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Fast Company recently posed the question: Why isnt your workplace wellness program reducing stress? The answer, as the article rightly pointed out, isnt about bad intentionsits about bad execution. Most wellness initiatives are still treating symptoms, not causes. But we need to go even deeper. Workplace wellness isnt failing because its frivolous. Its failing because employees arent engaging with it. Stressed and burned out Corporate America spends an estimated $65 billion a year on wellness perks, from mindfulness apps to meditation pods yet 77% of employees still report feeling stressed, and 82% say theyre at risk of burnout. In the largest academic study of U.S. programs, fewer than half of eligible employees ever engaged with the resources on offer (RAND Corporation). Digital-only benefits fare even worse: app sprawl and discovery fatigue mean that most perks are forgotten before theyre used. A meditation app buried in a browser tab cant move the needle on mental health, absenteeism, or retention. Its easy to blame employees for being disengaged, or to point fingers at toxic culture. But the truth is more subtleand more solvable. Complexity kills engagement When HR teams assemble a buffet of stand-alone appsfinancial coaching here, sleep tools there, therapy platforms somewhere elseevery login is another cognitive task. Overwhelmed workers dont skip your yoga discount because they dislike yoga. They skip it because they dont remember where the link lives. At YuLife, we partnered with the University of Essex to study this problem. We found that bundling insurance, rewards, virtual care, and micro-challenges into one gamified experience radically changed engagement patterns: Users take healthy actions on 20 of 30 days, double the norm 54% return monthly, 50% engage daily Daily steps rose 13%, equivalent to adding 4.5 years of life expectancy Self-reported stress dropped 53%, productivity rose 57% Crucially, activity inside the app predicted use of other benefits. Those included 4× more Employee Assistance Program utilization, 2.4× more virtual GP visits, an 11.5% drop in absenteeism, and a 2.75% drop in turnover Engagement is the missing variable Wellness programs arent underperforming because employees dont care. Theyre underperforming because the programs werent designed with real behavioral engagement in mind. Three blockers we can eliminate today: Perk fragmentationConsolidate your well-being tools. If it takes more than two clicks or logins, it’s too much. Build a single front door, ideally integrated where work already happens (Slack, Teams, a unified app). Slow-burn rewardsPoints that take months to redeem lose meaning. When users can swap earned coins for gift cards the same week, engagement jumps 30% and rises again with leaderboards or friendly duels. One-size-fits-all contentA new parent, a cyclist, and a burnt-out manager dont need the same nudges. Personalised AI-driven prompts that respond to user behaviour drive a 3x increase in healthy habits. Well-being is infrastructure, not a perk We often hear that wellness is hard to measure. But thats usually a reflection of low engagement, not flawed strategy. At 20% adoption, noise drowns out signals. At 50%+, the ROI becomes clear, including a 5% drop in claims costs for employers integrating preventive data into group-risk underwriting. If fewer than half your people open the app, the program doesnt work. No matter how many perks you fund. The takeaway? Treat well-being engagement as a performance indicator like churn, CSAT, or NPS. Then: Start with one frictionless entry point Deliver generous, rapid-fire rewards Use behavioral science (and yes, a little fun) to sustain momentum Track outcomes investors care about: utilisation, risk, absenteeism, retention We dont need more perks. We need platforms people actually use. And that starts by treating engagement as the product and not the afterthought.
Category:
E-Commerce
YouTuber MrBeast made a brief cameo in the new music video for Mariah Carey’s song Type Dangerous, but it was a font that got more screen time. The video is divided into seven acts named after different would-be paramours, like “Mr. Player,” “Mr. Danger,” and “Mr. Beast,” and each act is introduced with red, all-caps text set in Aviano Serif Black, a squat, geometric typeface with short, sharp serifs that was vertically lengthened by 130% for the video. If it seems familiar, that’s because it looks a lot like the typography Carey has used throughout her career, starting with her 1990 self-titled debut album cover. But look closely at the serifs, and you’ll notice it’s not the exact same font. [Images: Columbia Records, Macmillan Publishing] Many artists switch up the typefaces they use to reflect an albums theme. Carey, though, has stuck to similar typefaces throughout her discography, which dates back 35 years. Friz Quadrata Carey’s primary typeface of choice is Friz Quadrata, an award-winning serif by type designer Ernst Friz released in 1966 that’s also used in the logos for Law & Order and Dr Pepper. Used consistently throughout her career and on best-selling albums like Daydream, Music Box, and The Emancipation of Mimi, Carey’s name written in all-caps has over time become as much a part of her brand as her high heels, dresses, and wind machines. Carey also has a monogrammed version of just an M and C. The logo mark is to divas what the Rolling Stones’s tongue and lips logo is to rock bands. [Screenshot: Gamma/YouTube] Though eagle-eyed viewers will notice differences in the letterform for letters like M and R, the customized, heightened Aviano Serif Black looks like a spitting image of Friz Quadrata in the “Type Dangerous” video, which was directed by Joseph Kahn (the director behind hit videos like Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood”). Like a brand refresh you don’t even notice happened, the font choice gives Carey’s video a new bespoke typeface that still looks familiar and classic.
Category:
E-Commerce
Field Notes cofounders Aaron Draplin and Jim Coudal have convened to ostensibly talk about their cult-fave memo book brand. But Draplinthe gregarious, hilarious Portland proprietor of Draplin Design Co.just wrapped up jury duty. And almost 10 minutes into our conversation, hes regaling us with courtroom sketches he made during the trial. (Of course, I had to figure out some way to exploit it for creative purposes.) Such freewheeling is just part and parcel of knowing Draplin, but Coudal has a knack for seamlessly and seemingly effortlessly steering the conversation back to the subject at hand. It underscores a point: Without Draplin, there would be no Field Notes. And without Coudal, there would definitely be no Field Notes. What Jim brought to the table is that he had the light bulb where he saw what this thing could be, Draplin says. Jims, like, reputable and stuff. People always say, well, youre half of the thingyeah, but I would have killed it because I might have gone to the next goofy little thing. Jim Coudal and Aaron Draplin [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] Today, 20 years and more than 10 million sold notebooks later, what began as a casual side project with no real expectation has yielded a cult product that is in 2,000 stores worldwide, has a robust direct-to-consumer membership program, and, Coudal says, just came off its best year for sales and revenue. And 2025 is on pace, he adds, with hopes to surpass it. It all goes back to Coudals light bulband, of course, Draplins before it. He had been drawing all his life and learned bookmaking at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. When Draplin left the Midwest for the West Coast in 1993, he began collecting memo books that agriculture companies historically gave out as promos, and was taken with their lineage and practical design. He decided to make some of his own notebooks in 2005, and the pragmatism and charm of those promosthe vernacular type treatments, layouts, voicefound their way into Field Notes DNA. He hand-printed 200 notebooks on a desktop Gocco and later invested $2,000 into a first run of 2,000 notebooks with FIELD NOTES printed on the cover in Futura. His goal? To give them out to friends. And one of those friends along the way happened to be Coudal, of Coudal Partners, the measured mind to Draplins mad scientist. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] He just said, There’s something here, Draplin recalls. Coudals team made a website. On the day it went live, they made 13 modest sales via PayPal. But that was okayagain, he and Draplin both had their own gigs, and Coudal says Field Notes wasnt a priority for either of them. But, Before you know it, there’s media attention . . . and we’re seeing real numbers, Draplin says. According to Coudal: One by one we fired all our clients because this Field Notes thing was getting bigger and taking up more of our timeand it was a lot more fun than making work we were proud of for people we didn’t particularly like. Stanley Donwood, Is a River Alive? [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] THE FIELD NOTES FORMULA When the pair formally launched the brand, Coudal says projects at his studio had three mandates: They had to make money, as the team had mortgages and kids to put through school; they had to be something the team would be proud of; and they had to be able to learn something new from it. Field Notes checked the boxes. Draplins goals were more straightforward. He says he was making a buck for every grand the agency he worked for did. The mid-aughts were the dawn of the modern maker movement, and there was an opportunity to craft your own future. He did just that with a concrete design system for the brands signature notebooks from the get-go. There’s never been a piece of type on any Field Notes material that wasn’t Futura or Century Schoolbook, two beautiful, hardworking American fonts, Coudal says. Other assets like the highly structured copy on the inside covers, as well as the logo placement on the front, were likewise sacrosanct. We can do different printing techniques, and we can do different-size notebooks, and we do a lot of things. But we don’t mess with what made Field Notes Field Notes. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] They sold the 3.5-by-5.5-inch 48-page books in packs of three, and the business grew slowlybut steadily. And as it grew, Coudal says, it became easier: he more notebooks you make, the cheaper each one becomes because youre buying in bulk. When they began scaling up their print runs, they were able to get the price down to a couple dollars per book, and sell the three-packs for $13 to 15which got them into stores. (Today, you can find them everywhere from indies to Barnes & Noble.) One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailers other personal favorites from our design heroes. There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoesand out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes, Coudal says. And when that happened, a lot changed for us. Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibilityafter all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled FieldNuts. Meanwhile, Draplin dropped into a New York store where the notebooks were arranged amongst $600 sweaters and $800 jeans. And the proprietor told him he could be selling the notebooks for $29.95 or $40which is something he would not do. That’s my favorite partthis stuff is accessible, right? Draplin notes. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] SUBSCRIPTION STRATEGY In 2009, Field Notes launched a set of color variants, and does a new installment every quarter, which subscribers can get annually for $120. They are up to 67 editions. And over the years, the program has grown to include elaborate series like the brands popular National Parks books, celebrations of spaceflight and letterpress, and dozens more themes. Coudal says the first few print runs were around 1,500 packs eachbut they have grown to the 30,000-to-60,000 range today. He adds that aside from a couple very strange years around COVID, gross revenue and DTC sales (which account for about 50% of the business) have increased almost every year since 2009. Rocky Mountain National Park by Rory Kurtz, Great Smoky Mountains National Park by Chris Turnham, Yellowstone National Park by Brave the Woods [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] The thing about the subscription model is, first of all, people are paying us now for a product we haven’t made yet, Coudal says. That’s really good for cash flow for a small company. But more important than that, having these four projects every year that people are funding ahead of time gives us a really great way to make a relationship with our customers and our retailers. Each one also fulfills Coudals third tenet for projectshe has an opportunity to explore an entirely new subject through the work. Emmy Star Brown, Flora [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] THE DRAPLIN FACTOR Of course, as Field Notes has risen in notoriety over the years, Draplin has been on a parallel path. He embodies the brand at design conferences like Adobe MAX and in his merch pop-ups, where he is treated like a rock star. I ask about the impact of Draplins industry celebrity, and Coudal jumps in. I can answer that because Aaron’s going to be humble about it. I think it’s made a lot of difference. I think that Aaron has brought a lot of people to the brand, and he’s also like our gospel preacher out on the road, telling the storythe gospel of Field Notes. Before the brand had an advertising budget, Coudal says that was critical. And for Draplin, those talks arent to simply shill. It’s a reminder: You can go make your own stuff, too, he says. With Draplin on the West Coast, Field Notes core team of around 10 is anchored in Chicago. While Draplin says he used to be far more involved in the day-to-day around seven years ago, these days he regards his role as a bit of a mercenary. He drops in with ideas; Coudal will, say, assign him to go make something weird. Hes also pissed the team off, on occasion, by going rogue with an idea. [Photo: courtesy Field Notes] Ultimately, I’m along for the ride at that point, because there’s a den mother watching over us, Draplin says. Asa result of being removed from the daily routine, he adds, I get to experience the buzz of what the customer gets. Which is, in all likelihood, a valuable temp check. A sample of Aaron Draplin’s collection of vintage farmer’s memo books. Explore the digitized collection here. [Screenshot: courtesy Field Notes, Eric Lovejoy, Leigh McKolay and Joe Dawson Jr. (site credits)] Aaron’s wisdom and inspiration are a constant good thing for the brand,” Coudal says. “And while he’s not checking the layouts anymore, he’s certainly a big part of the general direction that the ship sails. Looking to the future, Coudal says his goals are straightforward enough: Generate more interest, tell interesting stories, get wider distribution. Draplin, meanwhile, still seems a bit incredulous that the company exists in the first place. The biggest, funnest part about this thingnumber one, we didn’t lose any money. Isn’t that cool? I would have been okay if we did, he says. But, This can exist. This happened. [Weve done] it for almost 20 years. It’s fucking amazing. I’ll tell you what . . . it exceeded my dreams.
Category:
E-Commerce
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