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Three decades before TikTok’s obsession with tinned fish brought us sea-cuterie boards, tinned fish cookbooks, and trendy brands like Fishwife and Scout, there was Bela Brand Seafood. This OG tinned fish purveyor hit grocery store shelves back in 1997 with aesthetic, design-centric packaging—and now, it’s refreshing its brand identity to remind modern audiences that it took a bet on tinned fish before it was cool. Bela (formerly known as Bela Brand Seafood) was founded by native New Englander Joshua Scherz and his mom, Florence. The brand has remained family-owned since its inception, quietly growing without any funding from outside investors. But during the pandemic, Sch…

Just beyond a fenced-off access road in fields of tall grass on public land in Pennsylvania’s northwest sits a natural gas well pad that sat idle for close to a decade. The old fracking site suddenly roared back to life in 2022, spewing noise and pollution and rattling residents who were used to hunting pheasant on the quiet, bucolic terrain. Diversified Energy turned on the well pad, known as Longhorn Pad A, to funnel the natural gas into on-site generators powering cryptocurrency-mining supercomputers that churn away at numbers at all hours. The company set up and started the mine without securing a required air quality permit from state regulators, Capital & Ma…

Olympians aren’t just physically exceptional—they’re masters at managing where their attention and energy go. Cognitive research finds a key link between working memory and performance: elite athletes are better able to regulate their memory and attention than their less-trained peers, and this ability predicts better performance under pressure. What separates peak performers isn’t just effort, but also the discipline to balance their mental load. In other words: their “thoughtload.” Consider thoughtload the invisible tax on your ability to perform. It consists of three problems that erode your effectiveness: The cognitive demands of competing priorities…

Growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, the Joslyn Art Museum was a hub of culture for surrounding Midwestern towns. No matter how much or how little you knew about fine art, it was the place you could go to see works that you might not otherwise be able to access outside of the coasts. Decades after leaving Omaha, I returned this past December, and while visiting my mother’s house, I noticed a brochure for the Joslyn in her mail pile. It was unusually striking and had a look and feel that was vastly different from the Joslyn’s original brand identity. The old logotype, locked up with a pictorial mark, was traditional and respectable, but also very much tied to the past. The n…

It’s become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts don’t achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to change—including synaptic, network and cost effects—that lead to resistance. Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies. These are famously flawed, lacking controls, and often relying on self-serving accounts. One unlikely place …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate “new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.” Unlike housing demand, housing stock isn’t as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up. As a result, the heightened demand drained the market of active inventory and caused home prices to overheat, with U.S. home prices in June 2022 sitting a staggering 43.2% above March 2020 levels. S…

Today marks the start of the Year of the Fire Horse, which in Chinese tradition is all about action, boldness, and taking on new challenges. And what better way to celebrate a year that should be full of red hot, blazing energy than with a hand-crafted cowboy hat from Stetson? The color? Red, of course. The company, started by John Batterson Stetson in 1865, invented the cowboy hat. Today, it’s still known for embracing the spirit of the West with its quality hats, boots, and outerwear. And to mark the year of intensity, which hasn’t happened in 60 years, the brand is partnering with Gold House to turn an iconic cultural item—the cowboy hat—into a modern…

It looks like ordinary paint, but a new coating called Lilypad Paint has a hidden ability to pull moisture out of the air. It works like a dehumidifier, without the energy use. If it’s on the wall in your bathroom, it can suck water vapor out of the air after you’ve taken a shower. The paint holds the humidity in nano-size pores, and then slowly releases it as humidity levels fall in the room. Under the paint, a layer of custom primer “acts like a smart gatekeeper ensuring that vapor doesn’t end up accumulating in the wall,” says Derek Stein, founder and CEO of Adept Materials, the startup behind the product. A passive fix for moisture in modern buildings The t…

With little more than a coat of paint, buildings could soon make the air around them cooler and harvest gallons of water directly from the atmosphere. Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia have created a nanoengineered polymer coating that passively cools building surfaces while enabling them to collect water like dew-coated leaves. It’s a material solution that could help combat rising heat and water insecurity in places all over the world. The white coating, a porous paint-like material, reflects up to 97% of sunlight and radiates heat, making surfaces up to 10 degrees cooler than the surrounding air, even under direct sun. This cooler condition a…

Paris’s youngest neighborhood was built over the last two decades atop a former rail yard and a new station on the Paris Metro Line 14. Clichy-Batignolles, in the 17th arrondissement, is roughly split into thirds, with two developed areas hugging the massive, resplendent Martin Luther King Park. The quarter’s quiet, mostly car-free streets are fronted by stores, cafes, and schools. These businesses and institutions occupy the ground floors of apartment and office buildings designed in an astonishing array of shapes, materials and textures. Some structures are gently curved, others are sharply angular; some are covered in stucco, others in bamboo. Each unique building…

To help a North Carolina community recovering from Tropical Storm Helene, a tulip farm in the Netherlands gave the gift of flowers. Dutch Grown runs a tulip farm in Voorhout, South Holland, and a warehouse in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where it ships out its flower bulbs to customers across the U.S. After Helene devastated western North Carolina last September, Marco Rosenbruck, a Dutch immigrant who moved to the region, reached out to the company with photos of the devastation asking for a few boxes of bulbs. Dutch Grown ended up sending 31 boxes filled with 10,000 bulbs for tulips, daffodils, and peonies. “At Dutch Grown, our motto is: ‘To plant a garden is…

Giving money away has never been so easy—thanks to AI. Daffy, a platform that facilitates charitable giving, is rolling out a suite of new AI-powered tools that’s making it easier than ever to donate to charity. So easy, in fact, that a Daffy user can feel like a billionaire making a quick donation to their chosen charity without having to fill out forms, mail checks, or any of the other tedium that can slow the giving process down—simply hit a button, or make a verbal command, and make a donation. Specifically, Daffy’s new tools include a Quick Donate feature, which converts free text or voice commands into an immediate donation. Daffy will need some direction (u…

The way we edit images is in the midst of a massive reinvention right now. Adjustments that once required costly software and professional-level know-how are suddenly at our fingertips 24/7—with instant results and not even an ounce of skill required. And yet, for all the fantastic feats these fancy new AI image remixing genies of ours can accomplish, there are still times when a simple specialty tool can save the day and make your life instantly easier. Today’s Cool Tool is a perfect example. It’s an incredibly useful photo-editing resource that does one specific thing and does it insanely well. And—oh, yes—it’s completely free to use. This tip origin…

Some good news on the weight-loss front: Customers can now go to Costco to get Ozempic and Wegovy, brand-name injectable prescription drugs manufactured by drug maker Novo Nordisk, which contain the same active ingredient: semaglutide. The Danish pharmaceutical firm announced Friday that both are available at the big-box retailer’s pharmacies nationwide, for $499 for a month’s supply—the same price as sold in CVS, Walmart, and the company’s direct-to-consumer website. You’ll still need a prescription to buy the drugs. Fast Company has reached out to both Costco and Novo Nordisk for comment. Also—Costco is offering a 2% discount for both Costco executive member…

Remember CDs? There’s a new company betting that, if you don’t already, you’re about to. Jewel is a Norwegian company specializing in manufacturing high-end display cases for CDs. The brand recently soft-launched online in Europe and is planning to expand to the U.S. in the coming months. It offers products that range from an $130 freestanding case that fits four CDs to a $300, 16-slot case designed to be mounted directly onto the wall. Launching a CD-based brand more than 20 years after CDs hit their peak feels like a counterintuitive prospect. After all, how many people even own a CD player these days? But Marius Brandl, Jewel’s founder, says the brand’s thesis …

Africa’s official maps are stuck in the past, often either outdated, incomplete—or both. But governments don’t have the budgets to fix them, making it difficult to complete projects as complex as deciding where to put new solar plants to as simple as delivering a package. Now a new plan is underway to map the entire continent using satellite data and AI. “Maybe 90% of African countries don’t have access to an accurate current base map for their country,” says Sohail Elabd, global director of emerging markets at Esri, the mapping company behind the Map Africa Initiative. At a United Nations event last year, Elabd met the heads of national mapping departments from a…

The benefits of taking time off from work are well-documented. In previous coverage, Fast Company has detailed how vacations stave off burnout, promote engagement, and may even help you be healthier. There are a number of ways to get more out of your vacation days, says time-off expert Jackie Swayze, founder of Maximizing My PTO, a website that helps people use a number of tips and tricks to plan unusual getaways. She says that one size does not fit all when it comes to paid time off. “There’s so much more creativity to be had than the standard, you know, take one week off in the summer,” she says. Here are some ways others have made their time off distinctly thei…

America is in an overstock and returns crisis. Every year 8.4 billion pounds of products are returned to online sellers, according to the National Retail Federation. The typical solution from retailers is to send the roughly 17% of their inventory made up of returns to a landfill, regardless of the condition of the products. It’s a problem that sellers have little incentive to solve. Since dumping product can be written off as the cost of doing business in profit and loss statements, companies don’t invest in a complex reverse supply chain or inspect items for potential resale value. But recommerce site Rebel just raised a $25 million series B round to fuel its wo…

Search today sure ain’t what it used to be. On the one hand, you’ve got the escalating sense that Google’s once-reliable results are stuck in a downward spiral. It’s a perception we’ve been seeing take shape for some time now, even before Google Search started pushing accuracy-challenged AI answers into its search engine and steering people away from first-party sources. On the other hand, you’ve got AI-powered info engines ranging from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google’s own Gemini chatbot now browsing the web for you and offering up immediate (if occasionally also inaccurate) answers. For the first time, that’s raising pressing questions about the long-term fate …