Well Made

Since the early 2000s, Amit Sharma has worked with commerce giants like Walmart and Apple to build supply chain infrastructure. In 2012, he founded Narvar. If you've bought anything online in the past few years, you've no doubt interacted with Narvar. Brands like Sephora, Patagonia, Gap and Sonos, ship millions of products per year using Narvar's comprehensive pre-to-post-purchase software.To fulfill the packaging piece of their pixel-to-package promise, Narvar recently acquired Lumi! In this episode, Stephan and Amit talk about the flux in consumer expectations, what it takes for brands to please customers now, and what's next for Lumi and Narvar.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Climate anxiety is real. Expounding environmental factors and consumer guilt can make it hard to want to click on the latest climate change headline. But, climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis has a track record for making climate change coverage go viral. For example, she wrote a story in The New York Times about evil purple urchins.Whenever climate change swoops in in the form of a flood, fire, or fuzzy caterpillars, Kendra is there to follow the story. Despite her "Gloom is my beat" Twitter username, Kendra has a bullish way of making you care about climate change — in her writing and in her reporting on How to Save a Planet. She does it by rooting her reporting in human stories, offering actionable solutions, and making it funny whenever possible.On this episode, she pulls no punches and cracks lots of laughs. Get ready to get real about shifting climate responsibility from consumers to companies, devaluing oil, and being fueled by obligation over hope.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

For Emmett Shine, being in the right place at the right time was never a matter of luck — it was a matter of hustle. It was a practice in leveling up a bit before you're ready, but not overstretching. After designing, building, and strategizing some of the most iconic modern brands — from Sweetgreen and Whole Foods to Warby Parker and Everlane — his design agency Gin Lane closed to pursue Pattern Brands. They're scaling down and venturing out to build a thoughtful collaborative of home brands that are, of course, stunningly functional and instantly essential.In this episode, Emmett cuts right to the chase of what it took to get in the room with legacy fashion brands, the design and marketing strategy that built iconic ecommerce brands, and what he's looking for in new brands for Pattern.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Being ingrained in the tech startup world has taken Amit Gupta down a different path than most. After selling his first company Photojojo in 2014, he started traveling, writing sci-fi, and more recently, building Sudowrite. Sudowrite is an app for creative writers that uses AI to beat writer's block.You're probably familiar with predictive text models offering suggestions for sentences in your Gmail or text messages. Sudowrite is built off of Open AI's GPT-3 model, and it generates word patterns based on learnings from millions of sentences online.Amit's passion for writing took him down the path to build Sudowrite. While Sudowrite predicts the paths for a most immediate future — what words could come next — Amit's optimistic sci-fi imagines a more long term future. In this episode, he talks about breaking away from the dystopian sci-fi status quo, the upside of robots writing your emails, and how to chisel away at creative blocks by using learned word patterns.Visit the Lumi blog for links, charts, and images.

An online identity is a cyclical existence that feeds on the past. Reggie James calls the pre-Facebook internet "proto-identity." From there, we quickly excelled from profile pages to performative identity, slicing up our full self into concise slivers.Reggie James is the CEO and founder of Eternal, a new kind of identity platform. He's rejecting the comforting nostalgia of what users have "liked," and building a new way forward. In this episode, he challenges what we think about when we think about our online identity, praises the future-thinking theories of game design, and pushes product designers to think beyond the container.

As more product categories are getting "smarter," are they actually getting better? Wires, buttons and ports are disappearing from tech devices, meanwhile microchips and apps are being introduced to products that, for decades, have worked just fine without them. Tyler Mincey is always thinking about the long view of new products. He's brought his decade of product experience from Apple, Fictive Kin, and Pearl Automation to the VC, Bolt, and on this episode, he's disassembling generations of past products and optimistically building toward a future that he's excited to invest in.Visit the Lumi blog for links and show notes.

Accelerated by dire circumstance, ecommerce had record growth over the past year. But behind all those order confirmations and tracking numbers, supply chains and logistics were stretched further than ever.Returning guest Laura Behrens Wu is the CEO and founder of the shipping platform, Shippo and she had a front row seat to watch the rapid growth of brands and shipping providers. In this episode, she's unpacking the past year of shipping from every perspective: consumer, brand, and carrier.Visit the Lumi blog for links, charts, and images.

In his blog post titled My Life Countdown, Kevin Kelly cites a friend's philosophy of approaching your life's projects in 5-year chunks. His newest project, Vanishing Asia has broken this 5-year rule, clocking in at 5 decades.  Every one of his trips to Asia in the past fifty years has led to this 1000-page, three-volume book, capturing 9,000 photos. Kevin is known for being an eloquent futurist, a purveyor of tech and cool tools, and the founding executive editor of Wired. So at first glance, this project may seem like a departure from his work. But in this, his second visit on the Well Made podcast, Kevin shares how this 50-year visual anthology taps into what it means to plan for a payoff that will come after your lifetime.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

For the past few decades, Jeremiah McElwee has not only had a front row seat to some of the most significant growth in the natural products industry, he's been one of the people in the driver's seat. As part of the Thrive Market team since its origin, Jeremiah has led everything from category growth and farm partnerships to product packaging and the shoppable values.To build patient supply chain partnerships and keep an only-the-best product catalog, Jeremiah says they have to take their time, but you wouldn't know it from their 1 million members.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

There are a number of ways that the wellness industry can feel exclusionary. Sometimes, a product's information is overly complex and other times it's pitched as a total lifestyle overhaul. But sustainable growth is often slow and healthy changes are gradual. In the three years since launching Golde, Trinity Mouzon Wofford is perfecting her knack for balance — between accessibility and quality, between scale and mission, and between business partner and life partner.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

After 27 years as the iconic mind behind J.Crew creative, Jenna Lyons is a few months into the launch of a brand new startup – Loveseen. Of course, her decades of creative and marketing success are invaluable to her new pursuit, but she admits that she still has a lot she has to learn.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When you order a Take Back bag from For Days, you fill it with old clothes (in any condition, from any brand), ship it back to them, and they give you store credit. But behind that very simple exchange is a complex supply chain that's built on circularity.When founder Kristy Caylor learned that on average, each person in the US sends 70 pounds of fabric to the landfill, it was an epiphany. If you think about how to shrink your annual pile of unwanted clothes, donation, resale, and repair may come to mind. But Kristy was concerned about the items that don't have a place in any of those reuse streams, which is why For Days is focused on basics. There are no greener pastures for your old t-shirts, socks, and underwear — that is until now.For Days launched with an in-house recovery facility where they receive, source, and grade each item they collect from their takeback program. Depending on the condition and fabric of an item, For Days will rejuvenate it for sale on their site, or ship it to downcycling partners. In this episode, Kristy talks about what it really takes to build a circular fashion brand, how to motivate consumer behavior changes, and where brands need to invest to accelerate real industry progress.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

In the summer of 2018, we talked to Hilary Milnes about how retail isn't dead but it's changing, the struggle of shuttering department stores, and innovative ways that online and offline shopping can intersect.Over two years later, it's a case of same same but different. Hilary is still covering retail and fashion, but as the Americas Editor for Vogue Business. And now, one year into the pandemic, these trend trajectories have spiked, forcing brands to accelerate faster than anyone predicted. The customer-facing shifts came quickly — adapting to an online fashion month, pivoting retail strategies, and riding the ephemeral wave of creator-driven trends. But behind the scenes, supply chain shifts are still happening far too slow, leaving frontline fashion workers shortchanged and overworked, even amidst consumer outcries.On this episode, Hilary Milnes has optimistic and pessimistic takes on which of these shifts will stick in a post-pandemic world. She also illuminates new opportunities or smaller fashion brands and the ever-growing, ever-elusive role of the "creator."Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When consumers see a brand that claims to be "sustainable," reporter Alden Wicker encourages them to investigate. Every product's supply chain has different sustainability opportunities, so sustainability strategies will look different for every brand.First, she says brands have to acknowledge that sustainability is not binary. One product can be more sustainable than another, but sustainability is an ongoing journey rather than a final destination. Next, brands need to define their sustainability strategies and what sustainability looks like to them. This requires unraveling the supply chain of each product to see the impact of your materials, manufacturing, and transit.It's a lot to unpack, and Alden is always eager to investigate. In this episode, Alden answers the question, "What do we talk about when we talk about sustainability?" She advocates for a bigger focus on factories, warns against recycling red herrings, and confronts the challenge of assigning value to sustainability.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When you're researching a sustainability topic, it can feel like a Russian nesting doll of rabbit holes — you often end up with more questions than when you started. The good news is, if you find yourself deliberating the gray areas of sustainability, then you're in the right place.Ian Montgomery says that designing for sustainability is all about getting comfortable with tradeoffs. He is the founder and Creative Director of Guacamole Airplane, a design studio focused on sustainable packaging, and one of the first Lumi Experts. If you've explored the Lumi Sustainability Properties, then you're familiar with Ian's work and his knack for finding clarity, and even conviction, in sustainability's gray areas.

The first step to making Cyclon, On's recyclable shoe, was to use a single family of materials — polyamide (made from castor beans!). But that's just one piece of the cradle-to-cradle puzzle.To capture the shoes for recycling, they've developed a subscription model and a dedicated recycling stream. Staying true to the mission, these shoes aren't recycled to turn into other plastic goods down the line — they're recycled into new Cyclon shoes.It's an experiment that co-founder Caspar Coppetti says is aimed at not only revaluing waste in the supply chain, but slowing down our behavior of consumption. In this episode, he goes in the weeds on sourcing, manufacturing, and open source sustainability after talking about the origins of On and their unique philosophy on sponsorship.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

After four years as Slack's Head of Global Design and before taking her new role at Facebook, Kristy Tillman brought her side projects to the forefront.Kristy has a list of impressive side projects in her creative think tank, Tomorrow Looks Bright. It's a place where she does more than invite herself to the table — she creates the table and sits at the head. Kristy's work is always driven by optimism and an urgent need for a more equitable future which doesn't start in a decade, or in a year, but tomorrow.In this episode, Kristy talks about incentivizing diversity, acting on your values early, designing for millions of people at Slack, and before designing for 30 people with her new fellowship, Made in the Future.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Before Rumpl, sleeping-bag-style puffy blankets were predominantly marketed to Alpine athletes. Rumpl didn't invent the category, but founder and CEO, Wylie Robinson is doing everything he can to expand it.Wylie likes to ask people a simple question, "How many blankets do you have at home?" Then he asks, "How many of the brands can you name?" Outside of heritage brands like Pendleton or Woolrich, there is very little brand loyalty in the blanket business. Beyond that, there's little being done to bring performance textiles into the space.On this episode, fresh off of his Shark Tank pitch, Wylie shares what he learned from being on the show, how Rumpl continues to scale and differentiate, and why the pandemic took their branding down a few notches on Maslow's hierarchy.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

By his own account, Boll & Branch founder, Scott Tannen knows that his bedding brand may not be the first that comes to mind when you think of "cool" DTCs. The branding is classic and the style feels universal, but dig into the Boll & Branch supply chain and you'll find that they're totally changing the game for how textiles can (and should) be manufactured.Before he had a logo, or even a brand, Scott had drafted out the unwavering brand principals which deviated far from the norm of the textiles industry. Boll & Branch has adopted and created their own standards that meet or exceed qualifications for ethical labor, sustainable materials, and transparency.As he puts it, "There are so many issues that exist within this manufacturing cycle, and if you don't break it all apart by starting from scratch, you can't fix it." Tune in to hear how Scott and his wife Missy have built a transparent supply chain that they're proud of.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

If you bought a Bellroy wallet when the company launched a decade ago, you're probably still using it. For the past ten years, while they've worked to slim down your every day carry, they've slimmed down their environmental impact behind the scenes.CEO and co-founder Andy Fallshaw has a unique brand of optimism that's a constant ebb and flow between digging into details, and panning out to see the full picture. On this episode, he's settling into the nuance of sustainability, talking through current and future solutions that adapt and evolve. To build for sustainability, you often have to break a few paradigms along the way.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images. 

By definition, an heirloom has proved that it's resilient, timeless, and special enough to have been passed down for generations. That's how Schoolhouse started, with the discovery of a collection of cast-iron molds that stood the test of time. For the past 18 years, Schoolhouse has designed and manufactured high quality home goods with "heirloom quality" as the guiding light.As President, Sara Fritsch works across teams to lead the company mindfully without wavering on quality. Their supply chain is a big part of their value statement and their competitive advantage. They manufacture as much as they can in the US, with the majority of their wares being manufactured and shipped from their very own factory in Portland.With transparency and control over their supply chain, and a high mix / low volume approach to their catalog, Schoolhouse stays true to the task of making modern heirlooms.In this episode, hear how Sara defines the criteria of making an heirloom, why employee engagement is their most important driver of success, and how — in a socially distanced era — home is more valuable than ever.

In April, Shopify launched Shop, the consumer-facing counterpart to Shopify. In the app, buyers have direct access to thousands of companies selling through Shopify. The Shop app not only connects shoppers to brands of all sizes, but it makes the checkout flows we're used to feel incredibly arduous and clunky. Even with its intuitive UI, simple payments, and transparent shipment tracking, Shop General Manager Carl Rivera says this is just version 0.5. Since selling his company Tictail to Shopify in 2018, Carl has continued on his mission to help brands and shoppers discover each other. To make a marketplace that brings companies straight to customers without the rising costs of acquisition.In this episode, Stephan talks to Carl about building a platform that gives brands the power of customization while giving customers the ease of streamlined simplicity. They discuss how the Shop team is prioritizing upcoming features, and why email is their main competitor. Carl also shares why the Shopify acquisition was the perfect fit and how the rapid growth of Tictail motivated him to slow down.Visit the Lumi blog for links, images, and a full transcript.

Emily Singer is the creator of the newsletter Chips + Dips. A couple times a month, she shares news about consumer brands and marketing trends, but her insights get deeper than data. She draws perceptive connections amidst brands, but she also gets personal, making the newsletter feel like a DTC diary.In the newsletter's 26th issue, Emily is four months into the COVID-19 pandemic and reflecting on a shift in perspective and an overall lack of excitement for new brands — How could I get excited about a skincare company’s content strategy when thousands of people were dying and when I, myself, was doing the bare minimum to care for my skin?Emily wasn't the only one in a brand rut. If you're immersed in the world of DTC ecommerce brands, you may have noticed that many of them fall within certain archetypes. These archetypes are well documented in a Bloomberg article titled Welcome to Your Bland New World. From fonts and photography to mission and story, the opinion piece chronicles similarities that make some of these brands seem downright interchangeable — but maybe similarity is not always a bad thing.In this episode, Emily reflects on this article, contemplating the comfort of sameness, our human inclination toward trends, why brands have to have soul, and why sometimes, toothpaste should just be toothpaste.For images and links, go to the Lumi blog.

The slow pace of the pandemic has given many of us the opportunity to take a step back and reexamine our impact on people and the planet. This slower pace may seem counterintuitive in the face of urgent crises like climate change and systemic racism, but Céline Semaan and her team at Slow Factory have decided that it's the right pace for real, lasting progress.  Systemic change, Céline says, comes first with unlearning old systems, then relearning by way of open education. In fact, she plans to help boost the public's sustainability literacy with peer-to-peer initiatives like Study Hall, Open Education, and Landfills as Museums — an initiative to show product designers, firsthand, the impact and potential of waste (pictured above).In this episode, Céline walks us through the perspective shift she's seen in the past nine months, and how optimism and progress can only come with discomfort. See links and images on the Lumi blog.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we all discovered that toilet paper is a product that we've taken for granted. But since 2012, Danny Alexander, Co-founder and CPO of Who Gives A Crap has unraveled the true potential of the stuff.From launch, Who Gives a Crap has had purpose built into their business. They donate half of all their profits to non-profit organizations that are working to improve access to hygiene, water and basic sanitation in developing countries. With a 1,100% increase in sales, that's totaling out to a staggering $4m donation this year.On top of that, the bulk of the toilet paper they sell is made from 100% recycled paper, and the rest is made from bamboo.Their witty toilet humor and playful patterns may not be what you'd expect from a brand so grounded in giving back, and that's exactly the idea. In this episode, Danny talks sourcing, branding, and scaling to meet the demands of a pandemic.You can find images and link on the Lumi Blog.

In the US, more people are shopping online than ever. This stark jump in ecommerce has left a lot of industry experts asking how new ecommerce businesses can successfully launch in the midst of a pandemic, where does the ecommerce experience still falls short, and if the pandemic has permanently changed how we shop. To answer all these questions, we're talking to Dan Frommer. Dan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The New Consumer where he researches and writes about why and how people spend their money. (You may remember him from Episode 94.)Head over to the Lumi blog for links and images.

Most of the spices you buy at the grocery store are several years old, but that's only part of the problem. When Diaspora Co. founder  Sana Javeri Kadri discovered how disconnected US spice pantries are from their origins, she started a company to change how we think about our spice supply chains. Diaspora Co. is one of only a few direct trade spice companies out there, and sourcing these spices has been a lesson in disconnecting heirloom spices from the influence of Western colonization. For example, indigenous varieties of turmeric were introduced to the Western world under names which simply reduced them to a color, but with Diaspora Co., Sana is bringing story to Indian spices. In this episode, Sana shares how a more transparent supply chain can be a huge step for food justice. 

Five months into a pandemic, going to the grocery store requires much more than a reusable tote. You're probably suiting up with a mask, hand sanitizer, and a grocery list to make sure that you're in and out as quickly as possible.Ithaca Hummus can only be found in grocery stores but the founder, Chris Kirby, built the brand to be flexible so they could adapt to times like these. He's always been focused on making sustainable, scalable choices for the business, and that hasn't changed in the pandemic.On this episode, Chris talks about how the packaging challenges of DTC made them focus their efforts on brick-and-mortar grocery, his biggest takeaways from being part of the Chobani incubator, and how they've had to shift their strategies to adapt to the new expectations of shoppers entering grocery stores.

"Intersectional environmentalist." You may have heard those two words separately, but Leah Thomas was the first person to put them together. "Intersectional" is a powerful framework that, when combined with the environmentalist movement, illuminates issues of inequity in climate change.As Leah Thomas talks about in this episode, Eric Garner's last words, "I can't breathe" take on an even bigger meaning when considering that poor air quality disproportionately affects the lives of people of color.Leah Thomas studied environmental science and communications before joining the team at Patagonia. With several years experience learning how to message the urgency of climate change, she started her company, Intersectional Environmentalist to provide people with resources that dismantle systems of oppression in the environmental movement.In this episode, Leah talks about how intersectional environmentalism has gone viral and how she's embracing the moment to build communities and resources for progress.

One of the biggest obstacles for True Botanicals was the preconceived notion that natural products don't work as well as those riddled with toxins. To prove the potency of natural ingredients, True Botanicals invested in top notch suppliers promoting biodiversity and clinical trials to prove that these ingredients outperformed leading skincare products.On this episode, True Botanicals founder Hillary Peterson talks customer education, pricing high performing products, her transition away from CEO, and how True Botanicals had to change their plans amid the pandemic.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

Every time you order an item from a seller on Etsy, the company offsets the emissions created from shipping that order. Since the start of this initiative in February of last year, Etsy has invested in offsetting 173,000 metric tons of CO2. While offsetting these emissions accomplishes a big goal for the Etsy Sustainability team, Director of Sustainability, Chelsea Mozen says it's not the first or last item on their to-do list.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

On our podcast, we talk about changing patterns of consumption to mitigate the risk of climate change, but we've overlooked a huge blindspot — how climate change disproportionally and profoundly harms communities of color.Full episode transcript available.

A fridge that's full of Methodology meals isn't stacked with disposable trays. A Methodology fridge is stocked with columns of colorful foods, visible through glass jars.Founder Julie Nguyen knows that the Methodology audience is niche — busy people who value high quality, sustainable ingredients — but since they launched five years ago, she's seen their dedicated customer base grow.Every week with her co-founder Stephen Liu and their R&D team, Julie is sourcing new ingredients, while keeping their supply chain quality consistent. She's testing new menu items while continuing to produce customers' go-to favorites. And she's making health swaps while keeping their meals comforting and fulfilling.In this episode, Julie talks about walking the line between keeping standards incredibly high while staying sustainable, finding a stride with automated marketing, traveling to expand the palate, and her discoveries about people's relationship with food.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

The tile industry moves slowly, but when Eric Edelson joined the Fireclay Tile team, he was set on speeding things up. They were making a phenomenal product and it felt like they’d hit their limit in wholesale. In a sort of eureka moment, Eric penned a new manifesto/business model for a going direct to consumer. That was in 2008.With new flexibility and freedom, Fireclay Tile has experimented with all kinds of upcycled materials (from toilets to monitors), software for customization, sample processes, and sustainability initiatives. In 2015, they became the first tile company to be B Corp certified. Even in the midst of a pandemic, they didn’t lose speed. They were prepared with a plan of action, grounded in their core values: the health and safety of employees, business and client stability, love and kindness. Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

If you already know that kombucha is fermented tea, you're in the minority. If you drink it, you're in an even smaller minority. In the US, only 17% of US households drink kombucha. The idea of a fermented tea made from a hunk of slimy-looking culture is not immediately appetizing, but the taste and health benefits have appealed to people for thousands of years — it's only in the past decade that it's become a mainstay in every health foods store.When Health-Ade Kombucha launched in Los Angeles farmers' markets in 2012 Vanessa Dew and her co-founders had to explain it to health food early adopters. Fast forward eight years, and you can find their bright, colorful, nautical-themed bottles in grocery stores and health food stores across the country, but Vanessa realizes they still have a lot of space to make kombucha a household name. In this episode, Vanessa shares their strange path to kombucha, how they've seen buying habits shift dramatically since people have quarantined, and what they're doing to make kombucha as approachable as possible.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

The very nature of an emergency is that you don't know when it's coming. It's this vast unknown that paralyzes most people from making plans for worst-case scenarios. Simon Huck, CEO and co-founder of Judy says that people who are unprepared often fall victim to thinking that emergencies could never happen to them or being overwhelmed by all the preparation that has to be done. Judy’s emergency kits and preparedness content are setting out to change that. Judy launched weeks before the spike in coronavirus cases in the U.S. On one hand, a pandemic is certainly a worst-case scenario, so the prevalence of an emergency is not hard to imagine. But on the other hand, Simon and his team had a huge responsibility to build a genuine brand that isn't fueled by hysteria, but instead, guided by facts.In this episode, Simon shares how bite-sized guidance plays a huge part in preparedness, how COVID-19 affected their supply chain, and plans for expanding their product line.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

Another Tomorrow launched in January, and already they've built an impressive criteria of sustainability standards to keep their supply chain ethical for human, animals, and the planet. Those are the three pillars of their business.Vanessa Barboni Hallik didn't start in fashion. She started in finance, but as she was researching more sustainable finance, she uncovered the huge disparities in the supply chain ethics of fashion fashion brands and luxury sustainable brands. The gap felt unsurmountable, but Another Tomorrow is taking on the challenge, backed by science, data, and an incredible eye for fashion design.In this episode, Vanessa shares how are patterns of apparel consumption can shift and she takes us into the depths of a carefully considered, ethical apparel supply chain.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

Davis Smith is the founder of Cotopaxi and to grow his team, he's built an environment where people can create. One of the most physical manifestations of those creations is the Del Dia Collection of bags. They're repurposed from remnants of fabric and each bag is a one-of-a-kind colorway, designed by the craftspeople sewing them.As they've grown for the past six years, the Cotopaxi mission to Do Good has extended to new geographies with systemic supply chain shifts to start eradicating poverty in communities around the world. In this episode, Davis shares how he's always faced tough decisions by focusing on people first.Go to the Lumi blog for links and images.

In the midst of a pandemic, businesses and consumers are prompted to hurry up and wait. Meanwhile, the definition of essentials is governed, retail locations are ordered to close, and more and more people are out of work. While a period of in-between can feel stagnant, Rhone founder Nate Checketts decided to take action. He recruited 20 brands to join BRANDS × BETTER — a new coalition of companies that have pledged to donate a portion of their funds to COVID-19 relief organizations. This not only supports to relief efforts, but keeps businesses up and running. From "Not another coronavirus email" to unwavering product launches, Nate and his team at Rhone have opted for action instead of reaction and adapted with solutions that are right for their business and their customers.Links and images on the Lumi blog: https://www.lumi.com/wellmade

With fewer cars on the road, COVID-19 could lead to the biggest drop in emissions since WWII, but this stat doesn't paint a full picture of the pandemic's environmental impact. Sustainability is complicated, and journalist Alden Wicker is an expert in navigating the nuances.Alden worries that the strain on businesses could set back environmental progress by a decade. In Bangladesh, one million apparel factory workers have been laid off due to a shortage of new orders and huge businesses like JCPenney, Kohl's and Walmart declining to pay for orders — over $3B worth. Through the lens of sustainability, Alden is not only concerned about where those clothes might end up, but how these dire circumstances have already lead to the suspension of significant environmental regulations.In this episode, Alden and Stephan discuss how these challenges have magnified issues in the apparel supply chain and Alden shares her three-prong solution for true environmental impact that's not solely reliant on conscious consumerism.Find links and images for this episode on the Lumi Blog.

In many ways, the cannabis industry still feels like a grey area. That's why Recess founder Benjamin Witte didn't set out to build a brand on top of an ingredient — he wanted to build a brand on top of a feeling.The creative community has adopted the fruit-infused CBD drink with open arms, which is very much by design. The pastel gradients, neon signs, and ephemeral imagery are all meant to evoke that easy sense of creative calm.Lately, Benjamin has spent most of his time pushing for the FDA to issue final regulations for CBD. With clear regulations, his team has plans to expand way beyond fizzy drinks. In this episode, Benjamin shares how he hired writers to build a story driven marketing team, how he's generating the most impressions for the least amount of money, and what new products Recess has in the works.

Barkbox hasn't followed the conventional direct-to-consumer-brand growth plan. Since launching Barkbox in 2012, Henrik Werdelin and his co-founders have launched several companion brands including Super Chewer and Bark Bright — dog dental hygiene products.These products may seem obvious, but the strategy behind them is not. Rather than expanding from dogs to other pets, Bark chose to dig deeper into the nuance of the dog space. Instead of launching these new products under the Barkbox product line, they launched them as new brands.It's all part of the framework to innovate independently of brand clout and see if a concept can stand on its own.In this episode, Henrik takes us through his Acorn Method and shares how the method has guided major decisions around choosing Bark's companion brands, incubating new talent, and keeping their entire team dedicated to the mission of making dogs happy.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

While it feels like a new trend, every couple decades, there is a new take on minimalism. Writer Kyle Chayka has studied minimalism's many iterations over time and he argues that our modern interpretation — one that's rooted so deeply in aesthetics — is as far as we've ever been from true minimalism.In his first book, The Longing for Less, Kyle is on a quest to illuminate the origins of minimalism. He critiques various modern interpretations including the Marie Kondo methodology, the Wirecutter-top-pick purchases, and the sharing economy. These new philosophies and practices can all be part of a minimalist life, but Kyle believes that to be true and lasting, minimalism should be rooted in supply chain — in simplifying the steps between an item being made and an item being purchased.On this episode, Kyle and Stephan weave their way through minimalism through the lens of stoicism, Marxism, and Bauhaus. They discuss how these movements reinterpreted minimalism within constraints of the time, and how our time of "simplified" technology puts us as far from minimalism as we've ever been.

Peter Dering knows that there's some controversy around purchasing carbon offsets, but as the founder of Climate Neutral, he thinks it's an immediate path forward. Before Climate Neutral, he founded Peak Design. He and his team design photographic accessories and outsource the manufacturing. After visiting one of his factories, he was looking around at all of the materials and energy that went into production and he started strategizing options to cut down on resources where they could, and offset carbon where they couldn't.He and his team always made sustainability a priority, but they wanted to do more to quantify their footprint and measure improvements. Peak Design took a huge step in January by getting B Corp certified. The other huge step they took was starting the nonprofit, Climate Neutral.Peter found out that paying to offset carbon is not an unwieldily cost — it's actually affordable. Carbon Neutral provides a consistent system to measure carbon usage and pay to offset it. Hear exactly how Carbon Neutral calculates emissions businesses, and how offsets can actually make a real impact for climate change.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

The grocery store model hasn’t adapted with how people shop. Traditional big box stores stock up on everything under the sun and rely on small margins based for big cart sizes. With traditional grocery stores struggling and US consumers being slow to adopt online grocery, Emily Schildt saw an opportunity to prioritize discovery over convenience as a way to help people find brands they actually love.Pop-up Grocer is a highly curated 30-day activation featuring grocery brands that get an A+ for innovation, nutrition, and design. Emily has thoughtfully positioned Pop-Up Grocer to be an exciting space that leaves people wanting more. Just ahead of their Venice launch on February 7, she is sharing the careful balance between curation and discovery, the importance of location, and the paths envisions for Pop-Up Grocer in the future.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

There are dozens of tools out there to build and launch products, but Very Great has set out to launch brands — companies creating products that improve lives and keep people coming back. They're doing it with a platform that centralizes the functions of any consumer brand. From research and development, through launch and logistics, Very Great is an infrastructure to build a brand that lasts.So far, co-founders Eric Prum and Josh Williams have helped to launch three brands in the Very Great family — W&P Design in the housewares space, Wild One in the pet space, and Courant in the tech space. Hear how Very Great ideates to create products that inspire loyal customers, their approach to building genuine brands, and their strategy to make a bullet proof supply chain.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

Fast Company Senior Staff writer, Elizabeth Segran is an expert in the cross section where fashion, technology, and ecommerce overlap. For every company that recycles innovative materials for fabric, opens an immersive retails space, or builds a sustainability initiative into their model, she's there to cover it. That's why we invited her on the show to reflect on the past couple decades of consumer trends and — more importantly — make some insightful predictions about what's to come. On this episode, Elizabeth and Stephan weave in and out of micro and meta. Listen to hear how gradual consumer shifts have created substantial changes in what people expect of brands and which brands they're choosing to buy into.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

Phone cases don’t need to last a lifetime, but in a landfill, they might. Pela cases are made from a blend of biopolymers and flax scraps meant last a few years — basically, the lifetime of your phone. When you get a new device, you can compost the case or ship it back to Pela. As more and more consumers are choosing sustainable products, phone cases may not be obvious, but the impact is significant.Jermey Lang founded Pela part-time, doing the initial research and development with government funding. Eight years later, they’re expanding to eyewear and other new products that are the right fit for their Flaxstic material. Hear how Pela developed Flaxstic and how they’re making a place for themselves in the responsibility economy.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

To take on their huge ambitions of making Grove Collaborative and 100-year company, CEO and Co-founder, Stuart Landesberg only looks far enough ahead to see the next milestone. He doesn't let perfection get in the way of progress.As more and more people adopt sustainable purchasing habits, the going philosophy seems to be, do what you can and make incremental improvements right now. On this episode, Stuart talks to Stephan about how they made incremental progress to get where they are and how they plan to get where they're going.

Trade Coffee ships customers new coffee based on their tastes. It's a subscription, but CEO Mike Lackman says that part s a necessary evil. Some subscriptions help you discover new products while others help you replenish the products you already love. Trade does a bit of both.Mike comes from an operational background and this episode is a deep dive into how Trade approaches each component of their supply chain. From the roaster dashboard to their new compostable bags, every step has been optimized to create a journey that keeps customers coming back.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.

Universal Standard is creating a world where size is obsolete. To hear co-founder and Creative Director Alexandra Waldman talk about it, what they're doing at Universal Standard is overdue and obvious. She said, "All of us actually believe in the body positivity movement, [but] the brand is not about that because we do not believe that you should have to make an emotional payment to buy a frock."It's as simple as that. But building that experience is not simple. Photographing each item on every size model is not simple. Offering free exchanges with the Fit Liberty program is not simple. All of it requires research, agility, and thoughtfulness. Listen to hear how Alexandra and her team are working to build the largest size range in the world.Find more links and images from this episode on the Lumi blog.