Drug Store News
Walmart customers can add the ingredient lists of menus featured in 4,000 videos from BuzzFeed’s Tasty app to their online grocery cart and then place their order for pickup from more than 2,500 stores nationwide -- or have the groceries delivered to their homes from more than 1,100 stores across the country.
Hollywood Reporter
15-year-old actress Millie Bobby Brown -- known for playing the psychokinetic and telepathic Eleven on Netflix's "Stranger Things" -- is launching a vegan skin care line, Florence by Mills, available soon at Ulta. Priced at $10 to $34, products include Clean Magic Face Wash and See You Never Concealer, and are aimed at a market that's “youthful but playing that sophisticated teenager as well," says Brown, per The Hollywood Reporter.
Fast Company
In its 2020 catalog, Ikea swapped its custom typeface for a simple Google-designed font called Noto. The beauty of it is it will function in any market, because it supports more than 800 languages. “The Latin characters in the typeface family are simple and sans-serif, and they look slightly slimmer and cleaner than Ikea’s previous type, Verdana,” per Fast Company.
WardsAuto
im Dunne gained notoriety among automakers for going to great lengths to photograph vehicles, often years in advance of their introduction. Dunne, 87, died this week of a rare cancer. He also worked as a writer for Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and WardsAuto. His photos appeared in many auto magazines, including MotorTrend. “He also was a sartorial dandy, showing up at events with shirt, tie and jacket when most of the automotive press corps had long since shifted from ‘Casual Friday’ to ‘Casual Everyday,’” according to WardsAuto.
The New York Times
The New York Times revisits the contentious relationship between the two now-partners, which included "attack ads and needling social-media posts that flew back and forth over the course of a decade." A 2016 Sprint commercial featured a customer calling T-Mobile “ghetto.” In a 2017
Harvard Business Review article, T-Mobile CEO John Legere wrote that his marketing strategy involved creating “the idea of an evil force” and finding “villains to fight.” And "for three years, the company’s face was Carly Foulkes, a sunny spokeswoman who praised T-Mobile while cheerfully denigrating the competition."
Business Insider
Tesla is looking to prop up its lagging solar panel program by offering a rental program. Customers will be able to rent panels for $50 a month in Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New Mexico and $65 a month in California. "With the new lower Tesla pricing, it's like having a money printer on your roof if you live [in] a state with high electricity costs," Telsa Founder Elon Musk tweeted.
Retail Dive
Walmart Chief Marketing Officer Barbara Messing plans to leave the company by the end of August, according to an internal memo emailed to Retail Dive. Messing joined Walmart from TripAdvisor about a year ago. Until she is replaced, Michael Francis, a marketing consultant for Walmart and former Target executive, will expand his role and lead retail marketing for Walmart.
Chicago Tribune
Uber Technologies has signed a 10-year lease for a massive office space in Chicago. The 463,000-square-foot space in the city’s old post office will give the California-based company room for thousands of employees. “The deal is the largest office lease signed in downtown Chicago this year, and one of the largest in Chicago in recent years,” per the Tribune. "Not including renewals or extensions of existing office spaces, Uber’s deal is the fourth-largest in the past five years.”
Chain Store Age
Shoe company Steve Madden Ltd. "has acquired Greats, a fast-growing, digitally native footwear brand specializing in premium sneakers made in Italy," according to Chain Store Age. "Founded in 2014, Greats sells the majority of its products through its website and a solo brick-and-mortar location, a flagship in Manhattan’s SoHo district."
CNBC
D2C brand Allbirds, which has "amassed a cult-like following of people who wear its comfy wool sneakers, is expanding beyond shoes — starting with socks," according to CNBC. It "will begin selling three styles of socks, retailing between $12 and $16, online and at its five bricks-and-mortar shops in the U.S."