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Since taking over the coffee chain in 2024, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol has been on a mission to go back to Starbucks and rekindle the feeling of warmth inside the coffee giant. Thats led to new store designs, new employee training, new uniforms, new menu items, and new staffingwhich have helped the company break out of a two-year sales rut. But as part of this deep strategic exploration, Niccol made two specific asks for Starbuckss cross-discipline design team that are being revealed today: an iconic new cup and a new plush chair. As the literal touchpoints between the consumer and the company, they are the biggest signals we have of warmth, comfort, and generosity, says Dawn Clark, SVP of global concepts and design at Starbucks. The new Starbucks cup (ceramic in every size) [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] The new Starbucks cup is not just one cup, but five different glazed ceramic optionseach offered to customers who stay to enjoy their coffee. Built to accommodate drinks ranging from a single shot of espresso to a venti latte, the cups come in white (inspired by their takeaway cup, with a hand-painted green siren and rim), and green (where the siren is embossed). Notably, the cups all share the same tapered silhouette. Clark says the cup design took inspiration from a blend of Italys espresso culture and Starbuckss own mercantile and coffee trading history. The result lands somewhere between European sensibility and American utility. After concepting different designs, they came up with four frontrunners which they 3D printed and shared with various stakeholders across the companyranging from corporate executives to on-the-ground baristas. They refined the designs and rendered them in ceramic before making the final choice. The company knew it wanted a single, strongly branded silhouette across every size, which limited what could work. Its a really big design challenge because not all those forms that looked good in a short or tall looked great in a mini or large size, Clark says. The other, perhaps bigger problem was drinkability. Different geometries affect how the coffee flows into your mouth, and those geometries dont always scale well. They also needed to survive countless rounds of dishwashers. [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] The wide-mouth, tapered design won out because it satisfied every above requirement. But most of all, Clark says it was just a really nice vessel for drinking, shaped to make the coffee go with the flow perfectly from the cup to your lips. From what I gathered, Starbucks may eventually choose to sell these mugs as merch, and its easy to imagine the company introducing special colorways for limited-time offerings. A toasty orange version for PSL season feels almost inevitable. The new Starbucks chair (in green this time) [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] While cups are intrinsic to coffee, the new Starbucks chair requires a bit more explanation. Even brand devotees may have forgotten a piece of lost history in Starbucks lore. In the 90s, when Starbucks took lattes mainstream across America, many stores had one or two special, extra-wide, purple velvet chairs. They were an almost Dr. Suessian take on the hyper plush living room seating of that decade, meant to shake up the rigidity of Starbuckss design at the time while urging you to stay a while. What was great about that chair is it was oversized; it wasn’t practical. It was very much like you could maybe have two people sit in it, you could put your feet up, swing your legs over the arm. There were a lot of ways to occupy it, Clark says. That was a big part of the inspiration [for a redux]and also the lushness of the texture. Indeed, Niccol told me last year that an updated chair needed to imbue something akin to FOMO when sitting down at Starbucks: Its got to be the seat that when you walk in, youre like, Man, I cant wait for him to get up. Im hopping in that chair the second he does. Starbucks landed on a design that resurrects hefty 90s furniture and adds a dollop of midcentury design. I find myself sucked back into 1996 just looking at it. You see the same voluptuous arm silhouettes from the original chair (dont worry, theyre stll fixing that ruching), but its framed in wood (albeit with far more weight than youd see in traditional midcentury designor even the rest of Starbuckss midcentury-inspired furnishings). The visual heft of the entire chair is intentional, built to exude confidence that it can accommodate your most leisurely posture. [Photo: Courtesy of Starbucks] Its a little overly generous in its invitation to be comfortable, Clark says. Like the cup, Starbucks developed the new chair in-house. The process began with an adjustable ergonomic model. Built from a CMF frame and sparse cushioning, it looks straight out of IKEA, but the system allowed the team to study how it would feel to sit (and eat and drink) at various angles. From there, they built a cardboard massing model to lock in its curves and proportions. For the final production sample, the company went with its rich Starbucks green because, gosh is that purple a statement. But more colors could enter the mix in the future. No doubt, this is a premium chair for a QSR restaurantmost stores may get one or two. Its inevitable cost and maintenance is probably why Starbucks ditched their purple chair years ago, which I recall looking pretty gnarly before they up and disappeared. Clark believes its new velvet fabric will be easier to clean, and that Starbucks locations can get five to ten years out of a chair before retiring it or even reupholstering it. However, she also insists that isnt their chief concern. Part of what were in a way saying, it doesn’t exist to be convenient or easy to maintain. It exists to provide comfort. And were willing to take on the challenge, Clark says. Of course we designed it to be up to the test for all the use it gets, and well have to take care of it . . . but its something were committed to. The new cups and chairs will arrive in U.S. stores toward the end of 2026, while the cups are slated to go abroad in 2027. And theyll undeniably add a little more oomph to Starbuckss turnaround, as it works to make its cafes once again a place you want to sit and stay a while. I think that it really is more than just a chair or cup, Clark says. These are the most intimate things. These are the things you occupy or touch. We feel these are really intrinsically linked to everything about our brand.
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E-Commerce
When the email pinged in my inbox, I didnt even bother to open it immediately. I already knew what it was. One glance at the subject line told me everything. After enough time on the job hunt, you develop a sixth sense for HR language. The preview textThank you for taking the timesaid it all. Its the standard soft intro to bad news: Your application was amazing . . . but not amazing enough. The blow softens once youve received a few of these. But the emotions that follow resemble the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and eventually, acceptance. I ran the gamut of these feels when I got my latest rejection for a role that seemed promising all the way through the final interview. Heres how I felt and acted after I opened that message and faced reality. Denial Nah, this can’t be right. I refresh my inbox three times, as if the letters in the message will magically rearrange themselves into a sequence that reveals a start date. Could it be a system glitch? Maybe they sent this to the wrong candidate? (Believe it or not, its happened to me before.) I mean, I was perfect for this role. Remember in the final interview when I gave that answer about cross-functional collaboration that made the hiring manager nod so hard I thought she had that new J. Cole playing in her AirPods? I draft a response. Thank you for your consideration. However, I believe there may have been an error . . . I let it sit in my drafts folder for exactly 11 minutes before deleting it. Even my delusions have limits. But I do check LinkedIn to see if they’ve posted the position again. They haven’t. Which means they hired someone. Which means this is real. Which leads me directly to . . . Anger I’m in my feelings now. Who did they hire? I need to know immediately. I’m on LinkedIn doing forensics like I’m on The First 48. I filter the companys employees by most recent hires. There he is. Brayden. Of course it’s a Brayden. His profile says he thrives in ambiguous environments and has experience with stakeholder management. My profile says the exact same thing but with better action verbs. Ugh. Bargaining Okay, let me think about this objectively. What could I have done differently? Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned I needed to check the start date because of a vacation I had already booked. Maybe that made me seem uncommitted. Or maybe I should’ve asked more questions at the enddid I seem too confident? Not confident enough? Maybe I talked too much . . . or too little. Should I have laughed at the hiring managers joke about getting her ducks in a row? It wasn’t funny, but maybe that was the test. I consider emailing the recruiter to ask for feedback. Just a friendly note. Hey! Would love to learn what I could improve for next time :) The smiley face is crucial. Makes me seem coachable and not at all dead inside. I type it out. I don’t send it. I know what they’d say anyway: We had many qualified candidates. Translation: Brayden’s uncle plays golf with the CEO. Depression It’s been three days since the rejection. I’m still thinking about it. I’ve applied to 16 other jobs since then. Each one feels like I’m rolling up a resume, stuffing it into a Dos Equis bottle, and chucking it into the ocean. My Easy Apply count on LinkedIn is getting embarrassing. I’m tailoring cover letters for positions I’m overqualified for, underqualified for, and in some cases, not even sure what the job actually is. Customer Success Champion could mean literally anything. I think about Brayden again. Brayden’s probably in orientation right now, getting his company laptop, meeting the team, hearing about the unlimited PTO that no one actually takes. Brayden’s probably not wondering if his name sounded too ethnic on the application. Brayden’s probably not calculating whether the commute is worth it while also knowing he won’t get the offer anyway. Brayden’s just . . . winning. I eat leftover jerk chicken at 11 a.m. and consider whether this is rock bottom or if rock bottom is a few more rejection emails away. Acceptance (sort of) Here’s what I know: This isn’t personal, even though it feels personal. Corporate America isnt rigged. It just tends to work out beautifully for guys named Brayden. That company wasn’t the one. Maybe the role wasn’t even that good. The Glassdoor reviews mentioned fast-paced environment, which is code for no work-life balance anyway. I update my resume again. Not because I think it’ll make a difference, but because I need to feel like I’m doing something. I tweak one bullet point. I remove an unnecessary comma. I save it as Resume_FINAL_v3_ACTUAL_FINAL_Feb2026.pdf knowing damn well there will be a v4. And then I do what I always do: I apply to another job. Because theres only one thing worse than getting rejection emails, and thats not getting any emails at all.
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E-Commerce
Hello again, and thank you, as always, for spending time with Fast Companys Plugged In. In a remarkably influential 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen declared that software was eating the world. From entertainment to commerce to transportation, he argued, startups that were about code at their core were disrupting many of the worlds most deeply entrenched businesses. That was just the beginning, he warned: Companies in every industry need to assume that a software revolution is coming. Fifteen years later, we know that some of the disruptors Andreessen citedsuch as Zynga, Groupon, and Skype (RIP)did not, in fact, eat the world. His larger point, however, played out much as he predicted. Software really does run everything these days. And many of its purveyors are among the most successful companies in the world. Recently, however, Wall Street has been spooked by the possibility of another sea change in the making: AI might be on the verge of eating software. The sudden leap forward in the capability of software-writing LLM tools such as Anthropics Claude Code has investors worried that the corporate behemoths presently making tidy profits by selling subscription-based softwareparticularly for enterprise customersmight find themselves unable to compete with apps coded by AI for very little cost. This theoretical collapse of the software industry is known as The SaaSpocalypse, a name I hate but cant quite avoid acknowledging. (I promise not to bring it up again.) Its reflected in the stock performance of such seemingly robust companies as Workday (down 35% year to date), Adobe (-26%), Salesforce (-25%), Autodesk (-21%), and Figma (-19%). On February 23, after Anthropic published a blog post touting Claudes ability to modernize software written in the 66-year-old COBOL programming language, IBMCOBOLs kingpin for most of that timesaw its biggest one-day stock drop in more than a quarter century. Investors are right to expect that AI will radically change software as a business in the coming years. The evidence is already here, in the form of developments such as Blockthe parent company of Squareannouncing on February 26 that its terminating 40% of its 10,000 employees. Explaining the brutal reduction, CEO Jack Dorsey contended that AI will allow a smaller team to accomplish more and do it faster, and said he was getting ahead of an inexorable industry-wide trend. What happens next remains to be seen, but Block will surely never be the same. Still, Wall Streets apparent belief that AI spells bad news for todays software titans is premature, and possibly just misguided, period. Its certainly heavy on vibes rather than hard data: Mondays dip in the S&P 500 apparently stemmed in part from a dystopian imaginary June 2028 memo published by Citrini Research. Laying out a sweeping nightmare involving AI crushing the U.S. economy, it name-checked specific companies such as DoorDash and Zendesk as being incapable of competing with AI-infused apps and agents. Well, maybe, though even the documents authors admitted they were certain some of these scenarios wont materialize. In a little over two years, it will be possible to assess what Citrini got wrong and right. For now, it remains equally possible to imagine futures in which 2026s software-based kingpins arent mowed down by AI, even if the technologys coding chops will continue to improve indefinitely rather than hitting a wall. For one thing, the software business isnt solely about writing software. It requires selling itsometimes in the form of hefty annual contractsand supporting it when things go wrong. It will be difficult for AI (or even most AI-savvy startups) to take on these tasks outside of the human-powered infrastructure that major software companies have built, often over decades. In Sun Microsystems cofounder Scott McNealys memorable phrase, enterprise customers like having one throat to chokesomeone with the bottom-line responsibility of making them happy. They wouldnt get that by vibe-coding their own in-house replacements for major apps, or buying them from a tiny company offering look-alike equivalents. Instead, they have a powerful incentive to keep doing business with companies that have already shown an ability to deliver. People who use AI to write their own apps might even develop a newfound appreciation for all the ways software suppliers make their lives easier. For instance, last April I wrote about the note-taking app Id vibe-coded for my own use, and said Id put it together in a week. What I didnt know at the time was that Id spend the next 11 months fiddling around with new features, squashing bugs, and stressing over the fact that Inot Apple, Google, or Notionbear responsibility for the apps security and data integrity. Id do it all over again, but because its been great, mind-expanding fun, not because its saved me money or time. Its far too early to conclude that existing software giants wont use AI to grow even more dominant. After all, they have considerable resources to throw at that challenge, and deep knowledge of the industries they serve. AI could be a potent accelerant to their growth, or just a way to slash costs by reducing human headcount. But theres little evidence its on the cusp of figuring out how to build and market products humans will find compelling without plenty of guidance. Even as the technology puts pressure on software companiessay, by introducing enough competition that its tougher to endlessly raise pricesthey might be intrepid enough to find a new path forward. IBM, for example, isnt short on AI savvy of its own; if the company cant find a way to make money from customers wanting to modernize COBOL-based platforms, its IBMs own fault, not Anthropics. Yes, history is full of sobering case studies of once-mighty software companies that gotoverwhelmed by technological change. In the 1990s, for example, the PCs shift from the text-based DOS to the graphical interface of Windows was ruinous to big names such as Lotus, WordPerfect, and Ashton-Tate, none of which bet big enough on Windows early enough. Their miscalculation was unquestionably Microsoft Offices gain. But it doesnt always pan out that way. In the following decade, Office faced a similar threat as productivity migrated to internet-based tools. When Google launched products such as Docs and Sheets, stuffed them with innovative features, and offered them for free, observers thought that might be terrible news for Microsoft. Not so: The company reacted skillfully enough that Microsoft 365, as it calls Office in its current form, is bigger than ever, to the tune of $95 billion in revenue last year. In Silicon Valley, it has become fashionable to tell workers that the only way to remain relevant is to embrace AI rather than fear it. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang puts it, Youre not going to lose your job to an AI, but youre going to lose your job to someone who uses AI. The same principle applies to todays software companies. Theyre not going to be killed by AIonly by other companies that are better at seizing the opportunities it offers than they are. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company If technology could bring traffic fatalities down to nearly zero, why not embrace it?What the elevator can teach us about self-driving cars. Read More Anthropic’s autonomous weapons stance could prove out of step with modern warThe Pentagon is demanding that the AI company remove the safety guardrails from its AI models to allow all lawful uses. Read More Is Apple about to debut a new iPhone camera feature?What is ‘variable aperture’ and why you should care. Read More AI can write now. What happens to reporters?If bots can reliably draft copy, ‘something big’ might be happening to the job of a journalist. Read More Apple killed Dark Sky. Now its creators are trying again with a new weather appAcme Weather brings back the team behind the cult-favorite forecast app, with new features designed to show uncertainty. Read More 15 incredibly useful things you didn’t know NotebookLM could doFrom managing meetings to maintaining your car, Google’s Gemini-powered research tool can provide all sorts of eye-opening revelations. Read More
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