Like many American cities, the streetscape in downtown Brooklyn was for a long time very heavy on the street: a great place to park a car or drive through. But over the past 20 years, the area itself has gone from being a 9-to-5 shopping and business district to one where a growing number of people live 24-7. Since 2004, more than 22,000 housing units have been added to the neighborhood, changing its character so much that its old streetscape just wasn’t cutting it.
“There was a real evolution of the neighborhood,” says Regina Myer, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP), a business improvement district representing the area’s business owners, shopkeepers, and, increasingly, residential developers. “Frankly, the construction fences were down, and it was really time to look at the public realm afresh.”
So in late 2018, DBP hired the urban design and architecture firms WXY and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) to come up with some new ideas for Downtown Brooklyn’s streetscape. Myer says her organization wanted “infrastructure that really focused in on the pedestrian and mobility, shared streets, increased biodiversity, and also really making sure this was a bold plan for Brooklyn, that it didn’t look like something generic.”
[Photos: courtesy Downtown Brooklyn Partnership]
Now, after seven years of planning and prototypes, the designs have been fully installed. As these before-and-after images show, the transformation has been dramatic.
The formerly congested streets of downtown Brooklyn have been augmented with planters, bollards, street bistro seating, and other traffic calming measures, as well as increased greenery and public open space. Redesigned tree pits add a larger and more refined space for street trees to grow, and curving benches follow cobblestone paving that hugs the edge of the sidewalk. Compare to the preexisting street furniture, which Myer calls “mean,” the new spaces invite pedestrians to sit and experience the city around them.
[Photo: Hai Zhang/Downtown Brooklyn Partnership]
Prototyping public space
This work came about incrementally at first. WXY and BIG’s design guidance was first tested on the streetscape outside a Studio Gang-designed residential tower that was completed in 2021. Working with the city’s Department of Transportation during the project’s mid-pandemic construction, DBP convinced the city to allow sidewalks on two sides of the building to be widened to make space for these new streetscape amenities as an experimental pilot project. The resulting streetscape sparked a desire for other, more officially sanctioned improvements.
A second pilot project was then built outside the city’s first all-electric skyscraper, and officials were fully on board. “They liked it so much that they actually asked us to go through the [Public Design Commission] process for a plan for the entire neighborhood,” Myer says, referring to the path for making improvements to public and civic spaces in the city.
[Photos: courtesy Downtown Brooklyn Partnership]
This work led to the 2021 release of a Public Realm Action Plan covering more than 40 blocks in the area. In 2023, the mayor’s office dedicated $40 million in funding to put the plan into action. “The prototyping process really worked for us,” Myer says.
And in the four years since the plan was releasedrelative light speed in the realm of public space projectsit has materialized on sidewalks and shared streets across downtown Brooklyn. Bright yellow planters now sit in the spaces where cars once parked, carving out niches for outdoor seating and dining. Teardrop-shaped tree planters add flourish to the edges of sidewalks where trash once gathered. Swooping benches teem with life along streets packed with an increasing mix of uses.
[Photos: courtesy Downtown Brooklyn Partnership]
This could be just the start of a broader transformation in the area. WXY and BIG’s design has now become a system that developers can use to improve the streetscape of future projects. Myer says the plan was strategically minimal in its proposed interventions. The redesign requires little large-scale construction, utilizing existing street poles, for example, and making the most of the existing width of the sidewalk. Aside from the two pilot projects, no other sidewalks were extended, “because you know how gnarly that can get,” Myer says.
The plan has sailed through approvals and construction, and downtown Brooklyn’s streetscapes are almost unrecognizable from what they looked like just a few years ago. Myer calls it an effort that appeals across the spectrum, from business owners to building tenants to the growing residential population to visitors and tourists. “What we really were seeking here was to use our existing space better for people,” she says.
[Photos: courtesy Downtown Brooklyn Partnership]
For budding influencers, class is now in session.
Jessica Henig, founder of Unlocked Branding, is rolling out Social Media University, a new platform launching today that promises to decode the influencer industry for the next wave of creators and industry professionals.
The platform is free to join. We wanted it to be accessible for anyone who is interested in building a career in media and their network, Henig tells Fast Company. This community was built on after years of successfully building talent into top tier brands themselves, and weve seen such high demand from others who want to know where to start.
Henig knows the formula, after helping shape some of the internets It-talent, including Alicia Breuer, Millie Leer, Pia Mia, and Montana Brown among them.
Those who sign up can expect a mix of online and in-person interactive masterclasses with leading industry voices, seminars, trips, and community events, as well as mentorship and behind-the-scenes access to Unlocked Brandings global network of creators and partners.
The missing link from young people, over the past few years especially, has been that they are missing in person community, says Henig. Working for yourself can be isolating sometimes and we want to get everyone in the same room to foster connections and creativity.
With rising unemployment and a college degree no longer guaranteeing a career path, the creator economy has become a bright spot for young people navigating a bleak job market. The number of creators globally is expected to grow at a compound annual rate between 10 and 20% and the total addressable market is expected to increase to a projected $500 billion by 2027, according to Goldman Sachs.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha are fully bought in. Over half of Gen Z wants to become influencers, according to a Morning Consult survey. A 2024 Whop survey found that the top two career aspirations among Gen Alpha are YouTuber and TikTok creator.
With the influencer industry being so new in comparison to more ‘traditional’ career and education paths, theres a huge education context gap when it comes to breaking into the industry, says Henig.
Ive built talent up from the start of their careers, many of which started as early as 16 years old, and found that the intense experiential nature of the social media industry set them up for incredible success and long term career paths in the real worldwithout having to go to a traditional university route.
For those after a traditional education experience, Syracuse University recently announced its new Center for the Creator Economy, looking to train the new class of influencers, streamers, podcasters, and YouTubers. Still, one of the biggest selling points of a career in content creation is precisely the fact it doesnt require a degree or hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt that come with one. Starting out as a content creator has never been easier, you mostly need a phone and a dream. Yet, because of the low barrier to entry, the industry is saturated and some expert guidance could be that all-important leg up.
People should sign up if they want valuable insight, to understand the economics of the industry and how it affects strategy and work, says Henig. And a community of people that share similar values to want to stay at the forefront of what is moving the needle.
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter.
Earlier in the spring, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) announced that, starting in late May 2025, H-1B visa holders and other non-permanent residents would be banned from taking out new FHA mortgages.
The result?
Non-permanent residentsincluding H-1B visa holderssaw their share of FHA mortgage locks crater from 3.8% in September 2024 to 0.2% in September 2025, according to Optimal Blue. This sharp pullback comes after their share of FHA mortgage locks had spiked between 2020 and 2024.
Keep in mind that FHA mortgages make up a much smaller share of overall borrowers than, say, GSE conventional borrowers. Indeed, Optimal Blue data reviewed by ResiClub shows that FHA mortgages accounted for 22.0% of total U.S. mortgage-purchase locks in September 2025. Meanwhile, according to the New York Fed, as of June 2025, FHA mortgages represent just 12% of the nations $12.94 trillion in mortgage debt.
While FHA has pulled back on lending to H-1B visa holders, as far as ResiClub can tell there hasnt been a similar changeat least not yetin the conventional mortgage space (Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac).
This squeezes entry-level homebuying in some key housing markets already dealing with weak sales and too much supply, writes Eric Finnigan, president of Demographics Research at John Burns Research and Consulting. (JBREC published a report in October on the topic for its clients.)
As an example of a potentially affected housing market, Finnigan points to Fayetteville, ARwhich is where Walmart is headquartered. Walmart HQ has reportedly paused new H-1B hiring in late 2025 after the Trump administration announced itd impose a $100,000 fee for certain new H-1B applications.
Walmart HQ stops new H-1B hiring due to $100K fee. Lines up with research we sent to clients last week calling out Walmart HQ’s metro [Fayetteville] as 1 of ~15 local housing markets most exposed to H-1B changes, based on analysis of loan-level data by citizenship status, wrote Finnigan in October.
While growth markets in the Southparticularly those with the higher levels of homebuilding, such as Dallas, TX; Fayetteville, AR; and Durham, NCmight feel a sharper housing-demand contraction from this specific FHA policy change, they arent necessarily the markets that would see the greatest softening if there were a broader pullback in H-1B activity.
To run an apples-to-apples comparison that accounts for market size, ResiClub calculated H-1B visa petitions per 1,000 residents.
The states with the highest exposure to high-salary H-1B workersand the housing and rental demand they generateinclude Washington, California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and the District of Columbia.
Click here for an interactive of the chart below
Zooming out to the big picture, we are in something of an international migration bust following a boom in 2021-2024.
Between summer 2021 and summer 2024, the U.S. sa a substantial upswing in net international migrationmuch of it coming through the Southern Border. As of July 2024, the U.S. population stood at 340.1 million, up 3.3 million from 336.8 million in July 2023. Of that population increase, 2.8 million (or 85%) came from net international migration.
That international migration burst, of course, is behind us now. Recently, border crossings have plummeted. A July forecast by researchers at AEI expects that net international migration in 2025 will be somewhere between +115,000 and -525,000.
What does this international migration slump mean for the U.S. housing market?
All else being equal, an immediate and direct housing impact of fewer immigrants coming through the Southern Border, in my view, is lower aggregate rental demandspecifically at the lower end of the marketthan if that burst had continued. Rental markets likely to see the biggest impact are in metro areas that have experienced the most international immigration in recent years. In particular, major markets such as New York City, Miami, Dallas, and Houston could feel the greatest effects.
President Donald Trump has always been a master marketer. He is particularly adept at lending his name to products and buildings, which has proven to be a lucrative business. Now in office, he’s bringing that same licensing mindset to the very act of governing.
Last week, the State Department said it renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) after Trump and put his name on its building in Washington, D.C. This comes after Trump fired the board members and nearly all U.S. employees of the USIP.
The USIP’s open, natural-light-drenched headquarters was designed by Safdie Architects to symbolize conflict resolution. But it has ironically become the flashpoint of what former board members have described as a hostile takeover of the federally funded independent nonprofit in Trump’s second term. DOGE staff and police entered the building in March, but USIP took control two months later after a judge ruled the firings were illegal. Then a federal appeals court stayed the ruling in June.
The building’s switched hands several times, and with it back in the Trump administration’s hands, they’re looking to make it formal with signage.
The US Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C., on Friday, December 5. [Photo: Alex Kent/Bloomberg/Getty Images]
The politics of unearned credit
The building’s new “Donald J. Trump” signage is just the latest example of a larger trend where Trump has assigned his name to policies and initiatives that he once opposed. For example, Trump campaigned against the infrastructure bill signed into law by then-President Joe Biden in 2021, and yet Trump’s name went up earlier this year on new signage in Seattle for an Amtrak rain project funded by Biden’s bipartisan law.
“President Donald J. Trump, Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure,” the bright “Make America Great Again” hat-red sign says. The words, “Funded by the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act,” are written in smaller type below.
Then there’s the Nation Park Service (NPS), which Trump has taken an axe to, cutting staff 16.5% and the budget by more than a third. Still, Trump’s image is going on two designs for next year’s annual NPS passes. The Interior Department is also making Trump’s birthday, which falls on Flag Day, one of several “resident-only patriotic fee-free days” to parks next year while dropping it for MLK Day and Juneteenth.
When Trump put his name on stimulus checks funded through the CARES ACT, passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it was unprecedented, the first time a president’s name had appeared on an IRS disbursement. Now, it seems, it’s just politics as usual.
The man who once gave us Trump Steaks now seeks to gives us a Trump peace institute, and some might say its good politics. Biden called it “stupid” that he didn’t put his own name on stimulus checks funded through the 2021 American Rescue Plan. But with Trump’s approval at a second-term low of 36%, according to Gallup, these branding efforts don’t exactly seem to be working.
Judge a book by its cover, and you might think that American Canto, the memoir by Vanity Fair‘s outgoing West Coast editor Olivia Nuzzi, is destined to be a classic. The memoir, which chronicles Nuzzi’s drama-filled life and career as a political reporter in the Trump era, features a strikingly simple cover that serves as shorthand for the book’s ambitions.
The intent was to give the book a clean, no-frills design that felt both classic and contemporary, says Simon & Schuster senior art director Alison Forner, whos also designed book covers like Ezra Kleins all-type cover Why Were Polarized and Garrett M. Graffs Watergate: A New History.
[Cover Images: Simon & Schuster]
Nuzzi’s book features a stark white cover with the title and her name rendered in a serif typeface inspired by fashion magazine typography of the 1980s. The typeface does a lot of work for the book, which appears to be off to a slow start amid the ongoing media storm surrounding its rollout.
A political reporter since 2014, Nuzzi was fired last year from New York magazine following an alleged relationship with now-Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her publisher Simon & Schuster describes the much buzzed-about book by what it’s not: “not a memoir, nor a tell-all, nor a book about the president,” but “a character study of a nation undergoing radical transformation in real time.” Critics have called it a “tell-nothing memoir” that falls short of its ambition and is less interesting than the scandal that surrounds it.
[Cover Images: Wiki Commons]
Typographic covers using a vintage-inspired font is a surefire way to evoke a classic mid-20th century look, like in covers for John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Profiles in Courage or Robert A. Caro’s 1990 The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent. Most bestselling books today, however, use pictures and illustrations.
On the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, just two books have type-led covers, and both have numbers in their titles and also use other visual elements. (Andrew Ross Sorkins 1929, about the year’s market crash, uses a cratering market line to divide the bright red cover, and the cover of former Vice President Kamala Harriss 107 Days about her 2024 campaign counts down in serif numerals from 1 to 107 on a blue background.)
[Cover Images: PRH, Simon & Schuster]
American Canto goes further, relying on just text and a subversively patriotic white, red, and black color palette to communicate its message. I wanted something simple and evocativered, black, and white give the jacket an urgent minimalism, Forner tells Fast Company. Olivia specified wanting a red without blue undertones, and I was more than happy to oblige.
To capture the right shade of red, Nuzzi sent still photos of wildflower petals and cropped stills from films by director Martin Scorsese, including a scene in Goodfellas where a bodys in the back trunk of a car and the taillights are lighting up the fog.
“When there’s no imagery to rely on, every detail becomes extremely importantfrom the typeface choices and letter spacing, to the negative space and color,” Forner says. “They all need to work on an almost subliminal level to become the ‘voice’ of the book.”
Artificial intelligence is the most exhaustively covered technology since the dawn of the internet. As any tech editor will tell you, it can be challenging to find stories about AI that are not merely new but big.
So when our editorial director, Jill Bernstein, forwarded me a pitch from journalist John Pavlus, who wanted to write about a mad scientist attempting to stomp out hallucinations and other gen-AI nonsense from Amazons cloud security/ chatbots/robots/agents, I said yes in seconds. (He actually used a more pungent term than nonsense, but for decorums sake, Im keeping that to myself.)
And then I braced myself.
The pitch promised to explain the abstruse formal mathematics behind neuro-symbolic AI, a totally different kind of AI that is not based on the kind of large language models that power ChatGPT and just about every other AI product that has infiltrated our lives over the past three years. The mad scientist was Byron Cook, who heads up Amazons automated reasoning group.
Reader, I trust your intelligence, but this sounded like heady stuff. My concern was not that the piece wouldnt be smart or interesting. It was that you might need to be Byron Cook himself to understand it.
I neednt have worried. Ive worked with countless reporters over my three-decade career, and many of them dazzled me with their brilliance. But Im not sure Ive worked with anyone as gifted as Pavlus at translating the difficult into the digestible, let alone the delightful. See his story, Amazon’s hallucination hunter.
This article closes out our third annual AI 20 package. For this years list, global technology editor Harry McCracken and senior editor Max Ufberg set out to identify the unheralded scientists and ethicists, CEOs and investors, and Big Tech veterans and first-time founders of the AI universe, as McCracken writes in the introduction. Household names, theyre not. Yet theyre already changing our world, with much more to come.
You may have noticed that Ive now spent nearly 300 words touting our AI coverage without using the word bubble. That was intentional, and a bit superstitious. Do you have any idea how nerve-racking it is to produce a quarterly print magazine, in the age of AI, amid one of the frothiest stock markets in history, hoping that the tech reporting will hold?
Because of course its a bubble. The question is when it will pop, and how loudly, and how long it will take for the market (and the industry) to recover and settle into a more sustainable trajectory, with costs and revenue in alignment and real value returned to shareholders. A bubble can be a bubble and still be revolutionary, as we learned after the dotcom crash of the early 2000s.
Not everyone agrees, of course, especially the publicist, gadfly, podcaster, and mini media mogul Ed Zitron, who has become famous predicting that AI isnt just a bubble but a colossal fraud. He makes his case to McCracken in Meet Ed Zitron, AIs original prophet of doom.
When Levis CEO Michelle Gass was in Japan last summer, she and chief product officer Karyn Hillman wandered down the street from the brands store in Tokyos trendy Harajuku neighborhood to a small, unassuming vintage shop called BerBerJin. They took the stairs down into its cavernous basement, where it keeps racks and racks of its best denim finds, and began the slow, laborious task of searching for treasure. A couple of hours later, Gass walked out with a pair of 1947 vintage 501s and an even rarer 1952 trucker jacket.
We tried on so many, many pairs of jeans, Gass tells me over coffee in her San Francisco office in September. You appreciate the nuances and beauty of denim, how it ages and how its worn. There are these incredible finishes that come as a result of people wearing it for 70 years. Its so special.
Its the kind of experience that can only happen in Japan. When American Levis factories began modernizing their denim production lines in the 1960s and 70s, Japanese collectors came to America to buy up as much vintage and deadstock denim as they could. (Japanese manufacturers bought the antique shuttle looms, sparking homegrown brands like Big John and Studio DArtisan.) Levis created its Levis Vintage Collectionnew replicas of historical designsin the country in 1996. Recently, Levis cemented the relationship further, launching its Made in Japan Blue Tab collection, a premium line of trendy takes on classic Levis designs, last February.
Gasss success in striking vintage gold in Tokyo last summer is also symbolic of a larger trend for the 172-year-old company: Most of its consumers are now outside of the U.S. This has been a blessing for the bottom line. At a time when U.S. retailers have been roiled by tariffs and global supply chain challenges, Levis is outperforming its peers, posting 14 consecutive quarters of direct-to-consumer channel growth. Its a level of consistency its competitors undoubtedly envy; Gap posted its first annual revenue increase since 2022 last year (1%) after years of flat sales and declines.
Forty years ago, international sales accounted for just 23% of the companys annual revenue. Now that figure is close to 60%. The increase is noteworthy, given how low the U.S., as a country, has plunged recently in international esteem.
According to recent Ipsos surveys, the opinion of America as having an overall positive effect on world affairs has fallen in 26 out of 29 countries over the last six months. Only 19% of Canadians see the U.S. as a positive influence, down from 52% six months ago. The aesthetics of America from the past are not the aesthetics of America for today, says University of Michigan marketing professor Marcus Collins.
In September, Levis leadership in the U.K. acknowledged as much, saying that rising anti-Americanism as a consequence of the Trump tariffs and governmental policies could drive British shoppers away. The company avoided much of the impact from tariffs in 2025, thanks to a diversified supplier base across 28 different countries and minimal exposure to China, with less than 1% of its goods sold in the U.S. manufactured there. But its not immune: Gass said in October that the company will be raising prices on some of its products next year.
But the companys success overseas shows that though the brand of America might be strugglingriven at home and distrusted abroadthe quintessential brand of Americana that Levis represents is thriving. Sales in foreign markets are generating double-digit year-over-year sales growth for the company. In a July interview with CNBCs Jim Cramer, Gass said the brand is on fire in Europe, especially among younger consumers, pointing to Paris, Barcelona, and Milan.
Gasss vintage shopping spree reveals something else as well: that the woman at the helm of Levis grasps the intimacy of the relationship between people and their jeans. Fit, color, wash, agethey all add up to something ineffable for the wearer: identity. Merging heritage and quality with values of inclusivity, Levis is the ultimate ambassador for a certain kind of classic American cool, earning its spot on this years list of Brands That Matter.
Since arriving at Levis two years ago, Gass has been rewiring the company into what she calls the worlds definitive denim lifestyle brand, with a target of $10 billion in annual revenue, a significant jump from the $6.4 billion the company generated in 2024. It entails growing the womens category (from 40% today to 50% of total sales); accelerating the companys direct-to-consumer business (currently about 47% of sales); streamlining its manufacturing supply chain; and expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint of 1,200 owned and operated stores by 250 locations over the next five years, particularly in high-growth regions like India, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. This will better help the company control the consumer experience and how wholesale partners market Levis.
Our brand is actually bigger than our business right now, says chief marketing officer Kenny Mitchell. Levis has a market cap of $8.36 billiontiny compared to an American retailer like Nike ($107 billion). Its small even compared to Lululemon ($21.19 billion), a company with higher margins and a more developed DTC operation. (Denim, a more mature market than athleisure, has traditionally had lower margins and more competition.) Our job, Mitchell says, is to get our fair share.
Mitchell was on vacation in Paris to celebrate his wifes 50th birthday in early 2024 when he started to hear the rumors: When Beyoncés new album, Cowboy Carterthe follow-up to her chart-topping Renaissancedropped that March, it would include a track titled Leviis Jeans.
He immediately called Gass, who was barely three months into her CEO tenure. (She had been hand-picked for the role by her predecessor, Chip Bergh, after spending five years running Kohls and 16 years before that at Starbucks, eventually overseeing the European, Middle East, and Africa business.) It was the biggest gift, she recalls. I really could not believe it. Like, how in the world, or the universe, did this happen?
Beyoncé clearly harbored affection for the brand, which had offered sponsorship support to Destinys Child in the early 2000s, featuring ads with the group wearing Levis Low Rise Jeans. (She also famously wore a custom pair of Levis cutoffs during her Coachella set in 2018.) For Gass, the song was a double win: Not only did it position the brand at the center of culture, it also offered a direct appeal to women, a critical component of Gasss growth strategy for Levis. She and Mitchell formed a team to brainstorm a joint campaign they might pitch to Beyoncé, if they got the chance.
Levis is known for a lot of good things, but agility hasnt necessarily been one of em, says Mitchell, a veteran of McDonalds, Gatorade, and Nascar, who joined the company in June 2023 from Snap. The quick response showed whats possible, he says.
Levis chief marketing officer Kenny Mitchell [Photo: Vincent Tullo; hair and makeup: Roland Brummer; set design: Peter Christensen]
When the album came out in late March, Levis quickly changed all its social handles to include the extra i. (Fans were excited, too: The brands posts attracted 3 billion impressions within a month of the albums release.) Then Mitchell called Beyoncés team at Parkwood Entertainment; theyd seen the social swap and loved it, which led to talk of an official collaboration. Between September 2024 and August 2025, the parties would release three lushly produced video ads, all of which drew on the brands history while re-situating Levis within contemporary America. In a company press release to announce them, Beyoncé described Levis as the ultimate Americana uniform.
Beyoncés embrace of Levis was unique, but stars have been aligning themselves with the brand since the 1930s, harnessing its working-class, Western roots to signal, and burnish, their own rebellious, down-to-earth image. John Wayne in Stagecoach. Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock. James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Elizabeth Taylor in Giant. A pair of 505s adorned the cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. Bruce Springsteens 501-clad backside graced the cover of his 1984 album Born in the U.S.A. (in a photo shot by Annie Liebovitz).
President Ronald Reagan, no marketing slouch himself, liked to wear Levis while working on his ranch. He often talked about America being the shining city upon a hill, a beacon for the rest of the world. Over the decades, that light has been a swoosh, the golden arches, an apple, a Coke bottle, and, yes, the iconic little red tab that identifies a pair of Levis.
Mitchell recently returned from India, where he was visiting with two new Levis brand ambassadors: musician and actor Diljit Dosanjh and Bollywood star Alia Bhatt. I cant think of a lot of brands that have that dimension, he says of the variety of international cultures baked into its partnerships. Levis direct-to-consumer sales in Asia, including India, grew by 14% in Q1 2025.
When Gass delivered the undergraduate commencement address at her alma mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), in Massachusetts, last May, she spoke about growing up in Lewiston, Maine, and the jobs she had before college, including working at a bread factory and bagging groceries at the local Shop N Save.
Sitting in her office on the seventh floor of Levis headquarters on a September afternoon, with a stunning view of San Franciscos Bay Bridge, she smiles thinking about those old jobs, especially being a bun sorter at the bread factory, she says. It was for Burger King buns, no joke, that would come down the conveyor, and youd have to make sure that they were all lined up properly, toss the bad ones, and make sure it didnt get jammed up. I had a total I Love Lucy moment with hamburger buns that was really true. Buns were flying everywhere.
In her speech to WPIs graduating class, Gass, whod received a partial scholarship to attend the school, charted her path from chemical engineering major to leader of an iconic brand like Levis by identifying five principles that were instilled in her during her time at the school in the late 80s: Ask the question; Its science and imagination; It will be hard; The right distance between two points may not be a straight line; and Consider the impact.
Asked today how these principles apply to her work, she offers an example that illustrates principle one. Early in Gasss tenure as a marketer at Starbucks, in the late 90s, the company was still using red and white straws, like every other fast-food joint. She asked the question: Why dont we have green straws, to match the companys logo? That question prompted a company-wide look at small branding opportunities.
Years later, after her almost 10-year stint at Kohls, Gass became Levis president in 2023, under then-CEO Bergh. While touring stores and offices around the world, she wondered, Where are all the denim skirts? Shouldnt Levis be the destination for the best denim skirt, like the 501 of a denim skirt? she recalls asking Bergh. It seems so simple, but it was not part of our core line.
Chief product officer Karyn Hillman [Photo: Vincent Tullo; hair and makeup: Roland Brummer; set design: Peter Christensen]
The strategy she and Bergh developed for transforming Levis into a fuller denim lifestyle brand entailed expanding the womens category beyond jeans, which means skirts and tops.
Karyn Hillmans office is packed with five different racks of clothing samples, which she uses as inspiration for new products. Wearing a pair of vintage 1950s mens 501s, a brown leather jacket over a chambray blouse, and boots, the Levis product head exudes the companys denim lifestyle ambitions. She is positioning the brand as something of a personal stylist, helping shoppers make good-looking decisionsthe logic being, who knows what goes with 501s better than Levis? We have to keep answering that question day after day, Hillman says. Why would you buy that top, and why from us? And what makes it ours? As of Q3, tops comprise about 22% of the companys overall business, up 9% that quarter year over year.
Meanwhile, Gass unified regional product teams within one group focused on design and merchandising, which helped Hillman and her team develop functional new materials. A new line of denim thread called Thermodapt, for example, can now be found in certain jeans and jackets (like the 501s and trucker). Thermodapt contains hollow-core cotton yarn designed to wick away moisture, trap warmth, and improve breathability in the heat. Its something increasingly important to customers in a warming world, especially in Asia.
The rest of the denim lifestyle planwhich also involves bolstering the companys direct-to-consumer business, opening fully owned brick-and-mortar stores (particularly in Asia), and simplifying its supply chain and manufacturing operationshas involved difficult decisions. Last year, the company discontinued its sub-brandDenizen, originally launched in 2010. It sold another sub-brand, Dockers, for more than $300 million to Authentic Brands Group. These moves reduced staff in the companys headquarters by 44 people. Closing a production factory in Poland and a distribution center in Kentucky eliminated nearly 1,000 other jobs. One of the most important jobs of a CEO is resource allocation, Gass says. Now Levis is more focused.
Levis will need that focus to navigate a landscape that is increasingly volatile. Last summers controversy surrounding American Eagles campaign with Sydney Sweeney (Genes are passed down from parents to offspring.... My jeans are blue) is a prime example. When social reactions objecting to the slogans eugenic undertones went viral, the right pounced. President Trump called the American Eagle ad fantastic and the hottest ad out there. American Eagle decided to do absolutely nothing, sticking with the campaign. In September, the brand reported that between the Sweeney spot and a Travis Kelce collab soon after, it had attracted 700,000 new customers and boosted the stock price, but Q2 comparable sales still slid by 3% compared to the year before.
We are operating in a very complex environment, Gass says, but what gives me great confidence to navigate this time is that we have so much history and heritage around our values.
The company began when Levi Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant, worked with tailor Jacob Davis to apply copper rivet reinforcements to tough denim in 1873, making the first manufactured waist overalls. Its social efforts began soon after that. Strauss started endowing college scholarships for women at the University of California, Berkeley in 1897. The company operated racially integrated factories in California during World War II and opened one of the first integrated factories in the Southin Blackstone, Virginiain 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act outlawed workplace discrimination. In various marketing campaigns over the last few decades, Levis has often depicted itself as offering something for everyone. In a 2024 campaign, it called itself the unofficial uniform of progress.
Earlier this year, as corporate DEI programs were being shuttered, suppressed, or de-emphasized to avoid undue negative attention, Levis did what it has always done. The company launched its annual Pride product collection, sponsored Pride events in San Francisco, and continued its donations to the Stonewall Foundation and the Trevor Project. In April, a conservative think tank called the National Center for Public Policy Research formally submitted a proposal to shareholders calling for the company to consider abolishing its DEI program, policies, department, and goals. More than 99% of shareholders voted to reject the proposal.
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We did advocate for our position on diversity and inclusion, Gass says. We did maintain our Pride sponsorship. This is who we are. And in times like these, its important to be consistent. Its the right thing to do, its part of our history, but its critical for business. Having a diverse workforce allows you to make better business decisions. Ive seen that time and time again.
In August, Levis released a multimedia campaign starring Grammy-winning musical artist Shaboozey and chef Matty Matheson (who is also an actor and producer on The Bear) that exuded full-on, sun-soaked Americana vibes with a surrealist twist. Like Beyoncés commercials, theirsquirky odes to the Western shirt, 501s, and the trucker jacketevoke the history of Levis and of the American West. But theyre filmed through a modern lens (and maybe on shrooms?), blurring the line between heritage and hipster.
Shaboozeys music does something similar, straddling the disparate worlds of country and hip-hop. He is a Black artist drawing acclaim in a genre largely dominated by white artists and audiences, and his success is a living example of how expansive Americana can be. Its knowing where youre from, not being scared to journey into new territories, he says, and understanding that at the center of everything, its the same heart, soul, and spirit of whatever it is you represent. I think for Levis, across any decade or trend, the soul and the heart remains the same.
Shaboozey says hes been collecting Levis denim for as long as he can remember. Ive bought and sold and spent way more than I should on jeans, he says. It is part of my whole brand. My Twitter handle has been @ShaboozeyJeans since 2016.
He was thrilled earlier this year to visit the Haus of Strauss, the nondescript bungalow near the Chateau Marmont on L.A.s Sunset Strip that opened in 2022 as a place for artists, stylists, producers, managers, and others in arts and entertainment to check out the denim brands best and even get customized pieces. (There are now outposts in Paris, Mexico City, Tokyo, and London.) If you see Ryan Gosling in Barbie wearing a Levis vest, it wasnt a paid sponsorshipits because of the relationship with his costumer. Or artists come through before Coachella to pick outfits. Its an investment, CMO Mitchell says, but its a part of how we stay connected to culture and subcultures.
Beyoncé is a tough act to follow, but the NFL has gifted Levis with another potential megawatt moment: Super Bowl LX. The game will take place at the Levis Stadium in San Francisco in February, and perhaps even more importantly, so will the Super Bowl halftime show. It will be broadcast to more than 180 countries, with a total worldwide audience of more than 200 million. Once again, Mitchell says, We will be in the center of culture.
The scheduled performer? Bad Bunny, whose politics of inclusion align with the companys values, and who has drawn public scorn and ridicule from conservatives all the way up to President Trump and Mike Johnson, who disagree with his politics and lack of English lyrics.
The spotlight will offer a powerful opportunity for all three partiesBad Bunny, Levis, and America itselfto assure global audiences that there is still a lot to love on these shores.
And its a high-profile chance for Levis to grow its business to be as big as its brand, finally. Gass believes it can be done; 172 years of history give her confidence. We know who we are, were clear in our values, and we always want to be on the right side of history. Plus, she says, At times like these, consumers go to brands that they recognize and trust. Levis is one of those brands.
Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, is no stranger to Levis products. At the 2023 Grammys, his pared-down outfita Uniqlo tee and Levis 501sdrew rhapsodic reviews from no less than Vogue. Will he sport a Blue Tab Canadian tuxedo on the 50-yard line?
Im not going to break any news, Mitchell says, but I think your instincts are good.
The smartest financial move I ever made was to stop contributing to retirement savings. It may sound counterintuitive, even reckless. Dave Ramsey would have stress dreams about this article, but it may be time to get a divorce from your 401(k).
Heres the truth: You actually dont need millions to retire.
Those retirement calculators love to spit out impossible numbers: $3 million, $5 million, sometimes more. Numbers so big they make financial freedom feel like a five-decade slog.
Heres the part they leave out. Most people following the save for 40 years script never hit those numbers. They keep working and waiting, but theyre aiming for a moving goalpost.
And this isnt about only money. Its about decades of your life you dont get back.
The real shift isnt stockpiling a fortune someday, but creating passive income now. You dont need millions. You need cash flow. Changing your perspective on that changes everything.
Why the ‘retirement number’ is a mirage
Heres the dirty secret about those retirement calculators: Theyre built on a foundation of mediocre returns.
Financial advisers love showing you diversified portfolios earning 2% on treasuries, 4% on bonds, maybe 8% to 10% on index funds if youre lucky. Then they compound those small numbers over 40 years and tell you thats the path to freedom.
But what if I told you I routinely invest in small businesses earning annual returns of 32% or more? Same dollars, radically different outcome.
The $3 million to $5 million magic number isnt magic at all. Its a moving target designed to keep you paying fees to Wall Street. Inflation pushes it higher. Lifestyle creep makes it bigger. Market volatility makes it unpredictable.
And heres the part Wall Street doesnt mention: The longer your money stays parked in their products, the more fees they collect. Its not a conspiracy; its a business model. Their incentive is to keep your money locked up for decades.
What $120,000 taught me about real wealth
Early in my investing journey, I had a choice with my $120,000 of life savings. I could do what most people do: Put it into bonds or index funds, let it grow slowly, and maybe, decades later, it would turn into something meaningful. At 4%, that money would earn about $400 per month. Id be waiting 30 years before I could really use it.
Instead, I bought a small business that was already earning $150,000 a year. I made a few simple changes, tightened operations, hired a virtual assistant, improved SEO, and that same business had grown by nearly 40%.
That one decision changed how I think about investing forever. Once you see cash flow hitting your bank account in real time, waiting for retirement at 6% earnings stops making sense. A few investments pay back your income entirely.
Since then, Ive repeated and improved that model over and over, not just with my own capital but with investors I work with. We buy existing businesses selling for three to four times earnings, translating to annual returns of 32% or more. And unlike stocks or bonds, those returns dont sit on a statement. They generate cash flow starting in year one.
Compress 40 years into 5
Heres the most important lesson Ive learned: The difference between traditional investing and high return cash flow investing isnt the return, its the time.
Traditional retirement thinking locks you into a 50-year plan. You keep saving, hoping compound interest will eventually catch up with your life goals. Cash flow flips that script. It lets you start living off your investments almost immediately.
I started this approach back in 2017 and bought, merged, and managed eight companies. After perfecting the process, I helped other investors and operators do the same. None of us waited for a magical retirement number. We built predictable income streams that paid our expenses, and with those returns financial freedom is available in under five years.
What surprises most people is this: You dont need hundreds of businesses to create substantial passive income or diversification. A portfolio of 8 to 10 uncorrelated small businesses can deliver 60% to 80% of the diversification benefits of thousands of stocks, without watering down returns.
The future of financial freedom
Building wealth isnt about chasing a number. A net worth target is a someday goal, and someday often never comes.
Cash flow is about today. Its about building predictable income that pays your bills and funds your lifestyle now. Its about having the freedom to pursue meaningful work while youre still young enough to make an impact.
Financial freedom isnt a number on a screen. Its a system that pays you month after month and gives you back the decades most people trade away.
The retirement lie costs you 30 years. Cash flow gives them back.
Joseph Drups
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy
Enterprises have often dreamed about AI systems that can reason across their most sensitive data, execute multistep tasks, and explain their logic while remaining inside a highly governed environment. Snowflake and Anthropic are betting they can finally crack the code.
Through a multiyear, $200-million expansion of their agentic AI partnership, the companies plan to deliver an operational control plane that uses Anthropics latest Claude models, such as Sonnet and Opus 4.5, to power enterprise intelligence. The announcement landed alongside Snowflakes Q3 earnings for fiscal year 2025, which showed the company maintaining strong momentum. Snowflake reported $1.21 billion in revenue, up 29% year over year, driven by $1.16 billion in product revenue. The company now operates at a $100 million AI run rate (year to date) while adding a record 615 new customers.
But as the race to dominate enterprise agentic AI accelerates, not everyone is convinced that Snowflakes momentum guarantees staying power. Snowflake is still in the early innings of seeing if the traction will stick, says William Falcon, founder and CEO of Lightning AI. For a database like Snowflake, theyve hopefully learned from others mistakes and invested in Anthropic to try and avoid similar problems.
That skepticism frames what makes Snowflakes approach so interesting. Instead of treating AI as an external service that companies must funnel their data toward, the company wants the intelligence layer to reside where the data already lives. Its philosophy is to bring AI to the data.”By deeply integrating Claude into Snowflake Intelligence and Cortex AI, weve collapsed that sprawl into a single governed environment where the model runs directly where a companys data already lives, securely with full business context and without ever moving that data or introducing risk, says Vivek Raghunathan, senior vice president of engineering at Snowflake.
The hallmark of this collaboration is a new class of AI agents capable of multistep reasoning on governed corporate data through Snowflake Intelligence, the companys enterprise intelligence agent powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5. Under the hood of Snowflake Intelligence sits Cortex Agents, the Snowflake Horizon Catalog, and a layer of semantic models.
Analysts can ask complex questions in natural language, developers can build intelligent agents without stitching together infrastructure, and business teams can get deep insights with citations and traceability. In practice, the integration means a business user can ask a natural-language question, such as What is driving churn in our Northeast customer segment? and Claude will determine which datasets are relevant, write and execute the SQL, and explain how it arrived at its conclusion. In highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, or life sciences, that combination of deep reasoning with end-to-end governance is especially transformative.
In regulated environments, here’s the answer isn’t enough. You need here’s how I got there, says Katelyn Lesse, head of API at Anthropic. In areas like financial reconciliation, companies routinely juggle data from disparate systems that rarely align cleanly, with exceptions that demand human judgment. Lesse noted that earlier approaches either overlooked this nuance or relied so heavily on manual review that any promised efficiency gains disappeared. Claude can work through those discrepancies and flag where it’s uncertain, which is just as important as getting the answer right.
A larger bet on enterprise transformation
Enterprises can also design custom multi-agent systems, with Snowflake Cortex Agents serving as the scaffolding for production-ready data agents powered by Claude. These agents can retrieve, interpret, and reason across structured and unstructured data with greater precision and efficiency.We don’t see or access customer data because Claude operates within Snowflake’s security perimeter, so the customers data stays private, Lesse added.
Raghunathan notes that Snowflake uses Claude internally across engineering, sales, and operations. Developers rely on Claude Code to accelerate development and code production cycles, while its sales teams use a Claude-powered assistant to unify data across the organization and shorten deal timelines.The companies say that early customer results are already showcasing what an enterprise built around AI agents might look like. Customer communications platform Intercom now uses Claude through Snowflake Cortex AI to power its Fin AI Agent. Likewise, Simon Data, a composable customer data platform, uses Claude on Snowflake to unearth patterns that conventional analytics overlooked, while maintaining governance across customer datasets.
A growing competitive frontier
The race to dominate enterprise agentic AI has intensified pressure across the technology landscape. Snowflakes rising AI revenue has seized market attention, but experts argue that its strategy, while meaningful, does not fundamentally reshape enterprise AIs competitive frontier. Gregor Stewart, chief AI officer at SentinelOne, believes the Anthropic alliance strengthens Snowflake but does not vault it ahead of rivals.
Databricks has a stronger internal team and just as good relationships and arrangements with the frontier labs. In some ways, Snowflake is just catching up to them, he adds. I see hyperscalers using models and generic compute to build one-size-fits-all assistants that lack the specific business context residing in the data layer. In contrast, Snowflake is positioning itself as the governed brain where the actual work happens, rather than just the infrastructure where the model runs.
The positioning, AI where the data lives, is the philosophical gulf separating Snowflake and Anthropic from Databricks, Microsofts Copilot ecosystem, Googles integrated cloud stack, and AWS. The companies are betting that enterprises will increasingly favor systems that minimize data movement, maximize security, and deliver reasoning directly within existing governance boundaries.
Enterprises have been burned by AI projects that demanded new infrastructure, new skills, new risk, and delivered unclear ROI. Snowflakes revenue run rate validates that ease of adoption beats raw capability, says Ian Riopel, CEO of Root. Against Databricks: intelligence in SQL beats build custom pipelines; Against Microsoft and Google: AI in your existing flow beats adopt our new flow. The reality most vendors miss is that enterprises aren’t looking for another platform to master, they want 100 times the efficiency with the same knowledge and access their employees already have.
If that thesis proves correct, Snowflake and Anthropic may be constructing more than a partnershipan architecture for how enterprise software will work over the next decade. In that vision, agentic AI doesnt sit beside business systems; it becomes the operating system. And both companies are intent on owning the moment when enterprises decide to make that shift.
Our AI strategy is inherently open. We support models from several leading providers so enterprises can orchestrate multi-agent systems without being locked into a single cloud or model provider, Raghunahan added. This is what makes Snowflake a true AI control plane.
Nearly a quarter of American workers didnt take any of their vacation days this year. Thats according to a report published in October from FlexJobs based on a survey of over 3,000 U.S. workers. Despite workers being more burnt out and disengaged than ever, many refuse to take time off.
Could unlimited PTO be to blame?
Its been well-documented that unlimited PTO may not be the generous gift workers are led to believe. A recent skit from TikToker and comedian Jacob Capozzi assumes the role of the guy who invented unlimited PTO to highlight some of the reasons why.
Capozzi poses as an executive who wants to incorporate something more interesting to get people to want to work here. One coworker suggests more competitive pay. Another chimes in, what if instead of limiting their time off, we removed the limits entirely? Cue foreboding music.
During the past decade, unlimited PTO has emerged as a popular benefit in which companies allow workers to take time off at their discretion (pending manager approval). Sounds great, right? Wrong.
If I gave you my debit card and told you you could spend up to $20, Id bet my life savings youd spend $19.50 without hesitation, Capozzi explains. But if I were to tell you in that same scenario you had no limit. How much would you spend? The answer is probably less.
If we give them 25 days a year, theyll take 25 because its theirs. But if we give them infinity, theyll hesitate, the executive in the skit explains. Theyll work harder. Burn out faster. And best of all, we dont have to pay them out for unused vacation days.
There is now no vacation cap at 7% of U.S. employers, according to the Society of Human Resource Management and in data shared with the Wall Street Journal. This has jumped significantly from a decade ago when, in 2014, just 1% of companies offered unlimited PTO as a perk.
Still, a Harris Poll conducted last year found 47% of American workers feel guilty taking time away, and 49% get nervous requesting time off. Rather than deal with the smoke and mirrors of unlimited PTO, one in 10 applicants said they wouldn’t bother applying for a role if it offered it as a benefit, when surveyed by Adobe Acrobat on the biggest red flags in a job listing.
Just realized that i always brag about my company having unlimited PTO but in my 2 years here ive only taken 10 days off my god im right where they want me arent i, one commented beneath Capozzis video, which has more than 2.3 million views.
Don’t forget if you use too much you’ll be letting your team down, another added. You want to be a team player right?
On the other hand, many are taking the unlimited PTO policy at face value and are more than happy to use it to their full advantage.
This only works in America. Nobody feels bad about taking time off in the rest of the world, one comment suggested. Im so glad I dont relate to this, Ive lost count of how much pto I used, which is the whole point of unlimited pto, another wrote.
Not me gang, sitting at almost 40 days this year, another wrote. Yall be safe tho.
