51 Predicting Trends in Real Time with Cheryl Kaplan, President of M.Gemi

Since the early 2000s, Amit Sharma has worked with commerce giants like Walmart and Apple to build supply chain infrastructure. In 2012, he founded Narvar. If you've bought anything online in the past few years, you've no doubt interacted with Narvar. Brands like Sephora, Patagonia, Gap and Sonos, ship millions of products per year using Narvar's comprehensive pre-to-post-purchase software.

To fulfill the packaging piece of their pixel-to-package promise, Narvar recently acquired Lumi! In this episode, Stephan and Amit talk about the flux in consumer expectations, what it takes for brands to please customers now, and what's next for Lumi and Narvar.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

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 there to follow the story. Despite her "Gloom is my beat" Twitter username, Kendra has a bullish way of making you care about climate change — in her writing and in her reporting on How to Save a Planet. She does it by rooting her reporting in human stories, offering actionable solutions, and making it funny whenever possible.

On this episode, she pulls no punches and cracks lots of laughs. Get ready to get real about shifting climate responsibility from consumers to companies, devaluing oil, and being fueled by obligation over hope.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

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 venturing out to build a thoughtful collaborative of home brands that are, of course, stunningly functional and instantly essential.

In this episode, Emmett cuts right to the chase of what it took to get in the room with legacy fashion brands, the design and marketing strategy that built iconic ecommerce brands, and what he's looking for in new brands for Pattern.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

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 built off of Open AI's GPT-3 model, and it generates word patterns based on learnings from millions of sentences online.

Amit's passion for writing took him down the path to build Sudowrite. While Sudowrite predicts the paths for a most immediate future — what words could come next — Amit's optimistic sci-fi imagines a more long term future. In this episode, he talks about breaking away from the dystopian sci-fi status quo, the upside of robots writing your emails, and how to chisel away at creative blocks by using learned word patterns.

Visit the Lumi blog for links, charts, and images.

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. In this episode, he challenges what we think about when we think about our online identity, praises the future-thinking theories of game design, and pushes product designers to think beyond the container.

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 VC, Bolt, and on this episode, he's disassembling generations of past products and optimistically building toward a future that he's excited to invest in.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and show notes.

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 shipping from every perspective: consumer, brand, and carrier.

Visit the Lumi blog for links, charts, and images.

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, and the founding executive editor of Wired. So at first glance, this project may seem like a departure from his work. But in this, his second visit on the Well Made podcast, Kevin shares how this 50-year visual anthology taps into what it means to plan for a payoff that will come after your lifetime.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

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-best product catalog, Jeremiah says they have to take their time, but you wouldn't know it from their 1 million members.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.

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 between business partner and life partner.

Visit the Lumi blog for links and images.