When Raising Canes recently opened its first-ever location in Meridian, Idaho, it wasnt a particularly remarkable event for the restaurant chain. The fast-growing chicken purveyor also opened six other restaurants in five other states on the exact same day in November. It aims to open close to 100 new stores this year.
But some Idahoans were willing to stand outside in chilly fall weather for more than 48 hours to be the first in the state to get a taste of Raising Canes, whose exceptionally narrow menu features chicken fingers, french fries, a secret proprietary dipping sauce, and simple sides like garlic toast and coleslaw.
We had customers camping out since Sunday morning, AJ Kumaran, co-chief executive officer and chief operating officer of Raising Canes, tells Fast Company of the new Idaho restaurant that opened on a Tuesday. People are excited about our entry into that market.
A boom in a cooling restaurant economy
At a time when restaurant chains including Chipotle, Cava, and Sweetgreen are confronting a sales cooldown as Gen Z and millennial diners are pressured by inflation, high housing costs, flat income growth, and other broader macroeconomic challenges, chicken-focused restaurant chains like Raising Canes and Daves Hot Chicken have been consistently expanding across the U.S. and are posting sturdier sales and traffic growth.
The fastest-growing chain in America last year by unit count was Hangry Joes Hot Chicken & Wings, according to data provider Datassential, which also reported the domestic unit total for all chicken restaurant concepts increased by 4.7% in 2024 from the prior year, far exceeding the industrys increase of 1.5%. Systemwide sales for chicken restaurants now exceed $52 billion annually.
[Photo: Refrina/Adobe Stock]
Total restaurant traffic for all quick-service restaurant concepts dropped 1% for the year-ending September 2025 from the comparable prior-year period, while that same metric increased 3% for the chicken concepts, David Portalatin, senior vice president and a food and foodservice industry advisor for Circana, told Fast Company. The market researcher says that traffic for the QSR restaurant industry, which was battered by shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, is still down 8% from 2019, but has increased 15% for QSR chicken.
The chains defying fast-food slowdown trends
Were obsessed with fried chicken, says Portalatin. He believes that more innovative twists on chicken prep and unique sauces have put a more modern twist on classic, Americana staples. Chicken, Portalatin adds, is among the very few bright spots in growth areas within the restaurant landscape.
Since Raising Canes opened its first location in Louisiana in 1996, the chain has only sold chicken fingers and cooks every dish fresh to order, which Kumaran says results in efficient restaurants that are focused on making just a few menu items. There are no heat lamps or microwave ovens in the chains kitchensand no limited-time menu offers or discounts.
[Photos: Raising Cane’s]
We dont take shortcuts and we dont play any gimmicks, says Kumaran. You will not see us in discount mode or saying, Heres the flavor of the month.
Over the past decade, Raising Canes has grown from a $350 million business to $5.1 billion in system sales in 2024. The company says it is marching toward $10 billion in annual sales from more than 1,600 locations, which would be an increase of around 600 restaurants from whats in operation today. Earlier this year, Raising Canes leapfrogged KFC to become the third most-popular chicken chain in the U.S. after Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. The chain even has a nickname for its most devoted fans, the Caniacs.
That popularity has led to some increased competition from other chains outside of the chicken specialists that have added the protein to their menus. There are a lot of people jumping in, says Kumaran. Whether it’s taco players or fajita players or burger players, everybody’s got a chicken dinner option right now.
The new competition crowding the chicken category
Chickens soaring growth has been attributed to some yearslong trends like Chick-fil-As aggressive expansion beyond that chains initial regional focus in the south, the sandwich chicken wars that kicked off in 2019 when Popeyes debuted a new menu item that led to a social media and in-store frenzy, and the more recent perception that all proteineven fried chickenis better than other quick-service food options.
Whether that’s true or not, I’m not, I’m not being the judge of that, says Portalatin. I’m not a dietitian or nutritionist, but the consumer will often perceive the chicken option as the better-for-you option.
How the protein halo reshaped fast-food preferences
Chickens protein halo is particularly relevant to consumers who are taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, and that connection led Daves Hot Chicken earlier this year to debut a promotional meal called the Davezempic, featuring mini sliders. It gives influencers and customers a way to engage with the brand in a funny and quirky way, says Srishti Handa, vice president of marketing at Daves.
[Photo: Daves Hot Chicken]
Founded in 2017, Daves Hot Chicken recently sold a majority stake for a reported $1 billion to private equity firm Roark Capital and ended 2024 with 260 locations. The chain expects to have 400 locations in operation by the end of this year and has signaled it expects to open more than 125 restaurants every year for the foreseeable future.
When asked about a north star target, Daves President and COO Jim Bitticks told Fast Company the chain could easily support 1,000 domestic locations. Talk to me in 15 years and that number could be 2,000 or 3,000 restaurants, adds Bitticks.
The chain serves its Nashville-style chicken tenders and sliders at seven different spice levels ranging from no spice to the reaper, the latter requiring a signed waiver promising that yes, its that hot. I dont recommend it, but you know, youve got to try everything once, says Bitticks. It definitely blows your head off.
Bitticks says that Instagram and other social channels have been a big driver of traffic when Daves establishes restaurants in new markets, especially attracting Gen Z to the concept. Im not from that generation, I dont get the idea of following a brand that Ive never tried before, he added. I dont understand it, but it is a huge piece of Daves story.
Slim Chickens bets on variety, content, and sauce innovation
Slim Chickens, an Arkansas-based chain with 300 locations across 34 states, has a more expansive menu than its peer upstarts with tenders, wings, salads, wraps, and even chicken and waffles. The chain says that it is alluring Gen Z consumers and even Generation Alpha, children born after 2010 who are asking their parents to take them to a Slim.
[Photo: Slim Chickens]
Variety is a competitive advantage for us, Patrick Noone, chief marketing officer of Slim Chickens, said in an interview.
To stand out in a crowded category, Slim has created an in-house recording studio so that the chain can pump out a steady drumbeat of content across social channels. Noone says that these creative assets have a short shelf life online, losing their relevance after just 10 days. Slim is also in the process of developing and debuting a new mobile app in the first quarter of 2026. The chain is also continuing to think through the physical restaurant space to make it easier for customers who place a mobile order and want to pick up their food in the store.
But Noone says one top priority will always be innovation for Slims range of sauces, which today includes 14 different flavors like Korean BBQ, sweet red chili, and cayenne ranch.
We spend as much time innovating around sauces as we do on tenders and the center of the plate, says Noone. Chicken is just the perfect canvas.
Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Companys Plugged In.
Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologiesthe startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neoand spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the worlds most iconic one.
The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot, he told me. A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.
Sleepers reference returned to the front of my brain last week, when I attended a Wired event in San Francisco featuring an interview with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. Explaining AIs transformative impact, he turned to an obvious precedent: George Jetsons reliance on Rosie.
I keep watching reruns of the old cartoon show The Jetsons, Prince said. There are a lot of things that are anachronistic about it. But I think asking the question, Where does George get his information from? is a really interesting one. And the answer is Rosie the Robot. When he says, Hey, Rosie, I want a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Rosie doesnt say, Here are 10 blue links, go find one yourself. Rosie says, Heres a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
Rosie comes up so often in discussions of the future of technology that its easy to tune out rather than nod in appreciation. But hearing two executives mention her by name got me wondering why this secondary character from a 1962 Hanna-Barbera prime-time cartoon, canceled after only one season (albeit rerun endlessly), has been such an extraordinarily durable touchstone. Its not an easy question to answer. Even if, like me, youve already spent more time contemplating the Jetsons cultural impact than most people.
Before we go any further, a few Rosie factoids for you:
Her name was originally spelled Rosey, but the more common Rosie won out over time.
The very first Jetsons episode, Rosey the Robot, told the story of how she entered the Jetsons’ home, initially as a short-term rent-a-robot.
She appeared in only one other episode among the 24 in the first seasonthat shocked mebut was much more prominent in the additional Jetsons shows Hanna-Barbera produced in the mid-1980s, including starring roles in the episodes Rosie Come Home, Mothers Day for Rosie, and Rip-Off Rosie.
As a sassy-yet-kindhearted maid, she drew undeniable inspiration from the title character in the newspaper comic Hazel, which had been turned into a popular TV sitcom the previous season. (The rest of The Jetsons knocked off another comics mainstay, Blondie.)
Her Brooklyn-tinged voice was provided by actress Jean Vander Pyl, much better known as Wilma Flintstone.
If you need to catch up on Rosies adventures, as I did for this newsletter, youll find The Jetsons widely available on streaming servicesI watched the show on Huluand airing every day on MeTV Toons.
None of this explains why technologists are still talking about Rosie. The most superficial reason is that it would be pretty cool to off-load tedious household chores to someone else. Most of us cant afford human help, making a robot maid an alluring proposition. (As shown in the first episode, even paying for Rosie was a challenge for Jane and George: She was a discounted previous-year demonstrator model, and they were able to keep her only because Mr. Spacely gave George a raise.)
But if all Rosie did was the dishes, I dont think shed be so well remembered. She is a piece of sophisticated technology with an uncommonly humane user interface. Thats why the Jetson family loved her so much, and why she sticks in our minds. And given that her features are presently morphing from fantasy into stuff that might actually be possible to build, shes only growing more relevant.
As with many things about The Jetsons, Rosie is both old-timey and prescient. At one point in the first episode, she opens her front and dumps in Judy Jetsons homework tapes to incorporate them into her knowledge base. Thankfully, magnetic tape petered out as a primary form of data storage well over 40 years ago. But Rosies ability to crunch Judys classworkand presumably help her with itsure looks similar to an LLM ingesting data.
Rosie was an uplifting presence in the Jetsons’ household. [Screenshot: Hanna-Barbera]
In todays buzzwordy AI parlance, Rosie is also agentic. She handles tasks with a sizable degree of autonomy, is fine-tuned to behave responsibly and, though engaging and supportive, never slips into sycophancy. If Elroy confided that he was planning to become a juvenile delinquent, we can be certain she wouldnt aid him. Instead, shed push back on the idea andif necessaryalert his parents. Our 2025 chatbots are crude by comparison, if not downright dangerous.
Still another reason why Rosie remains resonant is the timeless appeal of The Jetsons optimistic air. As depicted in the show, the future is a pretty wonderful place, and Rosie is part of that. Even by the end of the 1960s, our culture had grown darker. 2001: A Space Odysseys HAL 9000 may be as famous as Rosie, but hes also a grim object lesson in the dangers of trusting technology to work in our best interest. You wont catch tech execs speaking approvingly of HAL as a font of inspiration.
The Jetsons was never dystopian, but neither was it naive. A sizable percetage of its humor stemmed from the downsides of theoretically useful technology, often in ways that are, in retrospect, as forward-looking as any other aspect of the show. As youll recall, the end credits of every episode concluded with George becoming overwhelmed by a runaway automated treadmill and calling for Jane to stop this crazy thing. (In real life, Pelotons safety issues with its Tread treadmill werent so funny.)
Rosie does not appear in another 1962 Jetsons episode called Uniblab. But its moralthat artificial intelligence in the office might be a pointless waste of moneyis the furthest thing from entertainingly quaint.
Mr. Spacely introduces George to his new boss, Uniblab. It doesnt go well. [Screenshot: Hanna-Barbera]
Uniblab is a workplace robot that Mr. Spacely acquires for $5 billion (!). Apparently an AGI true believerhe gloats that Uniblab has a higher IQ than GeorgeSpacely demotes George to serve as the robots assistant. It turns out that Uniblab uses his always-on microphone to spy on Spacelys employees. He also induces them to play rigged gambling games. And thats about all hes good for.
After being sabotaged by the shows resident hacker, the Jetsons handyman, Henry, Uniblab suffers a hallucinatory meltdown in front of Spacely Space Sprockets board of directors. Hes unceremoniously decommissioned. Humanity triumphs, at least for the moment.
When The Jetsons premiered in 1962, publicity materials explained that it was set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2062. That indicates that even 37 years from now, AI may struggle to definitively prove its worth. For now, countless present-day Mr. Spacelys are currently overspending on the technology based on unrealistic expectations.
Rosie, meanwhile, is clearly based on more mature AI than Uniblab. But in the first Jetsons episode, Jane and other characters are astonished at her capabilities, a sign that domestic robotics will still be in the process of going mainstream in 2062. Which means that it may be several more decades until Rosie is truly, unquestionably real. May she continue to serve as an aspirational stretch goal for the entire tech industry.
Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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When life gives people lemons, most try to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead, Beau du Bois, vice president of bar and spirits at Marisi Italian restaurant in La Jolla, California, found himself with an incredible opportunity.
In 2021, the Adler and Lombrozo families, owners of the Puesto Mexican restaurant chain, tapped du Bois to build Marisi’s bar program from the ground up. One of the first actions du Bois took when learning about this new venture was starting a batch of limoncello, using a lesser-known Amalfi Coast technique.
They told me about Marisi almost exactly a year before we opened,” du Bois tells Fast Company. “And the very next day, even though I’ve got 364 days to get the restaurant open, I started making the limoncello right away.”
Du Bois had excellent timing, as the appetite for limoncello in the United States has been on the rise. According to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, global limoncello volumes grew at a compound annual rate of 8% between 2019 and 2024.
In 2024, the top three markets for limoncello were Italy, Germany, and the United States, in that order. The U.S. has seen steady average annual growth of 5%. The IWSR predicts the figure will continue its upward trend, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 2% from 2024 to 2029.
Even though Du Boiss preferred preindustrial limoncello process has been a part of the restaurant since its 2022 opening, its recently made a big splash on social media.
An Instagram reel documenting the procedure has garnered over four million views and reveals larger trends in the hospitality industry.
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Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a 7.5-foot-tall Chewbacca holding a candy cane. At least, according to the team at Home Depot.
Home Depot has long been known as a purveyor of holiday decor, from pumpkins at Halloween to a wide selection of real and artificial trees at Christmas. In recent years, though, its been upping the creative ante on its decor game to capture new audiencesand, in some cases, to score a viral hit on TikTok.
This year, its doing just that with two new additions to its holiday lineup: life-size, animated versions of Star Wars Chewbacca and R2-D2 ($349 and $299, respectively), complete with movie-accurate, motion-activated sound effects.
While Home Depot declined to share specific sales data about the characters, R2-D2 appears to have sold out within weeks of debuting, inspiring several TikTok videos with hundreds of thousands of views and resulting in multiple Reddit forums where users are discussing strategies for getting their hands on one of the units. Resellers are already pedaling the product on eBay for nearly double its original price.
With its increasingly extravagant Halloween animatronics and now its suite of nerdy, high-tech Christmas decor, Home Depot is making the spectacle of extreme holiday decorating accessible to the average customer.
[Image: Home Depot]
Home Depot is turning extreme holiday decorating into an accessible sport
Home Depot is no stranger to building head-turning (and TikTok view-farming) holiday decor. In fact, its towering 12-foot-tall skeleton, Skelly (who debuted in 2020), is what initially propelled the big box store to its current status as customers go-to shop for viral decor. Since then, Home Depot has leaned into both the scale and detail of its holiday decor, including with Halloween releases this year like a seven-foot-tall Frankenstein and 9.5-foot-long haunted pirate ship. Now bringing that same amped-up energy into Christmas.
Chewie and R2-D2 are part of Home Depots range of IP-adapted characters, which include other popular characters like Chucky, a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington from Disneys The Nightmare Before Christmas, and, also new this year, Olaf from Disneys Frozen. The company already sells a seven-foot-tall Darth Vader and six-foot-tall Stormtrooper.
[Photo: Home Depot]
Aubrey Horowitz, Home Depots senior merchant of decorative holiday, says Home Depots Star Wars line plays to a couple of different emerging genres of holiday shoppers. One is the seasonal decor enthusiast, who tends to like to refresh their decor from one holiday to the nextwhich is why characters like the Stormtrooper, Darth Vader, and R2-D2 all come with modifications to transition from Halloween to Christmas.
Another is the holiday shopper thats interested in nostalgic aesthetics, from vintage-looking artificial trees to retro characters. That tracks with data Pinterest shared with Fast Company, which found that searches for nostalgic Christmas aesthetic were up 1,130% this November compared with last November.
[Photo: Home Depot]
With the majority of its IP collections, Home Depot is able to capture fans by keeping prices relatively low: For comparison, other life-size replicas of R2-D2 can run between $1,500 and $8,000. Clearly, the choice is resonating with fans online. A commenter under one video of R2-D2 with more than 130,000 views wrote, Take my money. Now I can put this alongside my R2D2 Pepsi cooler. And under a separate clip of Chewbacca, commenters are responding with photos of their own Home Depot Chewie surrounded by other Star Wars characters (and one dressed in a sports jersey).
This holiday season, Home Depot is making sure that the most eccentric dad on your block can tap into his childlike wonder without breaking the bankand were not mad about it.
Its hard to believe that just a few short years ago a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti generated by ModelScope, a text-to-video AI model, was the peak of AI slop.
Fast-forward to today and our trust for CCTV footage of cute animals has been eroded, slop is showing up across marketing and music playlists, and Sora 2 deepfakes are fooling both grandparents and politicians nationwide.
A number of artist projects are fighting back against the deluge of slop polluting the shared waters of the internet (or at least poking fun at those who willingly consume it).
Steve Nasopoulos and Peter Henningsen, both freelance copywriters, recently created the Slop Trough in their spare time. Its a digital feeding trough that serves up endless slop, so long as you turn on your webcam and get down on all fours like a good little piggy.
Are you a little piggy who needs your slop? the homepage asks. Click yes and it tells you to get on the ground on all fours oink oink.
We just wanted to capture the degrading feeling of having someone put this horrible content in front of us and actually expect us to consume it. It feels, how shall we say, a little dehumanizing? the creators told Fast Company. The internet was once a magical place, because it was full of weirdos making bizarre websites and stupid art projects. Slop and AI content are diametrically opposed to that because its mass-produced garbage made by robots.
Other online art projects imagine an internet untouched by generative AI. 404 media recently reported on Slop Evader, a browser tool created by artist and researcher Tega Brain that filters web searches to include only results from before November 30, 2022the day ChatGPT was released to (or, rather, unleashed on) the public.
The term AI slop itself emerged around 2023, when platforms like ChatGPT and DALL-E became publicly available and more widely adopted, according to Google Trends. Yet concerns about AI among U.S. adults have grown exponentially since 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, so much so that slurs for robots now exist.
But for every new AI slop video created, there will always be those resisting it with human-made projects. As Nasopoulos and Henningsen put it: We think humans making stuff and putting it on the internet is what the internet was designed for, so the more of that the better.
Six years ago, when Michael Buckley returned to True Religion‘s offices as CEO, the denim brand looked nothing like the one he had built a decade earlier.
Buckley was the brand’s president between 2006 and 2010, when True Religion was a luxury brand that sold jeans priced between $300 and $500 at Neiman Marcus and Barneys. Buckley helped grow revenues to more than $300 million a year, but after he left, the brand hit hard times, as it struggled to adapt to e-commerce. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2020.
In 2019, after serving as CEO of Differential Brands Group (which owns Hudson Jeans), Buckley came back to True Religion to clean up the mess. He’s executed a remarkable turnaround, doubling the company’s revenues and leading it to its highest profitability ever.
Buckley’s strategy is interesting. He’s rebuilt the business around the Black and Latino customers who have been loyal to the brand from the beginning. Under his leadership, the brand has rethought everything from pricing to design to marketing with these consumers in mind. (While none of True Religion’s top leadership is Black, Buckley says the company’s employees “reflect the brand’s consumers.”) “We didn’t change our target demo,” Buckley says. “This was the True Religion demographic all along, and it was our job to embrace them.”
In the past, True Religion’s ad campaigns featured predominantly white models, but today, its website and social media features exclusively models of color. The brand partners with rappers and hip-hop artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Quavo, and 2 Chainz as ambassadors. True Religion is now back at the center of culture, seen on celebrities like Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner. Thanks to collaborations with brands like Von Dutch and Supreme, the brand is regularly featured in fashion blogs.
Ciara [Photo: True Religion]
Buckley believes that the future of True Religion lies with Black consumers. The brand is now focused on winning over the next generation; it’s going on a college tour with a focus on historically Black colleges and universities, like Spelman and Morehouse. But experts say that for True Religion to build an enduring relationship with Black consumers, it needs to go beyond just marketing to them; it must also forge authentic partnerships with these communities.
Megan Thee Stallion [Photo: True Religion]
“It’s awesome that the brand is serving the Black consumers that stuck around when others abandoned them,” says Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business and the author of For The Culture. “But to take it to the next level, the question is, how are you showing that you’re invested in the community? Are you collaborating with the community in a way that shares equity?”
A Loyal Customer
Historically, Black consumers have been sorely neglected by fashion brands, despite having significant economic power. Their spending on apparel and footwear is expected to grow by 6% a year to $70 billion by 2030, and yet, many fashion brands don’t tailor their products or marketing to their Black audience.
A 2021 McKinsey survey found that Black consumers were profoundly dissatisfied with their fashion options and did not see themselves in most brands’ marketing campaigns. “Black consumers are so underserved and marginalized that they will gravitate towards brands that aren’t even targeting them,” says Collins.
When True Religion first hit the market in 2002, its advertising campaigns rarely featured people of color. Its pricingwhich was astronomically expensive for jeanswas also designed to signal exclusivity. When he was previously at the company, Buckley says products were designed for consumers with household incomes above $250,000. Jeff Lubell, who cofounded True Religion, had no apologies for this high price tag. Its not for everybody, even though I would love it to be,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “Its like being in the club.
When Buckley came back to True Religion in 2019, its price point and identity hadn’t changed significantly since its early days, but the style was no longer resonating in the market they had targeted. “The brad assumed the same luxury customer was buying, but when I walked the streets, it didn’t look like that at all,” he says.
[Photo: True Religion]
Buckley commissioned a survey to find out who was actually buying True Religion. The results were interesting: A third of customers were Black and 15% were Latino. Consumers skewed male and had an average household income of $65,000. For Buckley, this seemed like a big opportunity. “Years ago, when we were targeting wealthy consumers, we were touching 4% of the apparel market,” he says. “But the middle class demographic is enormous: it’s 150 million people. It seemed like a no-brainer to pivot.”
According to Kristen D’Arcy, True Religion’s CMO, the brand has resonated with Black consumers because rappers and hip-hop artists had taken to it early on. The rapper Quavo, for instance, was such a fan of True Religion in his teens that he got a tattoo of the logo on his arm back in 2007. In 2014, rapper 2 Chainz name-dropped True Religion in a lyric. “The hip-hop world has always loved True Religion,” she says. “Even when we were selling to a different consumer, they were buying it.”
Buckley has rebuilt the business around its current customers. For one thing, he lowered prices. Today, most of the brand’s styles are under $100, and thanks to frequent promotions, they’re often even cheaper.
The aesthetic of the jeans is also very different now than it was in the early 2000s. In 2019, Buckley brought back Zihaad Wells, who had previously served as the brand’s VP of design from 2006 to 2017. Today, True Religion’s jeans still feature some of its original design elementslike visible stitching and the horseshoe iconographybut they now have a distinct Y2K streetwear aesthetic, which appeals to Gen Z as well as older consumers who are nostalgic for the early 2000s. It sells bedazzled jeans and sweat suits, baby tees, and grungy, distressed jeans.
True Religion x Von Dutch [Photo: True Religion]
“The aesthetic looks very dated to me, particularly with the large logos,” says Tina Wells, a marketing strategist and entrepreneur, with an expertise in multicultural marketing. “It’s certainly resonating with a subsection of Black consumers right now, but it will be important for the brand to keep their finger on the pulse, so that they’re not just creating products they think Black people want.”
D’Arcy, for her part, has been focused on creating brand imagery that reflects this consumer base. With the brand’s $50 million annual marketing budget (which equates to 10% of sales), D’Arcy has launched campaigns with popular hip-hop and rap artists, including Megan Thee Stallion, Anitta, and NLE Choppa.
YG [Photo: True Religion]
Going Deeper
The turnaround strategy has been effective. True Religion is projected to reach half a billion dollars in sales this year, up from $280 million in 2023. According to McKinsey’s survey, Black consumers show a strong preference for brands that resonate with them culturally. And when brands develop products for Black consumers and create diverse marketing campaigns, they will be rewarded with an influx of consumers.
Saweetie [Photo: True Religion]
D’Arcy believes there is even more room for True Religion to grow within the Black community. True Religion is popular across age rangesincluding the over-60 crowd, which makes up 15% of its audience. But to be an enduring brand, Buckley believes it is important to target the next generation of Black consumers who will hopefully stay with the brand as they enter adulthood. “We’re focused on acquiring millions of new customers in the 18-to-25 market,” says D’Arcy.
True Religion is currently doing a college tour, where it hosts pop-ups on campuses, giving students a chance to take a study break while playing trivia games and browsing racks of clothing. Some of these colleges are HBCUs, including Morehouse and Spelman in Atlanta, while others, like the University of Florida in Gainesville and St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, have large Black populations.
Chelley B (Love Island) [Photo: True Religion]
Both Wells and Collins say that the test of True Religion’s commitment to the Black community will be borne out by how much effort the brand puts into really getting to know these consumers. He points to Ralph Lauren’s partnership with Morehouse and Spelman over the past two years, which resulted in two successful collaborations. Ralph Lauren spent a long time working with scholars at these schools, along with Black designers and creatives, to create clothing and campaigns that authentically reflected the Black experience.
“Their proximity to the culture allows them to do something that doesn’t feel opportunistic,” Collins says. “Black consumers immediately resonated with that campaign because it felt so authentic.”
For Buckley, True Religion’s current success is proof that Black consumers are a scalable and profitable market. “We’re doing everything we can to embrace a customer that has loved us for a long time,” he says. “This is a growing, trend-setting population. I don’t know why any brand wouldn’t want to serve them.”
Anitta [Photo: True Religion]
Leadership listening is in sharp decline, and the consequences run deep. A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago.
We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence.
But real influence doesnt come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people.
The disconnection crisis
When leaders stop listening, people stop contributing. Ideas fade, trust erodes, and creativity retreats into silence. Ive seen this in large transformation programs with a sound strategy. Employees felt unheard, so progress stalled.
When we paused to listen, everything changed. People began to share what was really going on. They talked about their fear of redundancy, exhaustion, and the loss of identity sitting just beneath the surface. Once they acknowledged those emotions (and responded with intentional action), we saw a decrease in resistance, and collaboration returned.
This situation reminded me that change rarely fails because of poor strategy. It fails when we dont understand the why behind the resistance. Leaders might not be able to fix every concern, but giving people space to speak and be heard starts to rebuild trust. Listening is the first act of empathy, and empathy is the bridge back to psychological safety.
The future model of influence
There is another kind of silence thats intentional and not imposed. Its the pause that allows leaders to think, feel, and respond with awareness rather than react. This is where modern influence begins. Visibility and authority wont build the leaders of tomorrow. What will set them apart is their ability to build trust and lead with empathy to create psychologically safe workplaces.
Todays leaders are juggling unprecedented complexity, whether thats shifting markets, hybrid work, rapid transformation, and multigenerational teams with diverse values and communication styles. Each generation might look for something different, but they all want someone to hear them out. Amid this constant pressure, few leaders have the space to slow down. Yet as complexity accelerates, active listening becomes essential. The most effective leaders create space for everyday check-ins rather than relying on quarterly surveys. These small moments of connection allow them to pivot quickly, address issues early, and stay in rhythm with their teams.
You dont measure the pulse of leadership in reports; you do so in daily conversations. Empathy enables leaders to read emotions as fluently as they read information and to sense what people need before they can articulate it. It turns listening into awareness and awareness into intelligent action. This isnt performative listening or surface acknowledgment; its a disciplined practice of presence, understanding, and follow-through.
Measuring connection
While you can measure listening, you feel its actual impact through culture. Simple questionsMy manager genuinely listens to my concerns or Senior leaders act on employee feedbackreveal whether an organization values voice and transparency. Psychological safety remains the most reliable indicator of a connected culture. When people feel safe to speak, innovation thrives. Regular pulse surveys can track progress, but measurement only matters when it leads to visible action. Asking employees whether they see follow-through ensures that listening translates into progress. When leaders act on what they hear, empathy becomes motion. It builds credibility and reinforces the belief that every voice matters, which turns trust from an aspiration into a measurable outcome.
The quiet revolution
Influence today demands composure in complexity. Leaders need to find space to hear what their employees arent saying, reflect before responding, and make room for diverse perspectives. When empathy becomes part of daily leadership, it strengthens clarity, confidence, and connection across the organization. Empathy allows leaders to stay grounded in uncertainty and connected in complexity. Listening transforms disconnection into alignment and noise into meaning.
This is human-first leadership that balances the rational with the emotional. I call it “rational empathy”where emotional awareness meets clear reasoning. Its the space where leaders respond, with both compassion and composure. Those who master it will build cultures that are open, resilient, and ready for what comes next.
The leaders who will define the next decade wont be the loudest in the room. The next revolution in leadership will listen and balance confidence with curiosity. Are you listening deeply enough to understand what really matters and what could change in your team, your culture, or your impact if you started there? When leaders truly listen, they connect, and that connection is where real influence begins.
From the latest skyscraper in a Chinese megalopolis to a sixfoottall yurt in Inner Mongolia, researchers at the Technical University of Munich claim they have created a map of all buildings worldwide: 2.75 billion building models set in highresolution 3D with a level of precision never before recorded.
Made from years of satellite data analysis by machinelearning algorithms, the model reflects a sustained effort to capture the built world in three dimensions. The result now provides a crucial basis for climate research and for tracking progress toward global sustainable development goals, according to the scientists behind it.
Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who leads the project and is the chair of data science in Earth observation at TUM, says the real achievement is that the new map is a threedimensional picture of how much space people actually inhabit. 3D building information provides a much more accurate picture of urbanization and poverty than traditional 2D maps, she explains. With 3D models we see not only the footprint but also the volume of each building.
[Screenshot: FC]
At the heart of this work is the GlobalBuildingAtlas, an open dataset that describes individual buildings across the planet both as 2D outlines and as simple 3D objects. In total, it contains 2.75 billion building footprintspolygons tracing the edges of each structurecovering every building the satellites could detect in satellite imagery from 2019.
[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]
At first glance, there are some interesting takeaways from the map, like the distribution of building volume clusters around major metropolitan regionswith particularly dense concentrations in East Asia, Europe, and North America. Meanwhile, many parts of the Global South show vast numbers of buildings that are small and lowrise, especially in Africa, which has more buildings than Europe and North America, but far less total built area and volume.
[Screenshot: FC]
The ability to map building height and volume reveals disparities that conventional 2D maps tend to hide: A dense informal settlement and a carefully planned neighborhood of multistory buildings can look similar in a flat, areabased statistic. But if you have accurate 3D buildings, experts can understand that they offer radically different housing conditions and require different infrastructure. Their proposed metric of building volume per capita turns the GlobalBuildingAtlas into a lens for spotting where housing and infrastructure lag behind population and, therefore, where urban policy and investment should concentrate.
[Screenshot: FC]
How they made it
The scientists used machine learning algorithms to identify one billion more buildings than any previous global database, creating simplified 3D “shoebox” models for 97% of them. That’s 2.68 billion 3D buildings, compared to Google Open Buildings, which has 1.8 billion building outlines.
The team started with daily satellite images from the PlanetScope constellation, which photographs the Earth at roughly 9.8 feet per pixel. Then they stitched together about 800,000 cloud-free scenes from 2019 into a seamless global mosaic, and taught a neural network to recognize buildings by training it on known building outlines from OpenStreetMap and other sources.
To add height to these flat building outlines, the team used laser measurements (LiDAR) from airborne surveys in developed countries to train an AI that can estimate how tall a building is just by looking at a single satellite photosimilar to how a person can judge a skyscraper’s height from its appearance and shadow. This height-prediction model scans the entire global image and assigns a height value to every pixel, even calculating its own margin of error.
Instacart just became the first company to offer an end-to-end integrated shopping experience with OpenAIs ChatGPT. Its yet another signal that AI is about to upend the way we shopand, maybe, the way we cook.
The new partnership was announced by Instacart and OpenAI on December 8. To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients. From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or leaving the chat.
[Image: Instacart]
This partnership is a significant milestone in the race among tech companies to make AI an integral part of the shopping experience. Amazon, for example, now offers a suite of AI tools to help shoppers make decisions and point them toward future purchases.
According to Adobe Digital Insights 2025 report on holiday season shopping, the company saw the first material surge in AI-directed traffic (users following links recommended by chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini) to U.S. retail sites in 2024. This year, it expects AI traffic to rise by 520%. In all, Adobe found that over a third of shoppers in the U.S. have used AI to help with online shoppingand that number is bound to keep growing.
Clearly, many shoppers are already turning to ChatGPT for advice on the best products to buy and where to get them. For OpenAI, then, it makes sense to bring the shopping itself directly onto its own platform. In all likelihood, this partnership with Instacart is only a trial run ahead of plenty more integrations to come.
In a press release, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, said that the new collaboration will allow users to go from meal planning to checkout in a single, seamless conversation. I decided to put Turley’s promise to the test by using the new interface the way I predict that its target audience might: recreating a TikTok-viral recipe (Ina Gartens brownie pudding) from start to finish.
Testing out ChatGPT’s recipe-generating chops
Making a trendy recipe with the new Instacart integration starts with actually getting ChatGPT to accurately reproduce its ingredients and instructionswhich, as it turns out, can be a challenge.
Based on my testing, ChatGPT is pretty good at regurgitating more general, nonspecific recipes from the open web. For example, a search for a popular, gooey chocolate chip cookie yields a standard recipe that ChatGPT describes as similar to The New York Times or Nestlé Toll House; while a search for green goddess salad yields a recipe that went viral in 2022 and has since resulted in dozens of publicly available articles, which ChatGPT is then able to pull from for its own summary.
Things get a bit trickier when youre looking for one specific recipe, thoughespecially if it’s protected by a paywall or other blocker. When I asked ChatGPT to find the recipe and instructions for The New York Times Lemon-Tumeric Crinkle Cookies, it confidently provided a slightly inaccurate ingredient list and instructions, and attributed the recipe to the wrong author. I asked the question again, this time including the real author in the prompt, only to be met with the same response with the disclaimer, I cant reproduce the copyrighted article verbatim, but these ingredients + steps accurately reflect the recipe (they didnt).
I moved on to attempting to recreate Ina Gartens brownie pudding, starting by asking ChatGPT to use popular TikTok videos to find the recipe. The resulting recipe was almost correct, but not quiteit substituted Gartens recommended framboise liquor for coffee. Next, I specifically requested that ChatGPT use the most-viewed TikTok video about the recipe in order to recreate it. The chatbot told me that it doesnt have access to TikToks live trending videos, so it couldnt pull exact instructions from the most-viewed clip, instead offering a TikTok-style version based on what it called popular adaptations. This version strayed even further from the original.
[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]
As a last-ditch effort, I asked ChatGPT to pull the brownie pudding recipe directly from Ina Gartens official website. ChatGPT then assured me that it was providing the exact recipe from her site (not an adaptation, not a TikTok version, but her real published recipe). This was, once again, not the real recipe.
[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]
For OpenAIs model, it seems, finding general recipes on the open web is simple, but accurately retrieving information from external apps, like TikTok, or paywalled websites, like The New York Times, is unpredictable at best.
Following this slightly maddening exchange, I decided to bake both Gartens official recipe and ChatGPTs bootleg TikTok-style version in order to decide which reigns supreme.
The battle of the brownie puddings
After my frustrating back-and-forth with ChatGPT, I was ready to throw in the towel and place my Instacart order as quickly as possible. But the process of actually using the integration proved to be a bit of a rollercoaster.
At first, everything was proceeding smoothly. I conducted several test runs using the activation word Instacart, and ChatGPT successfully added my requested ingredients to my cart directly through our chat. Mid-way through this experimentation, though, ChatGPT appeared to lose the plot, informing me, I dont have the ability to directly add items to Instacart or access your account.
[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]
After several troubleshooting questions, during which ChatGPT informed me that the Instacart connector wasnt active, I asked how to reactivate it. ChatGPT then said that I needed to be in a ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan session with Plugins enabled. In an email to Fast Company, though, an Instacart spokesperson clarified that the integration is available to all accounts, including free ones.
[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]
Its unclear to me exactly what went wrong, but when I tried again several hours later in a new chat, the connection was up and working again. Ordering the ingredients for the Tik-Tok style recipe was quick and straightforward, and everything arrived from my local Target within two hours (except the unsalted butter, which was substituted for salted due to a store shortage).
The recipes themselves were a similar concept with notably different executions. The TikTok style version, for example, called for vanilla extract instead of Gartens seeds from one vanilla bean; likely a result of multiple TikTokers making the swap themselves at home and suggesting it to viewers (vanilla beans in this economy?). Gartens original version also required cocoa powder alone for the chocolate component, whereas ChatGPTs interpretation called for solid chocolate. And, in terms of the baking process, Gartens pudding needed to be suspended in a water bath and baked for an hour, while ChatGPT omitted the water step entirely and suggested just 30 minutes in the oven.
Given its presumably crowd-sourced origins, the TikTok-style recipe was unsurprisingly cheaper, easier to make, and quicker. It had an extremely dark, almost bitter chocolate taste compared to the original recipe, which was mellower and sweeter. Both have their place, in my opinionthough Gartens was ever so slightly tastier.
Right now, the Instacart integration feels built for people who are already regular users of both ChatGPT and Instcart. For that niche, it might save time when brainstorming for meal prep and troubleshooting general recipes. But for everyone else, Im not sold on the utility of this tool. If you have a specific recipe in mind, its probably easier (and less headache-inducing) to just make it the old-fashioned way.
[Photo: courtesy of the author]
Most people care about fairness at work and want to support colleagues who face marginalizationfor example, people of color, women, and people with disabilities. Our research has found that 76% of employees want to be allies to co-workers who face additional challenges, and 84% value equity. Thats in line with a 2025 national survey that found 88% of employees supported employers offering training on how to be more inclusive.
So why doesnt that support always turn into action?
Our new study in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health points to one reason: Some people may freeze with worry because they feel like a fake. Specifically, they feel like they dont have the skills to effectively support their marginalized co-workers, even though they want to. Those feelings may block action, which makes people feel even more fraudulentcreating a loop thats hard to break.
Together, weMeg Warren, Michael T. Warren, and John LaVellefound that 1 in 5 people who want to support marginalized groups experience the impostor phenomenon even when they have the skills to be effective allies.
The impostor phenomenon, formerly called the impostor syndrome, is the feeling that youre not good enougheven when theres objective evidence that you are. Researchers have documented it across many workplace and professional settings, including in health care, technology, entrepreneurship, the C-suite, and academia.
Importantly, these feelings are linked to significantly higher anxiety and feelings of depression among people who want to be allies. We found that men, leaders, younger employees, and people of color were more likely to experience the impostor phenomenon in the context of allyship.
What the impostor phenomenon looks like for allies
Consider James, a senior project manager. For the past few years, his company has expected all managers to undergo diversity, equity and inclusion training and to support the companys Black Employee Network. Earlier this year, however, the company publicly withdrew its commitment to DEI and removed all mentions of it from its website.
When his team asked for his thoughts, James felt lost. The facts he learned during the Black Employee Network meetings were unsettling and undeniable. Before, he regularly cited these during various meetings with his colleagues and senior leaders. Now, he felt pressured to act as if none of this mattered. He felt frustrated, at a loss for words, and a complete fakelike he didnt know how to support his colleagues anymore.
While James is a composite character drawn from many stories weve heard over the course of our research, his experience captures the bind that many would-be allies face.
When allies feel this way, they often compare themselves to an imagined perfect ally, thinking that if they cant be outrageously heroic, they must be failures. They then deal with feelings of inadequacy by procrastinating or overpreparing before stepping up for othersto the point where they miss crucial opportunities where they could have made a difference.
People tend to feel like an impostor when they encounter a challenge that seems bigger than their ability to cope with it. So its not surprising that a lot of people feel this way about workplace equity. Inequity and bias play out in complex ways in organizations: The rules change rapidly, and people can receive mixed messages about what behaviors are appropriate, valued and rewarded. This can make allyship feel overwhelmingly challenging, even for those who are otherwise skilled.
Work culture also matters. In toxic organizational cultures or hypercompetitive environments, people feel pressure to hide their mistakes, they worry about colleagues sabotaging their efforts, and they see humility as a weakness. In such placesand especially when the would-be allys role is highly visible and entails heavy responsibilitypeople are vulnerable to impostor feelings.
Past criticism can add fuel, too. If youve been admonished for standing up for a colleague or have seen others be attackedincluding by those who wish to maintain an unjust status quoyou might further feel pressure to only act in ways that are immune to criticism. Thats an impossible standard.
Consequences of feeling like an impostor: Feeling worse, doing worse
Leaders in particular are vulnerable to feeling like impostors on allyship. Many havent been properly trained on how to listen to and support co-workers who might be facing discrimination and are quietly suffering, yet are held responsible for solving complex issues around fairness that long predated them.
And when stuck in this uncomfortable space, people who feel like impostors are likely to become defensive and feel pressured to be a hero. To prove themselves, they may overcompensate in ways that backfirefor example, by loudly claiming support for disadvantaged workers without following up with useful action, or by swooping in to fix issues without respecting the preferences of the people involved.
Unfortunately, this not only affects their ability to be a supportive colleague, but it also likely harms their mental health. Indeed, the impostor phenomenon has been found to be linked to heightened anxiety and feelings of depression, both in our study and beyond.
So you might wonder: What if I opt out of all of this by not thinking about inequity at all? Our research suggests that this is a bad idea. People who are disengaged from issues of inequity, and who dont invest in learning and growing as allies, experience lower self-confidence at work and have lower job satisfaction. Checking out of allyship could be bad for your professional well-being.
The good news is you dont have to be stuck feeling this way. You can take low-risk, bite-sized actions that can pull you out of feeling fake and boost your confidence, all while improving your own professional success and mental health.
Research points to three simple ways forward. First, recognize and loudly celebrate the strengths of marginalized colleages, which creates an uplifting work culture. Second, take concrete steps to build trustfor example, by giving proper credit to a disadvantaged colleague if their merit is wrongfully questioned. And finally, overcome your cynicismwhich research shows invariably suppresses constructive actionand instead adamantly choose hope, even when its hard.
Meg Warren is an associate professor of management at Western Washington University.
John M. LaVelle is an adjunct professor of public policy at the University of Minnesota.
Michael T. Warren is an assistant professor of psychology at Western Washington University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
