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Yahoo is at a critical inflection point. Despite having a large user baseacross Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Newsthe media company hasnt reclaimed the buzz of its early days. CEO Jim Lanzone candidly discusses the fear of being left behind and how hes pushing the brand to shed its old skin. He explains the wide-ranging implications as AI remakes search engines into answer engines and shares insights about the line between fantasy sports and gambling. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. 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. I wanted to ask you, you talk about it like Yahoo is sort of in a turnaround or a restart. But I mean, Yahoo News is the number-one news site on the internet, right? Yahoo Finance is the number one. Your fantasy sports platform is huge. You’ve got a big ad tech business, which I’m sure you talk about here. Second-largest email platform. You’ve got search, not Google-size search, but still substantial . . . All that sounds pretty robust. Yeah. Amazing ingredients with which to do a turnaround. So the way I would think about it is that absolutely the brands are still extremely relevant and they’ve had very loyal user bases. As a business, I think a lot of people know, but some maybe don’t, that we were spun out of Verizon. Over the years, Yahoo was a stand-alone public company. It was acquired by Verizon in the mid-2010s. They also acquired AOL, which we also own and is one of our brands. And we were acquired for about $5 billion. So if you think about the other brands in and around our rankings in the traffic rankings, they’re all trillion dollar brands. And so we had something to work with in terms of the size and loyalty of some of the audiences. But in some cases, email’s one of them. We had a big announcement last week. The core product hadn’t been improved in over 10 years. And so in the last nine months, every product that we operate has been relaunched with brand-new versions. And so taking advantage of the size of that audience to rebuild the business to be super valuable is the more turnaround side of it. And when you look at something that is robust, like the fantasy sports, as the NFL season comes, which will be your next big burst, right? We actually have a lot planned for it this year. I was curious, how much of the goal is to use this opportunity to introduce those users to other things you have, versus give them new things around what they already are coming for? I mean, what you’ll find is that our individual brands have in some ways different audiences. People who really use Yahoo Finance as their way to make more money and save more money and attract stocks and all that is pretty independent of people who love fantasy or love checking sports scores with Yahoo Sports. I definitely think the secret sauce of Yahoo, especially for advertisers, since we’re here, is that, collectively, it’s hundreds of millions of people who have a first-party relationship with us, which makes our ad targeting extremely effective. So one Yahoo overall is something that actually is true about the actual business. Getting people to use Yahoo as one point for everything is something that will happen over time, but we’re not going top-down in how we go about it. But it sounds like you don’t necessarily, at least right now, need to convert people into being like, “I’m a Yahoo, and I do everything in the Yahoo world.” I think that was the ’90s Yahoo, and I think the internet kind of moved past that. That said, we did relaunch the Yahoo homepage in February after months of testing different variations of it because the user base gets pretty locked in with how they do things, and you can really mess it up in the link chain if you change something. So we found one that really worked, and the most interesting thing about it was we went back to adding more portal-like features. Over the years, it’d become kind of just a newsfeed, and we added things back that were more utility-based around weather and other things and found that people love that. So actually, the Yahoo homepage that is more of a place to get things done is probably more the direction we’ll head with it than just straight news. Not everything about the way the internet was framed in the beginning was wrong. Right? It’s interesting because having competed against the people at Yahoo for the first 20-plus years of my career and taking that eye towards it, working here, you do kind of get an appreciation for how . . . If you go back and look at the 2007 version of the homepage or 2003, there was some magic to that and how it all worked, especially with the way the internet has gone with a lot of slop and misinformation, disinformation, clickbait, and people trying to get you to do things. The fact that it kind of had everything in one place, I don’t know, it was maybe taken for granted a little bit. So we actually have taken some inspiration from that. Obviously we try to modernize it. But yeah, we’ve taken some inspiration from it. So with the generative AI wave, media is changing like crazy. As search engines like Google become more of an answer engine as opposed to a search engine, sites like a lot of yours may see some of their referral traffic decline. At the same time, you have a search business yourselves. And if you follow where that is going to become more of an answer engine, you may encourage the development in that direction in people’s habits, which could undercut the other part of your business. I’m just curious how you think about those pieces fitting together. Yeah. And I spent the first 10 years of my career in search, and a lot of what we did back in the day was absolutely moving things towards an answer engine. And so I would say that’s not really new. What people know as Google OneBox, a lot of the search engines in the early 2000s were doing, already brought answers like the weather or music lyrics or multimedia or translations directly into the page. So this has always been the case. Now, there are certain kinds of queries called navigational queries. Those are trying to get you directly to a website. I do find it interesting that a lot of the generative . . . A lot of the large language models, they’re getting a lot of their traffic and sending it to places that are more canonical. So for ChatGPT, 50% of their citations are Wikipedia. For Perplexity, almost 50% are Reddit. And so those are more evergreen, deeper, almost more educational responses. A lot of Yahoo’s content is real-time, stock prices, sports scores. So for us personally, we operate in a kind of a different space. But you don&8217;t expect that referral traffic to decline? So a couple things. So one is I actually strongly believe that the role of search is not to take traffic from the open web, but to send traffic. And in our case, Yahoo’s been doing that for over two decades. We have relationships with all of our publishers where we share revenue, we send traffic downstream. And so I actually think that’s part of what Yahoo’s always done really well is help create a healthy ecosystem. That was also part of the bargain of the open web for search, that you would make yourself available to the engine that would then send you traffic downstream. Having that traffic get cut off and just subsuming that data to then keep it for yourself was not part of that grand bargain. I think we’re in the early days of figuring out how that’s going to go. What I actually think will happen in search over time, because I think we’re still in the primordial phase here of what AI versions of search will look like, is that the page will respond to your query and to what the search engine knows about you personally to have a different version of the search results page depending on the query type and depending on you. And so you’re never going to get the same kind of response to each one of these. I personally really believe that it should ultimately wind up sending traffic downstream to the sources, and little citation links probably are not going to do that.
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E-Commerce
Perched on a dusty high desert plain about 100 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, the Mojave Air and Space Port looks more like a final destination for aerospace experiments than a stepping stone to the stars. A field with dozens of decommissioned commercial jetliners bakes in the early morning sunitll eventually hit 110 degrees around noonand the small shacks set between dusty roads and cracked pavement look mostly empty. But drive past cracked airstrips and barbed wire gates, andwith the right security clearanceyou may be able to walk up and touch the exterior of the next orbital space station: a 2-ton cylindrical aluminum module built by the startup Vast. Called Haven-1, it currently hangs from a 50-foot-tall steel scaffold while it undergoes extreme pressure testing, one of many complicated engineering milestones it needs to hit before its planned launch in May 2026. Before engineers can install the modules instrumentation, electronics, and life-support systems, they need to repeatedly pressurize the structure to 2.4 times Earths atmosphere to test its workmanship. Massive hoses hooked up to a trio of multistory liquid nitrogen tankers inflate the stationan isogrid metal shell that resembles a waffle conewith nitrogen gas, like a kids birthday balloon. Observers need to stand at least 236 feet away in case bolts or brackets burst. During a visit in May, workers were welding and reinforcing the steel scaffold to make sure the structure can withstand a grueling and aggressive series of stress tests that will see the cabin inflated and deflated 200 times in a row. Fully-built flight-like control moment gyroscope (CMG). [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Vast is racing against the clock to launch the worlds first commercial space stationindependently, in-house, and in record time. Its an audacious effort, made possible by the retirement of an icon: the International Space Station, a fixture of childhood imaginations and of humanitys exploration of space since its first section was launched in 1998. Its now set to be decommissioned in 2030, via a guided crash into the Pacific Ocean, and Vast wants to replace it. Were going from an unknown to a formidable competitor, says Vast CEO Max Haot, a Belgian-American serial entrepreneur. Founded in 2021 by American crypto entrepreneur Jed McCaleb, who served as CEO until Haots arrival in 2023, Vast has grown to a team of nearly 1,000 people intent on building the next generation of human habitation in space. The company is entirely funded by McCaleb, who has invested $1 billion in the startup. NASA launched a competition for its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations (CLD) program five years ago, setting a date of 2026 to choose a team and design to eventually replace the ISS. Vast wasnt even around when the space agency awarded three teams seed funding to develop their visions: Starlab, Northrop Grumman, and a collaboration between Sierra Space and Blue Origin. Thats led Vast to adopt an accelerated approach that it hopes will ultimately prove its efficiency. To lap more established competitors, Haot is pushing his company to launch a prototype model before anybody else even submits their final proposal. Haot refers to other prospects as paper designs. Vast is already in the building phase. At the companys sprawling 190,000-square-foot factory in Long Beach, a three-building complex once meant to be an Amazon warehouse, the deadline is palpable. There are space gadgets around every corner of the bustling workshop floor. In the back, staff are testing a device called a CMG (control moment gyroscope), fast-moving flywheels that will spin and orient the capsule. One set has been spinning for two and a half years to test its durability. A few stations away, massive chunks of raw aluminum are being cut via water jet and plasma welded into gridded exterior panels. Next door, quality control engineers are shooting those panels with a special gun that simulates orbital velocity, to ensure they can withstand the impact of small meteorites or space debris. Visitors can even tour a full-scale model of the white, wood-paneled station interior, dubbed the Haven Experience; weightlessness, sadly, not included. Fully integrated Haven Demo [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Vast is at the forefront of a generational technological shift thats underpinning the next push into space. Vast and its competitors arent radically reinventing the tech that made the original ISS possible. Instead, theyre attempting to launch a space station in a better, faster, and cheaper manner. The ISS, with an estimated $150 billion construction budget, was a custom made Italian sports car. The space stations that Vast and its ilk are trying to build are more an assembly-line luxury sedan, still pricy, but ultimately much more accessible. Mason Peck, a Cornell professor and a former NASA chief technologist, says that while tech billionaires like McCaleb are bankrolling or running many key startups, building out more private, commercial ways to get to space tends to democratize access. From crypto to the moon McCaleb made his estimated $2.9 billion fortune by founding key cryptocurrency projects and following his hunches. He launched the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox Bitcoin exchange in 2010 after becoming interested in Bitcoin. To create the exchange, he repurposed an old website that he had made for trading Magic: The Gathering cards. (The domain name originally stood for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange.) In 2011, he sold the site, which at one point was handling 70% of global bitcoin transactions. It collapsed a few years later after losing nearly $350 million in Bitcoin due to hacks. By then, McCaleb had moved on, founding the cryptocurrency Ripple, which has provided the bulk of his fortune, and then Stellar, an online payment system. McCaleb explains his decision to step away from Stellar and divert more than a third of his crypto fortune to a space startup as an opportunity to follow his passion. Humankind, he believes, needs a frontier, a vision, something to strive for. As a kid, McCaleb told friends that he would mine an asteroid someday. Now he wants to help people to live outside of the solar system. But hes the first to acknowledge that Vast wont work without a viable business model. Vast CEO Max Haot standing by the Haven-1 primary structure. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] It is a little hand-wavy, because this has never been done before, says McCaleb, of creating a working business out of launching and running a commercial space station. [Space is] an emerging market, and were not exactly sure how itll shape up. But Im pretty sure if people want to be a part of it, then we will need habitation. Theoretical as it may be, space startups and industry analysts alike paint the race to replace the ISS as essential for the future of the commercial space industry. Vast and its ilk are seeking to create whats essentially an office in the sky for NASA, which would attract the billions of dollars the agency has traditionally spent on the ISS every year and help develop (very valuable) human habitation tech for moon and Mars missions. We’re not building a space station, we are building an economy, says Brad Henderson, chief commercial officer of Starlab Space, one of Vasts more established competitors. This is a piece of commercial real estate that is continuing on the legacy of what the world has done [with ISS]. But space station competitors also want to create a base for futuristic, low-gravity manufacturing, which has been shown to impactand even optimizecrystalline and molecular growth. Haot calls microgravity manufacturing the holy grail. Startups have already shown that manufacturing in space can lead to more pure fiber-optic cables, called ZBLAN, and pharmaceuticals. Southern California startup Varda has manufactured more pure versions of the HIV drug ritonavir on its satellite. Vast employee looking at Haven-1 flight panel post machining. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] You know that 30-year period when we went from biplanes made of cloth in the 1920s to traditional commercial jets in the 50swhen aircraft went from the domain of reckless people to an experience for everyday business travelers? says Peck, from Cornell. Thats kind of where we are right now with space. The potential of getting the next-gen space station right has some worried about what might go wrong. Starlabs Henderson frames the competition as a battle between companies with competence and experience and newer players that are trying to fast-track the engineering and launch process. His company is a collaboration between Mitsubishi, Airbus, Palantir, and Northrop Grumman. He sees the rightful successor to the ISS as coming from a company that can build international alliances, foster a space economy, and be a methodical, safe builder (Starlab doesnt plan to launch anything until mid-2029). To him, going really fast isnt the answer, and may be a liability. If youre trying to verticalize a brand-new company in a brand-new way, get it 100% right the first time, and go like a bat out of hell, the likelihood something small will go wrong, and you could have catastrophic failures, is high, he says. Minimum viable station Two things led Haot to becoming the CEO of Vast. The first was a tour of Cape Canaveral that he took in 1985 while visiting the U.S. as an 11-year-old. Cape Canaveral is where, if all things go right, the Falcon 9 rocket carrying Vasts Haven-1 station will launch next year. The second was his partial success with a startup he founded and ran, called Launcher, which attempted to build a rocket quickly and cheaply. With just $30 million and an assist from SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket, the firm put a pair of satellites into space in 2023, though they failed shortly after deployment. The company also landed a government contract to develop its rocket technology, though it never launched. The scrappy operation impressed McCaleb when he met Haot in 2022. Haot was seeking funding. McCaleb countered by acquiring Launcher in February 2023 and putting Haot in charge of day-to-day operations at Vast. McCaleb had stepped away from Ripple a few years earlier and, looking for the next chapter, began looking into starting a space company. He talked to friends, and friends of friends, speaking to anybody who knew about the industry, until he found himself in a hotel in Marina Del Rey in the summer of 2021 with a trio of engineers, including Colin Smith, whos still with Vast. They started laying out a strategy to win the NASA contest for an ISS replacement. First, theyd focus on the station module itself and not worry abou creating a launch system; theyd utilize SpaceX and the Falcon 9 to get the capsule into space. Second, theyd look to create a minimum viable product. Initially, the team wanted to build a more elaborate module with artificial gravity (a concept still in Vasts long-term game plan). But the initial launch, Haven-1, will be smaller, with the station set to orbit for just three years, but only have humans on board for separate, 10-day missions. Haven-1 corridor inside the Haven-1 Experience featuring the entry hatch, various consumable storage and systems in addition to the 4-person sleeping berth for the crew. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Haven-1 will be a leap forward from the cramped, utilitarian quarters of the ISS, with a sizable viewing port, Starlink internet access, interior wood paneling, and white walls that recall a spa. It wont, however, include facilities like a bathroom, or be habitable beyond short stints in space. During crewed missions, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will dock with Haven-1, and, to the relief of astronauts, provide access to a working bathroom and a means of leaving in case of an emergency. These choices allow Vast to build a smaller, lightweight structureand to do most of it in-house. The Vast team is shaping and welding Haven-1s aluminum form, along with designing and manufacturing its own batteries and avionics. Its even sewing the crews uniforms, thanks to a team of seamstresses who sit on the factory floor. Being vertically integrated, argues Haot, means you dont waste time and money outsourcing key components Haven-1 primary structure qualification article on the Vast-built test stand in Mojave, California. [Photo: Courtesy of Vast] Most of the technology underpinning this space is based off of previous ISS tech. As Vast engineers put it, nothing here is zero to one. Haot argues that the biggest challenge, the real zero to one, has been assembling the team and building a new culture within a few years. Thats where he thinks Vast has a huge advantage. He says the best engineers want ownership of their work and the thrill of seeing it launch; signing on for a space firm bankrolled by a billionaire with a plan to hit orbit in a few years is compelling. Haot says that at other companies, founders, and leaders need to sell workers on the mission, and get talent to take a leap of faith. But were putting together a station in space, he added. I dont have to convince anybody here. Growing competition Vast does have to convince NASA, which will not only be evaluating other contestants, but figuring out its own road map. The agency is facing proposed budget cuts of up to 25% under President Donald Trump. The president also scuttled space industry veteran Jared Isaacmans nomination to lead NASA in late May. Even so, in early June, a NASA spokesperson confirmed the agency will finalize its requirements for the ISS successor this year and evaluate teams next year. Competitors include Starlab, Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, and the Houston-based startup Axiom Space, which plans to attach one of its modules to the ISS in 2027. Each company is taking a slightly different route. Blue Origin said in a statement to Fast Company that its leveraging the substantial investment NASA has made with the firm on the lunar program, arguing that technology in development for lunar missions can also be used for the companys Orbital Reef space station. In December 2024, Blue Origin ran a trial in a full-scale mock-up of the station at a site outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, but that didnt include any working hardware. It declined to disclose how much money has been invested in Orbital Reef. Vast employee inspects a portion of the Haven-1 development primary structure. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] Axiom was cofounded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, the former program manager of the ISS who sent the first commercial passengers to the station. The company embarked on the AX-4 mission to the ISS in late June, taking an astronaut to the space station via a SpaceX Falcon 9, and plans to launch a module that will connect with the ISS in 2027. It has raised $505 million in venture capital funding. Meanwhile Starlab, which brings together heavy hitters from Airbus and Mitsubishi, continues to build alliances and research collaborations. Former NASA chief technologist Peck believes the challenge for any competitor i being in the right placewith the right tech, strategy, and approachwhen NASA figures out just what it wants to do. He argues theres a good chance it will default towards the team with the most traditional space résumé. That perspective favors teams like Starlab and Axiom, which have more experience with the ISS and NASA, and puts relatively inexperienced Vast at a distinct disadvantage. I don’t think it’s enough to build something, Peck says. I think it’s necessary for the successful contractor to have credible experience in space systems that span many years. So my opinion, from a business strategy perspective, is, if they haven’t already got it, they’re not going to get it this way. 1/20 model of Haven-1 with SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] The next six months will likely be a defining time for Vast. Once it finishes testing the current Haven-1 model in the Mojave, it will have to repeat those tests for the flight version of the space station starting this summer. When thats done, the module returns to Long Beach for integration, a process of outfitting the entire structure with electronics and avionics that will see the weight of the capsule go from 4 to 14 tons. Later this year, Vast will also launch a small satellite to test its avionics systems in space. A fully integrated Haven-1 will be transported to the NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio for a series of vibration, acoustic, and thermal vacuum tests. The FCC also has to approve a reentry plan for the station. If all that goes right, the approved module then gets shipped to Cape Canaveral for a scheduled May 26 launch. The Haven-1 Lab inside the Haven-1 Experience. [Photo: Spencer Lowell] These technical and quality control challenges, substantial as they are, may pale in comparison to the political and bureaucratic hurdles the company faces. McCaleb says that economics of commercial space stations hinge on the success of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which will be able to carry 10 times the payload of the currently used Falcon rocket. In May, Starship’s ninth test flight ended in yet another explosion. Meanwhile, NASAs pending budget crisis, as well as rumors that the proposed MAGA-friendly head, former U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Steven Kwast, is more likely to favor viewing space as a battlefield, suggest commercial research in space may be deprioritized. But McCaleband the 900-plus people scrambling to get Haven-1 in orbithave a harder time envisioning a world without a space station circling miles above the globe. I just don’t see a world where the U.S. doesn’t have a station that they can go to, said McCaleb. That seems like a huge step back.
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E-Commerce
Have you ever wondered where the unsold concert merch from decades worth of tours end up? For artists associated with Universal Music Groups merchandise arm, Bravado, it often winds up in a massive Nashville facility, gathering dust. Its like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, says Matt Young, president of Bravado. This stuff predates meI believe it was just forgotten. From an environmental perspective, decades worth of apparel sitting in a warehouse is among the least harmful options. Typically that stuff gets donated to Goodwillbut they dont even want that much, especially if it has a band name, Young says. Some artists may want it destroyed, or you do a sale on a websitewhich is usually the first wave of defense. Like fast-fashion, donated clothes that cant be sold in stores ends up in landfills or the global South, where countries like Pakistan, Kenya, and India import millions of pounds of used clothing every year from the West. Often rather than donate clothes, companies will incinerate them. UMGs head of sustainability Dylan Siegler says the company has so much deadstock in storage partially because it only donates or incinerates unsold merchandise as the very last resort. [Photo: UMG/Bravado] Looking to find a new option for its unsold apparel, Bravado is now sending 400,000 shirts from its Nashville warehouse via cargo ship to Morocco, where Spanish clothing designer and manufacturer Hallotex will turn many of them back into cotton yarn, which it will then spin into new, 100% recycled cotton shirt. It will also shred what cant be recycled, and turn that fabric housing insulation. At the end of the process, Bravado will have some 280,000 new shirts that will debut as artist merch for European fans in the fall, ahead of the holiday season. The effort was spearheaded by one of UMGs most influential artists: Billie Eilish. Eilish and her mother, Maggie Baird, have long focused on making both touring and merch more sustainable, encouraging fans to bring reusable water bottles to shows and eat plant-based, all while working with smaller designers on upcycled merch collections and sourcing organic or recycled cotton for apparel. With the T-shirt recycling effort, theyre helping UMG use recycled fabric on a wider scale. We are drowning in clothes on this planet, much of which is in landfills, much of which is shipped to other countries to pollute their waters and their land, Baird says. I think we have to be extremely thoughtful about what merch gets put out in the worldwhy does it exist, how is it made, and what happens to it in its second life? [Photo: UMG/Bravado] Selling sustainability Merchandisetour shirts, posters, and hats, among other productshas long been central to how artists connect with fans. But in the streaming era, these physical items have become increasingly critical for musicians as the music industry shifts away from relying on album sales for revenue. Entertainment analysis firm Midia Research projects that the global market for artist merchandise, which was roughly $14 billion at the end of 2024, will hit $16.3 billion by 2030. Industry sources say top artists can make in excess of $10 million selling merch annually. For a company the size of Bravado, the challenge is feeding this demand while embracing more sustainable practices. Bravado president Young is no stranger to the merch business. Before he joined Bravado in 2021, he spent 13 years building Warner Music Groups in-house merch arm, Warner Artist Services, which he led from 2016 till his departure. But he admits that he wasnt well-versed in sustainable sourcing until he connected with Eilish and Baird. In the past few years, Eilish has pushed Bravado to use nontoxic clothing dyes and water-based graphic inks in place of synthetic ones, which consume a lot of resources and include toxic chemicals that make them the worlds second-largest polluter of water. Recently, Eilish has been exploring smaller partnerships focused on sustainable merch. In the spring, she worked with designer Iris Alonzo, who overdyed old tour shirts and hand-painted them before adding the tour title in water-based ink. Clothing upcycler Lost Love made unique sweaters and shirts entirely from postconsumer materials. And L.A.-based textile recycler Suay upcycled work shirts into Eilish merch by overdying them and adding an embroidered Billie name tag on the chest. Baird says her daughters focus on sustainability dates back to the start of her career. We asked for [sustainable merch options] even before she was big, Baird says. It was a little bit like pushing a boulder up a hill for a long time. There is one challenge that comes with stocking sustainable merchsticker shock. Sustainable usually means more expensivefor the company and for the fan, Young says. (Such options can require a premium of as much as 30% more than an all-new product). As a result, artists play a role in educating their fans about why their shirt costs more than another artists might. Eilish plays a video before her shows explaining how her merchandise is made with an emphasis on sustainability. Her fan base has responded enthusiastically. Young notes that Eilishs stop at Quebec Citys Centre Vidéotron last September broke the venues record for single-day merch sales. Last summer, Bravado worked with Target to sell a limited-edition apparel line that included tees made with a blend of organic and recycled cotton. Young says the Target products sold strongly enough that the retailer placed multiple follow-up orders. With more UMG artists, including Shawn Mendes, Lorde, and the Rolling Stones, asking for eco-friendly merch, Young says the company is laying the groundwork for a bigger commitment. UMG has been assessing Hallotexs capabilities via several small-scale test runs for the past several years. Now its putting its deadstock on a boat to see if itcan, Young says, unlock the economies of scale that come with mass production of sustainable options. From left: Matt Young, president of Bravado; Susan Mazo, EVP of global communications at Universal Music Group; Eilishs mother, Maggie Baird; and Dylan Siegler, SVP and head of sustainability at Universal Music Group [Photo: R. Weber] Making it scale Hallotex, based in Barcelona, has for years been a go-to manufacturer for brands like Zara, J.Crew, Eileen Fisher, and Mara Hoffman who want sustainable options. Through a partnership with textile fiber maker Lenzing, Hallotex can incorporate the nontoxic, cellulose-based Tencel in products for retailers. Its partnership with Bravado, though, is built on its own process, which it calls the Loop. The company is able to break down garments and other textiles into small pieces that can then be spun into new yarn. The fibers that are made in the process will be 100% cotton regardless of what the constituents of the waste T-shirt were, says UMGs Siegler. Hallotex estimates that its process saves 15 liters of water per shirt createda small portion of the 2,700 liters needed to make a new shirt, from growing cotton, to processing the material, to manufacturing the final product. That adds up to 4.2 million liters of water saved for the shirts that Hallotex will make for Bravado. At first blush, the idea of sending nearly half a million T-shirts across the world by boat to be recycled in Morocco doesnt seem like the most eco-friendly move, but it came down to which company was capable of processing the sheer volume of fabric Bravado had on hand. The technology at that scale is not available in North America, Young says. We know putting it on a boat isnt the best for the world, but having it rot in a warehouse or go to a landfill is way worse, he says, noting that to mitigate the ecological impact of the journey, Bravado is planning to keep the new T-shirts in the nearby European market. For now, UMG hasnt calculated the actual emissions savings of the process for recycling its 400,000 shirts. But Siegler and Young both say the effort is focused on the Hallotex partnership as a better way to utilize deadstock clothing. Young also says that, for now, Bravado will absorb any additional costs associated with the shirts that Hallotex creates. Getting more artists on board is a crucial next step to scaling the capabilities of companies like Hallotex, and even ones closer to home. If we get more participation [from artists], we can figure out how to get companies with the technology in America to scale to where we can do this locally, Young says. Our ultimate goal is to get this to be such a widely accepted practice that the price drops to the point where people won’t even care or notice that a shirt is an extra couple bucks.
Category:
E-Commerce
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