When a Swedish startup set out to make personal care packaging more sustainable, it turned to an unexpected source of inspiration: aluminum cans.
Meadow, the company behind the concept, created a refill system that seals shampoo, lotion, and other products inside aluminum cans. Unlike soda, theres no pull tabthe aluminum cartridge, called Kapsul, has a solid lid. But when you insert the can into Meadows reusable pump and twist on the top, the device pierces the lid with a clean, satisfying pop. When youve used up the product, the aluminum can be easily recycled.
We knew that we would not be able to develop a totally new packaging solution, says Victor Ljungberg, Meadows CEO and cofounder. We dont have the time and we cant afford to build totally new infrastructure. We need to look at what we have.
[Photo: Meadow]
They knew that aluminum beverage cans had a high recycling ratein Sweden, its around 90%. In the U.S., its a much lower 43%. But thats still more than triple the recycling rate for plastic packaging. Aluminum can also be recycled repeatedly without losing any quality, unlike plastic.
The aluminum beverage can, the most recycled container, already exists on the market, Ljungberg says. But the whole industry around this has been focused on one thingto use that container for food-grade content. We asked ourselves, okay, what is it that we need to do to take it into new categories such as personal care, pharma, home care, and others?
[Photo: Meadow]
For safety reasons, they didnt want to put soap in a can that someone might mistake for a drink. Thats why the team designed the lid to only open when its inside the reusable dispenser. The design also makes it easier to use than typical refills that have to be poured into a container, Ljungberg argues. (The company calls the packaging prefills since theyre already ready to use.) Many refills also currently come in thin plastic film that ends up in the trash.
Of course, there are other ways to ditch plastic packaging. Companies like Kitsch make shampoo in bar form, for example, so it only needs a small paper box. But Ljungberg believes that many consumers arent quite ready for that much change.
[Photo: Meadow]
We need to admit that there is a very established single-use culture among people all over the planet, he says. With what we do, we meet consumers where they are, saying that we are not forcing them to change behavior too much. Instead, they will buy the cans on the shelf just as they buy goods today.
[Photo: Meadow]
The startup partnered with DRT, the Ohio-based company that invented the first pull-tab cans, as well as Ball Corporation, the worlds largest can manufacturer. Ball Corp is also one of the companys minority investors. (The startup has raised around $15 million in seed funding so far.) Because its possible to make the cans on existing equipment in factories, the packaging can easily scale up.
Brands can add their own branding to the cans and dispensers, paying a licensing fee to use the system. Companies like Ikea or Muji could also potentially make universal dispensers. Nuniq, a Swiss personal care company that avoids plastic packaging, recently started using Meadow’s system for products like cleanser and body lotion. More brands will soon follow when Meadow launches in the U.K. this fall.
On a crisp day in May, Josh Blackman, a third generation cotton farmer, is sitting atop his 14-foot tall John Deere planter on his family farm in Littleton, North Carolina. The planter is an engineering marvel. Its 10 arms create neat rows in the soil, then drop cotton seeds at the right depth, allowing one man to do the work of 50 laborers. By October, this field will be blanketed with fluffy white bolls of cotton that never fail to take the 34-year-old Blackmans breath away. Cotton is so pretty at harvest time, he tells me.
Blackmans grandparents established Warren Farms in 1941. Until the 1960s, roughly 95% of the clothes Americans wore were made domestically, so cotton from Warren Farms would travel by truck to nearby mills and factories to become Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and Levis jeans. But over the past five decades, the U.S. apparel industry has been decimated. Today, 97% of the clothes that Americans buy is imported, largely from China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The majority of Blackmans crop will be shipped to Asia where it will be turned into fabric, then cut and sewn into garments at low-wage factories.
Blackman often feels he is at the mercy of geopolitical forces. Hes competing with farmers in developing countries who produce more cheaply because they pay lower wages and have weaker environmental protections. China, the worlds biggest cotton importer, has an outsized influence on the commoditys price. This year, Blackman expects to lose money on his harvest because the price of cotton is less than 70 cents a pound, down about 10 cents from 2024, which was already considered a bad year. The weather determines the crop, and the market determines what we get for it, he says. But Blackman believes that if apparel manufacturing returned to the United States, there would be more demand for domestic cotton, allowing him to earn more. Bringing the factories to Americaopening them back upwill create a market for my cotton right here, he says.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
For years, the idea of breathing life back into American clothing factories, reversing half a century of off-shoring, seemed like a pipe dream. But the plate tectonics of the apparel industry are shifting. Over the past decade, dozens of American-made labels like Buck Mason, American Trench, Imogene & Willie, and Duckworth have sprung up, tapping into the skeletal remains of the domestic supply chain. This was a small-scale effort: These high-end brands make clothes for affluent customers who care about sustainability, ethical labor, and durability. But everything changed last summer, when Walmartthe largest company in the worldentered the picture. The retailer dropped a $12.98 T-shirt made end-to-end in the U.S. just in time for the Fourth of July.
Walmart sells an enormous quantity of clothing. Of the $648 billion in revenue it generated last year, Coresight Research estimates that $29.5 billion came from apparel. (By comparison, Gap, Inc. and H&M only generated $15 billion and $22 billion respectively.) The vast majority of clothes Walmart sells is made overseas, predominantly in China. But this American-made T-shirt suggests theres another way forward.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
Without a domestic supply chain, Walmart collaborated with an upscale U.S.-made label, American Giant, to make its Fourth of July collection. American Giant has spent the last 12 years building a domestic supply chain and cultivating demand for its $45 t-shirts and $148 hoodies. The T-shirts that came out of this partnership were a hit, with Walmart reportedly selling hundreds of thousands of T-shirts, spurring the two companies to make a $39.98 hoodie that similarly flew off the shelves. Now Walmart is building an ongoing partnership with American Giant to produce even more garments.
President Trumps pursuit of steep tariffs on China (currently 30%) and other apparel-producing countries, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia (at a universal baseline of 10%), have put Walmarts efforts in a new light. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon spent part of his last earnings call outlining ways the company was managing the cost pressure from tariffs, and made news whe he noted that prices would go up. Whether Trumps tariffs are intended to restart American manufacturing or simply extract more money from trading partners remains to be seen. But the jolt to the supply chain has forced large retailers and brands to consider what it would take to make their products domestically.
[Photo: courtesy Warren Farms/Enfield Cotton Ginnery]
Walmart, for one, is making a concerted effort to build an apparel supply chain in the United States. Today, American-made garments still only comprise a tiny fraction of Walmarts overall apparel sales. But as the company places enormous garment ordersmany times what startups like American Giant makes in a yearit offers a glimpse into what 21st century apparel manufacturing in America could look like. To produce at these volumes, factories of the future are likely to be powered by robots and AI, and managed by a relatively small group of highly skilled workers, rather than the labor-intensive operations of the past.
The possibility of making clothes in America is closer than it has been for decades. But it is still unclear whether this reality will materialize. Much will depend on whether Walmart continues its commitment to American-made apparel and spurs other large retailers to do the same. And whether Trumps tariffs stay in place long enough to motivate brands to set up supply chains in the United States.
At Warren Farms, Blackmans face lights up when he hears about Walmarts ambitions to make clothes in America. His cotton goes to a yarn mill that supplies American Giant, which means it could very well end up in the next batch of Walmart T-shirts and hoodies. I love growing cotton, he says. Its all Ive ever known. I want to be able to keep doing it.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
When Walmart Met American Giant
It was 2022 and Bayard Winthrop should have been on top of the world. A decade prior, he had quit his job at Chrome, an outdoor apparel brand, to launch American Giant. In the face of naysayers who told him his dream of making clothes in America was impossible, Winthrop had succeeded. American Giant was profitable and generated upwards of $10 million in annual revenue. Its 50 employees were constantly working to keep up with the demand for the brands growing assortment, which now includes jeans, dresses, and collaborations with celebrities like Jason Kelce.
Bayard Winthrop [Photo: courtesy American Giant]
Despite American Giants success, Winthrop wasnt satisfied. He had launched his brand to create the kind of durable, high-quality clothing he remembered from his childhood in the 1970s, when brands like Wrangler and Pendleton were still produced domestically. Back then, those brands were affordable to working-class people. But American Giant, which has a cult following among Bay Area tech executives, is decidedly premium.
Winthrop knew that if he could increase the size of his production runs, he would be able to create the same high-quality products for lower prices. In other words: He needed a quick growth hack. It dawned on him that the solution was for a large scale, mass market retailer to tap into his supply chain. And the most obvious one was Walmart.
In 2021, Walmart had announced it was investing $350 billion in sourcing American-made products over the next 10 years. The investment would go into everything from food (which makes up 60% of Walmarts sales) to packaging to electronics. This initiative would create jobs and make Walmart more resistant to the supply chain shocks we have seen in recent years resulting from COVID and Trumps tariffs.
Walmart has said that textiles are one of the hardest categories to make domestically, because the industry has been largely off-shored. Still, Walmart is slowly making inroads. In 2022, it encouraged one of its largest India-based suppliers, Classic Fashion, to open a cut-and-sew factory in Santa Ana, California, staffed by 125 workers who produce exclusively for Walmart. It partners with cutting-edge American tech startups like Unspun, which automates the cut and sew process, and Rubi Laboratories, which creates fibers using carbon dioxide.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
Look, there are many things that I disagree with Walmart about, Winthrop says. But no other retailer has done anything even close to what Walmart has done to support American manufacturing.
In the summer of 2023, Winthrop went on Mike Rowes The Way I Heard It podcast to talk about American Giant. During the chat, Winthrop gave Walmart kudos for its commitment to domestic manufacturing. A few weeks after the show aired, Winthrop got a call from Walmart executives inviting him to the companys Bentonville, Arkansas, headquarters. On that podcast, we got to hear his thought process not only about U.S. manufacturing, but Walmarts role in it, says Avinash Bhaskar, VP of private brands at Walmart. We wanted to explore a possible partnership.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
After a year of close collaboration between American Giant and Walmarts sourcing teams, the two companies launched co-branded T-shirts that cost $12.98. Six months later, they launched a sweatshirt that cost $38.98. Walmart wont share exactly how many T-shirts and hoodies it has produced, but people familiar with the matter say it is in the hundreds of thousands of units, many times bigger than a typical American Giant production run. These garments have sold well, prompting Walmart to turn the pilot project into an ongoing relationship. American Giant has also begun receiving calls from other mass-market retailers interested in exploring similar collaborations. (Winthrop declined to share which specific companies, since discussions are ongoing.)
The garments in the Walmart line are manufactured through the same supply chain that American Giant uses for its more expensive products. But making a large volume of a single garment immediately brings down the cost per unit by five or 10 times, Winthrop explains. Making a few thousand units of clothing is extremely expensive, because a factory takes time to train workers on how to cut and sew the product, and must use whatever equipment they have on hand, even if it is not the most efficient. When a factory makes hundreds of thousands of the same garment, workers get faster and more accurate; the factory can also invest in tools like automatic label makers and more powerful fabric cutters. Theres an initial startup cost for making a garment, Winthrop says. With a large volume, factories can amortize those costs knowing they have months of production ahead. They can accept a lower margin in exchange for predictable, reliable volume.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
To make the Walmart collection even more affordable, the team picked different materials and fabrications than a typical American Giant product. For instance, the Walmart shirts use widely available cotton yarns, versus more luxurious yarns like Supima, which can add up to $15 to the cost of a T-shirt. Walmart also uses fabric that is knit in a tube, cutting out the labor of sewing side seams, which costs about 50 cents more per T-shirt.
In spite of all these efforts to reduce costs, American factories arent able to sell their products to Walmart as cheaply as Asian manufacturers, Bhaskar says. But there are other advantages to making products here. Since the factories are closer to the customer, they can make products with shorter lead times, making it easier for Walmart to manage inventory. This means Walmart is less likely to buy too many units, which could end up marked down or unsold. It was a puzzle for us to think about how to make this product financially workable, Bhaskar says. But we realized it was a completely different cost equation from manufacturing overseas.
Still, its important to remember that Walmarts commitment to these American suppliers is relatively superficial. Walmart has not invested directly in these factories, or in American Giant. It just places large purchase orders, which gives these suppliers cash upfront, which they can use to make their own investments in technology or staffing. We think about the art of the possible with the purchase order, says Kyle Carlyle, Walmarts VP of supply and sourcing innovation. As I think about the supply chain, it allows Bayard and others to think about the volume of fabric they need or different points they can automate.
But experts point out that Walmart could pull out of these relationships at any time, particularly if it faces other economic pressures, including tariffs. A big order from Walmart is a bonanza for these suppliers, says Rachel Slade, author of Making It In America, a history of manufacturing and labor in the United States. But will Walmart place the same order next year?
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
How Walmart Drove Factories Overseas
Its ironic that Walmarts team depends on a small startup to source apparel in the United States. In the first two decades after Walmart was founded in 1962, it grew into one of the biggest buyers of American-made apparel. But, as Slade writes, when Walmart set out to dominate mass market retail in the 1980s, it focused on delivering the lowest possible prices. Walmarts scale meant that it could pressure manufacturers to sell their products fo less money, Slade says. Eventually, the manufacturers had to go overseas, where labor was cheaper, if they wanted to retain these contracts with their biggest buyer. Today, Walmart makes roughly 80% of its discretionary merchandise, which includes clothing, in China, according to the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
Retailers werent the only ones driving down the price of goods. Geopolitical forces were making off-shoring easier, as well. In 1978, the Chinese government opened its economy to foreign trade and subsidized its burgeoning apparel industry to make it more globally competitive. Meanwhile, the U.S. government was eager to give Americans access to cheaper products made in low-wage countries. In 1992, the U.S. signed NAFTA, which eliminated tariffs against Mexico, and in 2001, when China joined the World Trade Organization, U.S. companies had low-tariff access to Chinese goods. It didnt take long for Americas clothing factories to hollow out. Between 1990 and last year, the number of Americans working in clothing manufacturing shrank from 900,000 to 84,000.
America quickly became flooded with cheap clothes. But these low-priced T-shirts and jeans came at other costs. Many American towns built around the textile industry (such as Fall River, Massachusetts, or Gastonia, South Carolina) never recovered when major employers closed, leading to blight. Mill and garment factory jobs were never high paying, but they provided livable wages and steady employment. There are now pockets of persistent poverty, says David Robinson, director of external affairs at Manufacturing Renaissance, a Chicago-based organization that helps people find work in manufacturing. No other industry has come close to manufacturing in terms of creating opportunities for people to enter the middle class.
The explosion of cheap clothing has also led to environmental catastrophe. The $2.5 trillion global apparel industry produces hundreds of billions of garments annually, which generates between 4% and 8.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In many Asian manufacturing hubs, there are weaker environmental regulations and worker protections than in the U.S., which means both the planet and people are regularly harmed in the process of making clothes.
President Trump claims that he is trying to reverse decades of off-shoring with his tariffs. Many who support American manufacturing believe that some sort of tariff regime is good because it could even the playing field. Tariffs are a really interesting tool that the U.S. has used since its founding, Slade says, pointing out that the U.S. used tariffs to protect its textile industry throughout the 18th and 19th century. The United States can realign pricing to reflect the fact that we regulate industry because we believe in living wages, safe working conditions, and not turning rivers into flammable liquids.
The problem, though, is that the Trump administration has unleashed the tariffs haphazardly, making it difficult for companies to shift their supply chains to the United States. Building new factories in America is a slow, expensive process and it is unclear how long the current tariffs will stay in place. We need to create an environment that can give companies the assurance to make long-term investments, says Sheng Lu, director of graduate studies in the department of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware. But right now, I only see uncertainties. I dont even know what the tariffs will look like a month from now, and building a new factory requires a five- or 10-year market outlook.
Walmart, thanks to its large size and profit margins, is capable of taking a longer view on American manufacturing. In 2013, when President Obama was in office, Walmart made its first $250 billion commitment to sourcing products domestically over the following decade. In 2021, it made a second $350 billion decade-long commitment. According to Walmarts Carlyle, one reason the company is so focused on domestic manufacturing is research showing that it is important to its customers: In 2020, Walmart conducted a survey with BCG in which 85% of its clientele said that it was important for retailers to carry products made or assembled in America. Were trying to figure out how we can make this a priority because we know this is what our customers want, Carlyle says.
Walmart says domestic sourcing could support the creation of an estimated 750,000 new jobs. Many of these workers would be likely to be Walmart customers, too. According to Jessica Delton, a history professor at Skidmore and author of The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism, Walmart has long been in the business of hiring from among its customer base. They opened up in poor, rural areas that had been neglected by other retailers, she says. They could sell things cheaper to these people, but also offer them jobs. Walmart put money in their pockets they could then turn around and spend at Walmart.
Still, Walmarts entire business is built on delivering low prices. And its executives are aware that its customers have a threshold for how much more they are willing to spend on American-made goods. Our biggest challenge was to make the cost palatable to the customer, says Bhaskar.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
The Factory of the Future
After Warren Farms is done harvesting each fall, its newly picked cotton makes the four-hour drive to Parkdale Mills, one of the worlds largest yarn manufacturers and the largest buyer of U.S. cotton. The majority of Parkdales yarn is exported overseas, mostly to China, where it is woven into fabric. But a tiny fraction also goes into making American Giant productsand that figure is growing, thanks to the Walmart collaboration.
Founded in 1916, when the U.S. was still a major player in textile production, the Gastonia, North Carolina-based Parkdale bought raw cotton from farms throughout the South and spun it into yarn. Spinning machines already existed back then, but the process was still labor-intensive, as hundreds of workers carried heavy bales and fed them into the equipment to produce 900,000 pounds of yarn thread annually.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
Today, this facility is equipped with cutting-edge machinery from Germany and Switzerland. As a result, it produces two million pounds of yarn every week with only 23 workers. Fluffy bolls of cotton flow through pipes on the ceiling and walls, depositing them in machines that clean the fibers, comb them out, and spin them into filaments. Other machines wind the thread into spools and package them to be shipped off to fabric mills. Today, there are few people on the factory floor; instead, humanoid robots carry boxes around on trays. One abruptly stops a few feet away from me when it senses I am nearby.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
Matt Hardegree, the plant manager, began working in a yarn-making plant in 1980, right out of college. Growing up near cotton fields in Alabama, he was used to seeing two or three mills in every town. But when he started working in mills himself, the off-shoring was already underway. The smallest, the oldest, the weakest, the most out of date, got eaten up first, Hardegree says. The strongest survived.
Parkdale was the strongest. For years, the company poured its profits into buying the latest yarn-making machinery. This allowed it to beat out competitors and buy out other American mills. Today, it employs 4,500 people across 19 mills in the United States, and six in South America, generating upwards of $1 billion in annual revenues. It has managed to remain relevant globally, competing with high-tech mills in China. Hardegree has watched this play out over 45 years, during which hes learned how to operate increasingly complex equipment. He takes me across the floor, pushing buttons to pause the machines so he can hand me pieces of cotton and yarn threads to touch.
[Photo: courtesy American Giant]
Many Americans image of apparel manufacturing is stuck in the 60s and 70s, the last time factories were still thriving here. But the industry has evolved. Much of the process is automated, from Josh Blackmans cotton planting machines to Parkdales yarn mills. These days, most of the technology in apparel manufacturing is developed overseas rather than here in the United States. The American apparel industry is perceived to be in secular decline says Steven Kurutz, author of American Flannel, about the new generation of fashion labels building U.S. supply chains. Bright young people dont want to go into an industry like this. It is engineers in China, and other places with robust garment industries, that see the value in coming up with breakthroughs.
American manufacturers are also less competitive when it comes to the low-tech, labor-intensive parts of the apparel industry, namely cutting and sewing. American Giant owns a knitwear factory in Middlesex, North Carolina, but it was too small to fulfill the large orders that Walmart has brought in. Winthrop ended up finding suppliers in the Los Angeles Garment District. Cutting and sewing is where you hit a labor log-jam, he says. Our access to high-quality labor in Los Angeles was 20 times what it is in rural North Carolina.
Even in Los Angeles, though, its hard to find workers who are willing to do the repetitive labor of sewing hundreds of garments a day for low wages. Most of the people staffing these factories are immigrants from Mexico and South America who learned how to sew in factories there. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there are nearly half a million open manufacturing jobs right now in the U.S., whereas workers are lining up for factory jobs in Vietnam and Mexico.
The U.S. is an advanced economy with abundant capital and technology, while less advanced economies, including China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, are abundant in cheap labor, says Sheng Lu, of the University of Delaware. Well never have the comparative advantage in the labor-intensive parts of garment-making, like cut and sew.
Many aspects of cutting and sewing have been automated and improved over the decades. For instance, digital pattern making reduces wasted fabric, while laser cutters precisely slice through large volumes of cloth. But there hasnt yet been a technological leap to automatically turn fabric into garments. Ken Pucker, professor of the practice at Dartmouths Tuck School of Business, says there are clear reasons for this. For one thing, given how depressed wages are in many apparel-producing countries, factories havent been motivated to pour money into replacing these workers with machines. The styles change so frequently that its hard to figure out a model that allows for robotics, says Pucker. But that doesnt mean it cant happen in the future.
If America is serious about bringing apparel factories back, it will have to invest in automation. Though the Trump administration is levying tariffs in the name of American manufacturing, it hasnt yet offered any wide-scale support like tax credits or grants to spur innovation in apparel production. And establishing a new industry is expensive: When President Biden set out to develop Americas clean energy industry, he invested $1 trillion in manufacturing and infrastructure. The only way forward for the American apparel sector is for companies to make these investments. So far, few have stepped forward to do so. Walmart, for instance, does not invest in partner factories; it simply places large orders, like it has done with American Giant.
[Photo: Ashley Batz/Unspun]
Still, there are signs that Walmart is at least exploring new technologies that could one day replace cutting and sewing. In 2024, Walmart began placing orders with a tech startup called Unspun, which has developed technology that can weave yarn into clothes. We go from yarn directly to the garment stage, skipping the cut and sew stage entirely, says Beth Esponnette, Unspuns founder and CEO.
[Photo: Unspun]
The approach reduces the need for labor, but it is also better for the environment: There is no fabric discarded in this process, garments can be made on demand, and they can be made close to the customer, reducing transport emissions. Unspuns goal is to set up 3D weaving machines at microfactories around the country, with the goal of having 350 machines operational by 2030. I think its possible to automate many parts of the cut and sew process in the next few decades, but it will take big players like Walmart to achieve scale, Esponnette says.
Unspuns technology is still in its infancy, but Walmart is working on a pilot project to explore how Unspuns technology could be deployed in its supply chain. The first application of this partnership is to create mens chinos that will be sold at Walmart stores. Were exploring technology that could help us leapfrog where we are today, Carlyle says.
Back in American Giants factory in Middlesex, North Carolina, this kind of futuristic factory looks very far away. Winthrop stares out at the floor, where 85 workers are at their stations, manually sewing seams and tracing patterns onto fabric. Their needles bob and weave through fabric as they piece together the heavy-weight hoodies that made American Giant famous. But Winthrop has always had a gift for imagining a different reality; its what gave him the courage to start his company to begin with. A decade from now, he believes his factory will be smarter, faster, and more high-tech, churning out millions of high-quality clothes that Americans are proud to wear. We cant get there alone, Winthrop says. To level up, we need others to buy into our vision.
When Mike Krieger helped launch Instagram in 2010 as a cofounder, building something as simple as a photo filter took his team weeks of engineering time and tough trade-offs. Now, as chief product officer at Anthropic, hes watching early-stage startup founders accomplish far more in far less timesometimes over a single weekend. Thanks to intuitive agentic AI models (or AI agents), founders are experimenting with product, code, and business strategies, often without needing to hire specialized team members.
When I think back to Instagram’s early days, our famously small team had to make painful decisionseither explore adding video or focus on our core creativity, Krieger tells Fast Company. With AI agents, startups can now run experiments in parallel and build products faster than ever before.
To him, it signals a seismic shift: the rise of agentic entrepreneurship. Enterprises can supercharge engineering teams while individuals with bold ideas but no technical background can finally bring their visions to life.
At Anthropic, 90% of Claude’s code is now written by AI, and this has completely transformed how we build products. Recently, Claude helped me prototype something in 25 minutes that would have taken me six hours, Krieger says. I see founders who tried every model, couldn’t get their startup to work, then with Claude, their startup suddenly works.
Krieger believes agentic AI is fundamentally redefining what it means to be a founder. You no longer need to write code or raise significant capital to start building. The bottlenecks, he says, have shifted to decision-making and operational frictionlike managing merge queues. And the numbers support this momentum.
In its first week of launch, Claude 4 reportedly tripled Anthropics subscriber base and now accounts for more than 60% of the companys API traffic. Usage of Claude Code, its specialized AI coding agent, has spiked nearly 40%, drawing interest from both developers and nontechnical builders. Krieger shared that some users have even begun treating AI agents less like tools and more like capable creative collaborators.
AI models can now function like an entry-level worker, and that is going to have a big impact on the workforce. We think we need to talk about this so we can prepare our economy and our society for this change, which is happening very fast, he says. Its too late to stop the trainbut we can steer it in the right direction.
A few weeks ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that the first one-employee billion-dollar company could emerge as soon as 2026, enabled by AI. He also suggested AI could eliminate half of all entry-level jobs within the next five yearsa claim that drew immediate pushback from some in the tech industry.
Among the skeptics was Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who cautioned against overestimating the reliability of AI systems like Gemini. Even the best models still make basic mistakes, Pichai said during the recent Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco. Are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I dont think anyone can say for sure.
On the prospect of AI displacing the workforce in the near future, Pichai remained measured. Weve made predictions like that for the last 20 years about technology and automation, he said. And it hasnt quite played out that way.
Yet even amid skepticism, a quieter revolution is unfolding beneath the surface of agentic AIone thats reshaping how work itself is defined in the era of intelligent software collaborators.
MCP: The Infrastructure That Makes AI Work
The unsung hero behind Anthropic and Claudes leap in capability isnt just the model itselfits the Model Context Protocol (MCP). While Claude 4 is praised for its intelligence and natural language fluency, MCP is the system-level breakthrough that enables it to move from passive assistant to active collaborator. This open standard allows Claudes AI agents to securely interface with tools like GitHub, Stripe, Webflow, Notion, and even custom internal systems.
As a result, Claude isnt limited to answering prompts. It can pull real-time analytics, trigger actions, update databases, launch web assets, and manage entire project pipelines. Just as http enabled browsers to interact with websites, MCP is creating a universal interface layer for AI agents to operate across digital tools.
Previously, AI agents were largely isolatedthey could process information you gave them, but they couldn’t directly interact with your actual tools and systems, Krieger says. By solving the connection problem together, were building infrastructure that will unlock entirely new possibilities for human-AI collaboration, making AI systems dramatically more useful and relevant in real-world contexts.
Major tech companies are already integrating MCP. Microsoft has built it into Windows 11, Azure, and GitHub, allowing AI agents to run workflows across OS and cloud infrastructure. Google has added it to Gemini SDKs to bridge model interactions with live apps. Companies like Novo Nordisk, GitLab, Lyft, and Intercom are also deploying Claude agents into live workflows.
In this light, Amodeis one-person unicorn prediction seems less like hype and more like a reflection of a deeper platform shift.
As developers build new connections between knowledge bases, development environments, and AI assistants, were seeing the early emergence of the more connected AI ecosystem we envisioned, Krieger says. As AI assistants become more agentic, MCP will evolve to support increasingly sophisticated workflows. [MCP] might be the most important thing Anthropic has ever shipped.
Agentic AI Is Redefining the Modern Startup Tech Stack
Krieger sees the combination of Claude 4 and MCP as a genuine platform shiftone where the AI acts like a partner rather than just a productivity tool. He describes Claude Opus 4 as Anthropics most powerful agentic model yet and the worlds best coding model.
[Opus 4] can work autonomously for nearly seven hours, which transforms how teams approach work. When I can prototype something in minutes, that fundamentally changes what’s possible for a single person, Krieger says. In my experience, it mirrors how people manage their work. That level of autonomous task execution just wasnt possible before.
With MCP in play, Claude becomes more than an assistant. It can push code, analyze logs, manage dcumentation, and send updateswithout the constant context switching that slows teams down. In some cases, Krieger says, it simulates workflows that once required coordination across multiple departments. When you can iterate at speed, every manual process, every unnecessary meeting becomes this jarring interruption, he noted.
Still, not everyone is convinced that AI-powered unicorns are imminent. Analysts caution that while AI agents can automate many workflows, they cant yet match the experience seasoned professionals bring.
The state of LLM-based AI agents is that you must give them simple decisions to make to reliable answers. We are not close to being able to throw a bunch of data at an AI agent and trust its decision, Tom Coshow, a senior director analyst at Gartner, tells Fast Company. Is there an automatic VP of sales ready to go? Not even close.
Coshow emphasizes the need for realistic expectations. Its important to get real about what you can and cant build, he says. No-code design is incredibly powerful, but it also creates this illusion that anything you type into the box will just magically work. It doesnt.
Building robust AI agents for real-world business use, he explains, is far from trivial, noting, Complex agents are hard to get right. LLMs are inherently probabilistic, and most business processes simply cant rely on that kind of unpredictability.
A Brave New Startup Era?
Anthropics core bet reflects its broader philosophy: Were moving toward a world where major chunks of work are automated.
Its better to be aware of the risk and adjust to the change than to take the chance and be caught unprepared, Krieger says. Were seeing this shift begin with tech companies, but its going to move quickly into other knowledge-intensive industries.
So, is the one-person unicorn just hypeor a sign of things to come? It may still be too early to know. For experts like Coshow, the future lies not in abrupt disruption, but in careful evolution. The path forward is well-designed agentic workflows with a human in the loop, he says.
Whether or not a billion-dollar solo startup emerges by 2026, the tools to build one are already here. And that, as Krieger sees it, changes everything.
Its going to be about finding people who can work at the intersection of customer problems and AI capabilities, he says. The most valuable early hire might not be a traditional engineerit could be someone who translates needs into iterative, AI-powered solutions. The one-person unicorn will be relentlessly curious, and fluent in working with intelligent collaborators.
In my years as a Chief People Officerincluding leading HR through two corporate bankruptciesI learned the hard way that no perk or dashboard can save a sinking ship. No amount of free lunches or fancy engagement surveys can stop the exodus when employees are burned out. The only thing that kept the core team together was a shared meaning in what we were doing.
Fast forward to today, and I keep hearing a popular catchphrase: AI wont replace you. A person who knows how to use AI will. Its catchy, but surface-level. The deeper truth is that AI wont replace your job. But AI will expose your purpose. As automation accelerates, leadership will be judged on defining purpose and protecting the meaning that people can get from their work.
Once AI strips away the spreadsheets, reports, and routine tasks, were left with what only humans can offer: culture, trust, and mission. The best leaders in the AI era wont just make better decisionstheyll give people a reason to stay.
From knowledge to emotional intelligence
For centuries, leadership authority came from holding the most knowledge. If you had the answers, you had the power. But the internetand now AIchanged that. Today, information is abundant, instant, and almost free. Strategy templates, market research, and even forecasting analyses are one prompt away. Knowing more is no longer a competitive edge.
As knowledge became a commodity, leaders leaned on emotional intelligence (EQ) as the new X-factor: empathy, listening, and self-awareness. Business schools started preaching soft skills, and for good reason. IQ was still necessary, but EQ built trust, loyalty, and culture.
How AI is affecting EQ
Now, were seeing AI augment and automate EQ. AI-powered coaching tools whisper in managers ears to help them sound more empathetic on customer calls. Algorithms monitor Slack or emails to flag burnout risks. HR software can suggest how to phrase feedback based on an employees personality profile. EQ is still critical, but its quickly becoming a baseline that technology can assist with or even imitate. When everyone has an AI sidekick, emotional intelligence alone wont make a leader unique.
So, what remains as the true differentiator of great leaders? One word: meaning. Not information. Not tone. Purpose. The one thing a machine cannot provide is genuine mission and meaninga reason why were doing the work in the first place.
As someone who now consults on company transformations, I see this every day: Artificial intelligence can handle the what and how of work, but only real leaders can handle the why.
Why meaning matters more than ever
The business case for meaning is compelling. When work feels meaningful, performance soars and research backs that up. According to McKinsey, employees in high-meaning environments can be up to five times more productive at peak performance. Purpose-driven companies also dramatically outperform on key metrics. Deloitte reports that such companies grow faster than their competitors and enjoy far higher employee retention.
In short, meaning isnt a fluffy perk or a new HR programits performance fuel. No catered lunch or wellness app can substitute for an employees belief that their work matters. Its no wonder Gallup finds that only about one-third of employees are engaged at work, with many citing a low connection to their companys mission. People are starved for meaning, and theyll leave organizations that fail to provide it.
How great leaders infuse meaning into work
So, how do effective leaders cultivate meaning on the ground? It goes beyond slogans on the wall. In my experience and observation, the best leaders consistently do three things:
1. Connect every role to the mission
Great leaders dont just talk about purpose abstractlythey translate it for every team and individual. They help the junior accountant see how her spreadsheets support a greater mission, and the customer service rep understands who truly benefits from his daily calls.
Theres a famous story of a NASA janitor who, when asked what he was doing, replied: Im helping put a man on the moon. Thats the power of meaningful leadershipwhen everyone, even in humble roles, knows how their work contributes to a larger goal.
2. Protect the purpose in hard moments
Its easy to tout your companys noble mission when business is booming. Its much harder when youre facing layoffs, budget cuts, or a pivot that tests your values. Yet these tough moments are exactly when true leaders double down on purpose. Ive had to announce painful layoffs, and I did it by reaffirming what the company ultimately stood for and how we would stay true to that mission in the long run.
Great leaders refuse quick wins that violate core values, and they communicate even bad news through the lens of the organizations purpose. By protecting the integrity of the mission under pressure, you build credibility. Employees see that purpose isnt just PR its real, and it guides decisions. That consistency keeps your best people from walking out when times get tough.
3. Elevate meaning daily
Purpose isnt a poster in the break room or a once-a-year kickoff speech, its a daily practice. Leaders who excel at this weave meaning into the fabric of routines. They use storytelling, recognition, and even ritual to keep the why front and center. They make belief visible because belief drives effort. When people regularly hear how their work makes a difference, it reinforces that sense of meaning.
Focusing on meaning isnt just about making employees feel good or keeping them around. Its also about performance, resilience, and innovation. A highly skilled team that doesnt believe in the work will eventually burn out or quiet quit. On the other hand, even a lean team that truly believes will punch above its weight.
The leaders who will thrive in the AI era
The upshot is clear: The leaders who thrive from here on out wont be the ones with the highest IQ, or even EQ. Machines are rapidly catching up on knowledge and empathy. The winners will be the leaders who mean more to their teams, their organizations, and their customers.
In my consulting work, I tell executives: AI can do a lot, but it cant give your people a purpose. As technology takes over tasks, the last best leadership edge is cultivating an environment where work matters.
Meaning is no longer optionalits the difference between a team that merely endures and one that achieves extraordinary outcomes. Leaders who embrace this will not only retain their top talent; theyll unlock levels of performance that no AI can ever replicate. Theyll give their people a reason to come to work excited each dayand in the end, thats what truly separates the great companies from the rest.
At times, even the most capable teams find themselves stuck, operating on autopilot rather than experimenting, innovating, and adapting to change. Just as a defibrillator restores a normal heartbeat, leaders sometimes need to deliver a strategic jolt to reenergize their teams, disrupt stagnation, and rebuild trust and morale.
The Hidden Cost of Team Stagnation
The business case for disrupting the status quo is compelling. According to one report by Gallup, disengaged employees cost the global economy a staggering $8.8 trillion each year. McKinsey research further finds that employee disengagement and attrition can cost a midsize S&P 500 company up to $355 million annually in lost productivity, adding up to more than $1.1 billion in value erosion over five years.
Team stagnation doesnt just lead to missed deadlines or subpar work. It slows innovation, impedes decision-making, and damages morale. Left unchecked, it erodes an organizations competitive edge and amplifies the risk of broader cultural decay.
Why Strategic Disruption Matters
Meanwhile, energized and engaged employees fuel business growth. Gallup data shows that organizations with high employee engagement levels outperform their peers in productivity and sales. Strategic disruption, when delivered intentionally, becomes a tool for resilience and transformation. Its a form of conscious recalibration.
Consider Jessica, my former coaching client and a senior leader at a tech company. After a company-wide reorganization and a sudden return-to-office mandate, her team of 30 became demoralized. Productivity dipped, collaboration waned, and momentum faded. They werent resistant; they were exhausted. A deliberate disruption was needed.
Together, we built a two-day off-site focused on resetting expectations, reestablishing norms, and rebuilding trust. This intentional pause reenergized the team and reconnected them with their purpose. The results were immediate: Engagement rose, communication improved, and priorities became clearer.
Great managers dont just manage. They challenge complacency, spot stagnation, introduce interventions, and co-create a new path forward with their teams.
Understanding the Causes of Team Inertia
To reenergize their team members, leaders need to first understand whats holding them back. Inertia rarely arrives all at once. It sneaks in over time, fueled by structural misalignments and emotional fatigue. Common causes include:
Overwork and burnout. Relentless workloads and unrealistic expectations can dull even the most capable teams. When employees operate in a state of chronic stress, creativity dries up and initiative gives way to mere survival. Innovation takes a back seat.
Loss of purpose. Employees need to see how their work connects to something bigger. When purpose feels distant, work becomes transactional, motivation declines, and people disengage.
Low morale from top-down decisions. Corporate mandates, like abrupt RTO policies or layoffs, can devastate morale, especially if they contradict team values or employees lived realities. When employees are left out of the decision-making process, trust breaks down and buy-in diminishes.
Outdated or inefficient processes. Even high-performing teams falter when encumbered by obsolete systems or siloed structures. Redundant workflows and unclear communication create friction and waste time, draining forward energy.
Five Strategies to Regain Momentum
Leaders can disrupt inertia by introducing intentional shifts that foster trust, spark engagement, and realign the team. Below are five proven approaches to restore momentum.
1. Host an Off-Site Kickoff Meeting
Changing the setting can change the mindset. Off-sites provide space to reconnect, clarify expectations, and foster psychological safety. As a leadership and team coach, I often facilitate off-sites that use reflective exercises, feedback loops, and creative collaboration to reset dynamics.
Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, writes that teamwork begins by building trust, and the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability. Neuroscience reinforces this by asserting that rituals and new environments can rewire team norms and boost trust.
2. Diagnose the Problem as a Team
Instead of making assumptions from the top, involve the team in diagnosing whats offtrack. Owning problems together fosters engagement. Use reflective questions to guide the process:
Purpose and alignment: Do our current goals align with our teams mission? Where are we off course?
Energy and engagement: Where are we losing steam, and why? Can we redistribute workloads?
Psychological safety: Do we feel safe sharing feedback or dissenting opinions?
Adaptability and learning: What changes have we handled well recently? What skills do we still need?
3. Revisit the Team Structure
In fast-growing companies, structure often lags behind scale. When roles blur, decisions stall and accountability weakens. A structural audit can identify where friction occurs:
Are decision-making paths clear?
Are responsibilities overlapping or ambiguous?
Is there capacity where we need it, and support where its lacking?
Sometimes the solution is introducing a chief of staff or reassigning ownership. Dont hesitate to shift roles, consolidate efforts, or redesign workflows. Organizational agility is built on clarity and responsiveness. Structural realignment isnt about hierarchyits about empowering the right people to deliver with impact.
4. Conduct Regular Check-Ins and Prioritize Problem-Solving
High-quality check-ins create accountability and connection. They serve as forums for puse checks and course corrections. But its not just about frequency; its about depth.
Leaders can introduce simple tools like a decision-tree framework to categorize challenges and clarify what can be solved independently, collaboratively, or needs escalation.
After Jessicas off-site, I conducted one-on-one biweekly coaching sessions with her direct reports over the next six months. These conversations allowed her leaders to reflect on challenges, align on priorities, and design personal action plans. This created clarity, focus, and a sense of ownership.
As leadership speaker Simon Sinek puts it, Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge. Effective check-ins demonstrate care, build trust, and drive performance.
5. Challenge and Redefine Old Habits
Inertia often hides in routine. Teams may stick to outdated ways of working because they have always done it that way. Creating space to question these patterns is key.
One effective tool is the Start, Stop, Continue framework:
What new behaviors should we start?
What ineffective habits should we stop?
What should we continue and strengthen?
When team members co-create new norms, buy-in increases. People commit to what they help build. Leaders can further anchor these changes by modeling new behaviors, celebrating small wins, and reinforcing expectations consistently.
Culture change doesnt happen with one meeting. But it does begin with conscious decisions, repeated actions, and shared accountability.
Just like a defibrillator restarts the heart, an intentional shock to the system can breathe life back into a team stuck in a rut. It takes courage to disrupt. But with strategic intention, clear communication, and collaborative action, leaders can restore energy, trust, and direction. Momentum doesnt just return, its rebuilt. And often, that rebuilding becomes the foundation for something even stronger. It creates a team that is not only functional but also thriving, adaptable, and ready for whats next.
USAFacts, the nonprofit that aims to make government data more available, and understandable, to everyday Americans, is looking for a new leader who can help usher it into the AI age.
Poppy MacDonald, who has been the nonprofits president since 2018, will be stepping down on June 27. Steve Ballmer, the founder of USAFacts and former Microsoft CEO, will be stepping in in the interim, and hopes to fill role by the end of the year (or sooner).
In her seven year tenure, MacDonald oversaw the growth of the nonprofits reach, including to 640,000 newsletter subscribers, 65-plus million view on its “Just the Facts” video serieswhich explained things like how the government categorizes immigrants to how taxes fund the governmentand more than 16 million monthly website visitors. The nonprofit also released a massive report and data skills course for lawmakers; published more than 900 nonpartisan articles with data insights on topics like immigration, crime, and the economy; and, yes, began integrating AI analysis to respond to hyper-specific reader questions.
But going forward, USAFacts needs to focus on both speed and user experience, Ballmer says, in order to pull information from more than 90,000 government sources and help people apply all that data to their lives. How do you build AI style bot interactivity with our content? Ballmer says. There’s a ton of government data. We don’t have it all up there, if you will, in an accessible form. Can we use modern technology to move data into an accessible form at a faster rate? How will we work with the general purpose chatbotschat GPT, Microsoft, CoPilot, et cetera?”
What USA Facts is looking for in a leader
That means the next USAFacts president will have to have some technical skillsbut they also need to understand marketing and media in order to create new types of content and reach a bigger audience. (MacDonald herself came from a media background; she was previously the president of Politico). Do we have our content in enough forms, and the right forms, so that we can go from 16 million to 100 million visitors a year? Ballmer says.
That may sound lofty, but there are more than 250 million Americans of voting ageand Ballmer says a broad swath of Americans are interested in the topics USAFacts provides data for. The USAFacts president should be able to empower them to apply federal data to their everyday questions. How might I use the information if, you know, I’m shopping for a house. Let me understand my neighborhood. Or, on the flip side, this is the state of affairs, how do I want to express myself to my elected representatives? he says.
Thats a challenge at a time when many Americans lack a basic understanding of civics. A 2023 study found that one in six Americans couldnt name any of the three branches of government (two-thirds of Americans could name all three). Pew research from that same year found that fewer than half of Americans knew the length of a full term of office for a senator, or who chooses the president if theres an Electoral College tie. The rampage waged on federal offices by Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency has also highlighted how little Americans know about what federal workers actually do.
All that focuses on the role of the federal government, but local governments actually play an even bigger role in most Americans’ everyday lives, Ballmer notesand thats where those 90,000 sources of data come into play.
So the [next] leader then has to be able to be smart about being open about working with engineers and envisioning where AI takes us, Ballmer says. But they also have to have enough of that media flavor to understand how people want to consume information, along with an incredible marketing gene.
USAFacts and the role of AI
USAFacts has already experimented with AI. Ahead of the 2024 election, it unveiled a general AI-powered analysis engine that helped it take information from government sources like the Census Bureau or the Labor Department and use it to respond to ultra-niche reader questions.
If someone Googled, How many immigrants are in [my state]? or What is the unemployment rate in [my county]?, they would have found a direct answer from USAFacts (which was often featured in Googles AI overview and as the first search result).
But looking ahead, USAFacts wants to make this sort of AI response into more of a back and forth, allowing users to ask follow-up questions and have more of a back-and-forth conversation. Theres a few challenges there: current generative AI chatbots continue to hallucinate information, generating answers that just arent based in fact. Thats an issue for a company focused on disseminating facts.
USAFacts also touts itself as a nonpartisan organization; it has worked with politicians across the aisle and has emphasized its objectivity. We have to present real government data as it is. We can’t be interpreting it. We can’t be showing the wrong data, Ballmer says. So how do we take the core [LLM] technology, derive the benefit, without taking some of those risks? For USAFacts, that may look like a custom built chatbot; they wouldnt, for example, use a service that searches the open internet for government data; it would need to search only a specific database.
The nonprofits use of AI so far, by creating structured answer pages, has allowed for a human to be in the loop to ensure that trusted data is delivered to answer a user question, MacDonald notes. But what [Ballmer] really envisions for the future is that an American can come on to our site and search anything they want in an unstructured way, ask a question in natural human language, the question that is on their mind, and start interacting and getting that trusted data back, she says. You can’t really have a human in the loop in that process, right? And so it really relies on the technology.
A Changing landscape
The decision to bring in a new leader to guide USAFacts into this AI future was a mutual one, the nonprofit says. MacDonald and Ballmer have been discussing the leadership change for about six monthsand as Ballmer knows from his time running Microsoft, there are better and worse times for organizations to make a leadership transition. Were at a juncture point, he says.
USAFacts is in a really strong position coming out of the election, MacDonald adds. There’s momentum in terms of our AI efforts and how we can use that to scale the data that we can collect and clean and contextualize, but also the content that we can produce out of it and how personal and relevant it can be. And it just felt like a great new time to bring in a new leader with new experiences and new knowledge to bear.
MacDonald has helmed the nonprofit for seven years, the longest shes ever been at an organization. With er youngest child heading to college in the fall, MacDonald is going to take the summer to spend time with her family before thinking about whats next for her career.
Ballmer says MacDonald has left big shoes to fill for the next USAFacts president. The changing American landscape adds to that challenge. The Trump Administration has decimated government data collection. Trump ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association to stop tracking the cost of extreme weather and climate disasters, and has also hampered the ability of the National Weather Service to even collect climate and weather data, which undergird forecasts. He has also purged federal data sets and webpages on everything from crime to education to health, and even taken steps to dismantle entire agencies, like the Department of Education.
These situations have gotten Americans a bit more engaged with the facts, and provide an opportunity for what the nonprofit can do going forward. As people are hearing, hey, the Department of Education might close, I think they took it for granted that theres just always going to be a Department of Education, MacDonald says.
And now they’re curiouswhat does the Department of Education do? What does it fund? How would that impact my local school? And so we’re seeing an appetite from consumers who want this information, and that is a really exciting opportunity for how USAFacts can provide value, but also for our future growth trajectory.
USAFacts does not collect data itself; it simply publishes it from government sources. That means it needs government sources to keep existing. And though its nonpartisan, it will fight for those facts: If we think that there’s some important set of data that’s going away, we’ll make the case for it, Ballmer says. He actually tweeted at current Education Secretary Linda McMahon back in April, urging for the continuation of the National Center for Education Statistics.The future of U.S. education is on the line he said, and without solid data, we cant measure whats working.
But the nonprofits main purpose, he saysand a big challenge for its next leaderis keeping Americans interested in data at all. Unless we get more Americans to look at data, he says, it won’t matter how much we have.
Last year, when Ram Trucks parent company Stellantis announced it would discontinue the automakers popular Hemi V-8 engine for its Ram 1500 full-size pickup truck beginning this summer, its fans were upsetto say the least.
When Ram made the decision to discontinue production of the iconic Hemi V-8, the internet erupted, and lifelong loyalists voiced their outrage across social media, says Lindsay Fifelski, head of Ram brand advertising. We knew we couldnt market our way around this moment; we had to meet it head-on.
In the interim 12 months since the announcement, then-CEO Carlos Tavares stepped down from Stellantis. Then last week, the company announced the corporate version of Never mind!and the Hemi was back before it even left.
[Photo: Stellantis]
To double down on their message, Ram Trucks created a new commercial starring its CEO Tim Kuniskisand in it he admits the company made a mistake. Sales were down by more than 18% year over year in 2024, but Kuniskis told CNBC that he expects Hemi to represent 25% to 40% of the Ram 1500 pickup trucks sales this year.
Created with the ad agency Argonaut, the new spot was shot entirely with practical effects. It features Kuniskis himself behind the wheel of the truck, doing doughnuts, drifting, and taking a few hot laps on a NASCAR track.
One of Kuniskiss first lines in the ad is: We own it. We got it wrong. And were fixing it. Its a simple, textbook brand apology, creatively combined with the kind of pep talk aimed to get brand fans hyped for whats next.
The Ram apology ad is part of a growingand refreshingtrend of brands increasingly having the cajones to own their mistakes and be upfront about it. Last year, I outlined the five types of brand apologies. Both Bumble and Apple were examples of what I categorized as “The Genuine Apology.” This week, Ram Trucks joined the club.
[Photo: Stellantis]
Make it right
While a clear, unequivocal apology often feels like the most logical response to a mistake or to genuine brand fan anger, its not what brands are intuitively built to do. Deflect, distract, and avoid are too often on the menu.
Argonaut founder and chief creative officer Hunter Hindman knew the right answer here; he just had to convince his client. We all knew the best solution would be to put Tim in the hot seat, front and center, Hindman says. No corporate gloss. No hiding behind brand spin. Just a man, a machine, and a promise to make it right. And to Tims credit, he didnt blink.
Kuniskis says it wasnt a tough decision to admit the mistake. The brand knew almost instantly after last years announcement that it had a problem. A 2022 study from Forrester found that 41% of consumers would return to a brand that concedes to making a mistake and apologizes for it.
Our customers told us loud and clear howand I’ll say this lightly ‘displeased’ they were with our decision to get rid of the Hemi V-8, he says. You only had to go on to social media to see how they were feeling. Betrayed. We know that truck buyers are very loyal to their brand, and once you lose them, you have to fight tooth and nail to get them back. It was almost immediately clear that we had to right the wrong.”
How do you take a mall food court brand and future-proof it for a world with fewer malls? For Auntie Anne’s, the answer is modernizing the stores they already have with a new concept designed for the way people snack now.
Auntie Anne’s said Monday it would remodel 150 stores this year with a new store concept and a modernized visual identity designed to sell more of its pretzels, drinks, and snacks to millennial and Gen Z consumers at a time of changing habits. With consumers interested in mobile ordering, grab-and-go food, and novel experiences, the updated Auntie Anne’s store concept has a dedicated mobile order pickup area and an open view into the kitchen with a “Now Rolling” sign to draw attention to employees rolling pretzels by hand.
[Photo: Auntie Anne’s]
“Consumer expectations have shifted, especially around digital convenience, off-premise access, and visual appeal,” Mike Freeman, president of brands at Auntie Anne’s holding company GoTo Foods, tells Fast Company in an email. The redesigned stores were made to meet those expectations.
“It reflects how guests want to engage today with speed, transparency, and a space that feels fresh and energetic,” Freeman says.
A new blue and yellow “twist” mural pattern gives the store a more modern and colorful look, and an updated Auntie Anne’s logo is simpler and does without the old halo element of the outgoing logo.
[Photo: Auntie Anne’s]
Founded in the height of the shopping mall era in 1988, today Auntie Anne’s has more than 2,000 locations in shopping malls, outlets, airports, universities, Walmarts, travel plazas, military bases, and food trucks. Its owner, GoTo Foods, operates or franchises more than 6,900 restaurants and cafés for brands including Cinnabon, Jamba, and Schlotzsky’s.
Malls and airports are “core to Auntie Anne’s heritage and continue to play a key role in the brand’s footprint,” Freeman says, but expansion is also key. The brand plans for growth that includes street side and co-branded locations, and it’s open to partnerships and cross-branded collabs with Oreo and Hidden Valley Ranch.
The rebrand is about selling a nostalgic snack in a more contemporary way. Revitalizing a food court favorite that’s outlived many of the shopping malls it once occupied is no small feat, and updating the store’s look and feel could go a long way in keeping it relevant.
Say what you will about our workforce’s newest employees, but for the NFL’s incoming class of 2025, rookies today are arriving to the league with a strong recall of the intricacies of their team logos and are surprisingly adept at painting.
The NFL released the latest edition of “Rookies Paint,” the league’s annual video showing rookies painting team logos from memory. Most of the attempts over the years are painfully and humorously amateurish, and the funny tradition has evolved into merch.
This year, though, a number of rookies showed remarkable skill under pressure. Given the short five-minute time frame they have to complete it, it’s impressive how many managed to get close to their new team’s logo.
rookies drawing their team logos from memory will never get old pic.twitter.com/keZSzKXeJu— NFL (@NFL) June 8, 2025
Los Angeles Rams tight end Terrance Ferguson nailed his team’s logo. Indianapolis Colts tight end Tyler Warren and New York Giants running back Cam Skattlebo were on the right track. Kaleb Johnson, a Pittsburgh Steelers running back, got the gist of his team’s Steelmark, despite an issue with sizing and placing the right colors in the wrong order of the three hypocycloids, the red, yellow, and blue shapes that represent the elements that make steel.
“I see it every year and I’m always like, ‘oh, I would nail that,’ and now that I’m here I can already tell not not nailing it,” said Issac Teslaa, a Detroit Lions wide receiver who actually did a decent job with the basics of his team’s lion mark. “I think I did better than I was expecting to do,” he said at the end.
Since the series has run for multiple years, today’s rookies might come to the task better prepared, but that still doesn’t mean everyone nailed it. Even though he was wearing pants with the Jacksonville Jaguars logo stamped on them, rookie Travis Hunter could not recreate the logo himself. Others were challenged with translating the picture in their head onto the paper in one quick attempt. Two Cleveland Browns rookies took different perspectives for their team’s logos, with running back Quinshon Judkins painting a front-facing view while quarterback Dillion Gabriel did a side profile that captured the real logo’s perspective, if not the exact right tilt.
Remembering the details of logos is hard, even for logos we see every day because our brain doesn’t classify it as necessary information it needs to recall. The same goes for pro football players, though this new fun tradition may now mean rookies pay at least a little extra attention to the logo on the jersey they get on draft day.
With the first family actively engaged in memecoin ventures, speculation about the future of cryptocurrency has never been hotter. Laura Shin, crypto expert and host of the podcast Unchained, reveals the sectors emerging economic, political, and geopolitical implications. Shin also provides context for why stablecoins are growing so fast and how the current administration is shaping the conversation.This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You call yourself a no-hype crypto journalist, so can you give us a short, no-hype overview of where we are right now in cryptos evolution?
Yeah, I would say we’re probably on the cusp of more widespread adoption. The number-one biggest reason is simply that the Trump administration is really embracing crypto. That has not been true of previous administrations. In fact, the Biden administration was probably, I want to say, actively hostile. I don’t know if people will love that term, but that’s probably a pretty accurate description.
For a long time, there were a lot of entrepreneurs who were cautious about doing things in the U.S. This administration is more, not only open-minded, but even in some regards almost a little bit too embracing of crypto, you could say.
I think there’s going to be probably a decent number of crypto IPOs this year, but then on top of it, stablecoins are probably the first major application that has really found what the industry likes to call product-market fit. We’re seeing that stablecoins have a huge amount of uptake, especially in so many other jurisdictions where they don’t trust their local currency. It could be Argentina or Venezuela or Turkey or Nigeria. There are just a lot of places where people don’t actually have a great way to save their money, and they maybe don’t also have really great ways to send money across borders. So, stablecoins are fulfilling that role and Congress is probably on the cusp of finally passing legislation here in the U.S. around stablecoins.
For a layperson, someone not engaged in the crypto world, can you just explain what a stablecoin is relative to a memecoin, relative to whatever the portfolio might look like?
Yeah, so a stablecoin is any blockchain-based asset that is pegged to the value of some other asset99% of all stablecoins are pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. The way that stablecoins really took off initially was that on a number of crypto exchanges, people wanted to be able to buy and trade using dollars. I wrote this book called The Cryptopians, and it covers 2013 until 2018. Even at that time, people would recite back to me the price of Bitcoin or the price of Ether in dollars. No matter whether they were European or Asian or just wherever they were in the world, they always knew the price in dollars. . . .
Here’s a really simple example: Theres a serial entrepreneur in Afghanistan. Her name is Roya Mahboob, and she had this microblogging platform, and I think a lot of the people writing for it were women. They had a hard time paying them, because a lot of women in Afghanistan, they don’t have bank accounts, or if they do, then their male relatives might actually take the money that they earned from them. So [the platform] set them up with Bitcoin wallets and then taught them how to use them.
One of the women was in an abusive marriage and saved up the Bitcoin and then used that to eventually divorce her husband, so that gives you some kind of agency. I have some close Turkish friends, and I think it was in 2018, the value of the lira was just going down and down. So it’s like people in those places I think grasp these kinds of things a lot more quickly, like the value of crypto. Having a form of money that isn’t influenced by a central bank, that’s stablecoins.
Because the stablecoins are generally linked to the U.S. dollar, it’s a way to sort of have dollars without having dollars, right?
Exactly.
I mean, you’re getting the stability of that U.S. market, which there’s some irony in that, because of course one of the philosophical ideas around crypto is that it’s not linked to a government, that it’s separate.
Now we’re going to get really deep into this. So you’re correct that this is people wanting U.S. dollars, which is a form of currency linked to a specific government, but of course the people who want those dollars are people who don’t otherwise have the privilege of easily accessing them. Bitcoin, of course, existed before stablecoins ever existed. There have been times when the Bitcoin price would go up, and then it would crash for a little while, and then it would go up again and then it would crash, and so that’s kind of when you started to see stablecoins also take off.
A lot of people view Bitcoin as a good long-term investment, but on any short-term timescale, you don’t really know where the price is going to be, so if you need the money on a shorter-term timescale, then you would probably rather have something more stable, and so that’s where the interest in stablecoins came about. There’s a reason why 99% of the stablecoins are denominated or pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar, and it’s of course because we’re the global reserve currency, so there’s a lot of safety there.
Trump seems like he’s done a full 180 on crypto. I mean, he said it was a scam during his first term and then supported it very strongly in his campaign. He’s launched his own Trump coin three days before the inauguration. Do we know how much of Trump’s crypto position is about political opportunity or financial opportunity, or some larger philosophy about markets?
I don’t think there’s a larger philosophy. I think most people probably know what Trump’s MO is. But let’s just say he’s president and he took a luxury jetliner from the Qataris, so whatever it is that you think that says about him, it applies to his activities in the crypto world. What I will say though, aside from his personal dealings, which by and large in my opinion, they’re business dealings, things that would help his family or him. He launches this memecoin, which by the way, to make one of these things costs almost no money, so I just want to make that clear, and you’re basically printing money out of thin air, right? But then on top of that, the people who got in very early, they just had some agreement where they had to hold their coins until whatever it was, 90 days or I forget what the number of days was.
Now, fortuitously, when that deadline came, [Trump] announced that he was going to have a dinner, and in order to participate in the dinner, you had to be one of the top holders of this coin, so f course the price shot up right at that time when this unlock was happening for those insiders. Just note the timing there and put those two facts together and you can make your own conclusions, but, well, let me put it this way: Trump saw that the Biden administration alienated the crypto community. He realized these people have money and they hate the Democrats. . . . He said, “I’m the crypto candidate,” and he even went to the Bitcoin conference last year. He made all these promises to the crypto community and Bitcoin communities.
On top of that, people in his personal orbit, his family, realized this industry is going to get bigger, this industry’s all about money, and so they have been taking advantage. So you will see, and this is very interesting, there were a number of people who were very passionately pro-Trump during the campaign, and then once the memecoin thing happened, because not only Trump, but also Melania launched a memecoin, and they were not happy about what he was doing.
It was reported that their company, World Liberty Financial, was doing deals with different token teams where basically they were just exchanging money. “I’ll give you this amount of money if you buy the World Liberty Financial token, and we’ll buy this amount of your token. I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” But people in the industry also kind of look down on that, because it’s not organic.
