk — had plastered posters at bus stops, like one on the East Side saying “Dress code: Willful ignorance,” and on subways.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, though, had a different take. He’d attended a few Met Galas, and said billionaires were nothing new.

“There have always been billionaires here,” Sharpton said. “I may not agree with everything Bezos does, but do I abandon Beyoncé and Venus Williams?” He also praised Wintour for paying attention to diversity. “I opted to come.”

He said the gala “brings a cultured meeting space” for people who haven’t yet met.

A date night for Jon Batiste

At previous galas, Jon Batiste has performed, sometimes leading a musical band with his melodica to get crowds to head to dinner. This time around, he had no gala responsibilities — and he was happy.

After all, he said, “it’s date night” with his wife, Suleika Jaouad. “A night in the museum,” he quipped. The couple were dinner guests of Wintour herself.

Batiste wore a look by Eli Russell Linnetz that he said echoed the work of late Black portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks — a long white coat and white ensemble underneath. Hendricks often juxtaposed Black skin with white clothes, Batiste noted. Jaouad wore a sumptuous Christian Siriano gown.

Progress in the fight for diversity

Sinéad Burke, the Irish disability activist, said that when she was first approached to be on the host committee, “I said no.”

Unless, she says she told organizers, they made the gala fully accessible.

They did, Burke says, arranging for a step-free entrance for guests who need it, south of the main entrance.

Burke ended up working closely with the museum for 18 months before the gala. She made sure there was room for disabled press to cover the gala carpet. She and her organization, Tilting the Lens, also helped train guides who will assist the public when they view “Costume Art,” which has a large section on the disabled body.

And Burke herself, who was born with dwarfism, agreed to pose for a custom mannequin; two outfits are displayed on mannequins created in her image.

“I’m proud of the small moments,” she said.

But a step backward, elsewhere

Model Lauren Wasser, also on the host committee, attended in a custom Prabal Gurung ensemble all in gold, including her trademark gold prosthetic legs.

She said she was glad the museum was shining a light on diversity in body types. But she cautioned that in the outside world, things are looking bleaker. (Research has found that designers are starting to turn away from using plus-size models, for example.)

“I want to see it in real life, too,” Wasser said of such diversity. “We had a moment. But we’ve taken a step back.”

Wearing silver, feeling golden

The songwriter who won an Oscar for “Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters” was wearing, well, silver. But she said she was feeling golden.

In fact, EJAE, part of the team that won best original song for the impossibly catchy tune, said she was trying to channel a specific lyric with her gown, a Swarovski number dripping with crystals.

“I’m done hidin’, now I’m shinin’ like I’m born to be,” the song goes.

“I wanted to literally be shining,” EJAE said. Mission accomplished.

Sarah Paulson has the Met’s secrets — remember?

This wasn’t the first rodeo for Paulson. In fact in was her sixth Met Gala, she said.

But Paulson has more after-hours experience at the Met. She shot the movie “Ocean’s 8” there, a film about a heist during … the Met Gala.

“I spent a lot of time here — I know the secrets,” Paulson said. “They should watch out!”

Asked if six Met Galas got a little tiresome, Paulson said they did not.

“You can’t really believe the people here and the oxygen you’re sharing,” the actor said. “People from all the great talents of the world.”

Rihanna and A$AP Rocky are Heidi Klum fans

Dinner was under way. Beyoncé had arrived, with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy.

But the assembled media on the carpet and various staffers in the museum lobby weren’t breaking for the night. There was one more big arrival to come. Yes, Rihanna.

When she and partner A$AP Rocky arrived in the Great Hall, they stopped for photos quickly and then headed toward the Temple of Dendur for dinner. But then they ran into Heidi Klum, who knows her way around a costume, virtually unrecognizable as a marble statue.

The couple spent 10 minutes or so laughing with Klum and complimenting her.

“This is the coolest outfit tonight, ain’t gonna lie,” A$AP Rocky noted.

“Oh my god, I can’t stand you!” Rihanna said admiringly.

“How much did they pay you to just stand here for the rest of the night?” the singer asked the statue. They all laughed.

—Jocelyn Noveck, AP National Writer

Ruggable, the company that launched nearly a decade ago on the premise that rugs should be washable, has been on a mission to reimagine the jute rug. And after nearly two years of development, it is launching a machine-washable rug called Performance Weave that mimics jute so convincingly, you would need to touch it to know the difference.

To create it, Ruggable had to embark in a complex process of reverse engineering to give customers all the qualities they love about jute—the complexity of its texture and color—while making it softer to the touch and washable. “There’s so many performance benefits of jute when you think about it as a material, but there are a lot of drawbacks too,” says Nicole Otto, Ruggable’s CEO. “Traditional jute doesn’t have the best foot feel. We set out to fix that.”

Building a Jute-Alternative

The breakthrough starts at the yarn level. Rather than using standard synthetic fibers that are commonly used to make rugs these days, Ruggable’s team engineered a yarn made from a polymer called polypropylene specifically designed to replicate jute’s signature look.

To re-create the depth and tonal variation you would see in a natural fiber, they found a way to twist three distinct filaments together that were light, medium, and dark. It’s the same principle behind why our hair looks dimensional, rather than flat: Individual hairs come in different shades that work together to create richness. This makes it different from rugs that are dyed in a single color, which ends up looking flat and synthetic.

Many people like having jute rugs in outdoor spaces—particularly in warmer climates in the sun belt. So Ruggable chose to use yarns with a U.V. stabilizer built into the filaments, allowing it to hold up whether it is baking in the sun or in your living room.

From there, the yarn is tufted into what Otto calls a “croissant” weave. It is narrower at the base, but gains density as it loops upwards. The structure creates the thick, textured, organic look that makes jute so appealing, while staying soft to the touch. “We’ve actually woven it in a way that it has a lot of give and cushion,” Otto explains.

Ruggable found a tufted construction method that allows the rug to be both fully machine washable, while also staying structurally stable. The company promises that the rug won’t warp, wrinkle, or crease when you throw it in the washing machine. The bottom layer of the rug is thin and lightweight, keeping it pliable enough to fit in a standard home washing machine, while giving the rug some grip.

Ruggable’s All-in-One Platform

Since launching in 2017, Ruggable has made a business out of solving problems with traditional rugs. Founder Jeneva Bell’s original breakthrough was deconstructing a rug into layers and engineering them to survive a washing machine cycle together—which required understanding the material science of how each layer behaves under pressure.

To create a washable rug, Bell created a two-piece system that featured a rug cover attached to a separate non-slip pad. The cover was thin enough that it could easily fit in a washing machine when it needed to be cleaned. But many customers complained about putting the rug back together after the wash, since it was hard to get all the edges lined up perfectly.

Last September, Ruggable launched a new “all-in-one” rug design. Within six weeks of launching, Ruggable saw that the majority of its customers moved to the new innovation. It now represents 70% of the business, and it has been responsible for increasing Ruggable’s net promoter score by 20 points. Revenue climbed as well, although the company won’t share specifics.

“We’re obsessed [with] our consumers’ feedback,” Otto says. “We feel like we made the platform with our consumers and really addressed all of the hurdles of the two-piece system without compromising either design or functionality.”

The original two-piece system still has its devotees, particularly for high-traffic zones like kitchens where weekly washing makes sense, or under office chairs where you need something flat enough that your wheels don’t catch. But for larger rooms where you actually want comfort and texture, Ruggable is betting that washability plus natural-fiber aesthetics will keep driving adoption.

Performance Weave represents something the traditional rug industry hasn’t prioritized. Maintaining the design people want while engineering for the chaos of everyday life. It’s one thing to make a rug that looks like jute. It’s another to make one that survives your washing machine, children, or pets.