New market traders can phone an AI business coach trained on experienced mammies’ pricing, stock and customer know-how.

Across Central and West Africa, women known as "mammies" keep local food economies running. Selling ingredients in single-unit formats at open-air markets, they make affordable cooking possible for millions of families living on daily incomes, while supporting their own households in the process. But becoming a successful market trader takes years of hard-won experience: learning to price correctly, manage stock, control portions, and maintain cash flow. For younger women entering the trade, that learning curve is steep, and low literacy levels and limited internet access make it steeper. MAGGI, Nestlé's seasoning brand, aims to lend a hand with MAGGI MAMI, an AI-powered business advisor that new mammies can access by calling a toll-free number from any basic mobile phone — no internet connection or smartphone required.

What matters most about MAMI is what it's trained on. Rather than drawing on generic online content, the tool was built on the expertise of experienced mammies across the region: their pricing instincts, inventory strategies and how they handle customers. Callers speak in their local language and get practical guidance rooted in the realities of open-market trade. The initiative, which launches first in Côte d'Ivoire, was developed by Nestlé's Central and West Africa division in partnership with Publicis. It builds on MAGGI's existing investment in the trader ecosystem — since 2016, more than 2,500 mammies have graduated from a literacy program the brand developed with UNESCO. 

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Market trading in West Africa has never been a solo endeavor. Experienced mammies mentor newcomers, knowledge passes through family networks, and the market itself is a learning environment. MAGGI MAMI doesn't replace that ecosystem so much as attempt to extend its reach, making communal knowledge available to women who may lack a mentor or support network. The design choices matter here: a toll-free voice call in local languages, no internet or smartphone required, training data drawn from lived experience rather than scraped web content. For brands exploring AI in emerging markets, the lesson is less about the technology than the input. An AI tool is only as relevant as the knowledge it's trained on, and here that means actual market expertise. Whether MAMI proves more effective than deeper investment in the peer networks and literacy programs that already support these women remains to be seen.

In Canada, 43% of soccer fans cheer for two national teams. FanDuel's Dual Fan campaign turns that split loyalty into limited-edition scarves.

With Canada co-hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer, FanDuel Canada and Toronto creative studio OneMethod have zeroed in on a fan behavior that most brands overlook: dual fandom. Angus Reid research commissioned by FanDuel found that 43% of Canadian football fans plan to cheer for more than one national team during the tournament, driven primarily by heritage (37%) and family connection (21%). The campaign, called "Dual Fan," makes that split loyalty wearable with a series of limited-edition, dual-sided scarves pairing Team Canada with each of the other 47 participating nations.

In a country where more than 8.3 million newcomers maintain ties to over 200 nations, rooting for two teams at once isn't conflicted loyalty. It's just Tuesday. The top three nations Canadians plan to support alongside Canada are England (39%), Germany (19%) and Brazil (18%). Scarves are being seeded to influencers, distributed at watch parties and fan gatherings across Toronto, and given away as prizes for social media shares and follows. The execution is part of FanDuel's broader "We All Speak Footy" platform spanning broadcast, out-of-home and digital activations. 

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Plenty of brands talk about diversity. Fewer design around how multicultural identity actually plays out in consumer behavior. FanDuel's campaign starts with polling data about dual-team support, then creates an object that makes that behavior visible and shareable — instead of just celebrating multiculturalism in the abstract. For a betting platform trying to build credibility in Canada's football market, that's a more grounded strategy than wrapping the brand in vague inclusivity language. The scarf works because it doesn't ask fans to pick a side. It assumes they won't, and gives them something to prove it.

One cookie carries three grams of creatine and 250 milligrams of citicoline and is sold for focus; another is spiked with L-theanine and pitched as a wind-down before bed; a third packs ten grams of protein into peanut butter. So far, so familiar — the functional food and beverage category is thriving. But Fields Good, an Austin startup that launched this week with USD 1.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Female Founders Fund, is leaning into flavor first and pharmacology second.

Founders Ashley Fields (daughter of Mrs. Fields founder Debbi Fields) and Kim Anderson spent two years developing the recipes with one rule: the functional ingredients had to disappear into the cookie. For years, the category led with function and treated flavor as a compromise; Fields Good leads with the cookie and lets the benefits ride along. The wager is that shoppers have tired of food that feels like a chore. The Mrs. Fields name does quiet work here, too, handing a TikTok-era brand the kind of recognition most startups spend years building. This week's launch was paired with a small-batch pre-order.

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Functional food has become the default growth story in snacking, and the math explains the rush: the US wellness economy reached USD 2.1 trillion, with per capita spending hitting USD 6,293 in 2024, according to the Global Wellness Institute. Consumers now routinely stack protein, sleep, focus and GLP-1-friendly choices into ordinary days. But they also want products that provide a moment of joy. Newcomers like Fields Good are responding by moving away from biohacking toward comforting rituals. Think self-care meets little treat economics. Is your brand still making people choose between pleasure and self-optimization?

Why Sojasun turned "homme-soja" mockery on its head, recruiting its loudest critics as ambassadors and making their rejection the point.

In the manosphere, "soy boy" has hardened into shorthand for weakness, a slur deployed across thousands of videos to strip the masculinity from anyone deemed insufficiently manly. The phrase leans on a semi-understood notion that soy raises estrogen, and it has become one of the movement's favorite insults, a quick way to cast a man as soft, passive, feminized. The irony is hard to miss. These same communities are religiously devoted to protein, and soy is one of the richest plant sources of protein. Sojasun, a brand that pioneered soy products in France, decided to plant its new campaign squarely on that contradiction.

Rather than defending itself head-on, Sojasun and agency Marcel went the other way. They invited masculinist influencers, with a straight face, to become "SojaMan," their official ambassador. The operation was built to make the offer impossible to ignore and almost certain to be rejected. A storyboard arrived by email. Comments appeared under their TikToks. Pre-rolls slipped into their YouTube videos, symbolic donations landed on their Twitch streams, the brand infiltrated their Spotify playlists and parked a truck outside their windows. Each touchpoint worked as a fresh pitch, and the steady pile of refusals became the actual point. The more loudly the influencers said no, the more clearly the campaign made its case.

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The manosphere has spent the last few years moving from fringe forums into the center of mainstream worry, its language and grievances showing up in election coverage, classroom behavior, and the kind of content teenage boys absorb by the hour. A brand that needles that world is going to be cheered on by the large audience now actively alarmed by it, and Sojasun surely knows this. The calculation is tidy: the target is one almost no one in its customer base will rush to defend, and the reputational upside runs mostly one way. What keeps the campaign from feeling like a cheap shot? These specific people genuinely mocked Sojasun's product, which gives it the right to answer in kind. That's the part worth studying. Plenty of brands try to engage with a buzzy cultural clash and faceplant because they have no real stake in the fight. In marketing, picking an enemy works best when the enemy picked you first.

Can plants calm stressed teenagers? The Plants & Flowers Foundation Holland staged indoor gardens in exam gyms to find out, and to reframe what plants are for.

Picture the typical exam venue: a gymnasium emptied of everything but rows of desks, the squeak of sneakers replaced by the scratch of pens, fluorescent light flattening the room. This spring, the Plants & Flowers Foundation Holland set out to disrupt that sterile ritual. During the Dutch national secondary-school exams, it filled the gym halls of four schools with carefully chosen houseplants, turning the most pressure-laden rooms of the academic year into something closer to a conservatory.

The selection wasn't random greenery for atmosphere. Working with creative agency Gardeners, the foundation chose species it associates with calm and concentration, then gave them a visible place in the hall. The idea was for students to actually feel the shift — to sit down amid living things at the exact moment the stakes felt highest, and notice the difference. It fits the foundation's broader mission of nudging people to regard plants as something more than decoration, positioning them as leafy levers of mood and attention. The longer-term goal runs past exam week, toward classrooms where greenery becomes a permanent fixture of how students learn rather than a prop wheeled in for the occasion.

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The campaign rests on a claim that feels intuitively right and is scientifically slippery. Research on indoor plants and cognitive performance is genuinely mixed — some studies find modest gains in attention, others see the effect dissolve once you account for how pleasant a room simply looks and feels. But that ambiguity doesn't hurt the campaign's strategy. A sector with an obvious commercial interest in selling more plants has located a sympathetic, almost unarguable story: teenagers, exam stress and the gentle suggestion that nature might help. By staging plants at a moment of maximum human vulnerability, the foundation quietly reframes them from interior décor into an element of wellbeing infrastructure — a category that's far harder to argue with, and far easier to keep selling long after the exams are over.

87% of wedding guests buy outfits they only wear once. ThredUp's new pop-up and dress code decoder offer a cheaper, faster way to dress for the occasion.

The wedding-industrial complex has always extracted plenty from the couple, but a quieter cost has been piling up in guests' closets. According to new ThredUp data, 87% of wedding guests have bought an outfit they wore exactly once, and 68% of those pieces are still hanging in closets, waiting for an occasion that never repeats. The culprit is a feedback loop of hyper-specific dress codes ("Amalfi chic," "old Hollywood glamour," "colorful cocktail") and a social-media norm that treats outfit repeating as a minor public failure. Nearly a third of guests say they can't reliably decode what these invitations are even asking for.

On May 30, ThredUp is turning that anxiety into a storefront. The Guest List Pop Up in New York's SoHo is a secondhand dress shop built entirely around the guest experience, with dresses starting at USD 20 and a free one for the first 100 people through the door. Shoppers can trade in a pre-loved dress for store credit, build a bouquet, and grab a mini cake, but the centerpiece is the Dress Code Decoder, a tool that takes a confusing invitation prompt and translates it into a curated rail of secondhand looks. The pitch is less "buy something new" than "stop buying something new every single time," aimed squarely at guests whose once-worn buys are costing them USD 550 to 820 over a single wedding season.

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ThredUp's smart move here is to attack friction instead of preaching virtue. Its nationwide survey in April 2026 identified real pain points: guests spend up to a full workday hunting for one outfit, and 42% cut back on everyday spending to afford wedding attire. The company's Dress Code Decoder answers all of that with a single curated rail, so guests lose less time and spend less money second-guessing convoluted dress codes. Resale's environmental upside is real, but ThredUp keeps it in the back seat. For any brand whose sustainability story keeps bouncing off indifferent audiences, that's the lesson: lead with the customer's wasted hours and drained wallet, and the planet comes along for free.

A new Berlin supermarket pairs a rooftop greenhouse with a timber building built to be taken apart and reused, taking a holistic approach to sustainability in retail.

Above the produce aisle in Berlin-Lankwitz, lettuce is growing on the roof. REWE opened its new Green Farming market on May 21, capping a timber-framed hall with a 2,760-square-meter glass greenhouse, which the company calls the largest rooftop farm in Germany. Local urban-ag specialist ECF Farmsystems runs the hydroponic operation, which will produce up to 900,000 mixed-salad units per year, harvested daily and distributed to roughly 500 REWE stores across the capital region. Seedling to shelf takes 23 days.

Rooftop farms on grocery stores aren't new. What sets REWE's concept apart is the building underneath. The market hall is built from 1,800 cubic meters of domestic softwood, with 72 stacked-timber columns left deliberately exposed across a seven-meter-high space. The wood stores roughly 930 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, and the modular design means the wooden parts can be disassembled and reused. Waste heat from refrigeration, a heat pump, and rainwater from a cistern feed the greenhouse above. REWE has confirmed the format is going into series production, with more timber-built locations planned across Germany.

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For decades, supermarkets optimized for efficiency, and the result was a kind of clinical abstraction: fluorescent lighting, dropped ceilings, anonymous supply chains, shrink-wrap everywhere. REWE's concept pulls hard the other way. Daylight, an on-premise farm, natural materials, handcrafted counters, regional producers. All of it reads as an antidote to the sterile box. Most supermarkets can't grow lettuce on their roofs, and grocery margins don't leave much room for grand gestures. But the deeper move here is making a brand's values legible in its physical spaces, showing the producers, the materials, the supply chain instead of describing them on a sustainability page nobody reads. That part travels.

Reserved by Spotify saves two tickets for superfans. No scalpers, no extra fees. But the partner behind it is the one fans love to hate.

The modern concert ticket sale has become a familiar ordeal. Queue up at the appointed minute, refresh frantically, watch the inventory vanish into the hands of bots and resellers, and walk away empty-handed. At its 2026 Investor Day in New York yesterday, Spotify pitched a workaround. A new feature called Reserved will identify an artist's most dedicated listeners and set aside two tour tickets for each of them, available to buy during a private window of roughly a day before the general on-sale begins.

The mechanics lean on data Spotify already has. The company says it will flag superfans based on streams, shares, and other in-app activity, weighed against where a listener lives relative to the tour. Eligible fans get an email and a push notification, then complete the purchase through a ticketing partner with no added Spotify fees. The platform also says it will screen out bots to keep automated buyers out of the reserved pool. The rollout starts this summer for US Premium subscribers aged 18 and up, limited at first to select newly announced tours before widening to shows of all sizes. There's a catch the company is upfront about: superfans will far outnumber available seats, so plenty of qualifying listeners still won't get an offer.

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What Spotify left out of the announcement is the part worth dwelling on. Reserved runs on a multiyear partnership with Live Nation, parent company of Ticketmaster, the very operator whose chaotic on-sales fans most love to hate. So a feature framed as rescuing real fans from a broken system is, underneath, a new on-ramp into that same system, with Spotify's listening data deciding who gets to skip the line. It's smart positioning and a genuine convenience for the lucky few who get the email. But we wouldn't be surprised to see backlash against a platform acting as the arbiter of true fandom. One to keep an eye on for anyone working in loyalty!

By replacing school bells in 6,300 French primary schools with the calls of threatened species, WWF turns a daily ritual into a wildlife lesson.

For one week in May, recess at more than 6,300 French primary schools starts with a howl, a croak, a song or a click. WWF and Saatchi & Saatchi France have replaced the standard bell with the calls of four threatened species: the boreal lynx on Monday, the whiskered tern on Tuesday, the wolf on Thursday, and the sperm whale to close out the week — turning a sound that sends kids outside into a small, daily lesson on the wildlife they're meant to inherit.

The campaign, dubbed L'Appel de la Nature (The Call of Nature), will reach roughly 650,000 children. Teachers get educational kits built around each animal, with blind tests, stories, quizzes and games to fill the gap between hearing a sound at 10 am and knowing who made it. The experience continues at home: a playlist of animal sounds and stories is available on streaming platforms, and collectible cards featuring each species can be ordered through wwf.fr. Three hidden panda cards, tucked into select packs, win families a trip aboard WWF's vessel, the Blue Panda, to observe sperm whale habitat firsthand. WWF says the initiative will return annually.

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Children today spend far less time outdoors than their parents did at the same age, and a growing body of research links that withdrawal indoors to weaker environmental concern later in life. You can't protect what you don't know exists. WWF's smartest move here is the choice to hijack a daily ritual rather than ask schools to find new time for nature education. The bell was going to ring anyway. Kids were going to file out. The campaign just hands them something to notice along the way. For brands working on issues where the payoff is decades away and the audience is too young to donate or buy, that's a useful template.

When someone collapses, the outcome usually depends on instructions provided by an emergency dispatcher. ChatCPR outperformed human guidance on every measure.

Roughly 350,000 Americans suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest each year. Tragically, only about 10% survive. One reason is that just 2% of the population is trained in CPR, so when someone collapses on a sidewalk or in a living room, what happens next usually comes down to a 911 dispatcher talking a panicked stranger through chest compressions. Researchers at UC San Diego, working with the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins, have built an AI tool designed to do that job. In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, it outperformed human dispatchers on every measure.

The tool, called ChatCPR, was tested against recordings of real 911 calls in which dispatchers had already coached bystanders through resuscitation. On basic steps — hand placement, compression rate, depth — dispatchers hit 85% of the guideline checklist. ChatCPR hit 100%. On the finer points that most affect survival, like allowing the chest to fully recoil between compressions, the gap widened to 36 percentage points: 63% for dispatchers, 99% for the AI. The team had first benchmarked off-the-shelf models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, which averaged 90% on the basics but only 70% on the advanced steps.

"In cardiac arrest, good is not good enough," said coauthor Cameron Dezfulian, an intensivist at Baylor College of Medicine. "Missing 10 to 30% of steps can be the difference between life and death." ChatCPR was engineered to close those gaps, drawing on dispatcher training materials and current CPR guidelines, and the researchers have released it as open source. They are careful to position it as a support for dispatchers and first responders, not a replacement, and acknowledge that real-world testing, safeguards and legal questions still need to be worked out.

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Many medical AI systems promise to revolutionize diagnostics or drug discovery years from now. ChatCPR is a narrower bet: that a chatbot can be useful in the next five minutes, when a stranger is kneeling over someone who has stopped breathing. Instead of asking hospitals and other healthcare providers to overhaul their workflows or trust an algorithm with consequential decisions, this solution slots into phone calls that are already happening and "simply" raises the quality of the instructions being given. For organizations trying to figure out where AI actually earns its keep, that's a useful reference point.

Oatly's Amsterdam bike-thru turns the American drive-thru into a piece of novelty for cyclists, no car (or behavior change) required.

Amsterdam has long been a city built around the bicycle, so when Oatly went looking for a way to put its oat drinks in front of more people, the answer was already rolling past on two wheels. From May 15 to June 7, the brand is running the Oatly Bike-Thru at Papaverhoek 24 in Amsterdam-Noord: a stainless-steel kiosk with its own cycle lane, where riders pull up to a window, order, pay and pedal off.

The menu features a curated drinks list, including Salted Gochujang Barista Cacao, Earl Grey Mont Blanc and Strawberry-Sakura Genmaicha Matcha, alongside a Hojicha Soft Serve and a more conventional coffee menu of cortados, cappuccinos and lattes. Rather than nudging Amsterdammers to change how they move, Oatly went looking for them where they already were.

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A traditional drive-thru would have sat awkwardly against Oatly's whole reason for being: a brand built around a lighter footprint isn't going to start waving cars through a window. Flipping the format to bikes solves that neatly, but the more interesting question is what it offers the customer. For many Amsterdammers, who don't own a car or rarely use one, the drive-thru itself is the novelty: a piece of Americana experienced from the saddle of the bike they were already on. Sustainability never gets spelled out or lectured. Oatly just noticed what the city was already doing, and built something fun on top of it.

The Pulse ring skips biometric sensors. Instead of measuring sleep or stress, it vibrates a few times an hour to prompt brief mindful pauses.

Most smart rings compete on sensors: how accurately they measure sleep, how granularly they score recovery, how cleanly the data syncs to an app that turns the body into a daily dashboard. Pulse, made by a Swedish startup, doesn't play that game. It has no biometric sensors. It tracks nothing. It doesn't relay phone notifications. Its only job is to gently vibrate a few times an hour — with the audio frequency of a purring cat — prompting the wearer to pause, breathe and step out of autopilot for about ten seconds.

An optional companion app lets users adjust vibration frequency and follow guided practices like box breathing or gratitude prompts, but the ring works on its own for up to 21 days on a charge, with no subscription required for the core features. Founder Johan Matton has been candid about being surprised by his own product: "We thought Pulse would help people feel calmer during the day. We were thinking too small." Users have written to the company about using the gentle buzz to prepare for difficult conversations and to manage chronic pain — not by fixing it, Matton notes, but by changing their relationship to it. The ring starts at USD 199, and the company says it has logged more than 14,500 pre-orders.

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The wearables market has spent a decade equating self-knowledge with self-improvement, on the theory that more data must lead to better outcomes. The result is a generation of users who measure everything — and often feel worse because of it. Sleep scores become stressors. Recovery metrics become moral judgments. The quantified-self movement promised clarity, but can deliver cognitive overload: constant low-level evaluation disguised as wellness. Pulse reads that fatigue and responds with a product that helps people regulate emotion, attention and stress in real time. The future of wellness may involve fewer dashboards — and more deliberate pauses.

Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have introduced a new variable into wedding planning: a bride who picks a gown in February may not be the same size by October. David's Bridal is responding with the David's Fit Guarantee, a service launched this week that promises to resize, tailor or otherwise adapt any dress a customer buys so it fits on the day, no matter what's changed in the interim. The pledge covers bridal gowns, bridesmaid dresses, prom and other special-occasion wear, and it extends to dresses bought from competitors, not just David's own stock.

According to David's, one in every ten engaged couples is now pursuing a health and fitness journey ahead of the wedding, including GLP-1 use. The company is also seeing timelines compress, with a 50% jump in rush orders over the past year and 20% of bridal customers shopping six months out or less rather than the traditional nine to twelve. Faster timelines plus faster body change is a hard combination for a category built on fittings that take place half a year before a dress is finally worn. In light of dramatic weight changes effected by GLP-1s, some wedding-dress retailers are even asking clients to sign waivers regarding future fit.

To make the guarantee workable at scale, David's is drawing on its in-house production and alterations teams across roughly 200 US stores. Customers can return for alterations, a size swap or custom adjustments if their body, schedule or vision changes. The retailer is offering 50% off future alterations through the end of 2026 for anyone who buys a dress in May, including from another store.

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GLP-1s are changing the math for any category that sells something a body has to fit into months later. Bridal is the most visible case because the date is fixed and the stakes are high, but the same pressure is showing up in suiting and other formalwear. Most retail fit innovation so far has focused on the moment of purchase, with better size tech, AR try-ons and easier returns — useful, but all of it assumes the body buying the garment is the body that wears it. David's is treating the gown less like a finished product and more like a year-long service. That's also a clever competitive move: by altering dresses bought anywhere, David's makes itself useful even to customers who shopped its rivals. For retailers in adjacent categories, the GLP-1 era may require a similar rethink of where a sale actually ends.

🍫 P.S. For more on what happens to consumer demand when GLP-1s turn down the dial on desire, read the latest edition of Did You See This: "The wanting economy"

A 12-gram brooch captures sound and beams it to the ear, sidestepping the muffling effect that standard hearing aids suffer under a hijab.

The hijab is part of daily life and an expression of faith for millions of women in Indonesia. Hearing aids, however, were not designed with that reality in mind. According to Dentsu Indonesia, devices worn beneath the fabric can muffle warning sounds by up to 15 dB, raising the risk of accidents in busy urban environments by as much as 60%. The fabric also dampens conversations, leaving wearers struggling to follow the people around them. Hear in Hijab, developed by Dentsu Indonesia and halal beauty brand Wardah, moves the microphone out from under the cloth.

The hardware sits outside the hijab as a 12-gram brooch pin. It captures sound without obstruction and wirelessly transmits it to a small in-ear receiver, leaving the wearer's head covering intact and the technology disguised as an accessory. First units reached selected users in October 2025, with a second rollout phase now underway to reach more hijab-wearing women across the country, as reported by Little Black Book.

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Accessibility design has long been treated as a universal problem with universal solutions, which usually means solutions shaped by the bodies, clothing and routines of a Western default user. Hear in Hijab is a useful reminder that "inclusive" and "standardized" are not the same thing. Around 1.8 billion people worldwide are Muslim, and a significant share of the women among them cover their hair daily. That hearing aids have overlooked the acoustic consequences of that practice points to how much room remains for products to be designed for and from the realities of specific lives.

The brooch format also nudges the conversation about assistive tech. Rather than making the device smaller and more hidden, Wardah made it visible and wearable as jewelry, treating sound capture as something one might style rather than camouflage.

Kayali's May campaign offers a free Calm subscription with every order, alongside a USD 100K donation to support displaced Palestinian women.

For Mental Health Awareness Month this May, Dubai-based fragrance brand Kayali is bundling every purchase on its website with a three-month membership to meditation app Calm. Customers get access to guided meditations, sleep stories and other tools that, in the brand's words, can help them "sleep better, worry less and feel more like you again." 

Separately, Kayali's philanthropic arm KAYALICares is donating USD 100,000 to INARA for a 12-month mental health and skills-building program for displaced Palestinian women and their children in Turkey.

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Wellness collaborations are a well-worn beauty playbook by now, but the geography here matters. Kayali operates from a region living with the war in Gaza and renewed US-Iran tensions, where "sleep better, worry less" lands less like marketing copy and more like something people in the region actually need.

Pairing the consumer-facing Calm offer with a six-figure donation to mental health programming for displaced Palestinian women also keeps the campaign from floating in the soft, apolitical space most Mental Health Awareness Month activations occupy. It's a useful reminder that brands headquartered outside the usual Western wellness axis can speak to stress and recovery with a specificity their global peers tend to avoid.