Connecting to work in a different way When Steve Jobs was designing Pixar’s new headquarters, he famously designed the layout to make employees walk long distances to the nearest bathroom in an effort to increase collaboration, serendipitous meetings, and chance encounters. An office isn’t just a place where people work in isolation at desks or…
Allulose
Sweeteners and their continuing evolution In 2020, the FDA made a simple yet hugely consequential change to nutrition label requirements, requiring a larger font size for the calorie count. This set off a surge in demand for low-calorie sweeteners, as sweeteners usually constitute a significant portion of total calorie count. Allulose, a synthetic sugar that has…
Empty gift boxes
Gift boxes and their evolution Easy gift wrapping options from Amazon have led to a common holiday season sight: a Christmas tree where every single present is one of half a dozen standardized Amazon gift bags. In an effort to stand out, gift-givers are increasingly buying empty gift boxes instead. Online brands have been offering to…
Crushed egg shells
Eggshells in our diet Consumers are buying crushed eggshells for up to $17/lb, even though they can get them for free at home. It’s one of many products that turns easily-discarded waste into something valuable, and that derives its pricing power not from selling something that can’t be acquired elsewhere but from assuring the buyer that…
Toilet replacement seat
Determining factors for the evolution of the product Americans are getting much heavier, with the average person weighing 25 pounds more today than in the 1960s. That doesn’t just affect people’s clothes and lifestyles; it affects their furnishings and fixtures, too, and is a driving factor in the growing market for replacement toilet seats. Another market…
Scent booster
Scent booster in our daily life Fast fashion has a surprising side effect: as consumers own more clothes and wear each item less frequently, they’re missing out on the clean-laundry smell. Plus, as the line between workwear and workout-wear blurs, it becomes increasingly important to make sure clothes stay fresh for longer. Scent boosters are…
Suction plats
Suction plates: An industry that is growing every day One driver of parents’ spending is the need to buy new products to enable what used to be their normal activities before having kids. Kid-ready Android tablets and Disney+ subscriptions are partly a way for parents to return to a time when they could work at…
hCAPTCHA
The independent hCaptcha service Over a billion people don’t realize that they have a part-time job working for Google, and now there’s a competitor. Through CAPTCHA forms, Google has, over the years, digitized old books for Google Books, digitized address photos on Google Maps that it couldn’t automatically read, and most recently improved its algorithms for…
Luxury Picnic
Picnics that go beyond the traditional A growing number of workers are quitting their full-time jobs to become self-employed luxury picnic planners, and are often making more than they were before. While many event planners budget for event space rental costs, picnics typically happen on public land. And as many are finding, permitting practices haven’t…
Freeze Dryer
Frezze dryers and the history Freeze dryers historically had two main markets: food manufacturers and Mormons. Mormon doctrine encourages keeping a year’s worth of food supplies on hand at all times, and freeze drying reduces the weight and size of food while making perishables last 25-30 years. More broadly, the preparedness industry was accelerated by…