Well Made

Climate anxiety is real. Expounding environmental factors and consumer guilt can make it hard to want to click on the latest climate change headline. But, climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis has a track record for making climate change coverage go viral. For example, she wrote a story in The New York Times about evil purple urchins.

Whenever climate change swoops in in the form of a flood, fire, or fuzzy caterpillars, Kendra is the...

For Emmett Shine, being in the right place at the right time was never a matter of luck — it was a matter of hustle. It was a practice in leveling up a bit before you're ready, but not overstretching.
 

After designing, building, and strategizing some of the most iconic modern brands — from Sweetgreen and Whole Foods to Warby Parker and Everlane — his design agency Gin Lane closed to pursue Pattern Brands. They're scaling down and ve...

Being ingrained in the tech startup world has taken Amit Gupta down a different path than most. After selling his first company Photojojo in 2014, he started traveling, writing sci-fi, and more recently, building Sudowrite. Sudowrite is an app for creative writers that uses AI to beat writer's block.

You're probably familiar with predictive text models offering suggestions for sentences in your Gmail or text messages. Sudowrite is b...

An online identity is a cyclical existence that feeds on the past. Reggie James calls the pre-Facebook internet "proto-identity." From there, we quickly excelled from profile pages to performative identity, slicing up our full self into concise slivers.

Reggie James is the CEO and founder of Eternal, a new kind of identity platform. He's rejecting the comforting nostalgia of what users have "liked," and building a new way forward. I...

As more product categories are getting "smarter," are they actually getting better? Wires, buttons and ports are disappearing from tech devices, meanwhile microchips and apps are being introduced to products that, for decades, have worked just fine without them. 

Tyler Mincey is always thinking about the long view of new products. He's brought his decade of product experience from Apple, Fictive Kin, and Pearl Automation to the...

Accelerated by dire circumstance, ecommerce had record growth over the past year. But behind all those order confirmations and tracking numbers, supply chains and logistics were stretched further than ever.

Returning guest Laura Behrens Wu is the CEO and founder of the shipping platform, Shippo and she had a front row seat to watch the rapid growth of brands and shipping providers. In this episode, she's unpacking the past year of s...

In his blog post titled My Life Countdown, Kevin Kelly cites a friend's philosophy of approaching your life's projects in 5-year chunks. His newest project, Vanishing Asia has broken this 5-year rule, clocking in at 5 decades. 
 

Every one of his trips to Asia in the past fifty years has led to this 1000-page, three-volume book, capturing 9,000 photos. Kevin is known for being an eloquent futurist, a purveyor of tech and cool tools, ...

For the past few decades, Jeremiah McElwee has not only had a front row seat to some of the most significant growth in the natural products industry, he's been one of the people in the driver's seat. As part of the Thrive Market team since its origin, Jeremiah has led everything from category growth and farm partnerships to product packaging and the shoppable values.

To build patient supply chain partnerships and keep an only-the-be...

There are a number of ways that the wellness industry can feel exclusionary. Sometimes, a product's information is overly complex and other times it's pitched as a total lifestyle overhaul. But sustainable growth is often slow and healthy changes are gradual. 

In the three years since launching Golde, Trinity Mouzon Wofford is perfecting her knack for balance — between accessibility and quality, between scale and mission, and betwee...

When you order a Take Back bag from For Days, you fill it with old clothes (in any condition, from any brand), ship it back to them, and they give you store credit. But behind that very simple exchange is a complex supply chain that's built on circularity.

When founder Kristy Caylor learned that on average, each person in the US sends 70 pounds of fabric to the landfill, it was an epiphany. If you think about how to shrink your annu...

In the summer of 2018, we talked to Hilary Milnes about how retail isn't dead but it's changing, the struggle of shuttering department stores, and innovative ways that online and offline shopping can intersect.

Over two years later, it's a case of same same but different. Hilary is still covering retail and fashion, but as the Americas Editor for Vogue Business. And now, one year into the pandemic, these trend trajectories have spik...

When consumers see a brand that claims to be "sustainable," reporter Alden Wicker encourages them to investigate. Every product's supply chain has different sustainability opportunities, so sustainability strategies will look different for every brand.

First, she says brands have to acknowledge that sustainability is not binary. One product can be more sustainable than another, but sustainability is an ongoing journey rather than a ...

When you're researching a sustainability topic, it can feel like a Russian nesting doll of rabbit holes — you often end up with more questions than when you started. The good news is, if you find yourself deliberating the gray areas of sustainability, then you're in the right place.

Ian Montgomery says that designing for sustainability is all about getting comfortable with tradeoffs. He is the founder and Creative Director of Guacam...

The first step to making Cyclon, On's recyclable shoe, was to use a single family of materials — polyamide (made from castor beans!). But that's just one piece of the cradle-to-cradle puzzle.

To capture the shoes for recycling, they've developed a subscription model and a dedicated recycling stream. Staying true to the mission, these shoes aren't recycled to turn into other plastic goods down the line — they're recycled into new Cyc...

After four years as Slack's Head of Global Design and before taking her new role at Facebook, Kristy Tillman brought her side projects to the forefront.

Kristy has a list of impressive side projects in her creative think tank, Tomorrow Looks Bright. It's a place where she does more than invite herself to the table — she creates the table and sits at the head. Kristy's work is always driven by optimism and an urgent need for a more e...

Before Rumpl, sleeping-bag-style puffy blankets were predominantly marketed to Alpine athletes. Rumpl didn't invent the category, but founder and CEO, Wylie Robinson is doing everything he can to expand it.

Wylie likes to ask people a simple question, "How many blankets do you have at home?" Then he asks, "How many of the brands can you name?" Outside of heritage brands like Pendleton or Woolrich, there is very little brand loyalty ...

By his own account, Boll & Branch founder, Scott Tannen knows that his bedding brand may not be the first that comes to mind when you think of "cool" DTCs. The branding is classic and the style feels universal, but dig into the Boll & Branch supply chain and you'll find that they're totally changing the game for how textiles can (and should) be manufactured.

Before he had a logo, or even a brand, Scott had drafted out the unwavering...

If you bought a Bellroy wallet when the company launched a decade ago, you're probably still using it. For the past ten years, while they've worked to slim down your every day carry, they've slimmed down their environmental impact behind the scenes.

CEO and co-founder Andy Fallshaw has a unique brand of optimism that's a constant ebb and flow between digging into details, and panning out to see the full picture. On this episode, he'...