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Etsy witches have been dominating headlines in recent weeks, for both good and bad deeds. Earlier this month, just before the Seattle Mariners lost their sixth game in seven tries, an X user shared that they had paid an Etsy witch to help the team get their act together and start winning baseball games again, and hopefully make their way to the World Series and win. The spell, which cost the fan $19.99, came from SpellByLuna on Etsy. WE HAVE CONFIRMATION OF THE SPELL https://t.co/XyESsEpM7l pic.twitter.com/cGeosHQsIR— Absolute Unit (@notB0bR055) September 6, 2025 After a reversal of fortunes, the team is now on a nine-game winning streak. Coincidence? Perhaps. But the Mariners arent taking any chances, giving the Etsy witch a shout-out on their official X account. (Unfortunately, Luna is currently not selling on Etsy.) shoutout to the etsy witch pic.twitter.com/XalePUoOkW— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) September 7, 2025 And its not just sports fans turning to witches-for-hire in times of need. Whether you want to help your team to victory or cast a love spell on your crush, theres a cottage industry on Etsy ready to field your requests. Though the platform banned metaphysical services in 2015, there are thousands of spells for sale on the site that range in price from just $1 to upwards of $2,000. (Fast Company has reached out to Etsy for comment.) A number of influencer brides, including Jaz Smith and Becca Bloom, have enlisted an Etsy witchs service to ensure good weather on their wedding days. In at least Smiths and Blooms case, the purchase paid off: Both were blessed with blue skies despite the forecasted rain on their respective big days. Others are hiring Etsy witches for more nefarious reasons. Is now a good time to admit I paid an Etsy witch to curse his NFL team this season, one screenshot read, posted on X. What used to be a somewhat taboo, or at least unorthodox, practice has since entered the mainstream thanks to social media and Gen Zs embrace of spirituality. The psychic industry, which includes various specialties such as astrology, palm-reading, psychic readings, tarot-card readings, and fortune-telling, generated an estimated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2024 and employed 105,000 people, according to market research firm IBIS World. For a growing number of customers, thats money well spentwhether or not the spells actually work.
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E-Commerce
Japan’s exports to the United States plummeted 13.8% in August compared to the same month the previous year, marking the fifth straight month of declines, as auto exports were hit by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.The Finance Ministry data released Wednesday showed the rate of the drop in exports to the U.S. compared to the previous year worsened from a 10.1% slip in July.U.S. tariffs on Japanese automobiles and auto parts decreased from 27.5%, the amount Trump initially levied, to 15% this week, but that’s still higher than the original 2.5%.Wednesday’s data reflect the month of August, when the tariffs were higher. Japan’s overall exports were little changed, slipping 0.1%, as exports grew to Europe and the Middle East.The provisional data for August showed Japan’s imports from the world fell 5.2% from a year ago. Imports from China grew 2.1%, while exports to China fell 0.5%. Imports from the U.S. grew 11.6%.Exports to the world grew in food, gaining 18%, as well as in ships, growing by nearly 25%. Imports grew in computers, adding nearly 35% on-year, while aircraft rose 21%. Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama Yuri Kageyama, AP Business Writer
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E-Commerce
At a recent Apple event, the tech giant unveiled that Airpods will now be able to offer live translation abilities, powered by AI. Shares of Duolingo, the language-learning company, dropped nearly 3% that afternoon in response. (Google also added a similar feature to its Google Translate app in August.) But Luis von Ahn, Duolingo’s cofounder and CEO, isnt really worried that real-time translation will be a threat to his business. For one, real-time translation isnt a totally new technology, he says. About 10 years ago, Google did their event, Google IO, and demoed live translation . . . Nine years ago, they did an event again, and what they demoed was live translation. Eight years ago, they did an event, and demoed live translation, von Ahn said on Tuesday, speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] These announcements have been happening since Duolingo has been a public company, and its stock will dip, he said, and then bounce back. Language learning means learning it yourself Von Ahn also doesnt think live translation is appealing to Duolingo users. The app’s users generally fall into two big buckets, he noted, the first being the those who are learning English. They actually want to learn English, he said. Phone translation is just not going to do it for them. The other big bucket are people who use Duolingo to learn a language as a hobby. Just like chess, von Ahn said. (Duolingo added chess to its lesson lineup earlier this year). And computers have been better at playing chess than humans since 1997. People are still learning chess. Its not that von Ahn is against AI. Duolingo has been leaning into the tech, too. In a staff memo von Ahn wrote back in May, he detailed how the company would become AI-first. That memo sent off a wave of backlash, as people took it to mean that the company would be replacing its human employees with artificial intelligence. Von Ahn called that misinformation. We have not laid off a single full-time employee, now or in the history of the company, he said. (And Duolingo has actually been hiring since that announcement.) But employees are using AI to do more work. ‘Four or five times as much content’ To teach a language through its app, Duolingo offers users lots of different course contentsentences to translate, short stories to read, cartoons to watch. That’s all always been created with a combination of human work and automation. As time has passed, more and more has been automated, von Ahn said. So now, with the same number of people, we can make four or five times as much content in the same amount of time. The addition of chess is one example. Two Duolingo employees started that project, and neither were engineersor knew how to play chess. Instead, the designer and project manager duo spent six months using AI to “vibecode.” Once the interactions reached a certain level, they added engineers to the team. The whole thing was done from scratch to launch in nine months by a team that was at first just two people, and by the time they launched, it was only six, von Ahn said. And now . . . theres millions and millions of users.
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E-Commerce
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