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Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. Elite law firms like Paul Weiss and Jenner & Block may not advertise in traditional ways, or for a mainstream audience. But they and a handful of other prominent white-shoe firms are in the middle of an unprecedented brand test right now. At issue is how best to respond to pressure from the Trump administration and how that response affects their reputation. That has turned into a branding moment for these firmswhether they like it or not. The full verdict isnt in yet. But those who have chosen to fight executive orders designed to punish firms that President Trump apparently dislikes seem to be faring better, scoring early legal victories and burnishing an image of bravely standing up for principle. Or maybe its more accurate to say that those who have cut deals with the administration (promising a collective $940 million in pro bono work) are, reputationally and perhaps substantively, faring worse: losing partners, angering some clients, and even being labeled The Yellow-Bellied Nine by critical peers. The test began back in March, when Trump signed a series of executive orders restricting security clearances for lawyers and employees of various firms that had represented his perceived enemies or political opponentsa move that would severely cut into their business. The prominent firm Perkins Coie, which among other things had represented Hillary Clintons 2016 campaign, responded by suing the administration. The order was swiftly blocked by a judge who called it chilling. Other targeted firms, including Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey, have won similar blocks. Paul Weiss, one of the most storied and powerful law firms in the world, was among the first to take a different path: In exchange for the administration agreeing to lift an executive order targeting the firm, it agreed to perform $40 million in unpaid legal work for mutually agreed-upon causes and matters. The deal startled (and was immediately criticized by) many legal observers. (In a firm-wide memo, its executive chairman defended the settlement: The resolution we reached with the Administration will have no effect on our work and our shared culture and values.) Lately, Paul Weiss has made headlines for losing several high-profile attorneys, including the cochair of its litigation group, who left with three other partners to form their own firm, and a former U.S. attorney who went to Jenner & Block, which has sued the administration. Eight more major firmsincluding Skadden, Kirkland & Ellis, Simpson Thacher, and Latham & Watkinscut similar deals. Many others have remained above the fray, declining, for example, to join an amicus brief in support of Perkins Coie or others fighting the administration in court. Law firms are often paid to help mitigate risk, but in this case some may have underestimated the risk of brand damage. In the latest sign of tangible reputational fallout, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that at least 11 major companies, including Oracle and Morgan Stanley, are withdrawing business from firms that cut deals to get executive orders lifted or that are otherwise supporting the government in what some view as an effort to warp the legal system. As one client cited by The Journal put it: We prefer to work with law firms willing to fight. More broadly, the divergent response to the executive orders continues to draw scrutiny and controversy within the profession, with the potential to affect both recruiting and retention. Above the Law, a snarky but serious online publication popular with younger lawyers, coined the Yellow-Bellied Nine moniker, and has introduced a “Spine Index” that rates major firms responses to the executive orders (and notes, in addition, those that have scrapped DEI efforts). A survey of its readers found that a vast majority supported firms fighting the orders, and felt that law firms who make agreements with the administration are giving in to extortion, which sends a bad message to the entire profession. Still, while the firms fighting back have been winning new clients and winning in the courts (so far), its hard to gauge how that will ultimately affect their business: Clients who would rather steer clear of potential trouble with Trump arent likely to be very public about distancing themselves from the conflict. Meanwhile, as Above the Law has noted, neither the administration nor the firms that agreed to deals involving pro bono promises have offered up much detail or any sense of timing about those commitments. For Trump, that may be a matter of biding time; for the firms, it may be in hopes that the matter will fade from the court of public opinion.
Category:
E-Commerce
Sweetgreen changed the sad desk lunch forever. But the 17-year-old salad chain, which has grown its footprint to 25 states and 250 locations, isn’t just for office workers. Since the pandemic, it’s been building out its presence in the suburbs and launching heartier meals to appeal to a broader base. The company added steak to its menu last year and, in March, debuted air-fried, seed-oil-free fries. There have been growing pains along the way. After going public in November 2021, the company has struggled to turn a profit. In 2024, it narrowed its net losses by 20% to $90 million and achieved full-year positive adjusted EBITDA for the first time. In the first quarter of 2025, the company was adjusted EBITDA positive, but same-store sales declined by 3.1%, a first-time decrease since the chain went public. Sweetgreen sees its new automated prep technologywhich it calls the infinite kitchenas a path forward for efficiency. Sweetgreen cofounder and CEO Jonathan Neman came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss salad prices, the rollout of infinite kitchen, and whether the company’s seed-oil turn makes it MAHA. In August 2021 Sweetgreen acquired Spyce, which makes automated kitchen technology, for $50.7 million. How are you incorporating robotics into your restaurants? It really started with this idea of how can we improve the customer experience? [Customers] love the sourcing, they love the scratch cooking, but oftentimes in our fast-paced environment, serving a lot of people in a short period of time, getting orders accurate and on time could be challenging. So we acquired this company called Spyce. The amazing founders are all still with us. They were engineers out of MIT who built this technology for their own restaurant company. We decided to join forces almost four years ago. We’ve seen significantly less turnover in the stores that have infinite kitchens. So far we’ve been able to create a better business model as well. We’re seeing some nice margin leverage, and over time we see it as a way to attack our price value equation even more. Were already starting to test how we can give some of those savings back to the consumer. The holy grail for us is if we can have food that tastes good, makes you feel good, and is at the right price. That’s where this technology can take us over time. We are very early in our development. Weve opened 12 restaurants with infinite kitchen technology. We’re going to open at least 20 more this year. We call it the infinite kitchen. We don’t consider it a robot. It is an automated makeline. Are you saving money because those restaurants require fewer employees? It requires fewer people on production, so sure. You still have a lot of people working there. You still have a management team. You still have a culinary team cooking and prepping the food. The infinite kitchen does most of the assembly, but there are a few elements that do not go into the automation. We have what we call a finishing station. It’s like a chef’s counter at the end where we finish off each bowl. Those are where things like salmon or avocado can be mixed [in]. Then there’s that hospitality component. So you are operating with about a third less labor in each of those restaurants, but when you walk in, you’ll still see a lot of people. Does the automated system also cut food waste? Yeah, because now we have a perfect understanding of what is being used and what’s needed. It’s not just the infinite kitchen, but the systems we built around it. There’s like a mission control where the team sees [things like whether] the chicken is running low. Time to fire more chicken. So we get this perfect ability to make sure we’re keeping the food as fresh as possible and reducing waste. I think the most surprising thing has been the improvement in actual product quality. We thought the product quality would be equal, but because of the way we hold the food in these temperature-controlled tubes where they’re pressurized, we’re seeing the bowls be even more vibrant in terms of taste, flavor, and color. What are the store formats youre investing in? Today we have our classic format, the classic Sweetgreen with a frontline and a digital makeline. We’ve introduced a pickup-only Sweetgreen, where there’s no frontline. It’s only app or kiosk ordering. We run a lot of our delivery business and our pickup business out of those restaurants. Then we have our infinite kitchen format. We [also] have a concept we call the Sweetlane, which is our version of a drive-through. We see a lot of potential in the Sweetlane format especially. We’re very excited about the Sweetlane coupled with the infinite kitchen because of the speed of service that we will be able to offer. The infinite kitchen incorporates AI technology. How else are you using AI? Weve been early adopters in a number of ways. We use it to forecast sales and deploy our labor. Weve begun piloting a number of different customer service tools and have seen huge improvements in our customer service scores. Over time we see an opportunity to leverage AI to truly personalize the ordering experience where based on your order history and your dietary preferences, you would have a different menu presented to you versus someone else. JP Morgan analysts cut Sweetgreen’s target share price from $32 to $25 last month, and explained the reduction by noting that Sweetgreen prices are 7% to 30% higher than those of its competitors. Do you think your pricing is fair? Its something we’re really conscious of and I think there are opportunities for us to have different pricing tiers to bring in more consumers. However, in terms of what we offer, were proud of our sourcing. Were proud of the way we treat our teams and the scratch cooking we put into our food. There is a cost to all that we do, and our customers value that. Our chicken never has antibiotics in it. Many of our competitors’ do. We make everything in our restaurant from scratch every day, whereas many of our competitors don’t. We have taken less price than the whole industry since COVID, even though theres been a ton of inflation. If you look at the price of a value meal at McDonald’s in California today, it’s about $18. How have you been able to keep prices the same while inflation has forced other companies to raise them? Much of it has been our lesser reliance on beef, which has seen the largest increases from an inflation perspective. I think price is important. We want Sweetgreen to be as accessible as possible, and we are doing all that we can through automation and other efforts. I will say that a custom bowl at Sweetgreen in most markets starts at under $10. In almost every city, we have different pricing tiers where we price largely dependent on the price of labor and real estate. We are charging at what we believe is a fair price for all that we’re doing, while still believing there’s an opportunity to offer different price tiers. But it all goes into what we’re putting into the food, and the fact hat we’re not processing our food. We’re not doing a lot of the things that traditional fast food does to drive down the cost. Take our fries, for example, most companies have frozen fries that they fry. We are hand-cutting our fries and air frying them every 15 to 30 minutes. I think most of our customers really value that. What is it going to take for the company to become consistently profitable? Sweetgreen was profitable on an adjusted EBITDA perspective last year and will increase that this year. The difference between adjusted EBITDA and net income is maybe what you’re referring to. Its our stock-based compensation and depreciation. So the way depreciation works in our company is that as we open a lot of stores, we depreciate them over the life of the lease. So it’s not a cash profitability from an accounting perspective, but from a pure cash perspective, we are profitable. In January, you posted a photo of yourself on X wearing a Make America Healthy Again hat that Sweetgreen sold as merch in 2016, before it became a political slogan. What do you think about the agenda of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? The reason I started this business was always the mission: I saw food as one of the pillars of health and such a big problem to solve. Making healthy food delicious and desirable, convenient, and more affordable is something that I’m very passionate about. If you look at what fast food has done, it solved one problem, but it created a whole other problem. I think bringing more real food to the public is a very good thing. Weve partnered with anyone inside the government or outside the government who was looking to promote this way of living and eating. We partnered with Michelle Obama [as part of her] Let’s Move [initiative]. We started something called Sweetgreen in Schools. In 2016, we had a festival and as a joke we made these Make America Healthy Again hats. I will only speak to the narrow parts that I have the knowledge in and affect my world. I think what [HHS has] done around food dyes and artificial ingredients that are in our food is undeniably amazing. I don’t know, Do you want your children eating that stuff? Let’s just put politics aside. I also think things like the fact that we spend $12 billion a year of SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] benefits on soda that then makes people sick shouldnt happen. So there are parts of the agenda as it relates to food that I think are very on point. I think there’s a huge promotion of regenerative agriculture and more organic farming and the support of local farming. So there’s a lot of it that I definitely agree with. When it comes to things that are not in my lane, I have a rule that I dont talk about them. Kennedy has been a really big proponent of removing seed oil from food preparation. Sweetgreen did that in 2023. Why? We did it years ago, after hearing from our customers. Even though we were very proud of the type of oil we used, it was a high-oleic sunflower oil. Customers told us that they would come more often and they would become more loyal without seed oil. That was about two years ago before it got politicized. Everyone likes to politicize it. We’re not here to talk politics. I’m here to talk food and health. Sweetgreen recently launched a limited-time collaboration with Cote, the Michelin-starred Korean barbecue restaurant. What makes a good collaboration? One of the reasons we love to partner with chefs more than anything is that Sweetgreen is such a culinary-forward brand. While we are a fast-casual restaurant, we have full-service kitchens. We prep all our food from scratch. We are buying from many of the same farmers [that supply] a lot of the high-end restaurants. We heard from customers that they’re looking for bolder flavors and heartier dishes. So we’ve leaned into more protein-forward food. We thought it was a really cool way to tell that story with the best KBBQ chef in the world, David Shim, who happened to be a friend of ours. Years ago, when we started these collaborations [like with Blue Hill chef] Dan Barber, it was telling a story around the waste in the supply chain. Then it was David Chang, and telling a story about sustainability and sourcing kelp. When we came to California for the first time, we partnered with Jon & Vinny’s and then partnered with Nancy Silverton, classic California chefs, highlighting our produce with their culinary credibility. What innovations can we look for from Sweetgreen in the next year? Were focused on menu innovation and bringing more flavor and variety to the menu. One thing we’ve heard from our customers is they missed the seasonal menu. So that’s coming back in a big way, starting in July. We’re innovating a lot of things further up the funnel. Beverages are in tests today. Soft serve is a test that’s going on. We’ve talked publicly about the opportunity to introduce our version of a wrap. A lot of what Im focused on is continuing to elevate the core of what we do. Its about how do we get better as we get bigger, and how do we make our execution in the restaurant as consistent as possible.
Category:
E-Commerce
Right-wing conspiracy theorists once believed the government was using drones to surveil its own citizens. President Donald Trump actually did. During ongoing demonstrations in Los Angeles against Trumps aggressive immigration crackdown, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed at least two Predator drones to monitor the crowds, according to air traffic control audio reviewed by 404 Media. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) later confirmed the drone deployment to the outlet, and DHS posted the footage on its own social media channels. After a series of deportation raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in locations ranging from L.A.s garment district to suburban Home Depot parking lots, protesters began to rally outside the downtown immigration services building and detention center. Trump swiftly deployed the National Guard over California Governor Gavin Newsoms objections. Since arriving, the Guard has fired rubber bullets at reporters and militarized ICEs ongoing raids. Meanwhile, according to 404 Media, DHS deployed two Predator drones over the protests to track and film participants. The MQ-9 Reaper drone, referenced in air traffic control logs, is a high-powered aircraft capable of carrying up to 3,000 pounds and is regularly used by the U.S. Air Force. Predator drones have conducted strikes in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. (CBP did not respond to a request for comment.) Later, CBP confirmed to the outlet that federally sanctioned drones had flown over Los Angeles. In a statement sent to 404 Media, CBP wrote that the Predator drones were providing officer safety surveillance when requested by officers, but not engaged in the surveillance of first amendment activities. On X, DHS posted drone footage of the protestssoundtracked by dramatic musicwith the caption, This is not calm. This is not peaceful. This isn’t the Trump administration’s first drone deployment. In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter movement, DHS deployed Predators to monitor activity in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd. The federal government has invested sizably in drone research and accumulation under the leadership of both political parties. A 2012 slide deck from CBP shows the department had at least five Predator drones available for use. A year before leaving office, President Barack Obama authorized an $821 million spend on defense Reapers. Most recently, Trump signed an executive order pushing the Federal Aviation Administration to approve drone production requests more quickly. Can the MAGA conspiracy theorists handle drone activity? Under Trump, the GOP has embraced far-right conspiracy theories. Theyve spread vaccine misinformation, warned of mass anti-white violence targeting Afrikaners, and continued to blame perennial boogeyman George Soros for allegedly funding protesters. Drones have long figured into right-wing conspiracies of their own. During the New Jersey drone panic last year, theories about drone sightings began circulating online, some suggesting President Joe Biden had sent the devices. Trump himself said that the government and military knew what was going onbut wouldnt explain it to the American people. He posted on Truth Social: Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!! Fringe figures still insist birds are actually government tracking devices. (In an attempt to join the conspiracy conversation, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan mistakenly filmed the constellation Orion.) On January 28, months after the panic began, Trumps press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, finally clarified that the drones posed no threat. But now that the Trump administration has deployed Predator drones over an American city, his conspiratorial followers remain curiously quiet. Apparently as long as its their president leading the drone surveillance, there’s nothing to worry about.
Category:
E-Commerce
Carl Rivera believes that in the artificial intelligence era, we dont need the “UX” in UX designer. Last week, Rivera, chief design officer at Shopify, dropped the title at the e-commerce company, along with the title of content designer. His public announcement was met with some kudos and quite a bit of disagreement. When I put it out online, you get a complete view of how the market looks and feels about change, he says. How our jobs and how work is changing in the AI era of technology is both extremely exciting, but it’s also so frightening. For Rivera, dropping UX from job titles is about empowering humans in the face of AI. Instead of using his team to implement best UX practices, he’s asking them to lean in to what makes their skills unique: taste and intuition. “I want to get away from terms that make our craft more science than art. AI enables anyone to make things usable. Our job is to make them unforgettable,” Rivera said in his announcement. Scientists and engineers codified user experience as a discipline in the mid-’80s and ’90s after the success of the graphical user interface ushered in by the Macintosh. Since then, UX has developed predictable and replicable best practicesmany of which have been consumed and replicated by AI at this point. Rivera argues that UX, as a discipline, has become a bounded box created to standardize the experience of technology. UX designers use these rules and play within that safe zone “because it feels good to quantify things,” he says. But he believes those same rules also push other people in the organization away from the creative process. The result of the current system are user experiences that rate, according to Rivera, a “7 out of 10.” They tick all the boxes, but they are ultimately forgettable. We just dropped UX as a title at @Shopify. Same for Content Design. If you design, you're a Designer. If you write, you're now a Writer. Simpler. Better. (1/3)— Carl Rivera (@postcarl) June 6, 2025 Shopify’s solution is to get rid of the UX moniker altogether, instead focusing on the human skills that can make a user experience extraordinarynot just good enough. To Rivera, taste, intuition, and breaking the rules might be humans’ last bastion in this age of cookie-cutter AI. “When things become so scientific, they don’t have a soul. You see that a product is well designed and it’s doing the things that it’s supposed to do, but there’s nothing about the product that you’re able to fall in love [with]. Because it’s exactly the thing it was supposed to be,” Rivera says. He believes his team’s job at Shopify is to create software that people want to come back to, time and time againand only humans are capable of that. There was no UX science for those who invented UX I believe Rivera is right. Many of the leading minds behind the personal computing revolution didn’t think about experience through the lens of user experience design. People like Andy Hertzfeld, the chief software architect of the Macintosh, and Susan Kare, who was responsible for the Mac’s icons, crafted the experience through a vision to create the extraordinary. They didn’t call themselves UX designers, because at that point, the term didn’t exist. It was only later, after the Mac came out, that others codified what the original UX designers learned through intuition at Apple’s Human Interface Group (HIG). In the late ’80s, and especially in the ’90s, there was an explosion in the science of usability, led by people like Joy Mountfordwho was brought in by Steve Jobs to start the HIG in 1986and Jakob Nielsen and Don Normanwho made a business out of it with the Nielsen Norman Group, a consulting company for usability and UX certification in the ’90s. These scientists observed the outcome of human intuition and used focus groups, cameras tracking user motion, and quantitative and qualitative measurements to turn gut feelings (“Oh this feels good! That makes sense! This is fun! That sucks! Let’s go this way!”) generated by the Mac team into the science of UX. It was a necessary advancement at the time. But now we’re in a new technological age where all of that hard work and knowledge has been vacuumed up and processed, effectively becoming a textbook for AI. Now, it’s time for a new age of creative thinking. How does this look in real life? “We’ve been working on this change inside of the design team since I took over as CDO, and it really comes from this point of view I have that, in this new era of technology all of us are basically a 7-out-of-10 at every job in the market,” Rivera says. Rivera found that, if he looked at his team’s job descriptions and titles, so much of it was about how we try to turn subjective and aesthetic professionslike design and writinginto a science. “Everything is much easier when you’re, like, ‘Oh, the good is measurable.’ But what if that is not a fact, and it’s the opposite?” he asks. “What if we’re here to do this thing that’s intrinsically subjective, that’s unmeasurable?” Dropping the UX from titles, Rivera says, is meant to get away from the idea that a job is a science, and back to the basics, where people can create truly special experiences. He believes that now, thanks to AI, good UX is something that is democratic and can belong to everyone in the organization. “But really great design, I think, is something that we uniquely hold and, as such, as designers, we are here to do,” he says. Within Shopify, the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. Rivera believes that this is because, internally, the company has already come quite far on its journey of internalizing its shift toward a more AI-centric workplace where the technology can (and will) assume some of the rote tasks once given to human designers. “It prompted a lot of great conversations, too,” he says. “Like, okay, if our job is changing this way, how does it change how I do my job and the craft that I need to hone? How do you hone and improve taste, or bring a point of view?” Not everyone agrees with Rivera. While many UX designers have applauded his move, some believe it is a mistake. “Titles aren’t just labels. They reflect focus, craft, and expertise,” someone replied to him on X. Rivera argues the compression in the industry has been happening long before this point. UX, UI, and prototyping were all different jobs before AI started to shuffle things around. Now designers can craft the entire story, from vision to execution. For Shopify, this is an opportunity, not a threat. Creativity and intuition are humans’ last bastion against the standardization enabled by AI. “If we’re heading into unknown territory,” Rivera says, “I can’t think of a better group to draw up a version of what this future can look like, and to explore the edges of technology and what is possible.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Six years ago, a platform called Loop launched with a bold idea: What if common mass-market productslike Tide detergent or Pantene shampoocame in reusable packaging instead of single-use plastic? The concept took inspiration from the traditional milkman model. Customers would leave empty containers at their doorsteps (or later, return them to participating stores). Loop would collect, sanitize, and refill them, ready to be sold again. Rinse and repeat. Big brands, somewhat surprisingly, signed on quickly. Some developed custom packaging, such as a sleek stainless steel container for Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Major retailers, including Walgreens and Kroger, agreed to join pilots. Consumers liked the idea: when the first U.S. pilot launched with 10,000 customers, nearly 100,000 others joined the waitlist. Loop expanded pilots to other countries. But the pilots ultimately didnt scale up, and eventually shut downexcept in one place. In France, Loop is now in hundreds of stores, and selling more than 400 items, from food to personal care products. It expects to be in as many as 800 stores by the end of the year. Its also finally profitable. We talked to the founders about why the model failed in the U.S., but worked in France. [Photo: Loop] How Loop started When Loop began, plastic waste was a mainstream concern. Consumers wanted alternatives. Companies were facing the possibility that packaging waste might be regulated. Environmental groups were pushing for reuse, not recycling, as the solution. “There was a lot of pressure from that community saying that [brands] need to bring out reusable offerings,” says Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of Terracycle, the company that launched the Loop platform. Terracycle, a private company that Pitchbook reports has raised at least $69 million to date, had always focused on recyclingespecially hard to recycle itemsbut wanted to expand into reuse. [Photos: Loop] The company saw the advantages of returning to a system that worked before disposable packaging became ubiquitous. “Back in the day, packaging was an asset,” Szaky says. “It was the property of the manufacturer, secured by deposit with the consumer. And as a result, the manufacturer was motivated to make this long-lasting and durable.” When disposable packaging became common, companies tried to lower the cost as much as possible. That meant that packaging became less recyclable, because there was less of value to recycle. Terracycle had worked with big brands before on new ways to process hard-to-recycle packaging like candy wrappers. As it reached out to propose a new reuse platform, companies were receptive. More than 200 large consumer packaged goods companies decided to participate, and started exploring how their packaging and processes could adapt to the new system. Companies like Proctor and Gamble and Nestlé joined Loop’s Series A round in 2020, which raised $25 million. [Photo: Loop] The challenge of scaling up from pilotsand how a new law in France made the difference In pilots in the U.S., Canada, UK., Japan, and France, the company tested the business model, consumer demand, and environmental performance. The pilots showed that the system could work, Szaky says. But Loop struggled to convince retailers to add more stores. “The pilots were anywhere from 10 stores to two dozen, and they performed well,” he says. “Consumers liked it. They bought, they returned. Then we kept pushing these retailers saying, ‘Okay, let’s start scaling’–let’s add more store count and more product count. And we couldn’t get anywhere except France.” France had a key difference: it passed a strong law in 2020 that took on plastic waste. One of the provisions was that by 2027, major supermarkets would have to dedicate 10% of their floor space to products in reusable packaging. French law also offered a carrot along with the stick. It charges brands a packaging feeand then gives back funding to help make the switch to reusables. The funds can be used for buying new packaging, making new labels, or paying to be part of a system like Loop. “That helps offset some of the short-term challenges that might make a product less profitable when it’s in 400 or 600 stores versus full national distribution in France, probably 20,000 or 30,000 stores,” Szaky says. In the U.S., there was enough pressure to get support for pilots. But without regulation in place, it was hard to get companies to go farther. “We heard from some retailers who said, look, we don’t really wanna scale this until the regulatory threat is really around the corner,” Szaky says. Smaller-scale pilots are more expensive to run than operating a full system, so eventually, Loop pilots shut down everywhere outside France. Rethinking packaging As France pushed reuse forward, Loop had time to find a solution to another challenge. Some brands had developed creative new packaging for the initial pilots, and even began experimenting with new products like toothpaste tablets as an alternative to toothpaste in a plastic tube. But while brands had the resources to make small pilot runs and then theoretically jump to large-scale production, it wasn’t really feasible to grow more incrementally along with Loop. If you go from supplying a product to 50 stores, to 500, to 3,000, you might need a new packaging manufacturer each time. “Each one of those jumps are potentially a completely different facility with different equipment, different line speeds, all this stuff,” Szaky says. “So they have to keep onboarding different third-party manufacturers. And it’s quite expensive. They have to keep investing and probably losing money on the product until they get to a certain scale.” [Photo: Loop] When he talked to brands, they’d say they couldn’t grow incrementally. “We’d say, hey, guys, it’s great that you’re in 10 stores, and then we would come to them and say, what if we got to 30 stores? Are you ready to go? And they’d say: no. We’re ready to go when you’re at 1,000 stores.” But for Loop, that slower growth was necessary as it built up a full assortment of different products. Now, the company helps brands focus on working as much as possible with existing packaging. In some cases, the package is exactly the same as what’s already on the shelf. A glass bottle for wine or olive oil is already strong enough to withstand repeated cleaning and refilling. A plastic tub of kitty litter can also be cleaned out and refilled. All a company needs to do is add a Loop label to explain to consumers that the package has a deposit, and needs to come back. The reusable system can be cheaper for brands. “The brand doesn’t have to buy the bottle again,” Szaky says. “It’s that they just pay for the collection and sorting and cleaning, which is cheaper than buying a new bottle.” In some cases, stores have switched to only stocking a reusable version of the package. Consumers can also sometimes save money. Szaky shared a photo of a whiskey bottle with both a reusable and standard version on a French grocery shelf. The reusable bottle costs slightly less up front, and when someone returns it to collect their deposit, they end up saving around 69 cents. [Photo: Loop] A focus on convenience As France pushes reuse forward, other models are also showing up in stores. Some brands offer concentrated products, such as tablets for soap that you add to a bottle with water. But Szaky argues that while these products sell well online, it’s harder to convince a consumer looking at a traditional, full bottle on a shelf not to go for a product that looks bigger. (It also only works for certain products: you can’t really sell a concentrated candy bar.) French retailers are also offering more products in bulk. But that’s a little more work both for retailers and for consumers, who have to clean their own packaging. Again, it doesn’t work for every product. Disposable packaging was successful because it was so easy to use; Loop is attempting to come as close as it can to that convenience. Stores can shelve products in the same way that they did with reusable packaging. Consumers don’t have to bother trying to clean out packaging when they return it to the store. It still wants to go further. The company is now talking to waste management companies in France about curbside pickup, which could be feasible if reusables are adopted by around 10% of the population. If it can reach that point, then throwing the packaging in a bin for pickup would be as simple as throwing it in the trash, and retailers wouldn’t have the extra work of handling returned packages. Regulation is key As Loop proves out the model in France, it hopes to move to other countries when similar regulation goes into effect. The EU passed a packaging law that also includes reuse provisions, and will go into effect next year. In countries like Spain and the Netherlands, “we see very short-term opportunity, where those same carrots and sticks have emerged or will very soon,” Szaky says. There’s a push for a similar law in Australia. In the U.S., while a federal law supporting reuse is vanishingly unlikely at the moment, it’s possible that a large state like California could put something similar in place. Reuse systems “require regulation, or otherwise they won’t happen,” Szaky says. “Public pressure is not enough for a system like we use to work. It can’t work with one product or in one retailer, it has to be a huge ecosystem of products, and an ecosystem of retailers. Otherwise, it’s very hard for a consumer to adopt.” The evidence from France could help convince lawmakers elsewhere. “This is functioning today in France at scale every day,” he says. “It’s getting bigger, but already has some good scale to it. And reuse does work. It economically works.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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