68% of people saying they bought a laundry brand in the past 3 months didn’t buy it at all (according to panel data).
All Threads
Purple clothes seem ordinary to us, but to the Ancient Greeks they symbolised power. Purple dye was incredibly hard to find – coming from a sea snail called the murex – so it was only accessible to emperors, priests, kings and judges. It wasn’t until 1856 that a British chemist found a synthetic version of purple, soon making it available to the masses.
Wedding dresses are synonymous with white, but we only have Queen Victoria to thank for this. When she married Prince Albert in 1840, she decided to buck the trend of wearing red (white was reserved for courtrooms), and popularised a trend that has remained ever since.
After the Queen’s Gambit began ruling the Netflix charts in late 2020, Chess.com saw a 400% rise in registrations, while US sales of chess sets on eBay soared by 60%.
The celebrated director makes his movies with an audience in mind, but that audience isn’t a big group: “It’s me – I am the audience. I am the guy who pays $8 to go and see a movie, and I’m betting there are other people like me out there.”
Quorn initially targeted their products at vegetarians and vegans. After all, who else would want to buy plant-based meals? But they soon discovered that these meals also appealed to health conscious non-vegans. This insight led Quorn to rebrand as a ‘healthy food’ company, famously partnering with openly meat-eating Mo Farah, and helped them massively expand their buyer base (and sales).
Getir was valued at £9 billion in early 2022 – one of the many rapid delivery apps that thrived off pandemic restrictions. But two years later it exited the UK market, after the return to physical shopping meant it struggled to turn a profit (especially with competition from existing takeaway apps like Deliveroo).
The celebrity dating app currently has a 2.5 million person waitlist, but a user base in the low six figures. Why doesn’t it let more people in? According to CEO Daniel Gendelman this exclusivity is the very key to its success: Raya is thriving because lots of people aren’t on it – but want to be.
A clever bit of editing can turn the trailer for Harry Potter 6 – arguably the darkest film in the franchise – into a classic teen comedy. It’s surprising how well it fits, and it’s worth checking out other re-cut trailers (e.g. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a horror).
Think again. Over 55s are leading the charge in alcohol and drugs usage, sexually transmitted diseases and arrests – a result of having more disposable income, looser social attitudes, and fewer childcare responsibilities.
A decade of innovation around special flavours has boosted Red Bull’s penetration and increased overall sales by 9%. They’ve also helped to position the brand differently: now, 1 in 4 Red Bull drinking occasions are because it is “fun to drink”.
When Dietrich Mateschitz visited Thailand in 1982, he discovered Krating Daeng: a locally sourced drink that helped to cure his jet lag. He was so impressed that he decided to adapt it for a western audience: Red Bull.
1% of Reddit communities start 74% of all conflicts. As Ethan Decker puts it, “most people, most of the time, are mostly good.” It’s also a reminder that opinions on social media don’t reflect the general population.
In 2022, Google adjusted its search algorithms to surface Reddit threads more often. The result? Reddit went from 57 million visits from Google US to 427 million in less than a year. Reddit’s own numbers told a similar story: its total traffic was growing by 50% with no signs of slowing down.
At Noma in Copenhagen, René Redzepi restricts himself to using ingredients that grow in Nordic countries even there vegetation barely grows due to the cold weather. The result is that Redzepi works with ingredients other chefs wouldn’t think of touching – rotten seaweed, red ants, and fried fish scales – to create a menu of unexpected flavours diners can’t find elsewhere. As Redzepi says, “the best discoveries are hidden somewhere in insanity.”