| | | | | |  Richard A Chance | | IN THIS ISSUE | The many faces of Robin Hood | Zuck dreams of a virtual future | Build-A-Bear grows up | | | | Good morning. It's the first day of August, which also happens to be the month when I turn 30. "How does it feel?" you're supposed to ask. It feels great, thanks for asking. They don't teach you this in school, but getting older is a blast. Each day you live you understand more about how the world actually works, connecting dots you never thought belonged on the same page. But the greatest joy has been learning about myself. I know how much sleep I need to be well-rested. I know that I hate the smell of licorice. I know my strengths, and I know what to improve. Sure, turning 30 has its downsides. To quote Bo Burnham, "My stupid friends are having stupid children." Those boys' trips to New Orleans are less frequent. Responsibilities are piling up. I need to wear glasses. But that's OK. Priorities change. And if all goes well over the next decade, I'll be writing this same note at 40 from the suburbs, prepping for a glorious Sunday of coaching Little League and raking leaves. —Neal Freyman | | | | | Stock Watch: Robin Hoods 
| | | Icebreakers with...Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John Our Tennessee Build-A-Bear Workshop turns 25 next year (feeling old?), and the brand has been growing up with its audience. In addition to browsing the typical heart-stuffed plush, customers can head to the age-gated section of Build-A-Bear's site, The Bear Cave, and nab a Deadpool panda. So after buying 14 Pandapools, we caught up with Build-A-Bear CEO Sharon Price John to learn more about how the company known for its childhood mall magic has evolved. Chicken and egg question for you: Did you see increased interest from an older demographic and create more products for them, or did you create those products and the older demographic came? We started to see an expansion in interest [among older demographics] when we got closer to 20 years old. So five-ish years ago, there was a natural expansion. And that happens a lot in the toy industry. The key is how do you use it as a flywheel and not just a blip in time? As soon as we started to see the data, we started leaning in with more licensing, a little more edgy marketing, making sure that we were really appropriate online for digital natives. Because you want a bigger market. The kids market is hard. It's always new customers. It churns all the time. It's what we call a "leaky bucket." Adult customers are a bigger market that buys less often but is more stable. Plus, it elevates you from a pop culture perspective. The in-person aspect of Build-A-Bear stores feels like such a big part of the magic of creating your bear. How have you dealt with that during the pandemic? We had to shift hard toward e-commerce. It was our only source of consistent revenue as our stores shut down. We had to furlough the vast majority of our organization and do what many companies did. That's never simple or easy, especially when you're a company that prides itself on adding a little more heart to life. But we fortuitously put a number of updates in place that we had already been planning. Buy online and ship to store, buy online and pick up in store, we completed a deal with Shipt for same-day delivery...so we were able to maintain a good cash flow. To your point, experience is a benchmark of Build-A-Bear, and it's almost like we were experiential retail before experiential retail was cool. So how do we make sure our online experience has connectivity back to what we do in the store? For that, we created a Bear Builder Configurator that takes you through the process (pick your bear, pick your outfit, put a sound in), and you can do a heart ceremony. Zooming out to the toy industry, are you seeing any trends that we should keep an eye on? One is experience now that we're on the other side. I think you're going to see a pretty good horizon on that, on people re-engaging and getting out and doing fun things. Is there a particular licensed bear that's been super popular? We don't rank the products like that, but Baby Yoda's a phenomenon, not just with us but across the board. Harry Potter as you might imagine is one of the biggest powerhouse licenses out there, and then most recently, we launched Animal Crossing: New Horizons. We looked into that because of so much social media saying, "Please, please, please make Animal Crossing." This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. | | | | | | Are your digital assets scattered all over the place? That's a shame, since your bitcoin would really get along with the pizza gift card you forgot your neighbor gave you. With Bakkt®, you can hold bitcoin, participating loyalty and rewards points, and gift cards all in one place. That means you can trade, send, or spend them in cool new ways. Basically, Bakkt has your bakk back when you want to use your digital assets to buy actual stuff. You can even use the new debit card, the Bakkt Card, to pay online or wherever Apple Pay® or Google Pay™ are accepted. And Bakkt believes trading crypto should be easy and cost-effective, so there are no transaction or trading fees to buy and sell bitcoin* with the Bakkt App. Get started with Bakkt here. | | | | Make It Work: Somewhere on a Beach Giphy Make It Work is on a well-deserved vacation this week. In the meantime, here are 5 work-related reads… - How to get things done when you don't want to do anything. (New York Times)
- Micro habit stacking: 25 small changes to improve your life. (Medium)
- How to cold email your way to a dream job. (Morning Brew)
- The new culture of pop-up holidays. (BBC)
- Productivity expert Priya Parker on how we should properly gather and return to the workplace. (Charter)
| | | Into the Metaverse We Go Epic Games When he's not throwing spears or cloning Snapchat, Mark Zuckerberg dreams about the metaverse. "In the coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company," he said on Facebook's earnings call Wednesday. He's serious. On Monday, Facebook announced it was forming a metaverse product group to bring Zuck's vision from science fiction to reali—er, virtual reality. - The group's lead, Andrew Bosworth (Boz), wrote that Facebook wanted to "remove the limitations of physics" in order to allow people to connect with one another in virtual spaces.
- And if you didn't think FB was serious about the metaverse, Boz's post linked to a site with more than 700 open jobs.
But what is the metaverse? Well, here's the bad news: Not even the guy who popularized it can fully explain it. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, whose writing on the metaverse has influenced Zuck and other tech thinkers, calls it a "successor state to the mobile internet" but stops short of slapping down an actual definition. He does, however, identify key attributes of the metaverse. - Things will happen "live" just as they do in real life. You can't pause or rewind anything.
- The metaverse will be a fully functioning economy, so you can buy, sell, and invest in things as you would in the physical world.
- It will have unprecedented interoperability, meaning you can bring your virtual self and your assets (say, a skin from Fortnite) to every experience without compatibility issues.
The backstory: The term "metaverse" first showed up in Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel Snow Crash in 1992, and was built upon by other science fiction thinkers like Ernest Cline, who depicted a version of the metaverse in his book Ready Player One. Metaverse philosophizing picked up during the pandemic, when people started hanging out in video games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Animal Crossing instead of IRL. And yet the metaverse is so tantalizing, so esoteric, that it could mean everything...and nothing. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said this week his company was building "the enterprise metaverse" in reference to the company's cloud-computing services, he was mocked on social media for indiscriminately using a buzzword. Some critics say that while the metaverse idea sounds cool, it may not be the logical next step in the evolution of social media. Others say talking about futuristic concepts could be a tool for Zuck to keep investors excited about the company's deep investments in AR and VR...and distracted from its current antitrust battles. Bottom line: The metaverse won't magically appear one day. If it does come into existence, it'll be a decades-long process involving thousands of companies building the hardware, content, currencies, and other components that together constitute a metaverse. Just as Facebook conquered the internet, it wants to stake a claim in whatever the next version of that will be. | | | | | | Where's your sense of adventure? Find it on Viator—they've got nearly 400,000 tours and activities around the world to choose from. Cooking classes with a local chef? Sunset dinner cruises? Helicopter rides over the Grand Canyon?! GET OUT. No seriously, get going. With free cancellation and flexible payment options, there's no reason to hesitate. Book your next adventure with Viator right here. | | | | Open House Welcome to Open House, the only newsletter section that will make you seriously consider buying an entire home just for the yellow bathtub. We'll give you a few facts about a listing and you try to guess the price. 
Zillow In Clovis, New Mexico, a town 15 minutes west of the Texas border, a home exists with so much wood inside of it that you'd be able to dismantle it and sell it for parts if lumber prices go up again. But it's got so much more than nicely finished timber: - 4 beds, 5 baths
- Master bedroom balcony
- Plenty of built-in storage
- The widest variety of bathrooms
How much for your '70s dream house? Scroll to the bottom of the newsletter to find out. | | | Just Click It 1. How TV went from David Brent to Ted Lasso. (New York Times)
2. The hottest tattoo of the Tokyo Olympics. (BuzzFeed News)
3. Getting over gold: athletes and mental health. (David Epstein)
4. How to build meaningful relationships. (Founder's Journal)
5. Why so many millennials are obsessed with dogs. (The Atlantic)
6. A soil-science revolution upends plans to fight climate change. (Quanta Magazine)
7. A motorcycle-riding lawyer searches Guatemala's remotest corners to reunite families separated by the US. (Washington Post)
8. Gen-Z is rewriting the personal finance rules in real time. (Money)
9. A California city raised essential worker pay—and their expectations. (Politico)
10. Is BTS using more English lyrics to appeal to Western audiences? An analysis. (Morning Brew) *Don't let your money slack off. This card recommended by The Ascent lets your money work hard, earning unlimited 1.5% cash back on every purchase, every day. Learn more and put your money to work here.* *This is sponsored advertising content | | | Meme Battle Welcome back to Morning Brew's Meme Battle, where we crown a single memelord every Sunday. Today's winner: Jill in Redmond, OR. Same vibes when we judge all your memes, tbh. 
This week's challenge: You can find the new meme template here for next Sunday. Once you're done making your meme, submit it at this link. We'll pick a new memelord for next week's Sunday Edition and provide you with another meme template to meme-ify. | | | | | | | | | | | | |  | |
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