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Everyone has their individual bad memories of the pandemic, but one collective nightmare of the early days of that miserable period is the struggle to find toilet paper at your local store. Now, tariffs are bringing concerns about a toilet paper shortage back to the forefront. Suzano SA is the world’s largest exporter of pulp, the raw material used for making products like toilet paper. And the company tells Bloomberg it has seen shipments decline from Brazil to the U.S. due to tariffs, and worries that the shipping disruptions could get worse. It is, to be clear, much too early to know what the impact of pulp shipping disruptions will be. The company said shipments were down 20% in April and that stores, at present, are well stocked. But tariffs could result in higher prices for consumers, which could lead to a rush by some people to stock up. A similar scenario happened last October when a strike by dockworkers on the East Coast sent shoppers flocking to stores, emptying shelves of necessities, including toilet paper. Toilet paper and paper towels are largely produced in the U.S. (just 10% of the countrys toilet paper is imported). But the pulp used to make them is imported from countries like Brazil and Canada (which sends northern bleached softwood kraft pulp our way). It doesn’t take an actual shortage to empty store shelves. Just growing talk of one can cause short-term disruptions to the supply chain. Put another way: Theres a snowball effect. If a small number of people panic-shop, that drives others to do so as well. So if shoppers notice there is less toilet paper on the shelves than usual, they’re more likely to stock up just in case, due to recent talk of empty ports and looming product shortages. Suzano is still shipping products to the U.S.but not only is it shipping less; it’s charging more. The company says it is passing on the cost of tariffs to U.S. buyers, which could be part of the reason for the smaller orders. “Since customers are still struggling to forecast how tariffs can affect their production plants, either directly or indirectly, both pulp buyers and sellers are on a price discovery mode as we speak,” Leo Grimaldi, executive vice president at Suzano, said on a recent call with analysts. “There is not clarity yet of what is this price point needed for a full establishment of market confidence and dynamics.” Like the dockworkers’ strike last year, the trade war was something that was clearly telegraphed by the White House. That gave manufacturers like Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific time to stockpile pulp in order to keep retail prices level. Should a herd mentality lead to product shortages, however, that could lead to store managers putting buying limits on popular items. (The danger is that by limiting what you can buy, it could drive people who were not planning on buying any to join in on the hoarding.) Americans certainly love their toilet paper (which is somewhat ironic, as it didn’t become a household staple until the 1940s). At the start of the pandemic, when panic-buying was in full effect, Americans spent $1.4 billion on toilet paper over a four-week period in March and April of 2020, according to retail sales tracker IRI. That was a 102% increase from the same period a year before, which led to a widespread toilet paper shortage. We’re not alone. After the pandemic got underway, armed robbers in Hong Kong held up a supermarket. They weren’t interested in the cash registers. They did, however, take 600 rolls of toilet paper.
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E-Commerce
On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is cutting less than 3% of its global workforce, including LinkedIn. The company which an estimated 228,000 employees as of last June, meaning the layoffs will affect approximately 6,000 employees. The tech giant, which makes popular software products Windows and Word, will make cuts across various locations, teams, and roles. We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace, a Microsoft spokesperson told Fast Company. The news comes less than two weeks after the Redmond, Washington-based company beat first quarter earnings expectations, driven by its Azure cloud business. It also issued strong guidance going forward, despite President’s Trump’s tariffs and overall economic uncertainty. Microsoft also said it invested heavily in AI infrastructure during the first quarter of 2025. Microsoft said that it regularly adjusts its workforce to meet the strategic demands of the business, and that by reducing layers with fewer managers, the company hopes to increase agility and enhance efficiency by minimizing redundancy and streamlining processes, procedures, and roles. It also said the cuts will let employees spend more time leveraging new technologies and capabilities. On Tuesday, a number of LinkedIn employees posted about the reported layoffs on LinkedIn. The layoffs would be the largest at the company since 2023, when Microsoft eliminated 10,000 jobs, and follows a small round of performance-based layoffs at the beginning of 2025. However, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC the upcoming layoffs are not performance based. CEO Satya Nadella previously said Microsoft planned to spend $80 billion on data centers for artificial intelligence workloads in 2025, which could be even more costly with tariffs. Microsoft isn’t the only tech company to make cuts since the beginning of this year. A number of high-profile technology giants have been trimming their ranks, including Amazon, Meta, and Salesforce. Facebook parent company Meta Platforms cut about 5% of its workforceroughly 3,600 employeesin February, and Amazon announced it was laying off dozens at the end of January.
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E-Commerce
Eleven years after Google first announced its grand unifying theory of designMaterial Designits introducing its third major revision to the system.Called Material 3 Expressive, the company will tell you that it is its most researched update ever, promising to help people find what theyre looking for on the screen faster than before. But its also the companys most maximalist design system to date. Still enabling quieter minimalist designs, sure, but embracing bolder colors, more playful animations, and all around more overt approaches to interface. Theres a new roundness to almost every component, right down to the tips of Googles new default typeface, Google Sans Flex Rounded, which replaces the hard-edged terminals on letterforms with smooth tips.[Image: Google]But mostly, Google is using more of everything to accentuate contrast, like between headers and bodies. Button shapes can now be anything from giant pills to stars. Perkier animations rekindle techs old favorite words, joy and delight, with a bit more springiness in them across the board. And UI elements on your screen often react to othersdial a phone number, and each digit you press bounces the others out of the way like cartoony bubble tape.Its kind of like the next evolution, says Vanessa Cho, VP of Google Design. Its design with the soul. What I mean by that is its [still] driven with deep purpose but it also connects with you on the emotional level.[Image: Google]The history of Material DesignMaterial Design was born over a decade ago, as Google designers developed a grounding metaphor to codify its otherwise fragmented approach to design. Inspired by light and paper, Material Design was like a stretchy piece of wonder paper that could reshape to do anything, and it brought a sense of tactile physics to search, Android, and other Google services.In the years since, Material Design veered from its ambitious roots. It imagined eventually breaking out of screens and becoming the interface for our liveswhat would be a better interface for an internet of things than literal matter that would reshape itself in front of you? Material Design was built for a path toward that smart infrastructure that seemed so inevitable in the 2010s. But a decade later, and the world didnt play out that way. Instead, most things stayed dumb as we got sucked deeper and deeper into our phones. The stoic minimalism that Material Design version 1 celebrated got washed out by the pixel onslaughts of TikTok and other social media platforms. The emoji of 2014 seem quaint in comparison to just about everything on Instagram, where even AI characters are attempting to be my BFF.So in 2021, Material Design pivoted. It became more about personalizationallowing your phone to have a color palette and typefaces more reflective of you. And now? Material Design is trending more maximal, with an overt approach to design thats willing to call attention to itself as a moment of celebration, rather than disappear into the background.[Image: Google]Were in an era of expression thinking about TikTok and whatever youre on, says Mindy Brooks, VP of Product & UX for Android Platform. So this design system allows us to, even as developers and creators of it, to express what we want to in the product.Testing and manifestingAcross Googles products, these new design standards play out in different ways. On Android, it means we see apps presented in a greater array of typefaces (pushing expressiveness and information hierarchy at the same time), while apps like Photos trend toward the Canva create-a-card vibes we get on iOS today. On Wear OS, the colors from your phone can be mirrored on your wrist, and buttons now wrap all the way into the curves of the display through a lovely marriage of device and UI.[Image: Google]But what Googles design team most wants to highlight is that Material 3 Expressive isnt style over substance. Validated by 46 studies that tested hundreds of designs across more than 18,000 participants, they found that the expressive end of the Material Design system was preferred across all age groups, though especially by Gen Z, which preferred the more maximalist screens 87% of the time.[Image: Google]The team also found that Material 3 Expressive was faster to navigate. Certain actions were spotted up to four times faster than before. And while older adults are typically slower at finding certain buttons on the screen, the larger buttons inside Material 3 Expressive proved faster to find for everyonewhile eliminating the age gap. Google claims older adults can use this design system with the same rapidity of youth. (And who woulda thunk that a big red send button would be easier to spot than that old little paper airplane in the corner?)As a design solution, its hard to argue with Googles own validating data or the joy of bringing in more color and motion into the mix. But Im more interested in Material 3 Expression for what it reveals about this era of design. For the last decade and a half minimalism has taken over everything from blanded branding to interface (the world of interior design notwithstanding, which has been waffling on the idea for some time). But celebratory expression used to be in! Animations like Apples genie effectwhich shrunk apps into your task bar like a genie into the lampembodied playfulness before minimalism conquered tech. They were invented way back in 2004 during a more optimistic time in tech, right beside Bondi blue iMacs with handles on them. This was the hope of a world that didnt end after Y2K. Now, screen time debates have been decimated by the For You Page and AI everything, while your Grazas and Manischewitzes of the world prioritize a bit of funk over subdued Swissness. Were back in expressive times again.
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E-Commerce
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