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The News / Quartz by Marc Bain: The two companies shared their knowledge and expertise with one another to make a sneaker with no carbon footprint. They didn’t quite get there, but the sneaker they’ve just unveiled, called the Futurecraft.Footprint, has a carbon footprint per pair of 2.94 kg of CO2 equivalent emissions (CO2e), a measure that factors in other greenhouse gases as well, such as methane, for a more holistic tally of a product’s climate impact.
Primer: Allbirds and Adidas have released the Futurecraft.Footprint sneaker, the result of a rare collaboration between the two footwear brands who set out to create a no-carbon sneaker (here's how Allbirds defines that). While the Adidas collaboration is not no-carbon, it has a much smaller footprint than typical shoe. The companies will launch an inaugural release of 100 shoes through a lottery before rolling out tens of thousands of pairs, next year.
The shoe may not be as sustainable as the companies set out to make it, but it’s the fruits of an overhaul of a legacy manufacturing system in an effort to rethink production and materials. It’s a necessary step. And a peer into what retail needs to do in order to be more sustainable. It’s also excellent marketing for Allbirds and Adidas, who are demonstrating that collaborations and open sourcing can be good for innovation as well as a bit of earned media
A quote from a GQ interview with Allbirds head of design Jamie McLellan and Adidas Running VP of design Sam Handy sums up the significance of the partnership between the two brands:
Allbirds is a very young business compared to Adidas. Our mindset is scrappy but ambitious, and our operations are very nimble. Adidas has decades of expertise under their belt and their sheer scale gives them an incredible advantage – these capabilities were invaluable for this project. By working with new people, we learned to think in new ways and this will definitely have a positive impact on the business going forward.
Allbirds may not be scrappy for much longer. The New York Times reported in April that the company was interviewing bankers for its impending (and well-timed) IPO. With a groundbreaking partnership with Adidas under its belt and an IPO on the horizon, Allbirds is on its way to crossing over from disruptor brand to the mainstream.
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eCommerce / Wall Street Journal: Parents and other adults in a child’s life can set a budget on Camp’s website, designate the recipient and fill out shipping and payment information. Camp then sends the adults a one-time code and link that children can use to do their own shopping. The new feature, called the Present Shop, goes live Monday.
Editor's Note: Congrats to Ben and team at Camp.
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Brands / Sprezza: There was a brief period where it felt like J.Crew was on its game. You know, when Mickey Drexler and Todd Snyder (circa 2008-2011) were both at the helm, curating the best indie brands and partnerships at the famous Liquor Store in Tribeca. J.Crew felt fun back then.
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Creator Economy / Drinking from the Firehose: When the scale of investment is proportional to the addressable market of the project, even the smallest creators can bootstrap. Furthermore, their success is financially aligned with the goals of their audience. Equity isn’t just defined in a corporate context; it can be defined on a creator-, or even project-level.
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DTC Brands / Not Boring: Pure online brands like Boohoo, ASOS and Fashion Nova also understood the power of social media not only for promotion but also anticipating new trends. Working together with local factories close to their consumer base, this new breed of companies were able to take fast fashion up a notch into “ultra-fast fashion.” Richard Saghian, founder of LA based Fashion Nova described his company’s rise by saying, "We don't even really have a strategy. We grew so fast. We are just grabbing the tiger by the tail." Fashion Nova is currently #1 on 2PM’s DTC Power List, and more than 50% of the top 20 are fashion companies. Shein is mysteriously nowhere on the list.
Editor's Note: nice call out, Packy. Consider it added. 👇🏽
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Updated May 17: We’ve added 2021’s Internet Retailer Top 1,000 rankings for the brands that are mentioned. New brands include: Shein (@SHEIN_Official), Athletic Greens (@AthleticGreens), Hydrant (@drinkhydrant), Manscaped (@manscaped), Eight Sleep (@eightsleep), and Cometeer (@cometeer). This detailed and dynamic list is now 471 large!
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Linear Commerce / Vogue Business: First came the Gucci Garden Archetypes installation in the brand’s Florence palazzo, a physical recreation of 15 of Gucci’s most fantastical advertising campaign sets. Now comes another Garden, open to the world and time-zone agnostic. Behold, a fantastical virtual Gucci Garden to wander through, offering immersion in the everything-goes universe of creative director Alessandro Michele.
Re-read (or just read): Enter the Metaverse (2PM)
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Consumer Psychology / Bloomberg: The number of seniors using web grocery regularly declined by 25% in April compared with the previous year, Brick Meets Click and Mercatus found, the biggest drop of any age group by far. That suggests many seniors are still hunter-gatherers at heart, Morais says, and often prefer to use their senses to choose the food that’s most appealing.
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DTC Brand Coverage / Thingtesting: Such strategies are high risk, but can be high reward. Get it right, and consumers will think of the brand as a rare example of honesty, fun and authenticity at a time where trust in brands on social media is dwindling. If it doesn’t land right, however, brands risk coming across as strange, unrelatable, or even offensive.
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Streaming Economy / CNN Business: The New York-based company is also trying differentiate itself with its "tribrid" model, which includes working out at home through its app, visiting its gyms and exercising outdoors. Equinox is experimenting with outdoor gyms it calls "In the Wild" and has opened 20 "SoulCycle Outside" studios.
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Sociology / The Sociology of Business: Modern amateurs have nothing to do with the anachronistic meaning of the word. They are not dilettantes or laypersons.
Editor's Note: always read Ana's takes on fashion. She's in the process of trying to turn around Banana Republic, where she the PhD sociologist serves as the Chief Brand Officer.
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CPG / New York Times: For snack start-ups, 2020 was a year of struggle. Those hoping to be discovered, to find their way into lunchboxes a few years from now or be the next big hit, like the Kind bar or Popchips, found that the paths taken by many other successful snack companies were suddenly shut down.
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eCommerce / Andreessen Horowitz: Building a vertical marketplace shares many of the dynamics of more generalized marketplace companies — the challenge of the cold start, the pursuit of network effects — but it diverges from the standard playbook in ways that are fundamental and often inherently personal.
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Returns are in the spotlight. The tail is beginning to wag the dog. Strategist and consultant Michael Miraflor recently visited his neighborhood Kohl’s and observed an astounding trend. Nearly 70% of the store’s traffic was there to return Amazon packages, according to his estimates. I wanted to dig deeper here. Research suggested that while the 70% figure may be extreme, it’s not by much. Returns volume has become a business development boon. Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass said during a recent conference call:
While details of the partnership are confidential, we continue to see that this is accretive to both sales and profit. Conversion rates are trending upward for the people visiting Kohl’s stores to return a package to Amazon.[1]
The last 10 years of the digitally-native brand era seemed to reward the expressive brand experience. Consumers, founders, and industry pundits fawned over packaging, front-end web design, social media presence, and earned media. The traditional “DTC playbook” rewarded appearance over internal processes, aesthetic appeal over balanced books, and growth over customer service. This is changing and changing fast.
Continue Reading...
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