Amazon summed up its hopes for its international sales years ago, in a line buried in its annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. “We expect that, over time, our International segment will represent 50% or more of our consolidated net sales,” it said in its filing for the 2005 financial year.
At the heart of Amazon’s founding was the premise that e-commerce offers certain advantages physical stores just can’t match. Online shops are accessible from anywhere with an internet connection; they’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week; and they’ve got unlimited shelf space. In his 2018 letter to shareholders, founder Jeff Bezos said if Amazon were a physical store, it would stretch across six football fields.
Last July, a small group representing the giants of the tech industry gathered in the seat of US government, Washington DC. They probably didn’t want to be there.
China’s outbreak of a new strain of coronavirus is having ripple effects beyond its upending of daily life in the country. For the international luxury industry, which relies heavily on Chinese shoppers, it’s already taking a financial toll.
Athletic companies love the Olympics. Every four years they get a global stage to show off new products, and if the athletes wearing them win, they claim victory with them. It’s a tradition dating back to at least 1936, when a 22-year-old American named Jesse Owens won four gold medals wearing hand-made shoes with inventively positioned spikes given to him by Adolf Dassler, who would later found Adidas.
Last night, Britain officially left the EU. In the UK, some cheered and some despaired. The most fervent Brexit backers had petitioned—unsuccessfully—for London’s Big Ben to commemorate the moment.
Nike’s giant debt of gratitude to the city of Baltimore continues. Around 1984, the company was about to discontinue the Air Force 1 basketball sneaker it had introduced a couple years prior. But in Baltimore, the shoes had picked up a fanatical following. “We Baltimoreans call them ‘Airs’ because they’re as important to us as oxygen,” D. Watkins, an author and lecturer at the University of Baltimore, wrote in the New York Times last year. Thanks to that local fandom, Nike ditched its plans to ditch the shoe.
Football is by far America’s favorite sport to watch. Its popularity has made it traditional TV’s last bulwark against the tide of streaming, and its annual pinnacle, the Super Bowl, an indisputable cultural phenomenon.
It was a tough day for the NBA yesterday. The league mourned the death of one of its greats, Kobe Bryant, as well as his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, and seven others in a helicopter crash just outside Los Angeles that morning.
Louis Vuitton and the NBA are teaming up. The companies announced a multiyear deal for Louis Vuitton to produce the travel case for the Larry O’Brien Trophy, awarded to the championship winning team each year, as well as a small annual collection of clothes and accessories based on the league.
Since H&M released its first designer collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004, it has put out a series of projects with top designers plucked mostly from the runways of Europe’s fashion weeks.
Heavily pregnant and clad in a gold dress embellished with delicate flowers, Africa’s richest woman leaned on a throne and stared soulfully from a palatial backdrop.
World Athletics, the governing body for track and field, is said to be mulling a ban on the Nike Vaporfly shoes that are helping elite runners break marathon records.
From a distance, China looks like a gold mine to international fashion companies. Last year, China became the biggest retail and fashion market in the world, according to estimates, and its growth isn’t even close to finished.
In the first half of 2020, Amazon plans to launch its own digital platform for luxury fashion, according to WWD (paywall), a fashion trade publication.
More than most industries, fashion is preoccupied with youth. It’s an obsession reflected in the barely post-pubescent models on its runways and in its ad campaigns, and in the sources from which it takes inspiration.
Drought has been a chronic issue in southeastern Australia for years. In regions such as southern Queensland, months can pass without rain. Local communities have to ration water or risk running out.
US president Donald Trump’s tariffs appear to have hurt US manufacturing more than they’ve helped it, according to a study by the US Federal Reserve Board released this week.
The places we don’t find microplastics keep declining. They’re already known to be widespread in the world’s water, to the point that they’re ubiquitous in the guts of sea turtles and have been discovered all the way in Antarctica.
The government of the Netherlands has a message for the world: There’s more to our country than just Holland.
It’s been a happy holiday for Amazon.
The last eclipse of the decade is taking place in the sky above a roughly 73-mile-wide path running across the Middle East and South Asia.
Japan’s fertility crisis is growing worse.
On the heel tab of a sneaker released by Nike today is Colin Kaepernick’s unmistakable image. All but the most immediately recognizable features are stripped away, transforming it into an icon, not too dissimilar from how Nike turned a silhouette of Michael Jordan in air into its famed Jumpman logo. There’s a “K” on the tongue as well, and a “7” tag referencing Kaepernick’s former jersey number.
