An agentic commerce experience I worked on launched internally today. It's always exciting when these things make it into the world!
Speaking of shopping, I wrote an article about the way Vinted has ruined all other shopping experiences for me through its frequent dopamine hits. Kate Mossman has written a really great article on the same thing. Well worth reading.
Staying in the fashion world, I've been listening to Audrey Truffleman's podcast series on Ivy Style. I loved her series on the relationship between outdoor gear, the military, and fashion and, now that it's over, I needed a fix. The first episode is a really good exploration of trends – what they are, where they come from – and how relevant they are today. It's fashion focused, but can be applied to trends in technology etc too.
Still somewhat related to fashion, Billy Oppenheimer's always excellent Six at 6 focused on working through embarrassment to get to great work. Creation is embarrassing. When I worked (briefly) in advertising, the best creative directors wanted to hear all your ideas and would gently tell you why the rubbish ones were rubbish. I see less of that encouragement outside of the 'creative industries' even though there is as much creativity going on. Consequently, people self-censor and there'll be a ton of great ideas that will never make it out of their heads.
Tottenham Hotspur have launched a startup accelerator. Startups apply and in return for, presumably, giving away some equity they get access to Tottenham's audience to test and iterate. Seems a pretty good deal actually and I'd love to see something similar in endurance sports around the fan experience. The UCI, Ironman/UTMB, SuperTri, they could all benefit from this kind of arrangement.
No neat segue here, but I continue to be amazed by the Claude Code and Figma Skill combination. It's so incredibly helpful. And, non-AI related, but I don't know how I have never used Figma Slides before to playback journeys with some extra info around them. It indulges my habit of tweaking things all the way up to the start of a meeting!
On pairing with AI,I wanted TweetDeck for RSS feeds/newsletters. And I wanted it to work in just a specific enough way (integration with Readwise) to make it worth getting Claude Code to build it. It took barely an hour to build an Electron app. I remain bullish on the future of personal software.
I'm finishing up a project this week – I've been helping a retailer set the design vision for their app – and moving on to some more retail work for the next few months. My triumphant return to regular blogging stalled a little given the end of project rush, and I'm hoping to get back into it.