Is this the most unexpected collab ever? 🧐
Audemars Piguet has never licensed the Royal Oak in 54 years. This Saturday, a Swatch version drops. The why is even crazier than the what.
Full story on Wednesday's episode of TBOY 🎧
Did you know that appliance sales are one of the most reliable yardsticks for consumer health?
While the headline economy's telling a growth story, the household economy is moving the other way. @whirlpoolcorp is one of the first companies whose numbers are flagging the gap.
What's your appliance index reading these days, Yetis?
Sustainability...doesn't sell? 😟
A Stifel study asked apparel buyers what actually drives a purchase. Sustainability landed fifth, behind value, price, durability, and style.
It's an inconvenient truth — and it's why brands like @allbirds are falling back to earth.
The unofficial sneaker of Silicon Valley printed every shoe's carbon footprint on the heel, sourced wool from New Zealand, and IPO'd at a $4 billion valuation in 2021. The stock has since fallen 99%.
They're now renaming to "NewBird AI," pivoting to GPU compute, and asking shareholders to strike "environmental conservation" from its corporate charter.
#TheTakeaway:
Shoppers genuinely care about sustainability. They just care about value, durability, and style more.
Build the brand on what closes the sale; sustainability earns its place from there.
You can have your (AI) cake and eat it too 🍰
@nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's framework for the AI boom is a 5-layer cake. Each layer has its own players, its own economics, and its own role in the boom.
Alphabet's on its way to surpass Nvidia as the world's most valuable company.
They did it by building into every layer of the AI stack:
➡ Search, Gmail, and Docs at the apps layer
➡ Gemini at the LLM layer
➡ Google Cloud at the infrastructure layer
➡ custom TPUs at the chip layer
➡ and nuclear and clean energy PPAs powering it all at the bottom.
Nvidia may have dominated one layer of the AI cake, but Alphabet got its hands on all 5.
The toy at the bottom of the cereal box was the OG growth hack — and Kellogg's is bringing them back. 🥣
For the first time in nearly 2 decades, @kelloggsus is partnering with Disney Pixar to drop Toy Story toys in boxes ahead of the 5th sequel.
Millennial parents know it's nostalgia bait, but hey — the rinse and repeat move works, especially when the kid in the cart is also begging for it.
Get in millennials, your kids are having "blind boxes" for breakfast. 🤠
Move over greenwashing — there's a new trend in town 🤖
AI-washing is when companies slap "AI" on their pitch to sound innovative — even when AI is more of a side dish than the main course.
Take Casa, which just launched an AI butler that scans your home and schedules your handyman. Super cool concept — but the actual AI is probably 10% of the biz. The other 90%? Good old-fashioned property management.
And it's everywhere.
Last quarter, 68% of S&P 500 earnings calls name-dropped AI — the highest rate in a decade. Sometimes the AI is real. Sometimes it's a sprinkle.
Spotted any AI washing in the wild?
Product placements in movies? Groundbreaking.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 just pulled $77M domestic — nearly 3x the original's debut. But sit through it and you'll find the cast list doesn't just include A-list celebrities, but A-list product placements, too: @starbucks , @samsung , @dior , and… wait, @tweezerman ?
Product placement hit $33B globally last year, and from the looks of it, it's just ramping up. The Devil Wears Prada 2 sold out at the box office despite (because of?) the brand pile-up.
Have you seen #TDWP2? What other product placements did you spot?
