American Climate Refugees
It’s a terrible milestone: the first community in the U.S. to end due to climate change (Bloomberg). Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a small, atypical community — a few dozen houses, all on stilts — but it provides an early look at how local and state governments are trying to help doomed communities, in this case by moving the whole thing somewhere else.
Why Everlane Opened Up
Everlane is an iconoclastic fashion brand (no advertising, no discounting, no seasonal collections), but it’s also important for its emphasis on “radical transparency” before that became a buzzy term. For example, Everlane breaks down the individual costs for each product: materials, hardware, labor, duties, transport, etc. In Business of Fashion, founder Michael Preysman riffs on why that approach was a differentiator. “We didn’t have this notion of ‘radical transparency’ straight out of the gate. It emerged from helping customers understand who we were and why we were doing things in a certain way. We said, ‘Hey, we’re making a t-shirt that normally sells for $50 and we’re going to sell it for $15.’ But how do you actually explain that to customers in a way they get? How do you get them to understand that it’s a really high quality t-shirt and not a t-shirt that cost us $3 to make? So, we thought we’ve got nothing to hide. Why don’t we just tell people exactly what it costs us to make?”