Stock Watch: Robin Hoods

Icebreakers with...Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John

Our Tennessee

Build-A-Bear Workshop turns 25 next year (feeling old?), and the brand has been growing up with its audience. In addition to browsing the typical heart-stuffed plush, customers can head to the age-gated section of Build-A-Bear’s site, The Bear Cave, and nab a Deadpool panda. 

So after buying 14 Pandapools, we caught up with Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John to learn more about how the company known for its childhood mall magic has evolved.

Chicken and egg question for you: Did you see increased interest from an older demographic and create more products for them, or did you create those products and the older demographic came?

We started to see an expansion in interest [among older demographics] when we got closer to 20 years old. So five-ish years ago, there was a natural expansion. And that happens a lot in the toy industry. 

The key is how do you use it as a flywheel and not just a blip in time? As soon as we started to see the data, we started leaning in with more licensing, a little more edgy marketing, making sure that we were really appropriate online for digital natives. 

Because you want a bigger market. The kids market is hard. It’s always new customers. It churns all the time. It’s what we call a “leaky bucket.” Adult customers are a bigger market that buys less often but is more stable. Plus, it elevates you from a pop culture perspective.

The in-person aspect of Build-A-Bear stores feels like such a big part of the magic of creating your bear. How have you dealt with that during the pandemic?

We had to shift hard toward e-commerce. It was our only source of consistent revenue as our stores shut down. We had to furlough the vast majority of our organization and do what many companies did. That’s never simple or easy, especially when you’re a company that prides itself on adding a little more heart to life.

But we fortuitously put a number of updates in place that we had already been planning. Buy online and ship to store, buy online and pick up in store, we completed a deal with Shipt for same-day delivery...so we were able to maintain a good cash flow.

To your point, experience is a benchmark of Build-A-Bear, and it’s almost like we were experiential retail before experiential retail was cool. So how do we make sure our online experience has connectivity back to what we do in the store? For that, we created a Bear Builder Configurator that takes you through the process (pick your bear, pick your outfit, put a sound in), and you can do a heart ceremony. 

Zooming out to the toy industry, are you seeing any trends that we should keep an eye on?

One is experience now that we’re on the other side. I think you’re going to see a pretty good horizon on that, on people re-engaging and getting out and doing fun things.

Is there a particular licensed bear that’s been super popular?

We don’t rank the products like that, but Baby Yoda’s a phenomenon, not just with us but across the board. Harry Potter as you might imagine is one of the biggest powerhouse licenses out there, and then most recently, we launched Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We looked into that because of so much social media saying, “Please, please, please make Animal Crossing.”

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Make It Work: Somewhere on a Beach

Giphy

Make It Work is on a well-deserved vacation this week. In the meantime, here are 5 work-related reads…

1. How to get things done when you don’t want to do anything. (New York Times)
2. Micro habit stacking: 25 small changes to improve your life. (Medium)
3. How to cold email your way to a dream job. (Morning Brew)
4. The new culture of pop-up holidays. (BBC)
5. Productivity expert Priya Parker on how we should properly gather and return to the workplace. (Charter)

Into the Metaverse We Go

Epic Games

When he’s not throwing spears or cloning Snapchat, Mark Zuckerberg dreams about the metaverse. 

“In the coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company,” he said on Facebook’s earnings call Wednesday.

He’s serious. On Monday, Facebook announced it was forming a metaverse product group to bring Zuck’s vision from science fiction to reali—er, virtual reality. 

• The group’s lead, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), wrote that Facebook wanted to “remove the limitations of physics” in order to allow people to connect with one another in virtual spaces. 
• And if you didn’t think FB was serious about the metaverse, Boz’s post linked to a site with more than 700 open jobs.

But what is the metaverse?

Well, here’s the bad news: Not even the guy who popularized it can fully explain it. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, whose writing on the metaverse has influenced Zuck and other tech thinkers, calls it a “successor state to the mobile internet” but stops short of slapping down an actual definition. 

He does, however, identify key attributes of the metaverse.

• Things will happen “live” just as they do in real life. You can’t pause or rewind anything.
• The metaverse will be a fully functioning economy, so you can buy, sell, and invest in things as you would in the physical world.
• It will have unprecedented interoperability, meaning you can bring your virtual self and your assets (say, a skin from Fortnite) to every experience without compatibility issues. 

The backstory: The term “metaverse” first showed up in Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash in 1992, and was built upon by other science fiction thinkers like Ernest Cline, who depicted a version of the metaverse in his book Ready Player One. Metaverse philosophizing picked up during the pandemic, when people started hanging out in video games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Animal Crossing instead of IRL. 

And yet the metaverse is so tantalizing, so esoteric, that it could mean everything...and nothing.

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said this week his company was building “the enterprise metaverse” in reference to the company’s cloud-computing services, he was mocked on social media for indiscriminately using a buzzword.  

Some critics say that while the metaverse idea sounds cool, it may not be the logical next step in the evolution of social media. Others say talking about futuristic concepts could be a tool for Zuck to keep investors excited about the company’s deep investments in AR and VR...and distracted from its current antitrust battles.

Bottom line: The metaverse won’t magically appear one day. If it does come into existence, it’ll be a decades-long process involving thousands of companies building the hardware, content, currencies, and other components that together constitute a metaverse. Just as Facebook conquered the internet, it wants to stake a claim in whatever the next version of that will be. 

Open House

Welcome to Open House, the only newsletter section that will make you seriously consider buying an entire home just for the yellow bathtub. We’ll give you a few facts about a listing and you try to guess the price.

Zillow

In Clovis, New Mexico, a town 15 minutes west of the Texas border, a home exists with so much wood inside of it that you’d be able to dismantle it and sell it for parts if lumber prices go up again. But it’s got so much more than nicely finished timber:

• 4 beds, 5 baths
• Master bedroom balcony
• Plenty of built-in storage
• The widest variety of bathrooms

How much for your ’70s dream house? Scroll to the bottom of the newsletter to find out.

Just Click It

1. How TV went from David Brent to Ted Lasso. (New York Times)
2. The hottest tattoo of the Tokyo Olympics. (BuzzFeed News)
3. Getting over gold: athletes and mental health. (David Epstein)
4. How to build meaningful relationships. (Founder’s Journal)
5. Why so many millennials are obsessed with dogs. (The Atlantic)
6. A soil-science revolution upends plans to fight climate change. (Quanta Magazine)
7. A motorcycle-riding lawyer searches Guatemala’s remotest corners to reunite families separated by the US. (Washington Post)
8. Gen-Z is rewriting the personal finance rules in real time. (Money)
9. A California city raised essential worker pay—and their expectations. (Politico)
10. Is BTS using more English lyrics to appeal to Western audiences? An analysis. (Morning Brew)

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Meme Battle

Welcome back to Morning Brew's Meme Battle, where we crown a single memelord every Sunday.

Today's winner: Jill in Redmond, OR. Same vibes when we judge all your memes, tbh. 

This week's challenge: You can find the new meme template here for next Sunday. Once you're done making your meme, submit it at this link. We'll pick a new memelord for next week's Sunday Edition and provide you with another meme template to meme-ify. 

$450,000

✢ A Note From Bakkt

*Click here to learn more about Bakkt’s spread for bitcoin transactions.