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Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a 7.5-foot-tall Chewbacca holding a candy cane. At least, according to the team at Home Depot. Home Depot has long been known as a purveyor of holiday decor, from pumpkins at Halloween to a wide selection of real and artificial trees at Christmas. In recent years, though, its been upping the creative ante on its decor game to capture new audiencesand, in some cases, to score a viral hit on TikTok. This year, its doing just that with two new additions to its holiday lineup: life-size, animated versions of Star Wars Chewbacca and R2-D2 ($349 and $299, respectively), complete with movie-accurate, motion-activated sound effects. While Home Depot declined to share specific sales data about the characters, R2-D2 appears to have sold out within weeks of debuting, inspiring several TikTok videos with hundreds of thousands of views and resulting in multiple Reddit forums where users are discussing strategies for getting their hands on one of the units. Resellers are already pedaling the product on eBay for nearly double its original price. With its increasingly extravagant Halloween animatronics and now its suite of nerdy, high-tech Christmas decor, Home Depot is making the spectacle of extreme holiday decorating accessible to the average customer. [Image: Home Depot] Home Depot is turning extreme holiday decorating into an accessible sport Home Depot is no stranger to building head-turning (and TikTok view-farming) holiday decor. In fact, its towering 12-foot-tall skeleton, Skelly (who debuted in 2020), is what initially propelled the big box store to its current status as customers go-to shop for viral decor. Since then, Home Depot has leaned into both the scale and detail of its holiday decor, including with Halloween releases this year like a seven-foot-tall Frankenstein and 9.5-foot-long haunted pirate ship. Now bringing that same amped-up energy into Christmas. Chewie and R2-D2 are part of Home Depots range of IP-adapted characters, which include other popular characters like Chucky, a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington from Disneys The Nightmare Before Christmas, and, also new this year, Olaf from Disneys Frozen. The company already sells a seven-foot-tall Darth Vader and six-foot-tall Stormtrooper. [Photo: Home Depot] Aubrey Horowitz, Home Depots senior merchant of decorative holiday, says Home Depots Star Wars line plays to a couple of different emerging genres of holiday shoppers. One is the seasonal decor enthusiast, who tends to like to refresh their decor from one holiday to the nextwhich is why characters like the Stormtrooper, Darth Vader, and R2-D2 all come with modifications to transition from Halloween to Christmas. Another is the holiday shopper thats interested in nostalgic aesthetics, from vintage-looking artificial trees to retro characters. That tracks with data Pinterest shared with Fast Company, which found that searches for nostalgic Christmas aesthetic were up 1,130% this November compared with last November. [Photo: Home Depot] With the majority of its IP collections, Home Depot is able to capture fans by keeping prices relatively low: For comparison, other life-size replicas of R2-D2 can run between $1,500 and $8,000. Clearly, the choice is resonating with fans online. A commenter under one video of R2-D2 with more than 130,000 views wrote, Take my money. Now I can put this alongside my R2D2 Pepsi cooler. And under a separate clip of Chewbacca, commenters are responding with photos of their own Home Depot Chewie surrounded by other Star Wars characters (and one dressed in a sports jersey). This holiday season, Home Depot is making sure that the most eccentric dad on your block can tap into his childlike wonder without breaking the bankand were not mad about it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Leadership listening is in sharp decline, and the consequences run deep. A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago. We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence. But real influence doesnt come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people. The disconnection crisis When leaders stop listening, people stop contributing. Ideas fade, trust erodes, and creativity retreats into silence. Ive seen this in large transformation programs with a sound strategy. Employees felt unheard, so progress stalled. When we paused to listen, everything changed. People began to share what was really going on. They talked about their fear of redundancy, exhaustion, and the loss of identity sitting just beneath the surface. Once they acknowledged those emotions (and responded with intentional action), we saw a decrease in resistance, and collaboration returned. This situation reminded me that change rarely fails because of poor strategy. It fails when we dont understand the why behind the resistance. Leaders might not be able to fix every concern, but giving people space to speak and be heard starts to rebuild trust. Listening is the first act of empathy, and empathy is the bridge back to psychological safety. The future model of influence There is another kind of silence thats intentional and not imposed. Its the pause that allows leaders to think, feel, and respond with awareness rather than react. This is where modern influence begins. Visibility and authority wont build the leaders of tomorrow. What will set them apart is their ability to build trust and lead with empathy to create psychologically safe workplaces. Todays leaders are juggling unprecedented complexity, whether thats shifting markets, hybrid work, rapid transformation, and multigenerational teams with diverse values and communication styles. Each generation might look for something different, but they all want someone to hear them out. Amid this constant pressure, few leaders have the space to slow down. Yet as complexity accelerates, active listening becomes essential. The most effective leaders create space for everyday check-ins rather than relying on quarterly surveys. These small moments of connection allow them to pivot quickly, address issues early, and stay in rhythm with their teams. You dont measure the pulse of leadership in reports; you do so in daily conversations. Empathy enables leaders to read emotions as fluently as they read information and to sense what people need before they can articulate it. It turns listening into awareness and awareness into intelligent action. This isnt performative listening or surface acknowledgment; its a disciplined practice of presence, understanding, and follow-through. Measuring connection While you can measure listening, you feel its actual impact through culture. Simple questionsMy manager genuinely listens to my concerns or Senior leaders act on employee feedbackreveal whether an organization values voice and transparency. Psychological safety remains the most reliable indicator of a connected culture. When people feel safe to speak, innovation thrives. Regular pulse surveys can track progress, but measurement only matters when it leads to visible action. Asking employees whether they see follow-through ensures that listening translates into progress. When leaders act on what they hear, empathy becomes motion. It builds credibility and reinforces the belief that every voice matters, which turns trust from an aspiration into a measurable outcome. The quiet revolution Influence today demands composure in complexity. Leaders need to find space to hear what their employees arent saying, reflect before responding, and make room for diverse perspectives. When empathy becomes part of daily leadership, it strengthens clarity, confidence, and connection across the organization. Empathy allows leaders to stay grounded in uncertainty and connected in complexity. Listening transforms disconnection into alignment and noise into meaning. This is human-first leadership that balances the rational with the emotional. I call it “rational empathy”where emotional awareness meets clear reasoning. Its the space where leaders respond, with both compassion and composure. Those who master it will build cultures that are open, resilient, and ready for what comes next. The leaders who will define the next decade wont be the loudest in the room. The next revolution in leadership will listen and balance confidence with curiosity. Are you listening deeply enough to understand what really matters and what could change in your team, your culture, or your impact if you started there? When leaders truly listen, they connect, and that connection is where real influence begins.
Category:
E-Commerce
Six years ago, when Michael Buckley returned to True Religion‘s offices as CEO, the denim brand looked nothing like the one he had built a decade earlier. Buckley was the brand’s president between 2006 and 2010, when True Religion was a luxury brand that sold jeans priced between $300 and $500 at Neiman Marcus and Barneys. Buckley helped grow revenues to more than $300 million a year, but after he left, the brand hit hard times, as it struggled to adapt to e-commerce. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2020. In 2019, after serving as CEO of Differential Brands Group (which owns Hudson Jeans), Buckley came back to True Religion to clean up the mess. He’s executed a remarkable turnaround, doubling the company’s revenues and leading it to its highest profitability ever. Buckley’s strategy is interesting. He’s rebuilt the business around the Black and Latino customers who have been loyal to the brand from the beginning. Under his leadership, the brand has rethought everything from pricing to design to marketing with these consumers in mind. (While none of True Religion’s top leadership is Black, Buckley says the company’s employees “reflect the brand’s consumers.”) “We didn’t change our target demo,” Buckley says. “This was the True Religion demographic all along, and it was our job to embrace them.” In the past, True Religion’s ad campaigns featured predominantly white models, but today, its website and social media features exclusively models of color. The brand partners with rappers and hip-hop artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Quavo, and 2 Chainz as ambassadors. True Religion is now back at the center of culture, seen on celebrities like Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner. Thanks to collaborations with brands like Von Dutch and Supreme, the brand is regularly featured in fashion blogs. Ciara [Photo: True Religion] Buckley believes that the future of True Religion lies with Black consumers. The brand is now focused on winning over the next generation; it’s going on a college tour with a focus on historically Black colleges and universities, like Spelman and Morehouse. But experts say that for True Religion to build an enduring relationship with Black consumers, it needs to go beyond just marketing to them; it must also forge authentic partnerships with these communities. Megan Thee Stallion [Photo: True Religion] “It’s awesome that the brand is serving the Black consumers that stuck around when others abandoned them,” says Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business and the author of For The Culture. “But to take it to the next level, the question is, how are you showing that you’re invested in the community? Are you collaborating with the community in a way that shares equity?” A Loyal Customer Historically, Black consumers have been sorely neglected by fashion brands, despite having significant economic power. Their spending on apparel and footwear is expected to grow by 6% a year to $70 billion by 2030, and yet, many fashion brands don’t tailor their products or marketing to their Black audience. A 2021 McKinsey survey found that Black consumers were profoundly dissatisfied with their fashion options and did not see themselves in most brands’ marketing campaigns. “Black consumers are so underserved and marginalized that they will gravitate towards brands that aren’t even targeting them,” says Collins. When True Religion first hit the market in 2002, its advertising campaigns rarely featured people of color. Its pricingwhich was astronomically expensive for jeanswas also designed to signal exclusivity. When he was previously at the company, Buckley says products were designed for consumers with household incomes above $250,000. Jeff Lubell, who cofounded True Religion, had no apologies for this high price tag. Its not for everybody, even though I would love it to be,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “Its like being in the club. When Buckley came back to True Religion in 2019, its price point and identity hadn’t changed significantly since its early days, but the style was no longer resonating in the market they had targeted. “The brad assumed the same luxury customer was buying, but when I walked the streets, it didn’t look like that at all,” he says. [Photo: True Religion] Buckley commissioned a survey to find out who was actually buying True Religion. The results were interesting: A third of customers were Black and 15% were Latino. Consumers skewed male and had an average household income of $65,000. For Buckley, this seemed like a big opportunity. “Years ago, when we were targeting wealthy consumers, we were touching 4% of the apparel market,” he says. “But the middle class demographic is enormous: it’s 150 million people. It seemed like a no-brainer to pivot.” According to Kristen D’Arcy, True Religion’s CMO, the brand has resonated with Black consumers because rappers and hip-hop artists had taken to it early on. The rapper Quavo, for instance, was such a fan of True Religion in his teens that he got a tattoo of the logo on his arm back in 2007. In 2014, rapper 2 Chainz name-dropped True Religion in a lyric. “The hip-hop world has always loved True Religion,” she says. “Even when we were selling to a different consumer, they were buying it.” Buckley has rebuilt the business around its current customers. For one thing, he lowered prices. Today, most of the brand’s styles are under $100, and thanks to frequent promotions, they’re often even cheaper. The aesthetic of the jeans is also very different now than it was in the early 2000s. In 2019, Buckley brought back Zihaad Wells, who had previously served as the brand’s VP of design from 2006 to 2017. Today, True Religion’s jeans still feature some of its original design elementslike visible stitching and the horseshoe iconographybut they now have a distinct Y2K streetwear aesthetic, which appeals to Gen Z as well as older consumers who are nostalgic for the early 2000s. It sells bedazzled jeans and sweat suits, baby tees, and grungy, distressed jeans. True Religion x Von Dutch [Photo: True Religion] “The aesthetic looks very dated to me, particularly with the large logos,” says Tina Wells, a marketing strategist and entrepreneur, with an expertise in multicultural marketing. “It’s certainly resonating with a subsection of Black consumers right now, but it will be important for the brand to keep their finger on the pulse, so that they’re not just creating products they think Black people want.” D’Arcy, for her part, has been focused on creating brand imagery that reflects this consumer base. With the brand’s $50 million annual marketing budget (which equates to 10% of sales), D’Arcy has launched campaigns with popular hip-hop and rap artists, including Megan Thee Stallion, Anitta, and NLE Choppa. YG [Photo: True Religion] Going Deeper The turnaround strategy has been effective. True Religion is projected to reach half a billion dollars in sales this year, up from $280 million in 2023. According to McKinsey’s survey, Black consumers show a strong preference for brands that resonate with them culturally. And when brands develop products for Black consumers and create diverse marketing campaigns, they will be rewarded with an influx of consumers. Saweetie [Photo: True Religion] D’Arcy believes there is even more room for True Religion to grow within the Black community. True Religion is popular across age rangesincluding the over-60 crowd, which makes up 15% of its audience. But to be an enduring brand, Buckley believes it is important to target the next generation of Black consumers who will hopefully stay with the brand as they enter adulthood. “We’re focused on acquiring millions of new customers in the 18-to-25 market,” says D’Arcy. True Religion is currently doing a college tour, where it hosts pop-ups on campuses, giving students a chance to take a study break while playing trivia games and browsing racks of clothing. Some of these colleges are HBCUs, including Morehouse and Spelman in Atlanta, while others, like the University of Florida in Gainesville and St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, have large Black populations. Chelley B (Love Island) [Photo: True Religion] Both Wells and Collins say that the test of True Religion’s commitment to the Black community will be borne out by how much effort the brand puts into really getting to know these consumers. He points to Ralph Lauren’s partnership with Morehouse and Spelman over the past two years, which resulted in two successful collaborations. Ralph Lauren spent a long time working with scholars at these schools, along with Black designers and creatives, to create clothing and campaigns that authentically reflected the Black experience. “Their proximity to the culture allows them to do something that doesn’t feel opportunistic,” Collins says. “Black consumers immediately resonated with that campaign because it felt so authentic.” For Buckley, True Religion’s current success is proof that Black consumers are a scalable and profitable market. “We’re doing everything we can to embrace a customer that has loved us for a long time,” he says. “This is a growing, trend-setting population. I don’t know why any brand wouldn’t want to serve them.” Anitta [Photo: True Religion]
Category:
E-Commerce
Its hard to believe that just a few short years ago a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti generated by ModelScope, a text-to-video AI model, was the peak of AI slop. Fast-forward to today and our trust for CCTV footage of cute animals has been eroded, slop is showing up across marketing and music playlists, and Sora 2 deepfakes are fooling both grandparents and politicians nationwide. A number of artist projects are fighting back against the deluge of slop polluting the shared waters of the internet (or at least poking fun at those who willingly consume it). Steve Nasopoulos and Peter Henningsen, both freelance copywriters, recently created the Slop Trough in their spare time. Its a digital feeding trough that serves up endless slop, so long as you turn on your webcam and get down on all fours like a good little piggy. Are you a little piggy who needs your slop? the homepage asks. Click yes and it tells you to get on the ground on all fours oink oink. We just wanted to capture the degrading feeling of having someone put this horrible content in front of us and actually expect us to consume it. It feels, how shall we say, a little dehumanizing? the creators told Fast Company. The internet was once a magical place, because it was full of weirdos making bizarre websites and stupid art projects. Slop and AI content are diametrically opposed to that because its mass-produced garbage made by robots. Other online art projects imagine an internet untouched by generative AI. 404 media recently reported on Slop Evader, a browser tool created by artist and researcher Tega Brain that filters web searches to include only results from before November 30, 2022the day ChatGPT was released to (or, rather, unleashed on) the public. The term AI slop itself emerged around 2023, when platforms like ChatGPT and DALL-E became publicly available and more widely adopted, according to Google Trends. Yet concerns about AI among U.S. adults have grown exponentially since 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, so much so that slurs for robots now exist. But for every new AI slop video created, there will always be those resisting it with human-made projects. As Nasopoulos and Henningsen put it: We think humans making stuff and putting it on the internet is what the internet was designed for, so the more of that the better.
Category:
E-Commerce
Revolutionary France may seem like a strange place to find a life hack, but in the 1790s, the French satirist Nicolas Chamfort offered some stark advice to cope with our daily travails. One should swallow a toad every morning, so as not to find anything disgusting for the rest of the day, he wrote. In other words, start with the thing you dread most, and the following obligations will feel far more pleasant. Chamforts name has largely been forgotten by the English-speaking world, but his unsettling phrase has endured as a popular productivity mantra: Eat the frog. The idea has even inspired a best-selling self-help book from the 2000s. But does it actually work? It is only within the past few years that scientists have investigated the strategy, and they have found that “eating the frog” can be surprisingly powerful, boosting our satisfaction, motivation, and performance in the workplace, while helping us to begin our evenings feeling more refreshed. We just need to gird our stomachs and get on with it. Biased expectations You may be skeptical. The very idea of eating the frog runs against the widespread intuition that we should ease ourselves into a job with the simplest possible task. Most of us think that we can build up confidence as we progress, but it turns out to be completely wrong. Rachel Habbert and Juliana Schroeder at the University of California, Berkeley, first exposed this bias in 2020. In a series of experiments, the researchers first asked participants to consider different word games, and to say which order they would like to tackle themwith the vast majority of people opting to work their way up to the hardest challenges. They seemed to believe that this would allow their confidence to grow. To test whether those preferences were justified, Schroeder and Habbert then asked the participants to perform the tasks in order of either ascending or descending difficulty. Contrary to their predictions, the participants who started with the most demanding task ended up feeling considerably more confident than those who worked the other way. Eating the frog at the beginning of the task, it seemed, had allowed them to finish on a high. The “easy addendum effect” The results chime with a later finding by Edward Lai, an assistant professor of marketing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was inspired, in part, by the peak-end rule. Put simply, this is the principle that our memories of an experience are biased by its most intense moments, and by the way it endswhile neglecting its overall duration. In the original experiments describing this phenomenon, the late Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist at Princeton University, asked participants to plunge one of their hands into unpleasantly cold14°C (57°F)water for 60 seconds. After they had dried off, they then plunged the other hand into water of the same temperature for the same length of time, followed by a further 30 seconds at 15°C (59°F)before being asked which trial they would like to repeat. The logical answer would seem to be the first, but most went for the second, since it ended on a more pleasant note. Lai and his colleagues wanted to test how this might apply to our work. They tasked some participants with common administrative jobs, such as filing books alphabetically or answering customer inquiries. Some of the participants were given a single block of tasks, while others were asked to complete the same number of jobs while also taking on a second block of easier tasks. (The people answering customer queries were given a few extra emails asking for straightforward clarifications, for example.) Despite doing more work overall, the people who had been given the additional problems felt that they had made less overall effort than those who had simply tackled the core task, and they were more satisfied as a result. They also showed greater persistence. They were less likely to want to take a break, and more likely to opt in to additional tasks, and actually complete them, Lai says. To double-check that the sequence mattered, they also tried placing the simpler tasks at the beginning, or at the middle of the sequence. But the only way that people felt happier and more satisfied was when we put the easy ones at the end, he saysleading the researchers to call it the “easy addendum effect.” We can only conclude so much from laboratory experiments, but the finding has since been replicated in real-life companies. In one weeklong study, Chen Zhang, an associate professor in leadership and management organization at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and his colleagues encouraged 83 knowledge workers at an IT company to change their schedules so that they focused on the days biggest challenges during the morning. As Schroeders and Lais findings would have predicted, they ended the day more positively, with less fatigue as they left work. A second survey at an e-commerce company found that this approach could also increase productivity. The participants supervisors reported that they were more likely to go above and beyond their everyday responsibilities after completing their most daunting tasks first, for example. Reflection and planning Putting all this into practice will take a little forethought. In Zhangs study, the participants spent the first moments of each morning rating the difficulty of each task before deciding on their schedule. In some cases, there will only be one logical order to do things. Whenever we have a bit of flexibility, however, we can choose to tackle the biggest challenges as early as possible. I frequently apply this strategy myself. Ive just started writing a new book, for instance, and some of the more technical sections will require particularly heavy lifting. Knowing about the easy addendum effect, I focus on these more demanding tasks before lunch and spend the afternoon working on the connective tissue and the personal anecdotes, which are often far more pleasurable to write, before spending the final hour revising what I have written. I arrange work calls and meetings in a similar manner, placing those with the potential for conflict in the first half of the day, and friendly catch-ups toward the evening. Simply categorizing your emails can make a real difference, Lai says. Clearly, some will need to be answered urgently, but once you have prioritized those that need immediate attention, you can eat the frogs first and leave the quickest responses until last. Lai is sure this simple habit has enhanced his own happiness. If I do that, I feel like it hasnt been such a bad day when I walk out of the office, he says. Nicolas Chamfort, we can guess, would heartily approve.
Category:
E-Commerce
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