The beloved outdoors company’s partnership with Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi to fund four filmmakers reveals the secret of a modern brand’s content flywheel.

Earlier this week, outdoors accessories brand Yeti announced a new $200,000 grant to support emerging documentary filmmakers. Dubbed the Pretty Wild Fellowship, and created in partnership with Academy Award-winners Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin and the storytelling nonprofit Points North Institute, it will award four filmmakers $50,000 each in unrestricted grants, as well as mentorship and guidance throughout the development of their films.

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Elevated branding has turned pantry staples into specialty foods, to the tune of $194 billion.

We’re living in over-branded times. Maybe you’ve noticed it: the fancy olive oil, the prestige beans, the tinned fish (so much tinned fish!). Recent years have seen a packaging renaissance, where even the most mundane of products now sport labels designed to grab—and keep—consumers’ attention.

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Perfectly symmetrical and pleasingly simple, the cube has become the artistic flex of the architecture world.

It is the year of the cube building: The World Trade Center has gained a dazzling new performing arts center in the shape of a glowing marble cube. London is getting a glassy “Paddington Cube” by Renzo Piano. Tirana has Stefano Boeri’s Blloku. And Abu Dhabi now sports not one, but three cube buildings at the Adjaye-designed Abrahamic Family House.

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The chain and its Never Ending Pasta Bowl are a popular indulgence that is bringing America together.

Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.

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Social media feeds are designed to capture your attention, actual news be damned.

This fall, I’ve been starting my sociology classes by asking my students to share some uplifting news they’ve come across.

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Magic Spoon, the high-protein, low-carb cereal phenomenon, is launching Magic Spoon Treats. Why the company is expanding now and why the bars will start as an online exclusive.

Four years ago, Magic Spoon skyrocketed to direct-to-consumer fame when it tapped into millennials’ nostalgia for their childhood sugary breakfast cereals with a product that met their health standards as adults. Flavors that harked back to Cocoa Puffs, Fruity Pebbles, and Frosted Flakes served in a high-protein, low-carb, and no-sugar cereal, packaged perfectly for the ‘Gram.

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Buying stuff online feels like work. Can new technology make it fun again?

On a recent Saturday, I set out to find my two daughters flower girl dresses for an upcoming wedding. I typed “flower girl dress” into Google, a rabbit hole opened, and I tumbled in, only to emerge three hours later with a dozen tabs and thousands of options to choose from.

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The same mesh trash bins have dotted NYC’s street corners for nearly a century. Now they’re getting an upgrade.

New York City’s iconic green mesh wire litter baskets have sat on street corners since the 1930s—meaning that, while long synonymous with the city’s identity, they’re also really really old. New York’s sanitation needs have evolved in the nearly 100 years since the bin’s debut, which is why the city has started rolling out a new bin design that will soon replace more than 22,000 litter baskets.

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The former sugar factory is now high-end office space on prime New York City real estate.

At long last, the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is complete. Almost two decades after it shut down, the refinery building that once produced more than a million pounds of sugar a day has been transformed into a Class A office space.

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In a feat of engineering, the X-59 travels faster than the speed of sound, with barely any sound at all.

The Lockheed Martin X-59 is probably the strangest airplane ever designed. Its razor-sharp nose takes half of the airplane’s length; there’s no cockpit in sight; the wings are tiny compared to the entire fuselage; and its oversized tail engine looks like a weird hump about to fall off. Of course, there’s a method to this madness. The design is the secret sauce that has produced a true unicorn: a supersonic jet that doesn’t boom the hell out of people and buildings on the ground.

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Many downtowns are in terminal decline, but there are things cities can do to bring them back to life.

The hollowing out of U.S. cities’ office and commercial cores is a national trend with serious consequences for millions of Americans. As more people have stayed home following the COVID-19 pandemic, foot traffic has fallen. Major retail chains are closing stores, and even prestigious properties are having a hard time retaining tenants.

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As cities and states increasingly limit buildings’ carbon emissions, a number of products and services are popping up to help.

The good news: Most new buildings are pretty energy efficient. The bad news: most buildings are not new. This is a huge problem in the face of climate change, but there’s a growing movement to better measure just how bad these older buildings are in terms of their carbon footprint. Gauging the emissions of a building will become increasingly common, if not required, in the coming years, from the state of California to the city of Denver to the town of Edina, Minnesota. So now is a good time to start asking: how big is my building’s carbon footprint?

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Superhero movies are a dime a dozen, but the comic book podcast is about to hit its stride.

We’ve had a nice, long run of comic book movies and television shows. One after the other, with big actors and even bigger action sequences. Before the end of the year we’ll get Loki Season 2, The Marvels, and Aquaman 3, but then—and maybe you saw this coming—expect a lull. The tentatively ended WGA & SAG-AFTRA strikes mean delays. Sure, more movies and shows are in the pipeline, but then we might be in store for a bit of a drought.

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Instead of flipping affordable housing for maximum profit, these investors are keeping Charlotte’s housing accessible to those who really need it.

One of the most promising models for preserving affordable housing in the United States just got a big validation. The Housing Impact Fund, an investment fund focused on buying and preserving non-public and unsubsidized naturally occurring affordable housing in Charlotte, recently doubled its investment in solving the city’s affordable housing shortage.

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Lego pledged to eliminate petroleum-based materials from its products by 2030. Reality has proven to be more complicated.

For years, Lego has been trying to eradicate oil from the recipe of its beloved bricks. After many promises, trials, and good intentions, today the Danish toy company announced that it was halting the effort to replace its sturdy bricks made from ABS plastic with a more sustainable material. “In the early days, the belief was that it was easier to find this magic material. We tested hundreds and hundreds of materials. It’s just not possible to find a material like that,” Lego’s chief executive Niels Christiansen told the Financial Times.

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Gone are the rubbery meats and stale crackers. In their place are veggies and non-GMO ingredients.

Looking back on the ’90s, I have fond memories of Lunchables—namely, the novelty of building tiny skyscrapers of cheese, crackers, and curious meats, especially on school days defined by the culinary doldrums of whatever lifeless assortment was up for grabs on those fiberglass cafeteria trays.

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Depending on the situation, fear and anxiety can either inspire or impede.

In the U.S., anxiety disorders affect about one-third of the population. So it’s no surprise that a good number of artists and writers also suffer from anxiety and depression.

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The instant camera brand has a plan: celebrate the imperfections.

In the tumultuous history of Polaroid, the stars have aligned twice. First, when a group of enthusiasts resurrected the company after it careened into bankruptcy in 2001. Second, when the digital detox movement fueled an analog renaissance. In both cases, Polaroid was there to catch the wave and ride it all the way home, leveraging a stroke of luck into a stroke of genius.

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Director Craig Gillespie describes what it was like to bet on GameStop all over again.

It was cinematic from the start. A group of amateur stock dabblers, stuck at home during the pandemic in early 2021 and glued to their screens, began driving up the stock price of ailing video game retailer GameStop by making online investments. The amateurs congregated on the Reddit page, WallStreetBets, and were galvanized by a red head-band-wearing Bostonian named Keith Gill who went by the online moniker “Roaring Kitty” and doled out measured stock advice from a back room in his modest Massachusetts home. As GameStop’s stock surged, these rookie investors became instantly rich—in some cases, becoming millionaires in just a matter days. Meanwhile, Wall Street investors who’d bet against the company were forced to back out and buy back GameStop stocks—in what’s known as a “short squeeze”—losing billions.

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Downtowns are struggling, but cities are dragging their feet on investing in the very thing that could bring them back to life.

In San Francisco’s Financial District, a coalition of city officials, designers, and business leaders hope an alleyway can be a bellwether for the resurgence of a struggling downtown.

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