Well Made

Since the early 2000s, Amit Sharma has worked with commerce giants like Walmart and Apple to build supply chain infrastructure. In 2012, he founded Narvar. If you've bought anything online in the past few years, you've no doubt interacted with Narvar. Brands like Sephora, Patagonia, Gap and Sonos, ship millions of products per year using Narvar's comprehensive pre-to-post-purchase software.To fulfill the packaging piece of their pixel-to-package promise, Narvar recently acquired Lumi! In this episode, Stephan and Amit talk about the flux in consumer expectations, what it takes for brands to please customers now, and what's next for Lumi and Narvar.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Climate anxiety is real. Expounding environmental factors and consumer guilt can make it hard to want to click on the latest climate change headline. But, climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis has a track record for making climate change coverage go viral. For example, she wrote a story in The New York Times about evil purple urchins.Whenever climate change swoops in in the form of a flood, fire, or fuzzy caterpillars, Kendra is there to follow the story. Despite her "Gloom is my beat" Twitter username, Kendra has a bullish way of making you care about climate change — in her writing and in her reporting on How to Save a Planet. She does it by rooting her reporting in human stories, offering actionable solutions, and making it funny whenever possible.On this episode, she pulls no punches and cracks lots of laughs. Get ready to get real about shifting climate responsibility from consumers to companies, devaluing oil, and being fueled by obligation over hope.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

For Emmett Shine, being in the right place at the right time was never a matter of luck — it was a matter of hustle. It was a practice in leveling up a bit before you're ready, but not overstretching. After designing, building, and strategizing some of the most iconic modern brands — from Sweetgreen and Whole Foods to Warby Parker and Everlane — his design agency Gin Lane closed to pursue Pattern Brands. They're scaling down and venturing out to build a thoughtful collaborative of home brands that are, of course, stunningly functional and instantly essential.In this episode, Emmett cuts right to the chase of what it took to get in the room with legacy fashion brands, the design and marketing strategy that built iconic ecommerce brands, and what he's looking for in new brands for Pattern.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Being ingrained in the tech startup world has taken Amit Gupta down a different path than most. After selling his first company Photojojo in 2014, he started traveling, writing sci-fi, and more recently, building Sudowrite. Sudowrite is an app for creative writers that uses AI to beat writer's block.You're probably familiar with predictive text models offering suggestions for sentences in your Gmail or text messages. Sudowrite is built off of Open AI's GPT-3 model, and it generates word patterns based on learnings from millions of sentences online.Amit's passion for writing took him down the path to build Sudowrite. While Sudowrite predicts the paths for a most immediate future — what words could come next — Amit's optimistic sci-fi imagines a more long term future. In this episode, he talks about breaking away from the dystopian sci-fi status quo, the upside of robots writing your emails, and how to chisel away at creative blocks by using learned word patterns.Visit the Lumi blog for links, charts, and image

An online identity is a cyclical existence that feeds on the past. Reggie James calls the pre-Facebook internet "proto-identity." From there, we quickly excelled from profile pages to performative identity, slicing up our full self into concise slivers.Reggie James is the CEO and founder of Eternal, a new kind of identity platform. He's rejecting the comforting nostalgia of what users have "liked," and building a new way forward. In this episode, he challenges what we think about when we think about our online identity, praises the future-thinking theories of game design, and pushes product designers to think beyond the container.

As more product categories are getting "smarter," are they actually getting better? Wires, buttons and ports are disappearing from tech devices, meanwhile microchips and apps are being introduced to products that, for decades, have worked just fine without them. Tyler Mincey is always thinking about the long view of new products. He's brought his decade of product experience from Apple, Fictive Kin, and Pearl Automation to the VC, Bolt, and on this episode, he's disassembling generations of past products and optimistically building toward a future that he's excited to invest in.Visit the Lumi blog for links and show notes.

Accelerated by dire circumstance, ecommerce had record growth over the past year. But behind all those order confirmations and tracking numbers, supply chains and logistics were stretched further than ever.Returning guest Laura Behrens Wu is the CEO and founder of the shipping platform, Shippo and she had a front row seat to watch the rapid growth of brands and shipping providers. In this episode, she's unpacking the past year of shipping from every perspective: consumer, brand, and carrier.Visit the Lumi blog for links, charts, and images.

In his blog post titled My Life Countdown, Kevin Kelly cites a friend's philosophy of approaching your life's projects in 5-year chunks. His newest project, Vanishing Asia has broken this 5-year rule, clocking in at 5 decades.  Every one of his trips to Asia in the past fifty years has led to this 1000-page, three-volume book, capturing 9,000 photos. Kevin is known for being an eloquent futurist, a purveyor of tech and cool tools, and the founding executive editor of Wired. So at first glance, this project may seem like a departure from his work. But in this, his second visit on the Well Made podcast, Kevin shares how this 50-year visual anthology taps into what it means to plan for a payoff that will come after your lifetime.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

For the past few decades, Jeremiah McElwee has not only had a front row seat to some of the most significant growth in the natural products industry, he's been one of the people in the driver's seat. As part of the Thrive Market team since its origin, Jeremiah has led everything from category growth and farm partnerships to product packaging and the shoppable values.To build patient supply chain partnerships and keep an only-the-best product catalog, Jeremiah says they have to take their time, but you wouldn't know it from their 1 million members.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

There are a number of ways that the wellness industry can feel exclusionary. Sometimes, a product's information is overly complex and other times it's pitched as a total lifestyle overhaul. But sustainable growth is often slow and healthy changes are gradual. In the three years since launching Golde, Trinity Mouzon Wofford is perfecting her knack for balance — between accessibility and quality, between scale and mission, and between business partner and life partner.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

After 27 years as the iconic mind behind J.Crew creative, Jenna Lyons is a few months into the launch of a brand new startup – Loveseen. Of course, her decades of creative and marketing success are invaluable to her new pursuit, but she admits that she still has a lot she has to learn.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

When you order a Take Back bag from For Days, you fill it with old clothes (in any condition, from any brand), ship it back to them, and they give you store credit. But behind that very simple exchange is a complex supply chain that's built on circularity.When founder Kristy Caylor learned that on average, each person in the US sends 70 pounds of fabric to the landfill, it was an epiphany. If you think about how to shrink your annual pile of unwanted clothes, donation, resale, and repair may come to mind. But Kristy was concerned about the items that don't have a place in any of those reuse streams, which is why For Days is focused on basics. There are no greener pastures for your old t-shirts, socks, and underwear — that is until now.For Days launched with an in-house recovery facility where they receive, source, and grade each item they collect from their takeback program. Depending on the condition and fabric of an item, For Days will rejuvenate it for sale on their site, or ship it to downcycling partners

In the summer of 2018, we talked to Hilary Milnes about how retail isn't dead but it's changing, the struggle of shuttering department stores, and innovative ways that online and offline shopping can intersect.Over two years later, it's a case of same same but different. Hilary is still covering retail and fashion, but as the Americas Editor for Vogue Business. And now, one year into the pandemic, these trend trajectories have spiked, forcing brands to accelerate faster than anyone predicted. The customer-facing shifts came quickly — adapting to an online fashion month, pivoting retail strategies, and riding the ephemeral wave of creator-driven trends. But behind the scenes, supply chain shifts are still happening far too slow, leaving frontline fashion workers shortchanged and overworked, even amidst consumer outcries.On this episode, Hilary Milnes has optimistic and pessimistic takes on which of these shifts will stick in a post-pandemic world. She also illuminates new opportunities or smaller fashion brand

When consumers see a brand that claims to be "sustainable," reporter Alden Wicker encourages them to investigate. Every product's supply chain has different sustainability opportunities, so sustainability strategies will look different for every brand.First, she says brands have to acknowledge that sustainability is not binary. One product can be more sustainable than another, but sustainability is an ongoing journey rather than a final destination. Next, brands need to define their sustainability strategies and what sustainability looks like to them. This requires unraveling the supply chain of each product to see the impact of your materials, manufacturing, and transit.It's a lot to unpack, and Alden is always eager to investigate. In this episode, Alden answers the question, "What do we talk about when we talk about sustainability?" She advocates for a bigger focus on factories, warns against recycling red herrings, and confronts the challenge of assigning value to sustainability.Visit the Lumi blog for li

When you're researching a sustainability topic, it can feel like a Russian nesting doll of rabbit holes — you often end up with more questions than when you started. The good news is, if you find yourself deliberating the gray areas of sustainability, then you're in the right place.Ian Montgomery says that designing for sustainability is all about getting comfortable with tradeoffs. He is the founder and Creative Director of Guacamole Airplane, a design studio focused on sustainable packaging, and one of the first Lumi Experts. If you've explored the Lumi Sustainability Properties, then you're familiar with Ian's work and his knack for finding clarity, and even conviction, in sustainability's gray areas.

The first step to making Cyclon, On's recyclable shoe, was to use a single family of materials — polyamide (made from castor beans!). But that's just one piece of the cradle-to-cradle puzzle.To capture the shoes for recycling, they've developed a subscription model and a dedicated recycling stream. Staying true to the mission, these shoes aren't recycled to turn into other plastic goods down the line — they're recycled into new Cyclon shoes.It's an experiment that co-founder Caspar Coppetti says is aimed at not only revaluing waste in the supply chain, but slowing down our behavior of consumption. In this episode, he goes in the weeds on sourcing, manufacturing, and open source sustainability after talking about the origins of On and their unique philosophy on sponsorship.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

After four years as Slack's Head of Global Design and before taking her new role at Facebook, Kristy Tillman brought her side projects to the forefront.Kristy has a list of impressive side projects in her creative think tank, Tomorrow Looks Bright. It's a place where she does more than invite herself to the table — she creates the table and sits at the head. Kristy's work is always driven by optimism and an urgent need for a more equitable future which doesn't start in a decade, or in a year, but tomorrow.In this episode, Kristy talks about incentivizing diversity, acting on your values early, designing for millions of people at Slack, and before designing for 30 people with her new fellowship, Made in the Future.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

Before Rumpl, sleeping-bag-style puffy blankets were predominantly marketed to Alpine athletes. Rumpl didn't invent the category, but founder and CEO, Wylie Robinson is doing everything he can to expand it.Wylie likes to ask people a simple question, "How many blankets do you have at home?" Then he asks, "How many of the brands can you name?" Outside of heritage brands like Pendleton or Woolrich, there is very little brand loyalty in the blanket business. Beyond that, there's little being done to bring performance textiles into the space.On this episode, fresh off of his Shark Tank pitch, Wylie shares what he learned from being on the show, how Rumpl continues to scale and differentiate, and why the pandemic took their branding down a few notches on Maslow's hierarchy.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

By his own account, Boll & Branch founder, Scott Tannen knows that his bedding brand may not be the first that comes to mind when you think of "cool" DTCs. The branding is classic and the style feels universal, but dig into the Boll & Branch supply chain and you'll find that they're totally changing the game for how textiles can (and should) be manufactured.Before he had a logo, or even a brand, Scott had drafted out the unwavering brand principals which deviated far from the norm of the textiles industry. Boll & Branch has adopted and created their own standards that meet or exceed qualifications for ethical labor, sustainable materials, and transparency.As he puts it, "There are so many issues that exist within this manufacturing cycle, and if you don't break it all apart by starting from scratch, you can't fix it." Tune in to hear how Scott and his wife Missy have built a transparent supply chain that they're proud of.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

If you bought a Bellroy wallet when the company launched a decade ago, you're probably still using it. For the past ten years, while they've worked to slim down your every day carry, they've slimmed down their environmental impact behind the scenes.CEO and co-founder Andy Fallshaw has a unique brand of optimism that's a constant ebb and flow between digging into details, and panning out to see the full picture. On this episode, he's settling into the nuance of sustainability, talking through current and future solutions that adapt and evolve. To build for sustainability, you often have to break a few paradigms along the way.Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.