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For its first brand refresh in 13 years, Domino’s updated its color palette, packaging, and font to look more engaging. When it came to making new tagline, though, the Michigan-based pizza chain is trying something unique: they just added more Ms to their wordmark. Mmm. Domino’s announced a rebrand Wednesday that includes brighter reds and blues and a new font called Domino’s Sans that was designed to “be thicker and doughier” and proves that using sans serifs doesn’t have to be bland. Team members will get new branded gear to wear in the kitchen and out delivering orders, and there’s a reimagined suite of new pizza boxes, including one black-and-metallic-gold box designed for premium menu items, like Domino’s Handmade Pans, to better upsell pricier pizzas. [Image: Domino’s] It’s a brand refresh optimized for craveability, like recent rebrands for Burger King and Papa Johns that used squishy type and color palettes chosen to convey freshness and ingredients. This is graphic design meant to look delicious and make you hungry. For its new taglinewhich Domino’s is calling it its “cravemark”they tapped Shaboozey, who draws out the “m” sound when saying “dominos” in campaign ads (like “dommmino’s,” get it?). On screen, the musician’s jingle is visually reinforced with an animation that adds the extra Ms to the Domino’s wordmark before the letters snap into the Domino’s domino logo. “Rather than launching a more traditional tagline, we’re baking craveability right into our name and every aspect of our brand as a reminder of this relentless focus,” Domino’s executive vice president Kate Trumbull said in a statement. “You literally can’t say ‘Domino’s’ without saying ‘mmm.'” The cravemark is a wordmark, tagline, and jingle all rolled up into one, and judging by who the company got to sing it, Domino’s has big ambitions for its new brand asset. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” tied the record for the longest-running No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 chart history last November, and he was the only artist to be featured on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter twice. In a statement, he called pizza “that one food that brings everyone together” across generations and cultures. Domino’s is aiming for an asset with wide appeal and recognition. Domino’s is the leading U.S. pizza chain by revenue, bringing in $4.78 billion annually, ahead of Papa John’s, Yum! Brands-owned Pizza Hut, and Little Caesars. Same as its competitors, though, Domino’s has also seen its year-over-year same-store sales plummet since the pandemic as fewer people seek out delivery options. Like Peloton or Zoom, delivery pizza brands are pandemic darlings that are readjusting to new norms. Pizza has been hit especially hard by inflation, with median restaurant meal prices rising 12% for pizza, more than any other food category, according to data from Datassential. [Image: Domino’s] Other pizza chains have responded to shifting quick-service restaurant trends with redesigns of their own, like Papa Johns, which introduced a food-inspired brand refresh last year, and Pizza Hut, which is experimenting with its own new store concepts and premium menu items at home and a new, fun, retro logo abroad. Trumbull, the Domino’s executive, denies that their brand refresh is due to the company struggling, but it does have something to do with repositioning the brand. “Over the past decade, we became known as a technology company that happens to sell pizza,” she said. The pizza chain remembered for its pizza tracker and website would like to start being remembered for “making and delivering the most delicious products and experience,” as Trumbull put it. Though the brand refresh will show up in digital advertising and on Domino’s app and website, the impetus behind it is human.
Category:
E-Commerce
With no end in sight to the political impasse in Washington that has shut down the government, the U.S. IPO market is expected to experience a significant slowdown just as it was beginning to show signs of life again. Some companies are nevertheless forging ahead with their listings. Phoenix Education Partners, parent company of the for-profit University of Phoenix, which announced its IPO plans one day before the shutdown began, said on Wednesday that it has priced its shares at $32. That’s the midpoint of its earlier targeted range of between $31 and $33 a share. The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the “PXED” ticker symbol. Selling shareholders will offer roughly 4.3 million shares of its common stock, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, BMO Capital Markets, and Jefferies serving as lead book runners. At its offering price, Phoenix Education has a valuation of roughly $1.14 billion, Bloomberg reported. “An attractive and growing sub-segment” University of Phoenix is almost 50 years old and has been accredited since 1978, according to a company prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The school is geared toward online adult education, with most of its students already in the workforce and seeking to advance their careers in some way. “Adult learners represent an attractive and growing sub-segment of the higher education market,” Phoenix Education writes in its prospectus. “However, they face unique challenges that are not addressed by traditional programs designed for 18- to 22-year-olds, including the time constraints and responsibilities of work, community and caring for dependents.” The school says it had an average total enrollment of 82,700 degree-seeking students as of the first nine months of this fiscal year. Roughly 70% of its students are seeking bachelor’s degrees, with business and IT being its most popular areas of study, followed by healthcare and behavioral and social sciences. Is University of Phoenix profitable? Unlike some of the high-profile tech startups that have gone public this year, University of Phoenix is already profitable. Last year, it generated net income of $115 million on revenue of $950 million, according to its SEC filings, up from net income of $52 million on revenue of $801 million in 2022. What else is there to know? Phoenix Education is backed by Apollo Global Management and investment firm Vistria Group, with the former being a majority shareholder. The company is expected to list its shares today (October 9, 2025) at some point after the opening bell.
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E-Commerce
The IRS will furlough nearly half of its workforce on Wednesday as part of the ongoing government shutdown, according to an updated contingency plan posted to its website. Most IRS operations are closed, the agency said in a separate letter to its workers.The news comes after President Donald Trump and Congress failed to strike an agreement to fund federal operations, and the government shutdown has entered its second week, with no discernible endgame in sight.The agency’s initial Lapsed Appropriations Contingency Plan, which provided for the first five business days of operations, stated that the department would remain open using Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act funds.Now, only 39,870 employees, or 53.6%, will remain working as the shutdown continues. It is unclear which workers will remain on the job.Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement that taxpayers should expect increased wait times, backlogs and delays implementing tax law changes as the shutdown continues.“Taxpayers around the country will now have a much harder time getting the assistance they need, just as they get ready to file their extension returns due next week,” she said. “Every day these employees are locked out of work is another day of frustration for taxpayers and a growing backlog of work that sits and waits for the shutdown to end.”She urged the Trump administration and Congress to “reach an agreement that reopens government and restores the services that Americans need and deserve.”The notice to workers states that furloughed workers and those who remain on the job will receive back pay once the shutdown ends. This is notable since the Republican administration on Tuesday warned of no guaranteed back pay for federal workers affected by a government shutdown.Last week, Trump said roughly 750,000 federal workers nationwide were expected to be furloughed across agencies, with some potentially fired by his administration.Representatives from the IRS, the Treasury and the White House did not comment on the furlough plans.Earlier this year the IRS embarked on mass layoffs, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, affecting tens of thousands of workers. At the end of 2024, the agency employed roughly 100,000 workers and currently that hovers around 75,000. Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Creativity has always been governed by timenot just how long it takes to bring an idea to life, but how long a creator can stay in flow. Every designer knows the frustration of an idea hanging in digital limbo. But those pauses, once accepted as inevitable, are now starting to vanish. Figma, the cloud-based interface design tool, and Google Cloud, the computing and storage platform, have announced the integration of Googles Gemini 2.5 Flash directly into Figmas design platform. The collaboration aims to let designers generate visuals and make edits almost instantly, eliminating the lag between an idea and its execution. For users, that means faster collaboration, smoother iteration, and a more natural creative flow.The economic significance of latency in AI is far greater than just speedits about changing the commercial viability and product experience for every application built on a generative model, says Matt Renner, president of global revenue at Google Cloud. Lower latency, in turn, decreases computational and financial expenses, allowing the AI tools to become more scalable and efficient for high-volume tasks, he added. Gemini 2.5 Flash (also known as Nano Banana”) rose to prominence for its ability to merge multiple images, keep characters consistent across edits, and generate a wide range of styles, from lifelike portraits to classic art, in mere seconds. Google claims that in early integrations of Gemini 2.5 Flash, Figma users saw a 50% reduction in latency for the platforms Make Image feature, unlocking faster image generation capabilities for its users.In Figma, every second AI can return to the user, whether its time saved renaming layers, editing images or even generating multiple images at the same time, frees them up to focus on the kind of higher-level problem solving and deep iteration thats at the root of all great design, says Abhishek Mathur, vice president of platform engineering at Figma. The partnership signals a deeper strategic shift for Google Cloud. Rather than competing for user attention, the company aims to embed its AI models, including Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.0, and Imagen 4, directly into third-party creative ecosystems like Figma to make Gemini an unseen accelerant that enhances existing tools instead of forcing users to switch platforms.Our focus is on helping users go from idea to production, and we see AI as core to how this workflow will evolve moving forward, Mathur adds. Googles ecosystem strategy to scale Gemini Over the past year, Google has woven Gemini into a broad range of partner products, from workspace tools to data analytics suites, positioning the speed and security of its AI models and ease of integration as its defining edge. Salesforce has integrated Gemini into its Agentforce platform to power AI agents across Google Cloud and Salesforce environments. Oracle now supports Gemini models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, enabling enterprises to build multimodal AI agents that can process text, images, motion, and audio data. Googles underlying bet is simple: If AI feels secure and frictionless, widespread adoption will feel inevitable.Released in June, Gemini 2.5 Flash is known for generating high-quality visuals quickly and affordably (one-third the price of Gemini Pro). The model can deliver its first reply in under half a second, making it ideal for fast-moving creative apps, chatbots, or customer support systems. Moreover, the latest Gemini 2.5 Flash updates have improved its accuracy in following instructions, made responses more concise, and boosted speed by up to 40%, making it one of the fastest, most efficient AI models available.Experts caution, however, that faster performance alone may not be enough for Figma to win over creative professionals.Drops in latency will certainly encourage tool usage and support the kind of cross-discipline collaboration Figma has been building toward for years, says AJ Joplin, senior analyst at Forrester, who focuses on experience design, design organizations, and design leadership. But taste still matters. The efficiencies gained from generative tools can quickly disappear if teams dont pair that time saved with the ability to critically assess what the AI produces. The AI design race is heating up The Google-Figma partnership comes amid an escalating AI-design race. Adobe has integrated AI models from Google Cloud, OpenAI, and others like fal.ai, Ideogram, Luma, Pika, and Runway to power its Firefly platform and Sensei AI features, including generative fill, AI video editing, 3D design, and smart stock tools. And Canva has become an AI-first platform.Announced at OpenAIs Developer Day on Oct. 6, Canva is now a pilot partner for ChatGPT app integration, allowing users to create and edit designs directly within ChatGPT. The move aims to bring visual design tools to the chatbots 800 million weekly users.If Gemini 2.5 Flash delivers on its promise, the future of design wont just be more intelligent; it will feel instantaneous. And in the new economy of creativity, that sense of speed may prove to be the ultimate edge.
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E-Commerce
The bookstore cafe at Literary Arts new headquarters in Portland, Oregon was a hive of activity on a recent weekday morning. A few 20-somethings gathered for coffee in a corner, while at a nearby table, New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro discussed his new book, And to Think we Started as a Book Club. . ., with a journalist. Meanwhile, Olivia Jones-Hall, Literary Arts director of youth programs, chatted with some colleagues about upcoming events. Just a few days earlier, President Trump had announced on social media that he was ordering his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to send the national guard into War ravaged Portland to bring the city to heela directive aimed at the citys largely peaceful anti-ICE protests and fueled by the presidents blatantly false assertion, which he expressed in September, that riots have engulfed Portland every night. (This assertion appeared to be based on a 5-year-old old clip on Fox News of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.) In reality, Portland is far from the burning hell hole of the Presidents imagination. Here in the Central Eastside Industrial District, five minutes from downtown and about 15 minutes from the ICE facility, the focus is on books not troops. And the solution to shoring up the public safety and economy in some of the citys underinvested quarters is arts-driven community-building, care of Portlands 41-year-old nonprofit Literary Arts, which is known for organizing the annual Portland Book Festival each November. [Photo: courtesy Literary Arts] Indeed, since the organization announced, in 2022, its plan to move into a 14,000-square-foot former hardware store in the once-industrial Eastside neighborhood, the area around it has become a vibrant hub. Literary Arts new headquarters, which opened last December, include an independent bookstore and café, four classrooms, a podcasting studio, offices for the organizations 32 staffers, and an event venue that can seat 75 people. The blocks around it, meanwhile, house restaurants, bars, stores, and a soon-to-open apartment building. Arts and cultural organizations have often been at the forefront of how we rebuild public space, says Literary Arts executive director, Andrew Proctor. So I think that one of the paths to recovery for the city is going to be through arts and culture. [Photo: courtesy Literary Arts] A literary giant Literary Arts has had a big year. In addition to opening its headquarters, which it was able to purchase outright with a $3 million gift, the organization announced the successful completion of a fundraising campaign that raised more than $22.5 million in support of its community hub and the future Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency. (Located in the writers former house, the residency is slated to open in fall of 2027.) It has also scored some major literary coups, securing visits from Timothy Snyder, Kamala Harris, and Stacey Abramsall of whom will be appearing at the citys 2,770-seat Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in the coming weeks. And lest you think Literary Arts attracts only serious nonfiction writers and politicians, romantasy author Rebecca Yarros will be speaking to a sold-out auditorium during the book festival on November 8. (And Stacey Abrams wont be talking politicsshell be discussing her new thriller, Coded Justice.) In this moment, we are stuck in a very short cycle of thinking and reading, and that cycle is being dictated to us by technology, says Proctor. How long can you wander the desert of the internet before you realize you’re starved and parched and not getting nourished by this stuff? Like never! Proctor believes Literary Arts in-person events offer an alternative. These books, these experiences with books, are very nourishing. And when you pair that by being out in community, its even more rich, because now you’re reading the same things or youre at the festival standing in line talking to a stranger about something that you love and realizing that the world isn’t so strange and hostile. From left: Andrew Proctor, Jill Sherman, Ali O’Neill during construction of the new headquarters. [Photo: courtesy Literary Arts] Literary Arts, which also runs the Oregon Book Awards, the youth poetry slam competition Verselandia!, Writers in the Schools residencies (which pairs working writers with local high schools), and Portland Arts & Lectures event series, took ownership of the Portland Book Festival in 2015. This year, tickets have been selling at 10 times the speed they did last year, says Proctor. He thinks that the need for deeper experiencesand maybe a little escapismmay be driving this engagement. The festival is an easy sell to authors and ublishers, says senior artistic director Amanda Bullock, because it tends to move books. That could be because the $18 ticket fee includes a $5 coupon towards any book sold at the festival. (Kids 17 and under get in for free.) There will be more than 100 authors and interviewers at the festival this year, along with drop-in writing workshops and pop-up readings. Authors include big names like Abrams and Yarrows, but also plenty of new or up-and-coming authors. Roughly 40% of the presenters are from the Northwest. In addition to the day-long series of readings and interviews downtown, there are dozens of other events that go on for a full week as venues around the city host literary or musical events. [Photo: courtesy Literary Arts] A Tale of Two Cities Trumps disparagement of Portland comes at a moment when the city is turning a corner. During the pandemic, Portland saw crime rates rise, alongside increased homelessness and open drug use. But today, homicides are down 41% compared to this same time last year, fewer people seem to be openly using illicit drugs (a result, no doubt, of state lawmakers recriminalizing illicit drugs in 2024), and Mayor Keith Wilson has been opening homeless shelters at a fast clip. The city is also preparing to welcome the planned $25 million James Beard Public Market, Portlands answer to Seattles Pike Place Market, in downtown next summer. Indeed, the Presidents recent characterization of Portlanders as living in hell was so at odds with how locals experience their home that it promoted a rush of social media posts showing images of children running joyfully around fountains, crowded dog parks, and drool-worthy plates of foodall tagged #warravagedportland and #warravagedpdx. One Instagram threads user posted: Danny here, reporting live from war-torn Portland. The smell of BBQ permeates. The puppies are viciously kind. People are doing yard work. This is not okay. Pray for us. #pdx. Downtown Portland, October 06, 2025. [Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images] The truth is, the anti-ICE demonstrations have continued to be largely peaceful (at least on the side of the protesters), despite Trump calling up the Oregon National Guard and, after a federal judge barred him from doing so, the California and Texas National Guards. (The judge has since barred any National Guard from any state from being sent to Oregon.) Meanwhile, downtown Portland and the Central Eastside, both of which wrestled with homeless encampments and crime during the pandemic and in the years immediately after, are on the upswing. Artists and arts organizations have long played a role in reviving derelict neighborhoods, including New Yorks SoHo in the 1970s and Wynwood in Miami in the early aughts. Literary Arts, likewise, has played a key role in Portland. The Portland Book Festival, which is based along the Park Blocks downtown, traditionally brings more than 6,000-plus book lovers to the citys core. Readings, interviews, and workshops are held in the Portland Art Museum, a handful of different theaters, and at downtown churches. Literary Arts also runs Portland Arts & Lectures, one of the largest literary lecture series on the west coast. On the evenings that big name authors come to town, downtown restaurants are booked up weeks in advance. Arts & Lectures turns one of those [week] nights into a Saturday night, says chef Greg Higgins of Higgins, which is two blocks from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The organization raised a few eyebrows when it selected as its new home Central Eastside, which sits along the Willamette River and was the citys industrial and maritime hub in the late 1800s. The neighborhood, while gritty, managed to thrive even as trade dried up in the 20th century, and experienced something of a revival in the early aughts, as businesses moved into its once-industrial buildings. But it was hit particularly hard during the pandemic. But over the past year, the areaparticularly the block on Grand Avenue where Literary Arts is basedhas been reinvigorated by multiple businesses and nonprofits. Across the street from Literary Arts is the Architectural Heritage Center, which has been infused with new energy and exhibits thanks to a dynamic new executive director; used bookshop Mother Foucaults, which hosts readings and events every weekend, moved into the adjacent space. Next to Literary Arts is vegan Japanese restaurant Obon Shokudo where celebrities like Anya Taylor-Joy have been spotted. On the corner is Lollipop Shoppe, a lively bar and music venue. The building is open from 7 in the morning till 8 at night. Every day we’re serving coffee and food, and there are three events a week in the bookstore, Proctor says. Itd be hard to imagine us not having a pretty big impact on the neighborhood in a positive sense, just by sheer activity alone. Journalist and urban advocate Randy Gragg, who runs civic design nonprofit City of Possibilitywhere he organizes talks, exhibits, and gatherings about Portland design, architectureand civic ambition, says hes seen Literary Arts make an impact on Portland. They have really crystalized Portland as a literary center practically since their founding, he says. And [Proctor] has been a phenomenal accelerator from the day he arrived. Gragg says Proctors choice of the Central Eastside for the headquarters was inspired. I tink that was a somewhat counter-intuitive place and probably scary to a lot of his funders, but it would appear hes pulling it off. Portland residents and readers can see the impact of Literary Arts. If only our President could, too.
Category:
E-Commerce
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