Jennifer Fleiss, co-founder of Rent the Runway, had no background in fashion. But she says that “being naive is one of the best secrets of first time entrepreneurship. So we were naive enough to reach out to Diane von Furstenberg and to ask her advice and her time.” The meeting gave Fleiss important pointers for shaping the business.
All Threads
What causes riots? A study of unrest in 50 African and Asian cities found that “peak levels of unrest occur in the upper 20s [degrees centigrade]”. In short, heat makes it nicer to be outside at night. It’s not a coincidence that the 2011 London riots started in peak August.
During Covid-19, the public was inundated with dates for lifting specific restrictions. To make things easy to follow, a developer created a handy timeline based on beer consumption (the number one priority for most of the UK).
The tennis superstar won 80% of the singles matches he played, but only 54% of the individual points. Not all points are made equal.
Christmas might be the most magical time of year but it’s still motivated by profit: Rudolph the Reindeer was originally a promotional tool. Retailer Montgomery Ward had been buying and giving away booklets for Christmas every year and decided that creating their own book would save money. So in 1939 copywriter Robert L. May created Rudolph as part of the first published book, eventually selling 2 million copies.
Michael O’Leary removed the add-ons that make flying pleasurable. Ryanair routinely ranks bottom in airline surveys. Its social media is full of complaints about cancelled flights and extra baggage fees. But it’s a ruthless provider of low fares and high punctuality, and Europe’s most profitable airline.
There are 15% more same-sex couples in US places that had gold rushes (e.g. California) than counties that didn’t: rush counties were isolated, mostly uninhabited and lacked strong formal institutions, which helped shaping pro-LGBT attitudes.
Samsung’s new product enabled customers to display artwork or photos when it wasn’t in use, reframing it from an item that took up unnecessary space to a key part of the decor. Suddenly, the conversation was around what you want to display in your living room, rather than the maximum TV size you found acceptable.
To address the issue of children in India not washing their hands with soap, Savlon created Healthy Hands Chalk Sticks. So when children put their hands under the tap before lunch, the chalk powder on their hands turned into soap on its own – a great example of starting a new behaviour off the back of an existing habit.
It’s a common piece of advice to juniors entering the workplace – the best way of getting stuck in and learning from those around you. At the same time, people love to cite Steve Jobs’ teaching that “innovating is saying no to 1000 things.” The reality is that both have merit – it just depends on the context.
Ex-footballers have different views on the age-old England midfielder debate: they pick the one they played with. Gary Neville says Scholes, Jamie Carragher says Gerrard, and John Terry says Lampard.
The world’s greatest playwright was a serial borrower. All of Shakespeare’s plays were inspired by original source material; Hamlet comes from the Old Norse Saga of King Rolf Kraki, while A Midsummer Night’s Dream was based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Shein sells clothes for every need and occasion, but it was originally a portal to buy wedding dresses; branching out into womenswear in the early 2010s and to all types of fashion a few years later.
Rewe, a German supermarket, places baskets at the back of stores for people who have picked up too much to carry in their hands.
Supermarkets sell more when they allow consumers to buy quickly. Conversely, a slow shopping experience limits sales.