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The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 84.As a young organizer in Chicago, Jackson was called to meet with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis shortly before King was killed and he publicly positioned himself thereafter as King’s successor.Jackson led a lifetime of crusades in the United States and abroad, advocating for the poor and underrepresented on issues from voting rights and job opportunities to education and health care. He scored diplomatic victories with world leaders, and through his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he channeled cries for Black pride and self-determination into corporate boardrooms, pressuring executives to make America a more open and equitable society.And when he declared, “I am Somebody,” in a poem he often repeated, he sought to reach people of all colors. “I may be poor, but I am Somebody; I may be young; but I am Somebody; I may be on welfare, but I am Somebody,” Jackson intoned.It was a message he took literally and personally, having risen from obscurity in the segregated South to become America’s best-known civil rights activist since King.Santita Jackson confirmed that her father died at home in Chicago, surrounded by family.“Our father was a servant leadernot only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement posted online. “We shared him with the world, and in return, the world became part of our extended family.”Fellow civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton said his mentor “was not simply a civil rights leader; he was a movement unto himself.”“He taught me that protest must have purpose, that faith must have feet, and that justice is not seasonal, it is daily work,” Sharpton wrote in a statement, adding that Jackson taught “trying is as important as triumph. That you do not wait for the dream to come true; you work to make it real.”Despite profound health challenges in his final years including a rare neurological disorder that affected his ability to move and speak, Jackson continued protesting against racial injustice into the era of Black Lives Matter. In 2024, he appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and at a City Council meeting to show support for a resolution backing a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.“Even if we win,” he told marchers in Minneapolis before the officer whose knee kept George Floyd from breathing was convicted of murder, “it’s relief, not victory. They’re still killing our people. Stop the violence, save the children. Keep hope alive.” Calls to action, delivered in a memorable voice Jackson’s voice, infused with the stirring cadences and powerful insistence of the Black church, demanded attention. On the campaign trail and elsewhere, he used rhyming and slogans such as: “Hope not dope” and “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it,” to deliver his messages.Jackson had his share of critics, both within and outside of the Black community. Some considered him a grandstander, too eager to seek out the spotlight. Looking back on his life and legacy, Jackson told the Associated Press in 2011 that he felt blessed to be able to continue the service of other leaders before him and to lay a foundation for those to come.“A part of our life’s work was to tear down walls and build bridges, and in a half century of work, we’ve basically torn down walls,” Jackson said. “Sometimes when you tear down walls, you’re scarred by falling debris, but your mission is to open up holes so others behind you can run through.”In his final months, as he received 24-hour care, he lost his ability to speak, communicating with family and visitors by holding their hands and squeezing.“I get very emotional knowing that these speeches belong to the ages now,” his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., told the AP in October. A student athlete drawn to the Civil Rights Movement Jesse Louis Jackson was born on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of high school student Helen Burns and Noah Louis Robinson, a married man who lived next door. Jackson was later adopted by Charles Henry Jackson, who married his mother.Jackson was a star quarterback on the football team at Sterling High School in Greenville, and accepted a football scholarship from the University of Illinois. But after he reportedly was told Black people couldn’t play quarterback, he transferred to North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, where he became the first-string quarterback, an honor student in sociology and economics, and student body president.Arriving on the historically Black campus in 1960 just months after students there launched sit-ins at a whites-only diner, Jackson immersed himself in the blossoming Civil Rights Movement.By 1965, he joined the voting rights march King led from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. King dispatched him to Chicago to launch Operation Breadbasket, a Southern Christian Leadership Conference effort to pressure companies to hire Black workers.Jackson called his time with King “a phenomenal four years of work.”Jackson was with King on April 4, 1968, when the civil rights leader was slain at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Jackson’s account of the assassination was that King died in his arms.With his flair for the dramatic, Jackson wore a turtleneck he said was soaked with King’s blood for two days, including at a King memorial service held by the Chicago City Council, where he said: “I come here with a heavy heart because on my chest is the stain of blood from Dr. King’s head.”However, several King aides, including speechwriter Alfred Duckett, questioned whether Jackson could have gotten King’s blood on his clothing. There are no images of Jackson in pictures taken shortly after the assassination.In 1971, Jackson broke with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to form Operation PUSH, originally named People United to Save Humanity. The organization based on Chicago’s South Side declared a sweeping mission, from diversifying workforces to registering voters in communities of color nationwide. Using lawsuits and threats of boycotts, Jackson pressured top corporations to spend millions and publicly commit to diversifying their workforces.The constant campaigns often left his wife, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown, the college sweetheart he married in 1963, taking the lead in raising their five children: Santita Jackson, Yusef DuBois Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Jackson Jr., and two future members of Congress, U.S. Rep. Jonathan Luther Jackson and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who resigned in 2012 but is seeking reelection in the 2026 midterms.The elder Jackson, who was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1968 and earned his Master of Divinity in 2000, also acknowledged fathering a child, Ashley Jackson, with one of his employees at Rainbow/USH, Karen L. Stanford. He said he understood what it means to be born out of wedlock and supported her emotionally and financially. Presidential aspirations fall short but help ‘keep hope alive’ Despite once telling a Black audience he would not run for president “because white people are incapable of appreciating me,” Jackson ran twice and did better than any Black politician had before President Barack Obama, winning 13 primaries and caucuses for the Democratic nomination in 1988, four years after his first failed attempt.His successes left supporters chanting another Jackson slogan, “Keep Hope Alive.”“I was able to run for the presidency twice and redefine what was possible; it raised the lid for women and other people of color,” he told the AP. “Part of my job was to sow seeds of the possibilities.”U.S. Rep. John Lewis said during a 1988 C-SPAN interview that Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination “opened some doors that some minority person will be able to walk through and become president.”Jackson also pushed for cultural change, joining calls by NAACP members and other movement leaders in the late 1980s to identify Black people in the United States as African Americans.“To be called African Americans has cultural integrityit puts us in our proper historical context,” Jackson said at the time. “Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some base, some historical cultural base. African Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity.”Jackson’s words sometimes got him in trouble.In 1984, he apologized for what he thought were private comments to a reporter, calling New York City “Hymietown,” a derogatory reference to its large Jewish population. And in 2008, he made headlines when he complained that Obama was “talking down to Black people” in comments captured by a microphone he didn’t know was on during a break in a television taping.Still, when Jackson joined the jubilant crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park to greet Obama that election night, he had tears streaming down his face.“I wish for a moment that Dr. King or (slain civil rights leader) Medgar Evers . . . could’ve just been there for 30 seconds to see the fruits of their labor,” he told the AP years later. “I became overwhelmed. It was the joy and the journey.” Exerting influence on events at home and abroad Jackson also had influence abroad, meeting world leaders and scoring diplomatic victories, including the release of Navy Lt. Robert Goodman from Syria in 1984, as well as the 1990 release of more than 700 foreign women and children held after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In 1999, he won the freedom of three Americans imprisoned by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.In 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.“Citizens have the right to do something or do nothing,” Jackson said, before heading to Syria. “We choose to do something.”In 2021, Jackson joined the parents of Ahmaud Arbery inside the Georgia courtroom where three white men were convicted of killing the young Black jogger. In 2022, he hand-delivered a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago, calling for federal charges against former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke in the 2014 killing of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.Jackson, who stepped down as president of Rainbow/PUSH in July 2023, disclosed in 2017 that he had sought treatment for Parkinson’s, but he continued to make public appearances even as the disease made it more difficult for listeners to understand him. Earlier this year doctors confirmed a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy, a life-threatening neurological disorder. He was admitted to a hospital in November.During the coronavirus pandemic, he and his wife survived being hospitalized with COVID-19. Jackson was vaccinated early, urging Black people in particular to get protected, given their higher risks for bad outcomes.“It’s America’s unfinished businesswe’re free, but not equal,” Jackson told the AP. “There’s a reality check that has been brought by the coronavirus, that exposes the weakness and the opportunity.” Former Associated Press writer Karen Hawkins, who left The Associated Press in 2012, contributed to this report. Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in Minneapolis and Aaron Morrison in New York contributed. Sophia Tareen, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
This should come as a shock to very few people, but Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which typically needs very little reason to give away its doughnuts, is giving away free doughnuts today. This time, the free doughnut giveaway is in honor of Fat Tuesday 2026. But theres a catch. Heres what you need to know. What is Fat Tuesday? Today (Tuesday, February 17) is Fat Tuesday, otherwise known as Mardi Gras. The holiday always falls on the final Tuesday before the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the Lent observance period. Traditionally, Christians refrain from eating certain foods during Lent, particularly rich and fatty ones. As a result, the Tuesday before the Lenten fasting period began has historically been a day when followers binged on sweet and fatty foodstheir last chance to do so for over a month. This Tuesday thus became known as Fat Tuesday. Why is Krispy Kreme giving away doughnuts on Fat Tuesday? The ubiquitous doughnut chain never seems to miss an opportunity to give away free doughnuts. While this practice may appear anathema to a profitable business model, Krispy Kreme knows that giving away a few doughnuts will likely spur customers to spend more in-store than the chain is losing by giving away carefully formulated dough that costs it just a few cents each. After all, who can eat just one glazed doughnuts and not want to wash it down with a cup of (high-margin) coffee? What is Krispy Kreme giving away on Fat Tuesday 2026? Participating Krispy Kreme doughnuts locations will be giving away a free original glazed doughnut to those who go to their shops today. However, theres a catch. How can I get my free doughnut on Fat Tuesday? In order to get the free doughnut, youll need to wear beads, the traditional accessory that people adorn themselves with during Mardi Gras celebrations. As Krispy Kreme notes on its website, Bring your celebration spirit, and your shiniest beads, to a Krispy Kreme shop near you for a FREE Original Glazed doughnut per guest. The offer is available to those who physically enter a participating Krispy Kreme store or use its drive-through. Unfortunately, the offer isnt available for online orders. A disclaimer on Krispy Kreme’s website also notes that the offer is valid for today only and “while supplies last.”
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E-Commerce
Hospital intensive care units are notoriously noisy, with medical equipment emitting alarms, beeps, and other alerts designed to grab the attention of overextended healthcare workers. That constant barrage can lead to what experts call alarm fatigue, causing stress and exhaustion for doctors and nurses who must distinguish between routine signals and those indicating a patient is in urgent distress. Patients, too, often struggle to rest amid the cacophony, even though sleep is critical to recovery. To Ophir Ronen, a serial tech entrepreneur who sold his IT alert-handling startup Event Enrichment HQ to PagerDuty, the problem sounded familiar. Ronen first encountered the ICU alarm issue while volunteering in search and rescue, and he realized that although alarm fatigue has been widely discussed in scientific literature, no one had yet developed a comprehensive solution. I thought to myself, wow, we certainly experienced the problem of alarm fatigue in operations and enterprise ITI wonder if its the same pattern, he says. [Image: CalmWave] Betting the problem might have a similar fix, Ronen founded CalmWave in 2022, with early backing from the Allen Institute for AIs incubator program. The startup aims to help hospitals silence unnecessary alarms, prioritize those that truly demand action, and build datasets that make it easier for computers to tell the difference. Like other complex IT operations, Ronen found that critical information in hospitals is siloed across at least two systems: electronic medical records (EMR), which track diagnoses and treatments, and networks of sensors and monitoring systems that log vital signs and trigger alarms. Those monitoring data points typically never make it into EMR systems, which arent designed to handle that volume of information, Ronen says. CalmWaves technology integrates both streams. [Image: CalmWave] The system presents staff with a unified view of patient vital signs alongside treatment timelines, such as medication administration, reducing the need to toggle between records to assess a patients status. Drawing on its accumulated data, CalmWave can also recommend how to adjust alarm thresholds for specific patients, backed by clinical evidence explaining its reasoning. That might mean widening acceptable ranges to reduce unnecessary noise or tightening thresholds to catch problems earlier, according to Ronen. We don’t just reduce alarms, he says. We restructure which alarms fire when and why, giving the nurses the clinical evidence of why this makes sense. [Image: CalmWave] While the system is based on machine learning, its not powered by large-language models or other similarly inscrutable generative AI tools, Ronen emphasizes. Thats helped win acceptance from even skeptical medical professionals, and the technology is currently deployed in 14 hospitals. The company has also raised money from a number of investors, including in a follow-on round announced last June that brought in $4.4 million from Third Prime, Bonfire Ventures, Catalyst by Wellstar, and Silver Circle. An early pilot study with Wellstar Health System found CalmWaves system could lead to a 58% reduction in non-actionable alarmsreducing clinician interruptions and cutting by approximately 10 hours the time the average patient is exposed to alarms. On Tuesday, the company announced a new feature called Recovery State, designed to help hospitals identify patterns suggesting a patient may be ready for transfer or discharge from the ICU. Like its alarm-configuration tools, Recovery State draws on data from monitoring systems and EMRs, matching patient profiles to recovery patterns while leaving final decisions to clinicians. CalmWave hopes to roll out the feature this year. Ideally, Ronen says, it will help move patients out of stressful ICUsand potentially out of the hospitalsooner, freeing up resources and reducing costs. More broadly, he argues, it offers hospitals a way to measure when patients are improving, not just when they are deteriorating. Healthcare has always known how to detect when things go wrong, he says. What it’s never had is an objective, continuous way to confirm when things are going right.
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E-Commerce
Too many years ago, I remember slotting a 3.5-inch disk into my PC. With my allowance, Id bought $5 video game design software from a catalog. And as I looked at the terminal, lost without some familiar GUI . . . my coding efforts died. Game design became an abstract concept even as I became a game journalista topic sketched in notebooks, theoretically discussed, critically observed. That was, until I loaded Moonlake AI. With $30 million in funding from investors including Nvidia, AIX, Googles Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and YouTube founder Steve Chen, the 15-person startup founded by two Stanford PhD students dreams of building complete gamesfrom first person shooters to 2D puzzlesvia a single, one-shot prompt. [Screenshot: Moonlake AI] Yes, vibe-coding apps like Claude Code and Replit make it possible to build games, too, but Moonlake is purpose-built for the task. It will never ask you to copy a snippet of code, offers templates to start with if youd like, and has straightforward paths to bring in your own assets, too. It remembers your vision and constantly works to improve it alongside you. For a $40/mo subscription (though you can technically try the platform for free), you type what you want to play, and presto, its coded, bug tested, and appears into existence. Moonlake AI founders Sun Fan-Yun and Sharon Lee [Photo: Moonlake AI] Launching to the public in beta today, the Moonlake AI team knows they arent a one-shot game generator yetwhile I was playtesting my first draft game in minutes, it took hours of going back and forth with the machine to polish it much further. And in fact, the longer term goals for Moonlake AI stretch well beyond the lofty goal of vibe-coding video games. Their larger plan isn’t just to build Moonlake to be more capable, but to leverage the process of video game design itself to build a frontier AI model for the world. Building my game in Moonlake AI Am I the only one who, staring at the prompt, facing this machine that can do anything, suddenly cant think of doing anything? It was this lack of creativity that sunk me the first time Id taken Moonlake for a test-drive. I couldn’t come up with anything unique, so I suggested a 3D dungeon crawler. Despite having no original ideas, I walked through my vision in a multi-paragraph, explicit prompt. It felt too taxing to the system, too grand in scope, and too out of touch with what I imagined. My prompt was realized as one big broken room filled with pill shaped characters and no simple way forward. When I recount this story to Moonlake AI cofounder Sun Fun-Yun, he suggested starting smaller. Focusing on smaller interactions and building from there. (Even though he shared a few single-shot projects that hed made in one day, including this Centipede clone and postapocalyptic simulator). So I did the human work, and racked my brain for days before landing on a new concept: A miniature chef runs back and forth with a giant ice cream cone, catching falling scoops of ice cream. They stack and get harder and harder to balance. From here, I could pursue all sorts of game loops, depending on what felt fun about it (maybe you got points for each scoop, maybe some flavor combinations introduced bonuses, maybe ice cream scoops you didn’t catch got in the way). But for now, I focused on this simple introduction. [Screenshot: Moonlake AI] I typed this request into the prompt on the left side of the interface. And much like ChatGPT, Moonlake got to work, praising me for my brilliant creative idea, and then breaking down the tasks that would need to be taken to bringing it to life. Moonlake offered me an estimate of 1520 minutes to finish the job. Then it launched: Faster than I could possibly parse, the system created and worked through a checklist of to-dos. It needed to create graphic meshes, wobble mechanics, and sprites for my graphics. It researched topics it didnt readily understand. A mix of plain language explanations, and then hundreds of lines of code, populated into the chatbox, expanding and then consolidating away from my eyes. [Video: courtesy of the author] I was impressed by the decisions it made on its own, not just breaking down necessary tasks for a minimum viable product, but introducing a bouncy animation when the ice cream hit the cone (a detail I figured Id add in a polishing pass later). The system even said it was loading th game, and testing itspotting and squashing a few bugsbefore that magical button appeared in the big center box making up most of the UI: Play Game. The moment reminded me of the first time I tried gen AI; this actually worked! Sort of! [Video: courtesy of the author] My first draft felt something out of the early PC gaming era. My chef was too big, cone was too small. And the ice creams wouldn’t stack. But gosh, it got so much right about my simple pitch. The core vision was there. Ice cream fell at just the right pace from the sky. The scale of the entire scene felt right. The controls were all mapped without me needing to explain which key should do what. My chef . . . was something of a white blob stuck to a cone. He needed work. But Moonlake even did a decent job of creating a white tile kitchen background, with subtle sundaes printed upon it like murals. [Video: courtesy of the author] From there, I began lecturing the machine to fix the ice cream so it stacked. That created other issues. Ice cream started stacking, but would fall with any movement. Negotiating the feel led me to try all sorts of new prompts, and even as it failed and failed again, I started recognizing how the AI was translating ideas like stickiness into its own annotated code. Hours of casual updates in a tab in my browser followed. Fixing the physics of the scoops was vexing. I ended up in a loop of not quite solved problems. [Video: courtesy of the author] But I also asked for a new chef, this one with a proper, giant hat, with little sweat marks poking out every time he changed directions. This entire idea, Moonlake nailed out of the gate. My exact preferred aesthetic? No. But it captured the vibe. I found myself pleased, but also realizing that polishing this experience into something that felt delightful would take a lot of work. Another day? A week? It was tough to tell. The next morning, in a final ditch effort (I did have an article to file!), I decided to add a bunch of my lingering requests in one final push just to see what Moonlake could do. I wanted big multiplier scoring, a Kawaii graphic upgrade, and a few more fixes to my vexing scoop physics. It was unfair to request all these updates at once, and almost sure to break something. Fifteen minutes of coding followed, while I grabbed a coffee. What I returned to? Largely my brief! A few new issues around ice cream slippage! A game over screen I didnt ask for! But, at last, a true gamebuilt for about 950 of my 1,500 monthly creditsand published for you to try with a button press. (Moonlake is still determining pricing on extra credits.) [Video: courtesy of the author] Creating the frontier model Like a lot of AI companies, Moonlake is only charging customers its cost of computingwhich is why the base subscription comes with a limited amount of credits to run the AI. Everyone believes that cost should go over time, which could either widen Moonlake’s margins on subscriptions, or simply be reinvested to make the platform more capable. But only when I ask how Moonlake trained its model do I really learn how it all works, and to some extent, why this video game generator even exists as a business. Moonlake is an ever-growing AI model. However, its also really a video game building agent that takes your task and coordinates it with several specialized third party AI models that might handle anything from physics to asset generation. And its also growing into something even more ambitious as a result of sitting on top of so much existing AI power. Ours is an orchestrator that learns to fuse these modalities together, says Fan-Yun. And over time, our model can actually be more and more capable and incorporate other models’ capabilities into our own. But thats only the start of the strategy. As you vibecode in Moonlake, you are creating your own video game. You are also training Moonlakes own frontier modelwhat falls into a very hyped segment of world models or what Moonlake qualifies as multimodal modelsthat dont just rearrange words and concepts LLMs, but have a deep understanding of what the world is, how it works, and how all of its surfaces and touchpoints respond to inputs across physical space. That means when I correct Moonlake, saying an ice cream scoop should stack and stick atop another scoop of ice cream, it effectively learns that scoops of ice cream stick atop one another. Multiply that across millions of highly specific user requests, and as Moonlake AI cofounder Sharon Lee explains, game design could provide a perfect training loop to feed countless data points about how we expect the world to work into these world models. No, many or even most games don’t operate on real world physics which would translate 1:1 in some simulation. But in some cases they do, and Moonlake could extract such real physics for their own simulations. Furthermore, the founders believe the aforementioned causal relationships it’s mapping will still add a clarity to world models that’s otherwise hard to pin down. There’s a gap between large language models today and semantics they understand, versus actually building [a] world out, says Lee. And they believe that gap can be closed with more, intentional data. Today, researchers are trying to get these world inputs by renting Airbnbs and scanning the rooms with lasers, but that is relatively static information that is hard to scale. AI can also analyze videos to draw conclusions, but those lack the sharpness of human contextualization. As for video games? If you train a model on just a lot of Fortnite data, you know that you’re not going to really generalize to real world data, says Lee. [Our] data will just scale exponentially compared to hand curated data or collected data. Even Googles Genie AI can generate a slew of amazing 3D worlds with some interactivity, but the interactions they afford are superficial at best. I think the difference is sort of observing the world as it is, versus observing and understanding the world with causality, says Fan-Yun. And so causality is what Moonlake is after. Gaming is a task for V1 of Moonlakes model because the user feedback loop can teach it so much, but in the future, the team imagines applying a more mature version of this model to other fields. They see opportunities to train the next generation of robotics or improving driverless cars. Lee says theyve even fielded calls from manufacturing companies, that imagine understanding the human side of the equationcould help identify human factors issues in product design and assembly line production. The challenge, of course, is building Moonlake well enough that it produces games up to the standards of gamers, and that it continues investing in the product, so that people can restyle the entire graphics package with a button press, or easily export these games to sell on PC, iOS, or any other platform they would like. These ideas are all on the road map. But for now, Moonlake AI offers an accessible trip into the vibe-coding era, all through the lens of fun.
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E-Commerce
If you stop by the as-is section at one of Ikeas U.S. stores, you might now find a vintage table from the 1980s. The company recently started accepting older products in its Buy Back & Resell program, which gives customers store credit for bringing back used items, and then offers them for sale to other customers. Since launching as a pilot in the U.S. five years ago, the programstill the only one of its kind at a major furniture retailerhas steadily expanded, underscoring the demand for circular options. The program is our opportunity to bring our products back into the store from our customers to keep them out of landfill, says Mardi Ditze, sustainability manager for Ikea U.S. [Photo: Ikea] U.S. stores recently started taking back 700 additional SKUs through the program, from vintage furniture to glassware. Last year, customers brought back 14,700 products, growing from 8,000 in 2023. Most resold within 48 to 72 hours. The brands resale program is also growing globally. Ingka Group, the largest Ikea franchise that operates stores in 31 countries, sourced nearly 690,000 used Ikea products for resale last year. Part of the appeal, especially in the current economy, is the fact that the secondhand products have a built-in discount. We’ve always had a focus on creating value for money for customers, and this strengthens our low-price offer, says Karen Pflug, chief sustainability officer for Ingka Group. Our research shows that even though we feel we’re affordable, it can still be a barrier for some people. So the secondhand offers a whole new level of affordability. [Photo: Ikea] Selling secondhand products doesnt cannibalize the companys sales of new products. Instead, its helping bring in some new customers who are looking for lower-priced options. Customers who bring in their own used products to resell typically spend more than the value of the voucher that they get for the return. “Our experience has been that when a customer comes and successfully has a buyback resale transaction, has a store credit in their hand, they are likely thinking about what their next purchase is going to be,” says Ditze. “That transaction could happen as soon as that day, and that gift card gets applied to the purchase that they were thinking about doing.” Ikea also offers a peer-to-peer resale option in a handful of countries, with plans to expand this year. Customers who want to resell something scan their product with Ikea’s app, and then automatically get price recommendations, measurements, descriptions, assembly instructions, and professional product photos for their listing, helping remove some of the friction of posting an ad yourself on another platform like eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Sellers also get either cash or a 15% digital refund card that they can use at Ikea. Left: a page from a 1979 Ikea catalog with the Billy bookcase. Right: a newer iteration of the Billy, ca. 2022. [Photos: Ikea] The work is part of Ikea’s larger effort to become a circular company, meaning that it keeps products and materials in use as long as possible, shifts to recycled and renewable materials, and eliminates waste throughout the supply chain. Inter Ikea, the part of the brand that handles design, is also beginning to redesign products for longevity. The classic Billy bookcase, for example, now has more resilient materials and snap-in attachments instead of nails in the back, so it can be disassembled and reassembled more quicklyand more easily be resold and moved. Ikea has also long offered free parts to repair products if a screw is lost, and sofa covers to help furniture stay in use longer if it gets a stain. Some stores in Europe have tested repair programs for resold items. Ikea is actively finding new recycling options for when products do wear out completelyor if they can’t easily be resold because of hygiene reasons. The company invested in a mattress recycling startup, for example, which can harvest parts from springs to foam for use in new mattresses. And by 2030, Ikea is aiming for a third of the wood in its products to be recycled. “One part of it is creating a closed-loop circular stream for ourselves because of resource materials coming in,” says Pflug. “But the other is just doing the right thing from a circular economy point of view.” [Photo: Ikea] On the resale front, Ikea is tapping into momentum that alread existed. In Europe, Pflug says that Ikea products make up around 9% of the secondhand furniture market. But the company’s efforts could help nudge more people to take the time to give items a second life rather than throwing them out. Other brands could follow the same approach. “Customers already see the value of our products but also the value of secondhand furniture in general, and are doing it themselves,” says Pflug. “So if you want to have a part of that conversation and a part of that market, you have to make sure you’re being accessible and affordable and removing the barriers and pain points for people to do it. I think that’s when you’ll then get the demand.”
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E-Commerce
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