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When Marsya Ancker-Robert was younger, her father used to tell that her that he wanted to be buried naked, under a tree in the woods. The idea horrified Ancker-Robert, but when her father passed away earlier this June, the first call she made was to a Dutch company called Loop Biotech. Since 2020, Loop Biotech has been making biodegradable caskets out of mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms, and hemp. Unlike traditional wooden caskets, which are often treated with chemicals that leech into the soil, the company’s offerings are made of natural materials that enrich the soil as they biodegradea process that only takes 45 days after burial. So far, Loop Biotech has sold about 2,500 caskets in Europeprimarily in the Netherlands, but also in Germany and other parts of central Europe. But Ancker-Robert’s father, Mark Ancker, has just become the first person in the U.S. to be buried in Loop Biotech’s mycelium casket, called the Living Cocoon. “It was dignified, and beautiful,” says Ancker-Robert, who buried her father in a forest clearing on his property. “I have confidence that my dad will be fully part of the garden by winter.” [Photo: Loop Biotech] Growing caskets Loop Biotech was founded in 2020 by Bob Hendrikx, an architect and biodesigner known for his affinity for nature-based solutions, like a Living Bin that uses sea anemones to “eat” or compost our trash, or a Living Couch that uses algae water to cleanse the air around it. It is part of growing cohort of start-ups shaking up the $622 million green burial market with nature-based solutions. Resting Reef, from London, turns cremated ashes into underwater memorials that double as coral reefs. Coeio, from California, makes burial suits out of mushrooms and other organisms that accelerate decomposition. For Hendrikx, nature was always the starting point. When the designer first came up with the idea for a mycelium casket, he wasn’t looking for sustainable solutions to burial. He was looking for ways to harness mycelium’s natural ability to recycle dead organic matter into nutrient-rich soil. He knew that mycelium thrives best in soil, which led him to question the kinds of applications it could most benefit. “We call it organism-centered design,” he says, contrasting the approach with human-centered design. [Photo: Loop Biotech] Today, Loop caskets are made with mycelium, hemp, and nothing else. The two ingredients are mixed and poured into a mold, and a coffin grows out of that mold in just seven days. But nailing down the exact formula took several years. “Too long,” says Hendrikx with a laugh. Mycelium is a finicky organism that needs the right conditions to grow and is influenced by several environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, CO2, and oxygen. Even the moon, which influences air pressure on Earth, can have an effect, he says: “Collaborating with nature really allows you to see this interconnectivity of the ecosystem.” The company has a 1,500-square-meter growing facility in Delft, Netherlands with the capacity to grow 500 caskets at a time. In order to scale, Hendrikx wants to double the production capacity and potentially speed up the growth, too. This facility is what the company calls their blueprint. Once it is optimized, Hendrikx is hoping to replicate the model outside the Netherlands and grow the caskets locally, using local materials. The company has raised just over $3 million to date, and is planning a new funding round to finance the expansion. And for Hendrikx, the road to success transcends mycelium caskets. “Once we are profitable, we’ve shown the world that you can enrich nature while making money, so it’s a business case for a regenerative business model,” he says. [Photo: Loop Biotech] A first for the U.S. The burial in Maine marks a new chapter in the company’s journey, with mycelium caskets ($3,995) and urns ($395) now available to customers nationwide. But Hendrikx says he’s been getting requests for years. America is experiencing a green burial revolution. The total number of green burial cemeteries in the U.S. has quadrupled over the past 10 years, going from just over 100 in 2015 to more than 400 by March 2025. Over the past two decades, the nonprofit Green Burial Council has seen a 72% increase in demand from cemeteries for more sustainable end-of-life options. Loop Biotech’s expansion will likely depend on how willing people are to spend a few extra dollars on a biodegradable casket. An entry-level casket in the United States hovers around $800 for a simple metal burial casket, though average costs range from about $2,000 to $5,000. It will also depend on how fast the company establishes a robust infrastructure in the country. Already, Hendrikx has built a network of distribution partners and sustainable funeral homes that offer green burial alternatives. They also have a warehouse in Los Angeles where they can ship their products from. But if your local funeral home doesn’t offer mycelium caskets, and you’ve never heard about the company, you may never know it exists. [Photo: Loop Biotech] Ancker-Robert found out about Loop Biotech from a Tedx talk that Hendrikx gave in January, and she was really surprised she was the first person to order one. As it happens, Loop Biotech was gearing up to launch in the U.S. on World Environment Day when she called. Ancker-Robert allowed Hendrikx to film the ceremony, which turned into a small act of generosity for the planet. People made offerings of his favorite foods as well as flowers that Ancker-Robert will plant right above her father’s resting place so they can grow into a perennial flower garden. “The process is helping to turn the grieving process into one of creation and gives me something to daydream about instead of focusing on the loss,” she says. “I would much prefer to think of my father as part of the garden than as a dead body lying in the ground.” Ancker-Robert describes her father a free spirit who, in the ’80s, would jump into dumpsters to salvage food and drive around his community to distribute it. “There’s a famous picture of the traffic jam on the way to Woodstock. In it there is a young man in a striped shirt sitting on a VW bus looking at the traffic with binoculars,” she says. “That’s my dad.
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E-Commerce
For 13 years, Subway Surfers download rate has been consistent: about one million new installs every single day. Half of those downloads come from users upgrading to new devices. The other half comes from children aging into phone usage, and users in less developed countries reaching a level of affluence that allows them to purchase their first smartphones. This steady influx of players has made Subway Surfers the most downloaded mobile game of all time, with 4.5 billion lifetime downloads. Recently, however, Subway Surfers traffic has arrived in more dramatic waves. In 2020, the app saw a surge of new users after TikTokers discovered a way to hack the game. In 2022, a 10th anniversary social media campaigncombined with a TikTok-viral no coin challengeonce again sent downloads soaring. Mathias Gredal Nrvig, CEO of Subway Surfers parent company SYBO, understands the vital role social media plays in the games continued growth. Many of its early competitors have vanished: Draw Something and Zombie Farm are no longer on the app store, and Temple Run (which once inspired Subway Surfers) has stagnated. Through TikTok, though, Subway Surfers has kept its edge. The fact that TikTok loves us means were also being rewarded by Apple and Google, because their algorithms see what trends on other platforms, Nrvig says. Its a flywheel of activation. Subway Surfers social media dominance TikTok is crowded with so-called brain rot content. These posts typically layer two unrelated videos: one showing a TV show or narrated Reddit post, the other featuring a video game. Also called sludge content, the videos lull the doomscrolling brain into a passive state, watching and listening as the parallel feeds play. Its like Cocomelon for teenagers. @bekiedit23 #creatorsearchinsights #reddit_tiktok #aitastories #redditstoriestts #redditredings #reddittiktok #fyp #Aita #viral #edit #subwaysurfers #xyz #subway #subwaysurfersstorytime original sound – beki – beki Nrvig takes a much sunnier view of these videos, saying they give you a moment of zen. They also frequently feature Subway Surfers, repeatedly bringing TikTok users back to SYBOs IP. Theres no clear evidence that these brain rot videos drive viewers to the App Store, but they certainly do keep Subway Surfers in the conversation. [TikTokers] know were not going to go after them for posting our content, Nrvig says. We have a very different approach from other companies, where they do a lot more policing of social media. Subway Surfers in-house social media channels are led by Celia Zimmermann, SYBOs head of player experience. While the company produces plenty of its own content across platforms, the team also spends considerable time supporting the flow of organically created content. Zimmermann describes the games openness as brave, noting that many community managers at other gaming companies dont have the same speed for green-lighting. We have IP that were able to be quite flexible with, she says. This social momentum is especially important for Subway Surfers young audience. Many tween players gather on platforms like TikTok. SYBO does not track younger players directly, but Nrvig estimates anecdotally that about half of the games players are under 18. That figure does not account for the many kids playing on adult devices, which could push the percentage even higher. Of course, not all social media trends are positive. In New York City, a TikTok challenge recently encouraged some young people to try hopping between subway cars. At least six people died in 2024 attempting the stunt. Nrvig calls the trend unfortunate and says SYBO would never repost or amplify dangerous content, though the company ultimately decided not to issue a public statement. Train surfing has been a thing that people are doing in New York, thankfully very seldom, but we havent seen with our downloads that people think of it as something they can do in real life, Nrvig says. Its clearly a game, and a silly game at that, and therefore we dont have any direct connection to it. Can TikTok keep a 13-year-old game on top? Nrvig sees Subway Surfers as part of a standout group of Scandinavian mobile games. Theres Angry Birds, launched in 2009, and Candy Crush, which debuted in 2012. Both remain strong performers, though Subway Surfers download rate now outpaces them by a sizable margin, according to analysts. It also stands out as the only game in the group embracing such a deeply TikTok-driven strategythough it remains hard to say whether virality and revenue always go hand in hand. While SYBO declined to share exact revenue figures, Nrvig notes that 80 to 85% of the companys revenue comes from advertising, with the rest gnerated through in-app purchases. Monthly active users remain relatively steadyaside from viral spikesat 100 to 150 million. With such a stable user base, revenue shifts at SYBO tend to follow fluctuations in the ad market. Analysts are split on Subway Surfers future. Samuel Aune, a gaming insights analyst at Sensor Tower, supports Nrvigs view of long-term stability. He describes the games 10-year download curve as really consistent, especially when compared to its peers. Not a lot of games have lived 10-plus years, he tells Fast Company. Ariel Michaeli, CEO of Appfigures, takes a more skeptical stance. Mobile game downloads have declined across the board on both the App Store and Google Play. But Subway Surfers has dropped a little bit more than everyone else, he says, citing the companys internal tracking. It used to be number one for a very long time. Over the last few months, it started slowly going down [the ranking] . . . Subway Surfers has been around for so long that theres fatigue. And what if TikTok disappeared? That seems unlikely in the U.S. for now, with President Donald Trump having extended the TikTok ban deadline for a third time. But in India, where TikTok is banned, Subway Surfers had to pivot. Facebook is their go-to, and so is YouTube, so thats the place where we go to engage with them, Zimmermann says. For now, Subway Surfers holds its lead. Nrvig argues that among todays top-ranked mobile games, it is the only one growing organically. Its steady stream of downloads continues, driven by strong, recognizable IP and smart social media strategynot by less transparent forces. Were still the most downloaded viral game, Nrvig says. Everyone else has paid for their traffic to get on that list.
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E-Commerce
UX designers and product designers have very similar jobs. They both arrange digital parts. They both use Figma more than other designers do. And, according to a recent Fast Company analysis of design job listings, they start out with pretty much the same entry-level salary, around $70,000 a year. But as their careers progress, those salaries diverge. Among job postings asking that a candidate have between four and five years of experience, the average salary offered for UX designers was about $123,720, while the salary for product designers was $149,850. By the time these types of designers reach more developed stages of their careers, requiring at least eight years of experience, UX designers are offered an average of about $153,920, while product designers can earn $197,579. Thats about 28% more for product designers. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); UX design vs. product design To understand what might be driving the discrepancy in salary between UX and product designers over the course of their careers, it is helpful to look at differences in the actual duties that each type of worker performs, and how their careers typically progress. A UX designer is responsible for the feel and flow of a product, e.g. the user experience, while a product designer oversees both visual elements of an app or website and what types of features it should even have to begin with. Alexander Benz, a UX designer, product manager, and CEO of Blikket, a design and development agency for DTC brands, explains that people who start out as UX designers tend to go on become UX managers, involved in the production of a products design system, or they become other kinds designers. But as product designers develop in their careers, they begin branching out into other parts of the business, interfacing with stakeholders from across the organization. When you get into the product, he says, then you also have a bigger responsibility to . . . [take] in the ideas from stakeholders and manage more people in the whole process.” For example, while a UX designer might create a flowchart and visual style for a money transfer feature in a banking app, the product designer is closer to the metal, helping determine what components the app’s feature should actually containDoes it save a list of past transfer recipients? Does it autocomplete input fields?and so on, while considering the feature’s broader success metrics and technical constraints. “I think that is where the salary difference comes in. UX designers everywhere Another factor that could be contributing to the salary discrepancy is supply. There are simply more UX designers today than product designers. This may be because UX design boot camps, such as General Assembly and Springboard, proliferated in the 2010s, when interest rates were low, capital was cheap, and a new startup was seemingly being born every minute. These young companies all needed tech-savvy designers on staff to create their wireframes and user journeys, and boot camps minted them. Boot camps are based on the notion that certain jobs require practicing and perfecting a mostly fungible set of best practices that can be deployed to any client. Boot camps are accessible, cheaper than college or graduate school, and have created hundreds of thousands of additional workers in their respective fields. But while there were many boot camp options for budding UX designers, no such counterpart emerged for product designers. There is no oversupply, Benz says. Instead, product designers occupy roles in their companies that are more difficult to delineate. Their jobs require technical and soft skills that take more than a few months to master. There is no crash-course curriculum in product design. More good news for product designers Product designers are enjoying an extra advantage right now. Because their jobs cant be codified into a standard set of steps and principles, they are largely protected from LLMs. As language models become more sophisticated at performing junior- and, increasingly, senior-level coding tasks, they are threatening all sorts of jobs in tech. Its the jobs that LLMs dont understand that are arguably safest. In other words, the very qualities that make UX designers a target for easy boot camps also make them a target for AI. And the job description of a product designerthe fact that the role involves constant communication with individuals inside and outside an organizationmeans that it is relatively more protected from automation. For UX designers who might be looking for both a salary boost and a shovel to dig an anti-automation moat around their careers, it’s a great time to pivot. This article is part of Fast Company‘s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings.
Category:
E-Commerce
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