New Side of Zoë Kravitz – This Is NYC’s Hottest Neighbourhood – The growth triathlon: Three pathways to extraordinary growth in the consumer sector – Jennette McCurdy’s Memoir Is the Hit No One Was Ready For – It Was a Mystery in the Desert for 50 Years
Dear Readers,
Today the TextileFuture Team was picking a total of five features for your reading and seeing pleasure.
The first item is on “A New Side of Zoë Kravitz”,the beautiful young American Model and her new self created life.
The second feature allows you an insight in “New York City’s hottest Neighbourhood”. It is vastly illustrated with beautiful captions of the places and written by Lane Florsheim from the Wall Street Magazine.
The third item is a typical McKinsey work of different authors from the Consultancy, but in a rather short form. It is entitled: “The growth triathlon: Three pathways to extraordinary growth in the consumer sector” and presents the necessary facts and figures.
The fourth feature is about the actual Bestseller Book “Jennette McCurdy’s Memoir Is the Hit No One Was Ready For”.
The fifth item bears the title “It Was a Mystery in the Desert for 50 Years” and is on the monumental work of 50 years building work in the lifespan of one man’s ideas.
May your organisation and yourself enjoy the success of a week with appreciating customers!
The TextileFuture Editorial Team.
Here beginns the first item on the beautiful young American Model:
A New Side of Zoë Kravitz
For her provocative directorial debut, ‘Pussy Island’—starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum (whom she’s now dating)—the 33-year-old actor and musician was ready to write her own script.
By Hunter Harris | Photography by Campbell Addy for WSJ. Magazine | Styling by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson
Zoë Kravitz is in the panic stage of preparing for travel, running around Manhattan, squeezing in errands. “Packing’s funny,” Kravitz says. “I always talk about packing with friends of mine, about how it brings up all this anxiety—this is a whole concept I have—about who we want to be as people. You start to think, I’m going to this place, and who do I want to be in this place?” Outfits become fantasies; it’s less the mechanics of do I need this T-shirt or that one, and more, what will this new place conjure? But in reality, Kravitz says, “you end up wearing the same four things the whole time, anyway.”
Her destination is the set of Pussy Island, on the grounds of a lush Yucatán hacienda, a land of bacchanalia and vice that Kravitz herself has dreamt up. The movie, which will start shooting a few weeks after her arrival and is expected to be released in 2023, is the 33-year-old actor’s directorial debut. The script, which she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum, “was born out of a lot of anger and frustration around the lack of conversation about the treatment of women, specifically in industries that have a lot of money in them, like Hollywood, the tech world, all of that,” she says. She’d heard stories about powerful men inviting women to remote islands for hazy hedonist free-for-alls. What’s the version of that reality that I myself would want to see, Kravitz wondered. Then she started writing.
The title is intentionally provocative. It was the first thing that came to her when she started writing the script five years ago, before the #MeToo movement shook up Hollywood. “The title came from that world. The title is the seed of the story,” she says. While other projects have had their titles truncated—last spring’s The Lost City losing the of D, or Starz taking away P-Valley’s “ussy”—Kravitz says she won’t budge: “It represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that, and the illusion that we’re out of that time now.”
In the movie, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress (Naomi Ackie) accepts an invitation to be whisked away to a tech mogul’s (Channing Tatum) private island. Danger looms in the debauchery. To sell the movie to MGM, Kravitz directed a sizzle reel with original and found footage to capture the tone she wanted: dark, funny, sexy, frightening. “I didn’t know Zoë before I met her for the film,” says Tatum, whose company, Free Association, is co-producing the project. “When we first met the movie was pretty different than its form now, but the themes were the same. All the iterations it has gone through were all pretty punk rock, to be honest.”
Kravitz took advice from Steven Soderbergh, who directed her in this year’s Kimi. She sent the script to her friends. “I thought that the script was dangerous, which I liked,” says one of them, fellow actor-writer-director-musician Donald Glover. “It feels really dangerous for a woman to make this story about power.”
Kravitz is stepping away from an acting career on a perpetual upswing to direct Pussy Island. “She’s a real thoroughbred and a bona fide movie star,” says Soderbergh. He uses Kimi as an example: “She’s in 96 percent of the frames that exist in that movie. And to be able to pull that off with such poise and ease, that’s what movie stars do.” But directing isn’t a curious actor’s diversion. Does Soderbergh, who is also close to Pussy Island’s star Tatum, think Kravitz can pull it off?
“Of the people that I could name who I think have a real shot at coming out of the gate making something really distinctive and strong, she’s at the top of that list. Having said that, you really don’t know somebody until they show up on day one as the director,” he says. Kravitz describes the transition from being in front of the camera to behind it as using a different part of her brain. “I’m learning a lot about what it takes to make a movie and how many fires are constantly being put out before the actors show up to set,” she says. “I’m just kind of sitting back and learning and trying to not constantly be in a state of panic.”
For years, Kravitz has bounced between big projects, often playing the best friend, love interest or sidekick. She’s been a household name to people of a certain generation, but probably better known as Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet’s daughter to that generation’s parents. Kravitz was born into a creative lineage; listening to her describe her family is more like hearing about an artist collective. “They always remind me, ‘Why are we making art?’” she says of her parents. “‘You’re making [art] for yourself because you feel something that you want to express.’ I think it’s about bringing each other back to that place, because you get off course and start thinking about what people are going to think and all of that. I think it’s really about artists reminding each other that’s not why we’re doing it.”
In her early 20s, Kravitz made a series of indie films and seemed to reject a traditional Hollywood career. She also recorded music as singer of the Brooklyn band Lolawolf. The music was a spunky, flirtatious diversion: songs about hangovers, house parties, crushes. “I think it feels young and sweet,” she says of Lolawolf’s songs. “I always felt like I wasn’t getting to the place I wanted to with that music, mostly because of who I was [at the time].” She’s since started working on a solo album produced by Jack Antonoff, but it’s on the back burner. “I’m scared to make music, but I love it,” Kravitz says. “Now I’ve already kind of started it.”
By the 2010s, she was working in Hollywood, with small roles in the Divergent movies and an X-Men prequel; the Academy Award–winning Mad Max: Fury Road was a breakout film for her. Big Little Lies, the HBO series in which she played one of five secretive mothers, placed Kravitz in the center of its A-list milieu; later, she made an old movie her mother was in into a series of her own with High Fidelity, canceled after one season by Hulu. The Fantastic Beasts franchise, followed by The Batman, made her a bigger global star. “I know she feels the pressure,” Glover says of Kravitz’s efforts to be seen as more than “the daughter of.” He compares it to working with Malia Obama, a writer on Hive, his upcoming Amazon series. “There’s always a pressure that’s like, ‘I actually have to do something that’s good, because otherwise people will say it’s not because of me being creative.”
Kravitz, he thinks, makes work that anticipates getting dinged. “I think she just knows how the conversation is going to be. Her doing this script and directing it, I feel like she’s taking the risk to heart of like, ‘Yeah, you can’t say this is because of something else. Actually, this is my idea. This is my perception.’” Kravitz herself says as much: “There’s just a fear of judgment. The truth is, with almost everything I do, if I can get it to the point where I truly think it’s good, then I can kind of let things drop away where I’m not so concerned about what other people think.”
Today, over lunch at The Smile in SoHo, Kravitz is wearing jeans, a black T-shirt and a baseball cap. She has an impenetrable, angled stare, but her coolness isn’t icy. She’s prone to the occasional wry laugh. “I really didn’t feel beautiful growing up,” she says of her upbringing between California, Miami and eventually New York. “A big part of that was where I grew up, who I was around in terms of being the only Black girl,” she says. “I wasn’t exotic and cool-looking. I was the weirdo with the fuzzy hair.
“Then, you grow up and you look different now. It’s weird because it’s not really how I identify. I think a lot of people probably will hear that and think that’s bullshit, but that’s just how I feel,” she continues. “Even with directing, I think to myself, OK, I’m not going to be in a movie for a year. I hope we make another Batman. It’s just the sickness of the mind where I genuinely can convince myself that I won’t work again, that no one will call me and want me. That never goes away.”
“Of the people that I could name who I think have a real shot at coming out of the gate making something really distinctive and strong, she’s at the top of that list.” – Steven Soderbergh.
Kravitz is quick to correct the record and speak her mind. When entertainment trades recently took a quote about her not being cast in The Dark Knight Rises out of context, Kravitz clarified it in an Instagram post. In March, two days after the Oscars ceremony in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, Kravitz posted a pair of red-carpet photos of her dresses from the evening: “Here’s a picture of my dress at the show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now,” read the first caption. When a commenter asked if she supported Smith defending Jada Pinkett Smith after Rock’s joke about her shaved head (Pinkett Smith has alopecia), Kravitz responded with a simple “nope.”
The internet’s wrath was immediate and fierce. Kravitz later deleted the images. “It’s a scary time to have an opinion or to say the wrong thing or to make controversial art or statements or thoughts or anything,” she says. “It’s mostly scary because art is about conversation. That should, in my opinion, always be the point. The internet is the opposite of conversation. The internet is people putting things out and not taking anything in.”
Kravitz doesn’t seem to be in a rush to win back the internet’s affection, nor does she seem particularly scorched by its reproach. “I was reminded that I’m an artist. Being an artist is not about everybody loving you or everyone thinking you’re hot. It’s about expressing something that will hopefully spark a conversation or inspire people or make them feel seen,” she says. “I think I’m in a place right now where I don’t want to express myself through a caption or a tweet. I want to express myself through art.”
She allows that it was a difficult situation. “I’m torn about what to say right now, because I’m supposed to just talk about it; I have very complicated feelings around it,” she says. “I wish I had handled that differently. And that’s OK.”
If she doesn’t like something, she’ll say it; if it’s her own work not meeting her standards of quality control, she might not ever put it out. “A lot of artists think they’re artists but they’re actually entertainers. She’s actually somebody who is like, ‘No, I know when someone’s lying to me. I know when I actually look good. I know when my stuff is actually good,’” Glover says. “I think she’s honed that. And that’s hard to do when you’re insulated in this legacy bubble, or people just think you’re a pretty face.”
“If I looked like that, I wouldn’t do any work at all,” says Soderbergh. “She’s so arresting to look at…. There are people you meet who are striking, who you can tell they’re never not thinking about that. And that’s just not who she is.”
It feels fitting, then, that the lead of Pussy Island was a role Kravitz wrote for someone else. She landed on the British actor Naomi Ackie, whom she met while Ackie was in the U.S. working on the upcoming Whitney Houston biopic. “I wanted to make space for someone else. This is a role that I would have loved to have played…[but] I genuinely think Naomi is worlds better for this part than I am,” she says. They bonded one night over tequila. “Zoë has this really lovely, warm energy,” Ackie says. “I immediately felt at ease.”
Something similar happened with Tatum, whom Kravitz is now dating. (She and the actor Karl Glusman had a brief marriage that ended in August 2021.) When asked about her current relationship, she demurs. “Do I want to go into that? I guess what I’ll say is when you make things with people it’s a very sacred space, and when you’re compatible with somebody creatively it often opens up other channels, because you’re kind of sharing all of yourself,” Kravitz says. “I’m really grateful that this movie has brought him into my life that way.”
Kravitz needed an actor who wouldn’t be afraid of the script she’d written, a man with a good-boy image she could complicate. “I wanted to find someone who hadn’t played a dark character before, because I think that’s exciting to watch someone who’s mostly played boy next door, good guy, love interest, all of that,” she says. (Tatum was eager for the anti-typecast: “The easy answer is it’s always really intriguing to have someone bring you something that literally no one else has ever thought of you for. And really even allowed you to ask yourself why and can you play someone so different than what you have.”) Kravitz was confident he could pull it off: “I felt, even from afar, before I knew him, that he was a feminist and that he wasn’t afraid of exploring that darkness, because he knows he’s not that. That’s why I was drawn to him and wanted to meet with him. And I was right.”
In Mexico, she’s reunited with her cast, the people she handpicked to play with. Now Kravitz is free to get a little loose. Over the phone, with birds cawing in the background, her voice has an energized lilt. Being on location has a summer-camp vibe. “I’m wearing a necklace that my mom gave me and an earring that Channing gave me. I have a T-shirt from my dad. I’ve been wearing a lot of things that remind me of people who I love, because it’s comforting,” she says.
Four days into filming and a few days away from directing her first big group scene, she seems to be basking in the challenge. “If you zoom out too much and think about the whole thing at once, it causes a lot of anxiety,” she says, “but if you focus on the present moment, it’s really fun.”
Here starts the second feature:
This Is NYC’s Hottest Neighbourhood
New restaurants, retail and a stylish hotel come to the Orchard Street area, aka Dimes Square.
By guest author Lane Florsheim from the Wall Street Magazine.
Nine Orchard
Beauty is in the details at this 116-room hotel, down to the ceramic room-key tags from BDDW. For dining and drinking, check out Corner Bar and Lobby Lounge by Estela and Altro Paradiso chef Ignacio Mattos. NineOrchard.com
Bode
Since opening her menswear brand’s flagship in 2019, designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla has added a tailoring space that’s also a cafe. BodeNewYork.com
Desert Vintage
Classic pieces from designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, Thea Porter and YSL mix with finds from the 1920s and 1930s at this boutique, which comes to New York by way of Tucson, Arizona. DesertVintage.com
Le Dive
This natural wine bar was inspired by French tabacs, and the outdoor seating, which pours onto Canal Street, has the liveliness of a European street cafe. LeDiveNYC.com
P&T Knitwear
This 3,000-square-foot space is home to a bookstore and cafe as well as a podcast studio and event space that are free for community use. PTKnitwear.com
Time
In addition to omakase, this sushi restaurant founded by architectural designer Nick Poe and rapper Alec Reinstein offers dishes like Japanese fried chicken and Wagyu steak tartare. TimeOnCanal.com.
This is the start of the McKinsey work:
The growth triathlon: Three pathways to extraordinary growth in the consumer sector
For consumer companies to grow fast and profitably, they must expand their cores, tap into adjacencies, and ignite breakout businesses—all at the same time.
About the authors
This article is a collaborative effort by Jordan Bar Am, Simon Land, Duncan Miller, René Schmutzler, and Gage Wells, representing views from McKinsey’s Consumer Packaged Goods and Retail Practices. Jordan Bar Am is a partner in McKinsey’s New Jersey office, Simon Land is a senior partner in the Düsseldorf office, Duncan Miller is a senior partner in the Atlanta office, René Schmutzler is a partner in the Hamburg office, and Gage Wells is a consultant in the Washington, DC, office.
Delivering exceptional growth, even in the short term, is a tall order. More difficult still is to do it profitably, year after year. Yet demanding investors continue to expect—even in the face of global conflict, and with margins under pressure from inflation and supply chain disruptions—that consumer companies will deliver continuous, profitable growth above the historical average of 3 percent. 1
Is there one winning strategy guaranteed to achieve that kind of growth? As avid sports fans and avowed stat heads, we decided to “Moneyball” this question, investigating in the same way a baseball scout might use advanced statistics to assess a shortstop. After we sifted through the data to figure out what really drives success, we discovered that—at least when it comes to profitable growth outperformance—being a mere single-sport athlete is not enough. One can’t be just a swimmer, a runner, or a cyclist. Consumer companies instead need to think and execute like triathletes.
There’s no literal swimming, running, or biking involved here, of course. The three events in the consumer sector triathlon are three proven avenues for growth, each of which demands sustained focus and commitment:
- Companies must expand the core of the business.
- They need to expand into adjacencies, through innovation or acquisition, in either new categories or new geographies.
- They must ignite breakout businesses.
In the past, a company might have gotten away with pursuing just one of these pathways, but that’s no longer sufficient. Neglect any of these important routes to growth and a company risks falling behind the competition. Excel at all three, and the company becomes a consumer sector triathlete—on its way to faster, more lasting, more profitable growth.
Who is growing? How fast? And how profitably?
Across the consumer sector, average growth from 2009 to 2019 was 3 %. As Exhibit 1 shows, smaller companies (with USD 300 million to
USD 3 billion in annual revenue) grew fastest, at a rate of 5.2. It was far more difficult for large companies to grow: companies with more than USD10 billion in annual revenue grew at only 2.4 %.
Achieving rapid growth helps to beat the odds, but growth alone won’t satisfy demanding investors. Companies are expected to grow quickly while also expanding margins.
Within the consumer sector, about 30 % of companies were able to drive extraordinary growth of greater than 6 % CAGR between 2009 and 2019. But if one looks more closely, only about 40 % of those fast-growing companies—or just 12 % of all public companies in the consumer sector with more than USD 300 million in annual revenue—grew faster than 6 % per year while also expanding EBIT margins. Let’s call that elite 12 % the “extraordinary accretive growers.” Their combination of rapid growth and expanding margins rewarded investors with median total shareholder returns (TSR) of about 20 % a year. That’s 2.5 times greater TSR than the median for the rest of the sector.
What about companies that grew quickly but at the expense of margins? Companies that were able to achieve annual growth of more than 6 % but paired that growth with flat or declining margins weren’t nearly as lucrative for investors as their elite peers. These “non-accretive” growers delivered only a little more than half the TSR of the extraordinary accretive growers (Exhibit 2).
Profitable growth outperformance is the trophy here, but it’s no easy feat. Only 11 % of small companies, 15 % of medium companies, and 10 % of large companies in the consumer sector managed to achieve extraordinary accretive growth over the decade (Exhibit 3). Medium-size companies might have benefited from some measure of structural advantage by virtue of having sufficient scale and agility to compete but also ample room to grow.
We’ve established that extraordinary accretive growth is challenging but worth it. How can consumer companies achieve it?
When we study what distinguishes the extraordinary accretive growers from their peers, a pattern emerges. We frequently see that they don’t do just one thing well, but instead execute along three distinct growth pathways. Much like triathletes who are naturally gifted runners—but don’t neglect their training as swimmers and bicyclists—companies with aspirations for accretive growth might be naturally inclined to develop one particular growth pathway but are better off pursuing all three at once.
The three events in the consumer sector triathlon are growing via expanding the company’s core, growing via adjacencies—including new categories and new geographies—and growing via breakout businesses.
Let’s explore each in more detail.
Expanding the core: Don’t neglect the fundamentals
Expanding the core, which constituted 82 % of consumer sector growth between 2009 and 2019, is often a company’s most critical driver of growth. However, it is also often underappreciated. Throughout the past decade of working with many consumer companies, large and small, we’ve observed that most companies—even those that hold a leading share in a category—tend to underestimate the potential for growth remaining in their cores. Meanwhile, few companies are able to achieve their growth goals without growing their core categories and geographies. Strengthening the core means a company is 62 % more likely to achieve above-market, accretive growth.
Many companies, especially large ones, tend to think of their cores as static and frozen. That’s a growth-killing error. The core must be dynamically maintained, and a company must be willing to actively manage and routinely reevaluate the components of its core.
How can a company fully exploit its core’s growth potential? It might expand the universe of consumers it serves or increase the number of occasions when it serves them. It might mold itself into a truly world-class marketer or innovator. It might master the various aspects of revenue growth management: pricing, promotions, assortment, and trade investment. Growth through price alone might work for a year, but extraordinary accretive growth over a decade requires a healthy mix of transaction growth, revenue per unit growth, and overall volume growth.
Among large consumer companies, Coca-Cola has been a recent standout. The Coca-Cola system has a clearly defined core in soft drinks with strong brands. The company has been able to grow this core further by, in part, leaning on advanced analytics. By collecting abundant data, tracking it weekly, and mining it for insights, Coca-Cola can optimize revenue growth management. It can determine which products and promotions to offer—or even the best spot to place a cooler in a store—with each tactic carefully tailored to different segments of outlets and shoppers. The company’s analytical expertise helps it predict the effects that these choices will have on sales volume and ROI. From 2019 to 2021, employing this approach, Coca-Cola grew US retail sales from its core soft drinks by 22 %.
Another exemplar of core growth is the Swiss chocolatier Lindt. The company shifted focus to its two premium core brands (Lindor and Excellence) and to seasonal occasions such as Christmas and Easter. It bolstered its premium image with above-the-line marketing featuring regional “Master Chocolatiers.” The acquisition of the premium North American chocolate brand Ghirardelli rounded out Lindt’s core offerings. As a result of moves such as these, from 2009 to 2019, Lindt’s EBITDA margin grew to 20.5 %, from 15 %. At the same time, revenue grew by more than 6 % per year, primarily due to the pricing power that came from focusing on premium offerings.
Adjacencies: Growth might be just a step away
Many companies can grow by expanding into the next concentric circle of opportunity. That might mean related categories, new geographic markets, or both.
New categories
Done well, entering a new category can leverage a company’s assets and capabilities to compete in faster-growing and more profitable realms. Done poorly, entering new categories can lead to significant value destruction—as well as organizational distraction, loss of board confidence in future deals, and decreased investor faith in the company’s ability to grow beyond its core. While the risks are real, the potential upside is meaningful: companies that move into new categories successfully are 23 % more likely to achieve above-market, accretive growth.
t’s critical to enter only adjacent categories that are sufficiently related to the current core. Companies must carefully gauge how relevant their capabilities will be compared with incumbents in the adjacent category. Many companies we’ve worked with have, at various times, overestimated the magnitude of their relevant advantages. (Debiasing techniques, such as “premortems,” can be used to mitigate this risk. 2 )
As one leader in consumer packaged goods told us, “The surest way to fail in a new category is to pull it into the mother ship. The second surest way is to leave it totally alone.” In devising plans for how the new category entrant will operate, companies must find a happy medium between leveraging core assets and offering autonomy. This could mean integrating functions such as finance and procurement for greater efficiency while ensuring that unique approaches to brand marketing and innovation don’t lose their distinctive spark. Other pitfalls include entering adjacencies with unrealistic expectations or without lining up the top-performing talent and sufficient investment levels required to accelerate growth.
When Italy-based Ferrero found its core offerings of chocolate and sugar confections facing fiercer competition, it sought new growth in the adjacent biscuit category through both innovation and acquisition. Ferrero developed variants of its own core products (for example, Nutella hazelnut spread begat Nutella Biscuits) and acquired iconic but underperforming biscuit brands (such as Keebler, acquired from Kellogg’s). Among smaller companies, Kodiak Cakes has identified a slew of new products as the next step beyond its core. Between 2019 and 2021, Kodiak doubled its retail sales, but only 26 % of that growth came from its core dry mixes. The additional growth resulted from, among other efforts, more than sextupling its sales in new grocery categories such as muffin cups and granola bars.
For companies hoping to build adjacencies quickly, inorganic expansion is likely the best strategy for achieving rapid scale. McKinsey research suggests that programmatic mergers and acquisitions—an approach that employs a steady series of deals that adhere to a carefully honed theme instead of relying on intermittent “big bang” deals—can be particularly effective. Programmatic M&A yielded more excess returns from 2010 to 2019 than did “selective” and “large deal” approaches, both of which yielded negative returns on average.
New geographies
Geographic expansion has been a critical growth driver, particularly for large companies, over the past two decades. The recent upheaval caused by lockdowns in China, as well as by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has led companies to reexamine their ambitions for international growth. However, companies that are nonetheless able to move into new geographies successfully are 22 % more likely to achieve above-market, accretive growth.
Large companies often already compete in many markets, but they can seed new growth by mining local “brand jewels” from their core markets and transplanting them in new geographies. For medium-size companies, many of which might be at the beginning of their international growth journeys, internationalization starts by focusing on a limited number of promising markets. Companies sometimes feel compelled to enter many markets at once, but evidence suggests that new-market entry is generally harder and slower than anticipated. Likewise, the logic of “if we can win just 1 % of a big market, we’ll have a big business” is tantalizing but dangerous. Successful companies concentrate on their initial geographic growth forays, as they recognize that those successes will build confidence for subsequent expansions.
Breakout businesses: Disruptive bets can deliver big growth
Technological innovation and digitization are creating opportunities for disruption. Novel business models can provide access to new value pools while disintermediating the competition (or, in some cases, staving off disintermediation themselves). Promising business model disruptions can evolve even further—into outright ecosystems that generate network effects and stickier consumer and customer relationships. Launching disruptive businesses is the least established and most dynamic of the three growth pathways, but we can already discern a few lessons.
Disruption through platform building—employing either a direct-to-consumer or business-to-business model—is a popular gambit and can be a winning play. But across consumer subsectors, only a small number of platforms tend to achieve meaningful scale. There are often clear number-one and number-two players—with a long tail of competitors battling over the remaining 20 to 30 % of the market.
Very few consumer companies have the scale and resources to build a robust platform on their own. When companies do choose to be the architect or builder of a platform, they must articulate a clear ambition and coalesce behind it. It’s vital for a company to decide whether and when it is willing to disrupt its own business by, for example, hosting competitive brands on its platform. Companies that choose to simply participate on a platform instead of building it are more likely to thrive if they can act as “kingmakers”—joining the platform early and securing favourable terms such as autonomous pricing power, access to platform data, or exclusivity within a category.
There is no single guaranteed method of disruption, but a variety of success stories can offer inspiration. McDonald’s, a digital laggard until relatively recently, is now rapidly transforming itself into a digital behemoth—at first by partnering with existing food delivery apps and then by launching its own platform and using delivery partners for fulfillment. The company’s ballooning digital presence enabled a digital loyalty program that garnered 26 million members within nine months of its launch. By the second quarter of 2022, roughly five years after its initial forays, McDonald’s saw more than 30 % of sales come via digital channels.
By reframing itself as a pet care company instead of a pet food company, Mars Petcare looked beyond its roots in traditional pet food to create a reenforcing digital and physical ecosystem featuring veterinary clinics, diagnostic health tools, smart collars that track pet activity, and direct-to-consumer subscription pet nutrition services. As a result, the company doubled its business in ten years, with increasing multiples. It is now the largest operator of veterinary clinics in the United States.
If there is one rule about disruption, it’s that investors won’t be satisfied with mere talk. They wait for results. It’s unwise to assume that simply announcing an intent to disrupt will lead to higher valuation multiples.
Sustaining extraordinary accretive growth in the consumer sector is challenging and only becomes more difficult as a company expands. Ongoing impediments such as geopolitical instability and supply chain tangles don’t help. Looming crises such as recession and hyperinflation wait in the wings, ready to thwart growth ambitions.
Investor expectations for growth in the consumer sector exceed its historical performance. But relentlessly pursuing three pathways in parallel—the tried-and-true core, promising adjacencies, and game-changing disruptions—will bring a consumer company closer to winning the gold medal in growth.
Here beginns the bestseller story:
Jennette McCurdy’s Memoir Is the Hit No One Was Ready For
The former Nickelodeon star’s book, ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died,’ has climbed to the top of the best-seller lists. While its publisher awaits a second printing, a secondary market has emerged. So have counterfeits.
By guest author Kate Dwyer from the Wall Street Magazine.
“I’m Glad My Mom Died,” a new memoir by former Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy, had all the makings of a publishing hit: a provocative title, an eye-catching cover, organic online buzz and glossy profiles that centered on the author’s troubled childhood and Hollywood secrets. But no one was fully prepared for the response the book received.
Within a day of its Aug. 9 release, “I’m Glad My Mom Died” sold out at major retailers including Amazon, Target, Walmart and Barnes & Noble, as well as most independent bookstores. At the store Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, which hosted a 300-person event with Ms. McCurdy on the book’s publication day, 400 copies sold out in under 24 hours. Emma Straub, the store’s owner, said she hadn’t seen that happen since the September 2021 release of Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You.”
“We felt confident the book would be a bestseller based on the enthusiastic response of early readers and reviewers, strong pre-order numbers and significant media interest, and the book was well positioned to succeed in the marketplace,” a Simon & Schuster spokesperson wrote in an email. “But demand on the order of what we are currently experiencing with ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died’ is a rare and unpredictable phenomenon.”
The book’s success can be chalked up, in part, to the author’s enduring fan base. Though no longer acting, Ms. McCurdy, 30, is known for her days on the Nickelodeon series “iCarly” and the spinoff “Sam & Cat,” in which she starred opposite Ariana Grande. In the memoir, she describes a life and career tightly controlled by her mother, Debra McCurdy, who died in 2013 after a long battle with cancer.
Per Simon & Schuster, sales from the first week totaled 200,000 across all formats, including audiobooks and orders awaiting fulfillment. “I’m Glad My Mom Died” topped the New York Times best-seller list, released Wednesday night, in both the hardcover nonfiction and combined print and e-book nonfiction categories. Her book is currently No. 3 on Amazon’s best-seller list. (Ms. McCurdy, who previously contributed essays to The Wall Street Journal, was not available for comment.)
Kristina Rivero, a bookseller on the Books Are Magic events team, said she flagged the title as one to watch, even though Simon & Schuster had not done much to promote it to the store. “They didn’t actually send us the book by default,” Ms. Rivero said. “I had reached out multiple times requesting a copy of it in advance.” (A Simon & Schuster spokesperson said “galleys were proactively shared with booksellers,” and some influencers received gift boxes including the book and a yellow tote bag with the phrase “I’m Glad” on it.)
Many publishers have been forced to adjust their print allotments to contend with supply-chain issues and an ongoing paper shortage. Per Simon & Schuster, the initial print run of Ms. McCurdy’s book was 70,000, and demand for the title has outpaced production enough that the publisher “went back to press even before the book came out.” Soon, there will be over 330,000 copies in print. The second printing will be “coming off-press at the end of the week,” according to the publisher, and distributed across several retail channels.
Excitement around the book has spawned a secondary market of sorts. On eBay, sellers are listing first-edition hardcovers and signed copies, some for close to USD 200 a piece.
When Lexi Carey, 24, found a listing for the book on Amazon for just USD 12, she ordered it immediately. “I was like, ‘Maybe it’s just really cheap,’” she said. (The list price for “I’m Glad My Mom Died” is USD 27.99.)
The listing, on closer inspection, contained several negative reviews from disgruntled customers who said they had not received a copy of the hardcover book but rather a paperback that appeared nearly identical to “I’m Glad My Mom Died.” Except on its cover was the word “NOTEBOOK” in black block lettering, and inside the pages were blank and lined. It wasn’t long before Ms. Carey received her own notebook in the mail.
Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Authors Guild, a professional organization that helps authors protect their copyrights, said in a written statement that the guild has seen “every possible scam and infringement of books on the Amazon platform” in recent years, including “outright counterfeits, cutting and pasting from other books to create a ‘new’ one and republishing other people’s books with a new cover.” The Authors Guild has been working with Amazon to curb these practices since 2018.
Julia Lee, an Amazon spokeswoman, confirmed that the “I’m Glad My Mom Died” notebook is no longer for sale and wrote in an email that the e-commerce platform has “taken appropriate action on the publisher account.” Customers who purchased the notebook may receive a refund, she noted, adding that, “All publishers are required to follow our content guidelines and the terms and conditions of our service.”
Ms. McCurdy’s breakout success echoes recent testimony in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit between the Department of Justice and Penguin Random House, which last year announced a USD 2.18 billion bid to acquire Simon & Schuster. The defense has stated that the Justice Department’s argument—that the merger will limit competition—belies the realities of the book publishing business, where best-sellers are not always predictable.
The Simon & Schuster spokesperson wrote that the publisher has been “delighted and amazed by the incredible response to ‘I’m Glad My Mom Died.’” Ms. Straub of Books Are Magic described it as an anomaly in its genre.
“There are a lot of books written and published by celebrities. Most of those books are garbage. Most of those books are fluffy, glossy puddles of nothing,” she said. “When one comes along that is honest and truly revealing and written by that person—and that person has a devoted audience who knows to trust them—it’s a totally different experience.”
Here is the start of the last feature, giving all the details on a single man’s building ideas:
It Was a Mystery in the Desert for 50 Years
In a remote Nevada valley, the artist Michael Heizer’s astonishing megasculpture is finally revealed.
By Michael Kimmelman from the New York Times.
Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Sia Michel, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick. Additional video by Quincy Ledbetter.
Design by Gabriel Gianordoli.
Nearly everything about Michael Heizer’s land art megasculpture called “City” can seem hard to fathom. That it’s a mile and a half long and nearly half a mile wide, smack in the middle of a remote stretch of the high Nevada desert, where what passes for a neighbor is Area 51. That the nearest blacktop is an hour’s drive away, on a dusty, bumpy, former livestock trail, across a couple of mountain ranges. That it cost USD 40 million to build.
Even that it’s called “City.” It’s a city in name only. Exquisitely groomed dirt mounds, roads, buttes and depressions like dry lake beds spread out in no immediately obvious order and in different directions. At both ends of the site, monumental structures riff on ancient ruins.
Now, half a century after Heizer stuck his first shovel in the ground, “City” is finally opening to visitors, which may be the most unbelievable thing of all. It had become the art-world version of ancient Atlantis, a chimera.
Art-world Atlantis will shortly be accepting reservations. Even so, its creator, the toast of downtown New York during the 1970s who turned into art’s Fitzcarraldo, still doesn’t consider “City” finished.
“I’m a fool, alone, helplessly watching as they wait for me to die so they can turn my ranch into a gift shop and motel,” Heizer told me here this spring. At 77, in rapidly failing health, he is as pessimistic as ever. “This is a masterpiece, or close to it,” he said, “and I’m the only one who cares whether the thing is actually done.”
None of that is true.
Except the masterpiece part.
“City” is hard to spot in a mountain-rimmed sprawl of wash and scrub called Garden Valley. This is Lincoln County, twice the size of Connecticut, whose few residents include ranchers and pensioners, Mormon families commuting to jobs at Nellis Air Force Base, and service-station employees along the Great Basin Highway, a hairy two-lane route. The county’s population is 5,177. That’s not quite enough people to fill the smallest Triple-A ballpark in America.
And aside from Heizer, none of those 5,177 people live in Garden Valley, roughly a three-hour drive north of Las Vegas. The trip serves as a useful decompression chamber between Sodom and Gomorrah and Eden — an overture to “City,” through an increasingly barren, eye-popping landscape. The sculpture burrows into Garden Valley’s floor, registering from a distance only as a vague, shadowy bump beyond the junipers and cottonwoods surrounding Heizer’s Sleep Late Ranch, whose main house and various dusty sheds, bunkhouses and studios are surrounded by green fields of alfalfa.
“City” defies easy description once you’re inside it.
One of its two big monuments, “Complex One,” the very first segment of “City” that Heizer built, can bring to mind an immense mastaba or altar. Projecting beams align when viewed from a certain angle to frame the complex’s facade, like one of those tricks of lenticular art.
The other monument, called “45°, 90°, 180°,” consists of a concrete plaza supporting several rows of increasingly enormous triangles and rectangles. In this case, the twist is that they’re like puzzle pieces. If combined, they would form a single immense wedge.
The other monument, called “45°, 90°, 180°,” consists of a concrete plaza supporting several rows of increasingly enormous triangles and rectangles. In this case, the twist is that they’re like puzzle pieces. If combined, they would form a single immense wedge.
Between “Complex One” and “45°, 90°, 180°,” sprawl the hills and paths and holes and brush. Aesthetically, “City” can strike a visitor at first blush as a mash-up of Chichen Itza and an unfinished highway interchange or an empty motocross track.
Every inch is smoothed and graded. The shapes and shadows take time to grasp. The whole gestalt thwarts a culture of Instagram selfies, something Heizer is especially proud of. The experience is a little like finding yourself in a John Cassavetes movie: It’s scriptless, improvisatory.
Depending on how the sculpted ground shifts and the light falls, you may suddenly spot some form or detail half a mile away, which may or may not look like a destination. There is no single designated lookout point, no encapsulating view, no map, no start, no finish.
Only from the air does the layout finally resolve into an elegant glyph. But “City” is not meant to be seen from above or all at once or in photographs or drone footage.
You’re meant to suffer its distances, its depressions and swells, and hear the crunch of gravel — to give yourself over to the peace and quiet, which itself takes on a sculptural presence. You’re meant to adapt to the subtle shifts in a desaturated palette of beiges, grays and dusky reds, and to notice the virtuosity of slender concrete curbs drawing lines in space that snake the length of several football fields. “City” substitutes the usual notion of relative scale in art for sheer size. “Masterpiece” is a loaded, dated term, but at the very least it implies something memorably singular, and that’s “City.”
This is “democratic art, art for the ages,” is how Heizer describes it. “I am not here to tell people what it all means. You can figure it out for yourself.”
“This land is in my blood,” Heizer repeats like a mantra. He means Nevada and the larger Great Basin region. I have come to memorize the soliloquy, having visited Heizer and “City” maybe half a dozen times, writing about the project over the years.
Heizer was born in Berkeley, Calif. He was a hopeless student, the exception in a family of distinguished engineers and academics. Olaf Jenkins, his maternal grandfather, was chief of California’s Division of Mines. Ott F. Heizer, his other grandfather, moved to Nevada during the 1880s and ended up operating the state’s largest tungsten mine.
Heizer’s father, Robert F. Heizer, grew up in Lovelock, Nev., and became an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, working on excavations in Egypt, Bolivia and at La Venta in Mexico. The Great Basin became one of his specialties, along with the study of the transport of megalithic stones. After Heizer built “Complex One,” his father wrote him an approving letter, describing a Mayan site in Guatemala that was a mile and a half long, anchored by big monuments at either end.
It’s all too neat, of course. The mining, the petrology, the archaeology — the artistically gifted, straight-F student, trying to live up to his brilliant, academic, domineering father. From Heizer’s perspective, the family history proves he’s not a carpetbagger like some other artists who headed west to make earthworks, Robert Smithson prominent among them.
During the late 1960s, Smithson anointed himself the fledgling land art movement’s philosopher-king, promoting Heizer, who first took him out west. In Utah, Smithson jury-rigged a rock-and-salt-crystal sculpture in the shallows of the Great Salt Lake called “Spiral Jetty.”
Heizer was not as deft at art-world politics. He was competitive, volcanic, megalomaniacal.
He had caused a sensation by drawing lines in the desert with motorcycle tracks, digging geometrically shaped holes in far-flung dry lake beds and, in 1969, blasting 240,000 tons of rock from the facing slopes of an obscure mesa in Nevada. That work, “Double Negative,” was a game-changer, making monumental art out of negative space. It would go on to influence generations of artists and architects.
His next big work, Heizer told colleagues at Max’s Kansas City, would be even more audacious. He had accompanied his father on an expedition to Luxor, Egypt, and came back with visions of Zoser, the stepped pyramid. With a loan from the art dealer Virginia Dwan, he acquired cheap land in Garden Valley, moved into a trailer and started on “Complex One.” It was 1972. Nixon was president, and Heizer was 27.
Then he gradually faded from the social scene. There would be exhibitions from time to time, at MOCA in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art, for example, but “City” became his life. He hired help. During winters, the road to the property would sometimes become impassable, and Heizer would be stuck in the trailer for weeks. A farmer lent him a paddle-wheel scraper, which kept breaking down. Friends occasionally came to his man-camp, mostly to keep him company. They drifted away. The art world moved on.
Decades passed.
When I first started visiting Heizer in the 1990s, “City” was not even half built. Heizer had spent years toiling on the first three, horseshoe-shaped complexes at one end of the site, which combined had grown to the size of Yankee Stadium. Over the years, Heizer had accepted commissions that helped him pay for repairs to his old, shoddy equipment and hire more workers to help shore up what had already been built, which eroded almost as quickly as it had been repaired. This was a largely D.I.Y. project by a self-taught artist at the scale of new town planning. It was a Sisyphean chore.
Briefly, during the ’80s, Charles Wright, director of the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, started to rustle up funds for “City.” But Dia’s fortunes soon went south. Then Heizer suffered a dire nerve ailment that knocked him out of commission for a while.
When I first started visiting Heizer in the 1990s, “City” was not even half built. Heizer had spent years toiling on the first three, horseshoe-shaped complexes at one end of the site, which combined had grown to the size of Yankee Stadium. Over the years, Heizer had accepted commissions that helped him pay for repairs to his old, shoddy equipment and hire more workers to help shore up what had already been built, which eroded almost as quickly as it had been repaired. This was a largely D.I.Y. project by a self-taught artist at the scale of new town planning. It was a Sisyphean chore.
Briefly, during the ’80s, Charles Wright, director of the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, started to rustle up funds for “City.” But Dia’s fortunes soon went south. Then Heizer suffered a dire nerve ailment that knocked him out of commission for a while.
By the mid-’90s, he was talking about demolishing “City.” At that point a new director succeeded Wright at Dia. Michael Govan was an admirer of Heizer. He loved big building projects and the aesthetic of a generation of artists that pushed art outdoors and into uncharted territory. Govan enlisted the cultural philanthropist J. Patrick Lannan Jr. as a “City” patron. Heizer was able to hire new teams of workers, buy fresh equipment and reboot the project.
Back then, he would insist that “City” had nothing to do with its surroundings, that it was in Garden Valley only because land there was plentiful and cheap. But that wasn’t true either. During the 1950s and ’60s, fallout from nuclear detonations at the nearby Nevada Test Site drifted across Lincoln County. On one of my early trips, Heizer introduced me to a rancher named Gracian Uhalde, his nearest neighbor, in the next valley, who became a contractor for “City.” Uhalde recalled seeing pink clouds and what looked like “snow falling in the mountains” after a hydrogen test in 1962.
“Here you’ve got ranching — small-time, old-style ranching, with the valley as a natural, reusable resource — coexisting in peace with Mike’s project, a cultural monument,” Uhalde told me.
Not coincidentally, parts of “City” resemble a bunker, a bomb shelter or a ready-made ruin. The project was conceived in a fit of apocalyptic cynicism about the fallout in the valley, the Vietnam War, the future.
But “City” at the same time was also, clearly, a love letter to this part of the world.
It was born near the dawn of the environmental movement. Every human habitation leaves some trace in nature. Heizer has tried to preserve what he has disturbed. He championed the use of solar power in the area during the 1990s. He built his ranch to be self-sustaining. Constructed not from bronze or marble, trucked in from far away and imposed on the valley, “City” uses mostly what’s at hand — the dirt and rocks on site. Heizer has incorporated billions of the streambed cobblestones that glaciers swept across the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era. In the valley, they’re unnoticed underfoot. In “City,” you are meant to stop and admire their beauty and differences.
It’s easy to pigeonhole Heizer as a chest-thumping Marlboro Man, claiming to give the world the timeless monument he believes it needed. But from another perspective he has created a work that pays homage to nature. Back in the ’70s, when the idea for “City” germinated, there was talk in art circles about gendered forms. Heizer belongs to a generation of abstract artists responding to an earlier generation of New York School figures like Jackson Pollock and David Smith, interpreting new geometries. The morphology at “City” purposely blends soft and hard, positive and negative, crystalline and amorphous, erect and recumbent shapes.
And the project led in 2015 to the designation of the Basin and Range National Monument. Two decades ago, Washington was contemplating the construction of a national rail system to transport nuclear waste past Heizer’s ranch on its way to nearby Yucca Mountain. Heizer and Govan persuaded Harry Reid, then a Nevada senator, and a bipartisan mix of officials to nix the plan and instead preserve 704,000 acres, including all of Garden Valley, by declaring the territory a national monument.
The designation infuriated many nearby ranchers, who don’t like the government telling them what they can and can’t do, and the “national monument” sign that went up at the start of the dirt road was swiftly riddled with bullet holes. But it was Heizer who was given marching orders.
“City,” because it was now part of the national monument, would have to admit public visitors.
It’s easy to pigeonhole Heizer as a chest-thumping Marlboro Man, claiming to give the world the timeless monument he believes it needed. But from another perspective he has created a work that pays homage to nature. Back in the ’70s, when the idea for “City” germinated, there was talk in art circles about gendered forms. Heizer belongs to a generation of abstract artists responding to an earlier generation of New York School figures like Jackson Pollock and David Smith, interpreting new geometries. The morphology at “City” purposely blends soft and hard, positive and negative, crystalline and amorphous, erect and recumbent shapes.
And the project led in 2015 to the designation of the Basin and Range National Monument. Two decades ago, Washington was contemplating the construction of a national rail system to transport nuclear waste past Heizer’s ranch on its way to nearby Yucca Mountain. Heizer and Govan persuaded Harry Reid, then a Nevada senator, and a bipartisan mix of officials to nix the plan and instead preserve 704,000 acres, including all of Garden Valley, by declaring the territory a national monument.
The designation infuriated many nearby ranchers, who don’t like the government telling them what they can and can’t do, and the “national monument” sign that went up at the start of the dirt road was swiftly riddled with bullet holes. But it was Heizer who was given marching orders.
“City,” because it was now part of the national monument, would have to admit public visitors.
With its soft opening planned for early September, Heizer started calling me to make sure I credited all the people who had helped him over the years. They included Wright, Dwan and Lannan; patrons like Ann Tenenbaum and Elaine Wynn; Uhalde; Shane McVey, the ranch manager; Arnaldo Zermeno, Heizer’s factotum; and Mary Shanahan, Heizer’s former wife, who with Heather Harmon will co-direct the Triple Aught Foundation that oversees the project. Also Govan, who continued to champion the project after leaving Dia in 2006 to run the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is now a vice president of the foundation. And Kara Vander Weg, a senior director at Gagosian Gallery, who started working closely with Heizer nearly a decade ago and is now his partner.
He habitually berates and bad-mouths most of them and others, so it’s striking how fiercely Heizer is loved by those closest to him. Years ago I met Bill Harmon, who traveled over 400 miles a week to pour concrete for some of the sculpture’s curbs. Harmon told me how Heizer would angrily rip up a 78-by-240-foot slab because it was off by a sixteenth of an inch.
I asked Harmon why he put up with it. His answer seemed like a definition of art.
“Mike is demanding,” he told me, “but I’ve worked in concrete all my life, and I’ve never had the time or money to do something to the best of my ability. Everything is hurry up. It’s about making money. That’s the American way.” On the other hand, Harmon said, Heizer asked him “to produce something that has more to do with accuracy than I’ve ever been allowed even to imagine. This here is my chance to do the best I can.”
About that USD 40 million.
Yes, it’s an obscenely big number, Heizer’s best estimate after 50 years. There is no easy comparison in this case. “City” is not a building complex or a park or an infrastructure project or a Richard Serra sculpture, although it has elements of all those things. In the art world, USD 40 million is a relative figure. A Francis Bacon triptych from 1969 sold for nearly four times that amount in 2013. The money for “City” came from gifts, half from Lannan, as well as from Heizer’s own wallet and sweat equity. Triple Aught just announced some USD 30 million in new donations to establish an endowment. The project, meanwhile, has provided dozens of much-needed construction jobs in Lincoln County.
And now it will provide more jobs as it is opening to the public. Sort of.
Govan and Vander Weg tell me that visitors can soon apply for tickets on the Triple Aught website. Free to residents of Lincoln, Nye and White Pine Counties, admission for others will cost up to
USD 150, money that will go toward an estimated annual operating budget of some USD 1.3 million. Because Heizer fears crowds diluting the experience, the current plan is only six tickets a day — about the number of seats on a SpaceX flight — and only on some days during certain times of year, suggesting long wait times.
Visitors will also need to get themselves to Alamo, Nev., a nearish town. They’ll then be picked up, allowed to roam “City” for a few hours and, because there are no lights on the road and no cellphone service, they will be driven back before dark, meaning they won’t get to see the sun rise and set, prime hours. Never mind no gift shop. There aren’t even benches.
I find the remoteness of “City” terrifying, liberating and addictive. There are moments I’ve resented trudging from one end of the site to the other, through the dirt and the heat or cold, waiting for an epiphany. But then I have watched the shadows slowly creep across the mounds, noticed a bird glide overhead and felt my heart leap.
I have come to think of “City” like Mount Rushmore and Hoover Dam. It is bravado, awesome and nuts, a testament to a certain crusty kind of American can-do-ism. With its high-low allusions to Mayan and Incan sites and interstate highways, Heizer seems to argue for a 4,000-year chain of cultural invention and engineering.
It isn’t necessary for a visitor to bring anything to “City” except an open mind. Its opening arrives as a young generation increasingly seems to value experiences over money and possessions. So it’s late, but on time.
I suspect it will make a beautiful ruin someday.
Newsletter of last week
For Sale: The ‘Sexiest’ Hourly Rate Hotel in New York’s Manhattan – Product development in the era of digital transformation and sustainability – A Design Gallery Ready for Its Close-Up – A Celebration of Style With Substance – How Americans are feeling about economic opportunities and the future – Off Brand: The Ultimate Yuppie Status Symbol, a Diamond Tennis Bracelet, Goes Mass – An appraisal: Why Steve Jobs Chose This Designer’s Turtlenecks
https://textile-future.com/archives/94151
Highlights of News of last week (starting August 16 -22, 2022) for your convenience just click on the subject
Follow-up of important News during non-publishing time (Part 5)
https://textile-future.com/archives/93985
Follow-up of important News during non-publishing time (Part 6) https://textile-future.com/archives/94114
Art
‘Leonardo’ Review: Deciphering Da Vinci https://textile-future.com/archives/94263
Beauty
The future of beauty and wellness: Inclusive, personalized, and sustainable https://textile-future.com/archives/94691
Companies
Buybacks of shares by H&M during week 32, 2022 https://textile-future.com/archives/94257
Suominen to implement surcharges in North America https://textile-future.com/archives/94351
trinamiX launches spectroscopy solution for smartphones and highly secure face authentication in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies https://textile-future.com/archives/94515
How Gucci is Using AI and Data: Part 1 https://textile-future.com/archives/94540
Cotton
USDA Cotton: World Markets and Trade – latest update https://textile-future.com/archives/94429
Crypto
Honesto – the Swiss Crypto App – a portrait and activities in August 2022
https://textile-future.com/archives/94744
Cyber Security
U.S. Government Warns Mobile Attacks Up 100 %. The Top 8 Types of DNS Records https://textile-future.com/archives/94312
U.S. Government Warns of Increased Texting Scams as Mobile Attacks Are Up 100 % https://textile-future.com/archives/94337
Scam robotext messages have exploded, but you can protect yourself by not clicking links, never texting back and turning on your phone’s unknown-message filter https://textile-future.com/archives/94736
Data
Excess EU mortality down to +6 % in June 2022 https://textile-future.com/archives/94383
Q2 2022: EU Business registrations down, bankruptcies up https://textile-future.com/archives/94404
Secondary sector production in Switzerland grew by 4.1% in the 2nd quarter 2022 https://textile-future.com/archives/94507
Luxembourg: largest share of newest cars in 2020 https://textile-future.com/archives/94532
Emissions
EU economy greenhouse gases still below pre-COVID levels https://textile-future.com/archives/94298
Events
Spinexpo https://textile-future.com/archives/94253
Hong Kong
Hong Kong Toy Story: Delivering Playtime Sustainability https://textile-future.com/archives/94325
Investments
BASF Venture Capital and Aqua-Spark invest in Sea6 Energy https://textile-future.com/archives/94416
UBS invests in tech unicorn BigPanda https://textile-future.com/archives/94421
Japan
Japanese Photographer Blows Whistle on Treatment of ‘Comfort Women’ https://textile-future.com/archives/94519
Personalities
Joules hires ex-John Lewis director as CEO https://textile-future.com/archives/94271
Eileen Fisher steps down as CEO https://textile-future.com/archives/94286
Restitution of illicit assets: Switzerland and Uzbekistan sign agreement https://textile-future.com/archives/94306
New Products
Hyosung TNC launches first bio-based spandex for commercial use https://textile-future.com/archives/94545
Alchemie’s Novara TM system significantly reduces costs https://textile-future.com/archives/94551
Publications
Boards, digital transformations, and more from McKinsey Global Surveys https://textile-future.com/archives/94693
Retailing
M&S Oxford Street: Author Bill Bryson and leading architects join fight against demolition https://textile-future.com/archives/94275
Sewing
Sewing thread for extreme weather conditions https://textile-future.com/archives/94411
Switzerland
Swiss Confederation preparing to issue first green Confederation bond https://textile-future.com/archives/94357
Ukraine
War in Ukraine: Twelve disruptions changing the world https://textile-future.com/archives/94564
United Kingdom
U.K. Inflation Tops 10 %, Underlining Gloomy Outlook for Europe https://textile-future.com/archives/94373
USA
Hot 25 Retailers: Apparel sales sparked growth for retailers last year https://textile-future.com/archives/94291
Webinars
Webinar on Hacking the Hacker: Assessing and Addressing Your Organisation’s Cyber Defence Weaknesses (August 18, 2022) https://textile-future.com/archives/94319
Webinar on ADA Debates: Biometrics (September 27, 2022) https://textile-future.com/archives/94342
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