Ultra-fast fashion brands have developed techniques that could help avoid overproduction. This article explores how niche and sustainable brands can learn from them. — Fashion and apparel brands have been disposing of millions of dollars of unsold goods. Shoppers like variety but it’s hard to predict what items will be popular. So most global brands make a wide selection of mass-produced items in the knowledge that large amounts of unsold stock will be destroyed.

Around 30% of new clothes and returned items remain unsold. This is a huge environmental and business challenge given that around 100 and 150 billion items are made annually. Making items that go unsold is wasteful and damaging to the environment. …

Startups are mostly innovation-led. Technology brings magnitudinal benefits (speed, cost reductions, efficacy, etc.). And in the digital domain the ability to break free of traditional business constraints (e.g. geography, human hours, material inputs, etc.). So technological innovation is fundamental to the startup game. The world’s most renowned accelerator Y Combinator…

Increase chances of success: decrease the impact of failure. I have attended a number of world-class startup accelerators (including Kiuas (Finland) and Google for Startups). While there are commonalities there are also significant differences. For good measure, I also signed up for the Y Combinator open Summer School to compare…

App Clips are streamlined versions of iPhone apps that provide on-the-spot solutions. They are activated by scanning codes. — QR (Quick Response) codes have been around for 27 years. In Japan and China, they have been used on packaging and tickets for over ten years, and in recent times they have become ubiquitous for both online and physical mobile payments — mainly due to their use within the WeChat…

Retail Apocalypse Not Now — Despite a ten-year stream of brick-and-mortar “retail apocalypse” stories, and the recent devastating impact of Covid-19, it doesn’t take much investigation to see that, under the shadows of dying retail dinosaurs (both big and small), physical retail is inexorably evolving into a new breed of showroom-type stores that better unite…

Store – ‘Place where goods are kept for sale’. This is a definition of the word store recorded in 1721, and this is still the general idea of what a store is. The old retail success metric of ‘sales per square metre’ is also still prevalent. …

A brief history of Finnish startup communities — [Updated: December 2019] At prep school, we were allowed a small bag of sweets each Sunday, and I would watch in bemusement as one boy enthusiastically gave away most of his sweets. …

Do good enough and perfection will follow; try for perfection and risk failing to be good enough. After graduating I took a teacher position at boarding school. I was put in a flat with another new teacher called Will Gould. …