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The L.A.-based fashion brand Lisa Says Gah just teamed up with Polly Pocket for a new limited-edition collection, and it appears to be a sign that Mattel is already gunning to recapture the marketing magic of the Barbie movie. Polly Pocket Says Gah! is an assortment of cardigans, baby tees, accessories, and PVC slingback kitten heels, all rendered in a pastel palette and topped with playful details like ruffled edges and quilted stitching. Prices range from $50 to $198. It debuts today exclusively on the Lisa Says Gah website. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] A Polly Pocket film has been in the works with MGM since 2021, but it faced a bump in the road last July when Lena Dunham, who was going to write and direct the movie, ultimately dropped out of the project. Communications on the status of the Polly Pocket film have been quiet since thenbut the movie is still in the development, Mattel confirmed to Fast Company. The studio has yet to share a release date. On the design side, the collaboration merges an ongoing interest in coquette aesthetics and Y2K nostalgia. But more broadly, its also harbinger that Mattels next blockbuster marketing campaign is launching sooner than we thought. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] Coquette core meets 90s nostalgia The seed for Polly Pocket Says Gah! was first planted when Mattel reached out to the fashion brand with an Instagram DM. Lisa Says Gah founder Lisa Bühler felt the partnership would be a natural fit. Growing up in the 90s, Polly Pocket was such a core memoryplaying with those tiny outfits, mixing and matching looksit was all about creativity and self-expression, says Bühler. LSG has always had Polly Pocket undertones in our playful cuts, graphic tees, and vibrant energy. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] The limited collection represents an evolution of the coquette core trend that emerged last winter: An aesthetic that fully embraces feminine touches like bows, ribbons, and lace. For the past year or so, this look has come to encompass a cultural movement online toward accepting the trappings of girlhood (e.g., girl dinner and girl math) that some women say they previously felt compelled to repress. Coquette core has enjoyed a longer-than-usual trend cycle thanks to the influence of rising stars like Sabrina Carpenter, whose Brigitte Bardot-esque look highlights soft, flirty touches and light pastels. According to Pinterest, the trend is expected to continue into 2025: per the sites Pinterest Predicts 2025 report, searches for both ultra-feminine, rococo-inspired looks and doll-like makeup are on the rise. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] It makes sense that the Polly Pocket Says Gah! collab would incorporate nods to coquette fashion (like heart-shaped jacket pockets and tiny ribbon bows on handbags) given that Polly Pocket was created as a line of miniature doll toys for young girls. The collection adds its own spin to the trend, though, by fusing its whimsical details with recognizable 90s Polly Pocket IP as a nod to grown-up fansbuilding on a current Y2K resurgence hats popped up everywhere from the cereal aisle to music and tech. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] Lisa Says Gah’s life-size Polly Pockets Instead of incorporating the Polly Pocket brands current logo, the Lisa Says Gah collection uses the brands original logo, which ran from 1989 to 1998. It also takes clear inspiration from the packaging of vintage Polly Pocket toys, which recently began selling for upward of $1,000 due to a burgeoning market of collectors. In fact, one of Polly Pocket Says Gahs signature prints is made up of various Polly Pocket compacts, a must-have portable toy in the 90s that was meant to mimic real makeup packaging but contained a whole tiny dollhouse. “This was a true collaboration,” Bühler says, noting that Mattel provided her team with 90s Polly Pocket images and prints from its archives for inspiration. “Our goal was to bring Polly Pockets tiny, magical world to life in a way that feels fresh, wearable, and true to LSG and its community.” That comes through in the apparel. Each detail of the new collection seems crafted to allow 90s babies to dress like life-size Polly Pocket dolls. [Photo: Lisa Says Gah] The first sign of a Polly Pocket movie Long before the Barbie movie debuted in theaters on July 21, 2023, the world had already been introduced to more than 100 Barbie-based brand tie-ins, including a signature XBox console, a line of Ruggable rugs, a Hot Wheels car, and a collection at Gap. Mattel and Universals wide-reaching marketing effort made the Barbie brand virtually unavoidable (and forced Fast Company to issue a moratorium on any new Barbie collabs.) It was such a smash hit that it arguably changed the way that major movie studios approach adapting recognizable IP, as in the case of 2024s Wicked, which similarly engaged in a months-long brand collab blitz. Now it looks like Mattel is gearing up for an even more drawn-out movie marketing play. Alongside the Lisa Says Gah collab, Polly Pocket has also recently debuted collaborations with The Office, Cotton On, and Funko (the latter two also use the brands 90s logo.) For now, its unclear whether there is a Polly Pocket summer on the horizonbut if there is, we can be sure to expect plenty more collaborations to come.
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E-Commerce
In a small section of Los Angeles’s Elysian Park, which spans the amount of land a single sprinkler head can water, a native plant experiment is underway that could change city parks for the better. It’s called Test Plot. Combining native plant species, volunteer gardeners, and a not insignificant amount of weeding, the experiment is trying to find a new way for urban parks to counter ecological degradation and improve climate resilience. The project launched in 2019 and is now underway in parks across California, and the approach is showing that with the right plants and the right amount of effort, parks can be brought back into sync with the natural tendencies of their environments. [Photo: Terremoto] An experiment to spur native, fire-resistant plant growth The idea came from the landscape architecture firm Terremoto, which formerly had an office just a few blocks from Elysian Park. “We saw that it was in need of some help,” says Jenny Jones, a landscape architect at Terremoto. Sections of the roughly 600-acre park were totally overrun by non-native species that crowd out more drought-tolerant, biodiverse, and fire-resilient species. The city’s overstretched parks department had been managing these issues through annual brush clearance, but the non-natives would always grow back, along with the risks they posed. “It clears for fire, but it also mows down every single native species in its path,” Jones says. “We wanted to just challenge the regime of maintenance that we were seeing in the park.” [Photo: Terremoto] In conjunction with a longstanding community group associated with the park, Terremoto approached the city about using the firm’s landscape architecture skills to try a different approach. They asked if they could run a small experiment, planting native plants and doing some active, volunteer-based gardening. The city agreed, with the stipulation that the project be temporary. [Photo: Terremoto] A way forward for more sustainable parks So in the fall of 2019 Terremoto hooked a hose to a water bib in the park, attached a sprinkler head, and started preparing a plot of land for a new kind of park planting. After a few rounds of watering and weeding, they planted dozens of one-gallon pots of native plants. Then, through regular maintenance and weeding sessions attended by a dedicated group of volunteers and enthusiasts, they simply helped the native plants thrive and stopped the non-native plants from moving back in. “We look to ecological restoration as a guide, but it’s not strict,” says Jones. “We lie somewhere between gardening and restoration.” Within three years the native plants fully established themselves, and no longer required watering, nor much weeding. This one plot, just 30 feet in diameter, proved that the park could be restored to a more sustainable and ecologically balanced state. [Photo: Terremoto] A 30-foot circle in a 600-acre park might seem like a drop in the bucket, but the idea has caught on. Terremoto expanded its Test Plot approach to other parts of Elysian Park and other parks across L.A. There are now about 15 Test Plots, including four or five that have fully established plants. By identifying degraded landscapes within parks, engaging with local groups already connected with those parks, and then asking city officials if they could temporarily intervene by adding native plants to those parks, they’ve been able to rethink planting and maintenance approaches at a larger scale. “There’s a little bit of figuring out how to pierce the bureaucracy and how to get around the otherwise really strict rules about engaging in that kind of work in public spaces,” Jones says. But in the urban context, parks departments often have to deprioritize planting and maintenance in the face of the social issues they also experience, like vandalism, drug abuse, unhoused individuals, and compromised public safety. A volunteer project like Test Plot is a welcome intervention. “[Parks departments] simply don’t have the budget to do what it takes to actually take care of a complicated urban park that faces intense urban problems,” Jones says. [Photo: Terremoto] Test pilot’s appeal for time (and budget)-strapped cities Test Plot is an appealing concept for parks who face such both budget challenges and the relentlessness of invasive species, and many across the state of California have allowed these interventions. Beyond half a dozen parks in L.A., Test Plots are adding native plants to parks in San Francisco, Berkeley, Daly City, Puente Hills, and Catalina Island. Interest in the approach has grown so much that it’s been formally spun off into a non-profit organization by the same name. Jones says the organization has received interest from parks groups across the country, including in Minnesota and Rhode Island. They are also being hired as consultants for new park projects, including a redesign of the Los Angeles River Center and Gardens that will feature an ethnobotanical garden created by the Test Plot organization. Jones says that a central element of all these Test Plots is community involvement. Volunteers are the backbone of the effort, and their ongoing engagement with the planting and weeding that Test Plot involves becomes a kind of reinforcement for the park’s vitality. “We have people come and they form a bond with their park in a way that they didn’t before,” Jones says. “A lot of people love their parks because they take their dogs on walks, it’s where they run, it’s where they walk with their friends. But there’s a whole new layer of bonding when your hands are in the soil and you are taking care of the land yourself.”
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E-Commerce
Kendrick Lamar. Drake. Lady Gaga. The charts of music streaming services pretty much all look the same these days, with familiar names dominating the top spotsexcept on up-and-coming Spotify competitor Audiomack. The current No. 1 album on Audiomack belongs to Nigerias Seyi Vibez, whose hypnotic Afrobeats tracks have amassed around 1.8 billion plays on the platform. Vibez is one of many African and Caribbean artists who have found breakout success on the platform. Many of them consistently draw larger audiences on Audiomack than on Spotify or Apple Music, largely due to the platforms strong presence in local markets. We are the most-used streaming service in a large swath of Africa, says Audiomack cofounder Brian Zisook. We’re No. 1 on iOS and Android in Nigeria and Ghana. The company boasts 58 billion-plus songs streamed in Nigeria alone. Half of Audiomacks audience of 40 million monthly listeners comes from the continent. Audiomacks rise in West Africa was initially unintentional, but it has since become a case study in the potential of emerging markets and how smaller music platforms can thrive alongside industry giants like Spotify and Apple Music. From a mixtape hub to an Afrobeats force When Zisook and Dave Macli founded Audiomack in New York in 2012, they just wanted to make it easier for local hip-hop DJs to distribute their mixtapes. At the time, many DJs relied on questionable file-sharing sites, creating a poor experience for fans. Those websites were strewn with pop-up [ads] and malware, Zisook recalls. If you downloaded a mixtape, you had to worry that you were going to crash your family computer. Audiomack grew steadily in Western markets, but never really broke through against its much bigger competitors. All that changed seemingly overnight in 2019 when West African musicians and their fans began flocking to the service en masse. We just took off, Zisook says. The growth was a hockey stick. To adapt, Macli and Zisook hired a local team in Nigeria, gaining valuable insights into their new market. The mistake that so many in the industry made was to view Africa as a monolith, Zisook says. If you are in Tanzania or Liberia, nothing is going to offend you more than only being served Nigerian, Ghanaian, or South African songs. Betting on Africa as a growth market for music streaming is savvy, believes MIDiA Research senior music industry analyst Tatiana Cirisano. As Western markets reach saturation, most future streaming growth will come from Global South regions, of which Africa is an important part, she argues. It was smart for Audiomack to position itself as a key player here. Betting on Africas music boom Cirisano cautions, however, that business models that work in the West may not easily translate to emerging markets. African countries have a lower average revenue per user than countries like the U.S. and U.K., she says. Even though Africas impact on global music culture and consumption continues to grow, its impact on global music revenue is not matching that growth. It’s very difficult to monetize music in Africa, acknowledges Zisook. You have a young audience that has limited or no disposable income, and a lack of access to credit and debit cards. They pay for things online using gift cards. So there’s no opportunity for consistent subscriptions. There’s a lot of churn. They have hard capped data plans, and they have unreliable or no Wi-Fi. Audiomack responded to this by striking bundling deals with local cellphone carriers. The company also integrated alternative revenue streams for musicians: Fans can become direct financial supporters of their favorite artists on the platform, and in exchange get badges and bragging rights. Its a clever way for Audiomack to differentiate itself from the competition, Cirisano contends, noting, The traditional streaming business doesnt monetize fandom, or depth of engagementit monetizes pure consumption. Thriving alongside giants like Spotify Scaling a business works for streaming giants like Spotify, which recently reported its first full year of profitability. But it has been much more challenging for second-tier services like Tidal, which reportedly laid off 100 staffers last fall. Audiomack could provide a blueprint for these smaller services to compete with, and prosper alongside the big guys. In addition to further growing its user base in Africa, Audiomack also courts expats across Western markets. A lot of our growth in Canada, U.K., Germany, and France is diasporic, Zisook says. Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in France. At the same time, the company is striking licensing agreements with major labels to gain access to more of their catalogs. This attracts Western listeners familiar with hip-hop while introducing them to Seyi Vibez and other Afrobeats stars. That way, Audiomack can become a complementary service for Western audiences looking to dive deeper into different music genres. The same folks who listen to Spotify at work might use Audiomack later in the day to more actively discover music, express their fandom, and access a catalog that is not available on mainstream streaming services, Cirisano says.
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E-Commerce
Teenage YouTube users across the world will now get automatic reminders to go to bed and take a break from their screens. YouTube announced this week it was expanding such reminders to minors across the globe, ensuring they are full-screen and toggled-on by default. The feature first debuted in the U.S. seven years ago, and went automatic for minors in 2023. So-called “bedtime” notifications have grown in popularity, buoyed in large part by YouTube and TikTok. But it’s unclear how effective the notifications are in the first place. After all, YouTube users only have to click to close out the banner; on TikTok, its even easier to keep swiping past the text. It will be effective for a small proportion of people, but the onus is still on the user to turn it off, says Jon-Patrick Allem, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers School of Public Health. These are all cosmetic things that may work for some people, but arent really going to shift user behavior. The rise of stop scrolling signs YouTube first introduced their overuse warnings back in 2018. At first, it was a simple opt-in take a break notification. By 2020, YouTube revealed that theyd sent more than three billion warnings, and added a bedtime reminder to their suite. This is the same year that TikTok also premiered their screentime management ads, headed by popular creators like Alan Chikin Chow and Gabe Erwin. A few years later, parents amplified concerns about their childrens social media usage. More and more data flooded the web about a teen mental health crisis, with an uptick in depression and anxiety. YouTube responded in 2023 by making their take a break and bedtime reminders more prominent on the screen, and making them mandatory for all American users under 18. TikTok debuted their own sleep reminder and silenced push notifications for users under 18 after 10 p.m. Now, YouTubes changes are global. In a LinkedIn post, Pedro Pina, YouTubes head of Europe, Middle East and Africa, wrote that the program ensures teens time on the platform is well spent. (YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.) But these reminders are still just suggestions: Rutgers’s Allem says that users see them as recommendations for best options, advice that theyre unlikely to take. There is no consequence if an individual acts or doesn’t act on this prompt, he says. It would probably be just as easy as moving on from the post like anything else you werent interested in. The one second that you take determining this isnt interesting so you keep scrolling, would that really be impactful? What does it take for us to actually log off? Beyond some limited content moderation, these warnings are the furthest major social media companies have gone to protect teens from addiction and overuse. But, in the wake of Jonathan Haidts The Anxious Generation and 2024s great upheaval around internet mental health, every pundit has their own ideas for further steps. The Surgeon General recommended cigarette-style warning labels; the State of New York demanded companies tamp down on their recommendation algorithms for minors. Allem rattles off a list of changes that would be more effective at stopping social media overuse. They could mandate lock-outs for minors during nighttime hours. They could force users to pay for increased hours using their apps. Or, the apps could be redesigned all together. Theres no natural stopping point for platforms designed with infinite scroll online, Allem says. We could consider default settings that were programmed to limit use, rather than allowing for unlimited use. But none of these changers are likely to happen anytime soon. All of this can be done quite easily, Allem says. It isnt done because it will tap into and reduce growth and profit.
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E-Commerce
The first thing anyone will notice about the new electric pickup from Telo Trucks is its compact form. Snubnosed and sporty, the five-seater has a bed the size of a typical pickup but an overall footprint the size of a Mini Cooper. When it goes into production next year, it will offer a radical counterpoint to the gargantuan trucks that dominate the U.S. automobile market.Today, Telo is unveiling the first drivable preproduction model of its new truck, the MT1, and Fast Company has an exclusive look at the innovations inside the truck that make its seemingly impossible size possible.[Image: Telo]The key to the Telo trucks interior design efficiency is its focus on whats known in the automotive world as the H pointthe location of a drivers hip inside the vehiclewhich becomes the main parameter that determines the size of a cars interior. Telo aimed to get about the same volumetric interior space as a crew cab Toyota Tacoma, the top-selling midsize pickup in the U.S. A lot of the special sauce as to how we get five people and a 5-foot bed into the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper is packaging, and people are the most important part, says Jason Marks, Telo cofounder and CEO.From left: An MT1 compared with a Tacoma; a Mini Cooper [Image: Telo]Telos focus on the H-point ended up shaping the entire truck, inside and outside. We knew we had the right amount of space that people were used to having. And then what the designers did within that space was they had a lot of free reign, says Forrest North, Telo cofounder and CFO.That led to an exterior design with a short, frunkless nose, and a truck bed that can expand inward into the trucks cab with an innovative folding midgate. That makes it big enough to haul a sheet of 4-by-8-foot plywood, giving the truck both utility and a compact size for urban settings.[Image: Telo]The interior design of Telos cabin space manages to compete with other trucks by repositioning how passengers sit. The driver and passenger seats were designed with an uncommon pedestal base that puts them higher up from the base of the floor. This height, and the lack of the typical twin mounting rails that sit on the floor beneath most front seats, creates more space underneath for the feet and legs of passengers in the back seat. The way that we built the front seats, its almost like theyre hovering in the air, Marks says. The angle of your thighs moves down, your back angle wants to be slightly more upright, and so it lets you actually occupy less horizontal room, even though you occupy more vertical room.[Image: Telo]Ditching the frunk in favor of a larger truck bed and shorter overall vehicle length meant that these front seats are positioned very close to the front of the truck. North equates it to the experience he had driving his first car, a 1975 Volkswagen bus. One of the great things about that is you know exactly where the front of the vehicle is. Parking and moving around in urban areas is much easier, he says.[Image: Telo]But to carve every cubic inch of waste out of the interior, the design had to account for the necessary safety features that exist in passenger vehicles, including crash structures, crumple zones, and a firewall. Having the front seats up on a pedestal cleared room beneath them for feet to swing in and out of the vehicle, which allowed those front end safety structures to sit closer to the people inside. That had to be designed in a very surface contoured, three-dimensional way that optimized for both how you enter and exit the vehicle and how the vehicle performs, Marks says. So that was a big part of how we do what we do in our vehicle[Image: Telo]Industrial designer Yves Behars company Fuseproject led the trucks design. (Behar is also an equity partner in Telo and serves as its chief creative officer and cofounder.) He says this pedestal seating approach is rare in car design, but has opened more space within the vehicle for human-centric design. Its a funny feature to talk about because its like talking about the underside of a chair. Nobody ever sees the underside of a chair, but thats really what this design is about, Behar says. Its about designing the things people cant see to deliver more comfort, more ergonomics, and more spaciousness in what I would say is an extremely small vehicle overall.[Image: Telo]Other space-efficient design elements are scattered throughout the cabin, from its two compact glove boxes to a smaller-than-usual center console bin to cupholders that slide out of view when not in use to a specific place to store sunglasses. Its actually a lot of storage but that feels more dedicated rather than just a big bin that you put all your random stuff in, Behar says.Because its an electric vehicle, the Telo trucks battery was also a big design parameter that shaped its interior design. North, who previously built the battery for the Tesla Roadster, says making the battery as thin as possible helped create more space inside the vehicle without compromising aerodynamics and range. You want to reduce any millimeter you can from your from your roofline, he says.For Telo, size is everything. But in contrast to most trucks out on the market today, bigger is not better, according to Behar. What I think pickup trucks have really embraced in the past 20-plus year is this notion of massiveness and masculinity and silly bigness, he says. That has essentially turned pickup trucks into dangerous and less utilitarian vehicles.
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E-Commerce
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