Hey friends!

My last email on “The Paradox of Progress” had a 48% open rate. A warm welcome to the 7 new people who subscribed since then!

My goal is to publish 40 pieces of writing this year. Most of these will be weekly newsletters, with some longform essays sprinkled in.

With today’s edition, I’m restarting my weekly newsletter. Future emails will hit your inboxes every Friday.

Finally, I want each piece I publish to get a little better, in medium and in message, so I’d appreciate your feedback on what you liked and didn’t like about each one! Shoot those emails.

And with that…

Here’s what I learned, shared, and paid attention to this week:

1. On Pantone’s savvy business model — 

“Meet the People Who Decide What Design Trends Will Dominate Each Year” by Ivana Rihter

I read this 👆 article about Pantone’s Color of the Year a couple of weeks ago, so when a friend hit me up to attend a last-minute event with Pantone in New York, I jumped at the opportunity.

What is Pantone? Since its founding in the 1930s as a printing company, Pantone has established itself as the de facto industry standard for color. According to its website:

While color standards accounts for 70% of Pantone’s revenue, it has developed other businesses over the years: 

• Pantone Standards, established in 1963, is its bread-and-butter tool. It’s a numeric language for printers, designers, and manufacturers to accurately reproduce colors and achieve consistency across the board. This first came into being as a portable swatch book of 500 colors that fanned out to reveal color chips on a spectrum. Today, the book contains over 1,700 colors.

• Pantone Color Institute, is its consulting arm. Established in 1986, the Institute offers color recommendations and brand consulting to companies, as well as its much-anticipated Color of the Year and Fashion Runway Color Trend reports.

• Pantone B2B licensing allows companies to use Pantone’s system for their customers.

• Pantone Lifestyle is their line of merchandise, offering fans Pantone-inspired apparel, home furnishing, and travel accessories. 

Outside of its core community of professional designers, though, Pantone's brand has become synonymous with good design and cultural relevance. They’ve achieved this, thanks to their much-anticipated Color of the Year report.

To come up with it, Pantone forecasters and colorists do in-depth research and spot patterns in popular art, Netflix hits, and viral social media moments. For example, the 2023 Color of the Year is Viva Magenta. This selection was inspired partly by a combination of interiors from Netflix's series Bridgerton and the reddish hues from cochineal bugs — insects harvested to sustainably produce a reddish dye for cosmetics.

Leatrice Eiseman, an executive director at the Pantone Color Institute says:

This was a fun little deep dive for me. Digging into Pantone’s history and business model was a great lesson on how a 50+ year old company managed to stay culturally relevant over the years and even maintain its leadership in design — an industry notorious for being susceptible to rapid shifts cultural trends and consumer behaviour. 

2. The tech of tomorrow are the toys of today — 

“The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like a Toy” by Chris Dixon

Chris Dixon is a general partner at the VC firm a16z and has been one of the biggest advocates of web3.

I reread his essay after attending last Wednesday’s Pantone panel on how technology, fashion, lifestyle, and color converge to affect the future of design. The discussions on the panel made realize that while crypto and NFTs still sound like amusing pastimes to many people, they might be considered serious technological disruptors in a few years. At the very least, blockchain — crypto’s underling technology — is worth keeping a sober eye on. 

In the present cultural narrative, fashion, art, and crypto share the same plane of existence: they’re luxuries. They’re expensive and frivolous. They’re fun hobbies for influencers, celebrities, and wannabes who have the time and the means for self-expression and financial speculation. 

Avatars, NFTs, and the metaverse, in particular, have sparked a lot of excitement in the fashion and art worlds. A fashion designer on the panel talked about launching their avatar at SXSW in March, along with their entire line of clothing. They pointed out how much easier becoming a virtual designer is, compared to being an IRL designer. After all, digital design is cheap to create, replicate, and sell. After spending time creating and coding a piece of clothing, they don't need to think about additional fabric, labour, and manufacturing overhead as variable costs. 

The decrease in effort and the increase in potential supply doesn’t equate to lower prices of goods, either.

A run of designs coded as limited NFTs introduces scarcity to a world of internet abundance. Each copy of the design is unique and able to be authenticated. Fashion houses like Chanel and Louis Vuitton could use the distinct grain patterns of their leather bags to create unique cryptographic hashes that certify each SKUs authenticity.

Here’s what I think: Even with these new business models and the amount of capital that has been poured into them in the last few years, art as NFTs merely scrapes the surface of what a distributed, worldwide ledger like a blockchain could do.

From my research, blockchain’s most powerful application will be in the global supply chain — not just for the businesses that profit from it. The benefits of blockchain is not simply about decreasing the black market for Gucci belts and Chanel purses. It’s about having accountability and transparency in the entire value network of trade.

Even we, the consumers, can benefit from this.

Having access to detailed product data gives us more knowledge, visibility, and power in our purchase decisions. Being able to vote on businesses, products, and brand values with our dollars takes power out of the hands of corporations and gives more of it to us, the people.

That's it for this week!

Here’s a photo of me at MoMA.

Stay strong, stay kind, stay human.

Till next week,

roxine