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During an end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree last year, the Department of Defense (DoD) dropped some dough on new Herman Miller furniture. The DoD spent $60,719 for chairs from the Michigan furniture manufacturer last September, according to the report from the watchdog group Open The Books, including at least one $1,844 Aeron Chair, the brand’s popular, ergonomic, fabric-meshed office chair. The Herman Miller purchases were just a small fraction of the record $93 billion detailed in the report, which was more than the DoD has spent in a single month since the group’s data goes back to 2007. For Herman Miller, its share was peanuts, considering the company is the longest holder of a federal government contract for office furniture, at more than 40 years. (Herman Miller did not respond to a request for comment by publication.) The DoD goes on an annual spend-it-or-lose-it buying spree every fall no matter the president or party, Open The Books found over a decade of tracking it. The group called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rein in the use-it-or-lose-it approach the agency takes to its budget. Instead, 2025’s spending was a record. While some line items highlighted in the report seem like clear attempts to run up expense reports before the time runs out, like $98,000 on a Steinway & Sons grand piano and $2 million on Alaskan king crab, office furniture purchases at least make practical sense. With nearly 3 million military and civilian employees, the DoD is one of the largest employers in the U.S. That’s a lot of butts in seats, which means a big budget for chairs and other office furniture. Open The Books found furniture purchases spike 564% every September over the monthly average across the other 11 months of the year. Last year, the DoD spent $225.6 million on furniture in total. Herman Miller’s parent company MillerKnoll had obligations of more than $15 million in the last fiscal year, and the DoD makes up 80% of its awarding agencies. In the past, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spent nearly $250,000 on Herman Miller furniture for a conference room refresh, according to Open the Books, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent $284,000 on Herman Miller furniture for its conference center. For defense officials looking to set up an office, Herman Miller offers DoD-approved options for everything from desks, carts, and lockers to nurses’ stations, pharmacies, and labs. This isn’t the kind of workplace interior design work that Ikea was built to handle. For Herman Miller, though, its volume of government sales isn’t what it used to be. Federal spending records since 2008 show MillerKnoll’s transactions peaked during former President Barack Obama’s administration, with obligations totaling more than $174 million dollars in 2010, a figure that dropped to a low of more than $12 million in 2023. While the DoD might not be as loyal a customer as it once was, Herman Miller has found other government work elsewhere. The company says it’s one of the largest furniture suppliers to state and local government agencies.
Category:
E-Commerce
Here is a number worth sitting with: 295%. That’s how much U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT surged in a single day last month, after OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense that its rival Anthropic had publicly refused to sign. In the same 24-hour window, Claude’s downloads jumped 51%. By that evening, Anthropic’s app had climbed to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, leapfrogging 20 apps in under a week. One values-driven decision. One weekend. A measurable transfer of market share. Most of the coverage framed this as a political story. It isn’t. Or at least, not only. It’s also a brand loyalty story. And it tells us something important about the category war that’s actually being fought in AI, one that has very little to do with compute power. The Switching Cost Nobody Is Naming Brand strategists understand switching costs intuitively. In banking, insurance, enterprise softwareanywhere the friction is highemotional and values-based factors end up doing as much heavy lifting as product performance. The category with the highest rational switching cost often becomes the category where trust matters most. AI is moving toward that same dynamic, faster than most people are ready for. An AI platform doesn’t just perform tasks. It accumulates context. It gets to know ushow we think, our shorthand, our working rhythms. For enterprise users in particular, this depth compounds quickly. The longer a business embeds an AI platform into its workflows, the higher the exit cost becomes, not just technically, but cognitively, culturally, and even emotionally. There’s a name for this: the relational cost. It’s the switching cost nobody in the AI conversation is actually naming. And in any high-switching-cost category, the brand questionwhat does this company stand for, and do I trust iteventually becomes the definitive one. Operationalizing Values Is Not the Same as Talking About Them The consumer response to the DoD news didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the visible payoff of a positioning strategy years in the making. Anthropic has been making a consistent, operationalized argument about what kind of company it isand backing it with choices that have visible cost. The Claude Constitution is a publicly available, inspectable training framework. Not a mission statementa framework. Anthropic’s Economic Index analyses AI adoption across sectors and positions the company as a participant in the difficult societal conversation about AI’s impact on employment, not just a product vendor. These are category-shaping moves, not PR. The market had been registering these signals quietly, long before last month. Independent analyses suggest Claude holds 32% of enterprise AI usage, significantly disproportionate to its 3.5% consumer footprint. Enterprisesmore deliberate, more risk-averse, more consequentially exposed to AI failurehave already been choosing Claude at scale. That gap between enterprise and consumer adoption isn’t a coincidence. It’s a trust premium. The Cost of Caring It’s easy to have values when they cost you nothing. For Anthropic, these came with a $200 million price tag. Thats the suggested value of this contentious Pentagon contract. Furthermore, the supply-chain risk designationa label the Trump administration has now formally applied, and which Anthropic is challenging in courtthreatens hundreds of millions more across broader government contracts. This damaging designation, historically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei, has never before been applied to an American company. That is a real commercial cost, not a hypothetical one. But what looks like a ceiling from one angle looks like a moat from another. In the weeks since the dispute went public, Anthropic’s revenue run rate has nearly doubledfrom $9 billion at the end of 2025 to almost $20 billion today, according to Bloomberg. The government closed a door. The market opened several more. That is not a coincidence. That is what trust, operationalized and defended under pressure, looks like as a growth strategy. So What Does This Mean for Your Business? The question that should be on the table in every leadership meeting right now: which AI platforms are you building on, and have you thought seriously about what that association means for your brand? AI platforms are no longer neutral infrastructure. They carry values, make visible choices, take public positions. The AI your business relies on is becoming part of your brand. When a platform’s ethics come into questionas they periodically and inevitably willthat exposure travels upstream to every company in its orbit. This creates both a risk conversation and a strategic opportunity. Evaluating AI partners on trust and values criteria, not just capability benchmarks, is the kind of decision that looks obvious in hindsight and prescient in the moment. The Brand Codes Are Being Written Now Early positioning in emerging categories hardens fast. The companies that define what a space stands for, not just what it does, shape expectations for years. We saw it with social media, with streaming, with fintech. In each case, the brands that defined the category’s values, not just its features, built loyalty advantages that capability alone couldn’t disrupt. AI is at that moment. The conversation about what kind of category this is going to be is happening now, in public, in real time. Stop asking which AI is most capable. Start asking which AI your business can afford to be associated with. Because our whirlwind romance with AI is fast turning into something more serious; committed, often exclusive, long-term relationships where platform loyalties get more embedded and more entrenched by the day. Choose carefully. Credibility compounds faster than compute. The data is already proving it.
Category:
E-Commerce
At a time when mainstream brands live in fear of getting dragged into a contentious political landscape, theres something curiously benign, almost feel-good, about Florsheimgate. If youve somehow missed it, this particular instance of an involuntary pop-culture brand cameo came about following press reports this week that President Donald Trump has become an enthusiastand de facto brand ambassadorfor Florsheim dress shoes, gifting pairs to cabinet members and media allies. The upshot is that less-than-$150 Florsheims have become the hottest and most exclusive MAGA status symbol, according to The Wall Street Journal. But more to the point, administration insiders who dont find the brand hot in the slightest, and would likely prefer more luxurious footwear, are sticking with the shoes Trump gives themeven, weirdly, if they dont fit. This naturally caught the attention of MAGA critics, who promptly lit up social media with mockery of the 79-year-old presidents taste and allegedly Stalinesque bullying of his compliant minions. And this included some collateral damage for the venerable, and some might say dowdy, Florsheim. But really, even the inevitable dunking (what a dated mall brand!) seemed good-humored. Florsheim, one Bluesky user wrote. When a Gift From Wicks n Sticks Just Isnt Enough. Others added comments like florsheim didn’t go out of business in like 1978? and Florsheim shoes? Man, that guys brain really is stuck in the 80s and Ok I give. Whats Florsheim. And of course plenty of memes. I get the feeling well be discussing Florsheim shoes today.— (@sundaedivine.lol) 2026-03-11T10:18:31.168Z Funny, but well short of a dangerous brand backlash. Nobodys demonizing Florsheim-wearers in general, putting out videos of shooting up loafers, or organizing a grassroots brand-oppo campaign on behalf of Vuitton loafers. To the contrary, it seems, at worst, to be a short-term, almost charming free publicity reminder to those who dont know that the brand is still aroundand, apparently, thriving. Turns out, Florsheim enjoyed record wholesale sales of $92 million in 2025, according to parent Weyco Groups most recent earnings release and call earlier this month, demonstrating resilience in a declining market for non-athletic brown shoes. The Florsheim brand has a choppy history dating all the way back to 1892. Worn by everyone from Harry Truman to Michael Jackson, its a brand deeply embedded in American consumer culture, a staple brand of the suburban shopping malls heyday. But it also endured a bankruptcy filing in 2002. Its now part of the Weyco Group, whose CEO is Thomas Florsheim Jr., a fifth-generation Florsheim. (Sales of other Weyco brands Nunn Bush, Stacy Adams, and Bogs were down last year, dragging down revenue and earnings for the company overall.) Weyco did not respond to an inquiry from Fast Company, but CEO Florsheim told The Journal he was not aware of Trump’s orders (and declined further comment). In the conference call (which predated this weeks Trump fandom news), the CEO was upbeat, calling Florsheim one of the few mens [shoe] brands outside of the athletic category to sustain this level of post-pandemic growth. While the non-athletic brown shoe category has been in secular decline, Florsheim has bucked the trend and gained market share. Whether thats true or not, the association with Trump seems more like a passing entertainment than a brand controversy. At a moment of profound tension brought on by war and the threat of a new global oil crisis, Florsheimgate didnt land like a point of contention; it was more like comic relief. In an interesting footnote, Weyco noted in its earnings call that tariff impactswhich CEO Florsheim has groused about in the pastsignificantly affected gross margins in 2025. Those tariffs have since been judged illegal by the Supreme Court, and the company is optimistic about retrieving $16 million from tariff refunds. Maybe Trumps Cabinet members should keep a spare pair of another brands loafers at the office, just in case Florsheim goes out of fashion at the White House.
Category:
E-Commerce
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