Hello readers…

I’m in Miami. Sunny skies with a chance of shady dealings.

I just went to the supermarket with my wife. A bottle of hot sauce, some cheap bottles of Sauvignon Blanc, various sundries, and batteries at the local Publix just set me back $140. Sadly, none of this is surprising anymore.

We then had lunch at a nice Mediterranean restaurant. Hummus, which is one of my favorite things in the world, was $19. A dish that’s essentially blended chickpeas. The traffic is insane too, and as you weave between Bentleys and Ferraris, it’s like driving through the physical embodiment of this country’s K-shaped economy. You’ll see some Miami housing data below that is quite surprising, too.

My mother lives in Sunny Isles Beach, which is primarily two and a half miles of skyscrapers on the ocean. Somehow, they keep finding space to fit more in. The Armani building went up a few years ago and killed her view of the Miami skyline. The Bentley building is going up a few blocks south. Two skyscrapers down from that is the Porsche building.

The Porsche building has a car elevator. You pull your car into the garage, and an elevator takes you up in your car, where it lives in a private “sky garage.” The Bentley building makes you feel like living inside a giant Bentley motorcar.

I think developers are leveraging luxury brands like Porsche and Bentley because they know those logos tap into something primal: the urge to signal status and stand out. They’re using that to sell overpriced condos with wonky floorplans. This is luxury 101.

Honestly, it’s kinda gross how much people are spending to attract the uber-wealthy, who just keep getting wealthier. It’s often done tastelessly, without consideration of consequences, and none of this is built to last. Some of these Miami condos are being built on sinking land.

Our mission, as “the custodians of beauty in a dark world,” should be to sell to the rich, then use that money to help make the world more beautiful. I’m not talking about being a modern-day Robin Hood: I run a for-profit business. But I want to hear ideas on how we can do this before it’s too late.

In this week’s issue, I look at Kravet’s move into Pottery Barn and ask whether it’s chasing the “undecided whale.” We also have yachts, luxury paint, and designer jewelry. Miami, basically.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

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🎲 P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. One player got closest to the price of last week’s surreal sheep. Let’s see who has the industry know-how to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

🏭INDUSTRY

Kravet goes whale hunting
Kravet has launched its second collection with Pottery Barn. It includes fabric, bedding, wallpaper, outdoor furnishings, and pillows. My instinct tells me that an interior designer who sees Kravet at Pottery Barn, and then sees Kravet in the D&D Building, might feel a little unsettled. Predictably after Dunes Point Capital, a private investment firm, acquired Kravet in December of 2024, the brand has been trying to reach a new customer.

In this brilliant piece on brand strategy, Ethan Strauss defines the “undecided whale”: the huge group of possible customers a company chases after it thinks it has saturated its original market. His example is Nike, which reorganized itself to pursue a larger customer pool while taking its established base for granted. I’m not getting into politics, but critics say Nike “went woke” to attract new customers (women, who are by far the largest apparel-buying demographic in the United States) and alienated its core customer (red-blooded sports bros who don’t shop as much).

In going with Pottery Barn, is Kravet chasing their “undecided whale”? Does this threaten to damage their brand like Nike? (As of Aug. 20, Nike stock was down about 75% from its Nov. 5, 2021 all-time closing high.)

I worry about this, not only because of how much I care about Kravet, and its importance to our industry as a fifth-generation, American, family-owned business (how amazing is that?).

But it also had me thinking about my own fabric company. I could try and pivot into retail, make the brand a household name beyond just the trade, and we could sell a million pillows. But is that dangerous? Am I forgetting the history, the heritage, and the people who made it special because I’m chasing a larger market? These are tough decisions and I don’t have any easy answers.

I have so much respect for Kravet and the wonderful family behind the brand. I’m not interested in trashing them. I’m just asking myself the same question.

I would love to hear from you. What do you think?

📊ECONOMY

MillerKnoll, and the Holly Hunt problem
I had longed for a Herman Miller Aeron chair since I first had an office. I told myself I couldn’t buy one until we launched a new product, and it took three years (that’s a subject for another day). Until then I sat on a really shitty office chair that made my butt hurt, then finally ordered a custom Aeron in silver because I didn’t want black. I wonder where that chair is now.

MillerKnoll just reported quarterly revenue of just over $1 billion, up 4.4%, while orders fell 6.3%. But there was news in their report that caught my eye. The company said Holly Hunt underperformed and hurt margins. That is a most troubling sign for this iconic company, and like Kravet, once again I fear that consolidation could be taking down another iconic name in our industry.

I keep an eye on these small trade brands sitting inside publicly traded companies.

I believe that the big consolidated strategy doesn’t work in our industry. We’re niche on top of niche on top of niche. Every home is a different client, a different architect, a different taste, and the designer specifying it wants something special — she wants to know who made it, who she’s buying it from, whether the guy on the other end of the phone picks up on a Friday afternoon. Try scaling that.

In 30 years, I’ve yet to see a design company get more beautiful after the captains of industry got hold of it. Bigger doesn’t equal better.

Which is good news for the rest of us smaller fish. The thing that makes our brands impossible to consolidate is the same thing that makes them impossible to copy.

Jewelry to the rescue
Jewelry sales are saving the big luxury groups. LVMH’s watches and jewelry division grew faster than fashion and leather goods in a recent report. Kering’s jewelry houses grew 20% on a comparable basis. Richemont’s jewelry maisons grew 24% at constant exchange rates.

Jewelry is different because after you drive a handbag off the lot, it can suddenly be worth nothing. Most handbags depreciate, although a few collectible models beat retail on resale. You buy a beautiful diamond ring, and you still have gold, silver, and diamonds on your finger. There’s no guarantee that it’ll appreciate in value, but there’s something there to sell if you find yourself in a pinch.

Jewelry is also an unbelievable signifier. You can wear an incredible piece and none of it has a brand on it. That’s the flashiest quiet luxury you can ever buy.

The takeaway for us is that luxury will never go away — the rich keep spending like crazy. They’re just no longer as enamored with “brand names” that have been overexposed in the age of social media. A new group of “mini luxury” brands is rising, and I can’t wait for it.

“Fine jewelry has emerged as one of the clearest success stories in luxury over the past year.”

— Zofia Zwieglinska, Glossy

Official: Miami now more expensive than metro New York
I’ve already told you about my $19 hummus, but wait till you hear about the housing. The federal government’s latest regional-price figures put metropolitan Miami’s overall cost of living about 1.4% above New York’s. Housing costs were roughly 4.7% higher. Miami is officially costlier than the Big Apple. Designers have long thought of breaking Manhattan as a badge of honor, but maybe they should consider Florida instead. The weather’s nicer (At least from November to May).

The market here has very different taste than clients in NY, LA or London (I won’t take any cheap shots). But they spend big and move fast. Any serious interior design brand looking to grow needs to take Miami seriously.

“Miami’s luxury housing boom has driven the cost of living to new heights.”

— Alyssa Khan, House Beautiful

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📈TRENDS

Superyachts: home is where you drop anchor
I just read that wealthy owners are using superyachts as full-time homes. Gabe Newell’s 364-foot Oceanco yacht Leviathan was designed to make people spend time together. It has dining space for 54 and fewer barriers between guests and crew. The names of nearly 3,000 people who built it appear onboard.

I understand the problem. In my family, five of us shared one bathroom and shower for the first 14 years of my kids’ lives. When the kids start hitting puberty, it’s not cute anymore. Then we moved from New York to a larger house in North Carolina. We don’t have superyacht money but everybody got a room and a shower. I could watch golf without everyone complaining.

But within a couple of weeks, my wife and I realized: Oh shit — we’re all so far away from each other. Sometimes I don’t even see my kids for half the day. We don’t live in a mansion, but my son can be in the family room while I’m up in my office, and I can’t hear Scarface or whatever he’s watching.

I like the way Leviathan’s designers thought about community. The wealthy wanting to live on yachts is a huge opportunity for our industry. I know one designer who made it his whole thing to make yachts feel like home. He’s doing fine.

“They don’t actually want to buy a boat; they want to buy real estate on the water.”

— Erwin Bamps, Gulf Craft CEO, via Robb Report

Wanted. Richer customers.
Modern Retail just asked retailers how they’re handling this economy, and nearly all of them had the same answer: sell more expensive stuff to richer customers.

Wayfair is the perfect illustration: Perigold, its high-end platform, grew more than 35% in the second quarter, while Wayfair overall grew 7.5%. Perigold is putting trained designers in its stores, and brands across the industry are pushing harder into premium. Polly Bickel Wong, president of marketing agency Belardi Wong, said she was seeing “fewer people buying, but those who are buying are spending more.”

No one in our industry would turn down that scenario. We make beautiful things, and the people with money are still buying beautiful things. But you can’t wake up on Monday and become a luxury brand by Friday. Caraa cofounder Aaron Luo says a business with a $120 average order can’t suddenly charge $350 or $400. It takes several product cycles. You have to earn those filthy rich customers.

The K-shaped economy has turned every retailer into a greedy luxury retailer-in-training. Is that good for our civilization? I don’t know. I do know we should build for the customer who’s coming through the door, not only the one we wish was there.

“There have been fewer people buying, but those who are are spending more.”

— Polly Bickel Wong, Belardi Wong president, via Modern Retail

Paint the town red
The decorative-paint market is nearly $100 billion, and new luxury paint brands keep appearing, especially in Britain. They sell color, advice, and paint you can talk about.

I totally understand the difference when you have incredible paint colors. They’re transformative in any room. But bragging about the brand of paint is stupid. The dumbest thing ever… the level of insecurity is off the charts.

That said, it shows this is a huge market. And while it may have felt impenetrable years ago against giants like Benjamin Moore and Farrow & Ball, some brilliant new entrepreneurs have found a way in.

It can be done!

“To many people paint seems to have become a fashion item and they use it to emphasise either their ethical bona fides or status.”

— Patrick Baty, architectural paint historian, via The Spaces

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• One of America’s tallest mass-timber office buildings is planned for Bellevue. What an amazing concept — imagine how much more beauty there could be if we made skyscrapers out of natural materials like wood. But I’m still not going back to the office.

• Italian police recovered stolen Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse works worth millions. Quite frankly, stunning.

• Aimee Lee brought ancient Korean hanji papermaking to Ohio. Good things still take time.

• Ferrari’s disgraceful and rightfully panned, first electric car sold at auction for $40 million. What the hell is going on here?

🎲 PLAYTIME

Last week we asked you to guess on this eccentric quartet of side tables we found listed on 1st Dibs.

Congratulations to Dianne M., who came closest with a guess of $200,000 — though every guess fell well short of the listed asking price of $317,856, so this one's a mercy win.

This week’s mystery is art that perfectly exemplifies today’s Miami.

Here are some clues:

✅ Creation by Ultra Fine Money Artist TRAN$PARENT whose work is now on the moon.
✅ Dimensions: 48 in H x 63 in W
✅ Medium: Canvas, Acrylic

What is the asking price?

The person who guesses closest to its listed price wins!

Reply to this email or click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader gets:

• A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.

• Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

I am on the beach this week. Enjoying the last bit of summer, before the second summer begins in Charlotte this fall. I found these precious and serene paintings by Winslow Homer. One of his favorite subjects was capturing the seaside. I found something very nostalgic about his work. It just made me…. A little bit happier after viewing them. And what could be better than that!

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Mr. Thread exists to help our creative industry build stronger businesses, and part of that job is deciding what deserves more of our time. So, I want to ask you directly:

Please click one. We want to know what will actually be valuable for you.

On to this week’s issue…

Hello readers…

Everyone in Spain went outside yesterday to stare at the eclipse. Totality lasted barely a minute, and it was a good reminder to stop working and look up once in a while.

Instead, I’ve had my head buried in a book. I finally finished From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe’s mad little 1981 attack on modern architecture. It’s been on my list forever. Wolfe is all over the place. He’s crazy. I love his writing style. I’m a hippie at heart, so The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is next.

Wolfe wrote about hippies, space, architecture, New York society—he bounced everywhere. Mr. Weft tells me Wolfe once wrote a long, letter-like memo to his Esquire editor about an article he couldn’t start. They published the note, and that became his style. I thought, Okay, good. I’m allowed to be all over the place too.

Wolfe’s argument, in the simplest terms, is that socialism turned decoration, craftsmanship, and individual taste into dirty words. In the moral fight to make good design available to everyone—which, in spirit, is beautiful; who doesn’t want everyone treated fairly?—we ripped some of the soul out of art. We ripped out the color too.

Color used to be a serious luxury. To make Tyrian purple, you had to extract pigment from sea snails’ mucus glands—roughly 10,000 of them could yield just one gram. It was a color reserved for the rich. The people in the poorhouse wore beige.

It became offensive in elite architectural and academic circles to use color and ornamentation. And since these societies almost single-handedly enforced the direction of modern style, we ended up with a world of concrete and glass boxes, with clean modern interiors. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions… this is a great, if not catastrophic, example of that in action.

The Atlantic just published a sobering piece arguing that the color recession may be permanent. We keep hearing maximalism is back, and the fall reports you’ll read about further down are full of wine red, smoky purple, and layered green. But the paint companies still sell endless shades of Swiss Coffee and “greige.” I hope this isn’t a little blip before everyone gets brainwashed back into brown.

Read on for some billion-dollar market research from Arhaus, Usher’s cringe-tastic AD home tour, and a 3D printer making buildings out of mud. Our Insider interview is with the business coach who saved my ass when COVID sent my company remote. She’s back with us again giving some fresh takes on how creative companies can survive and adapt in the new AI world.

See you next week!
Mr. Thread

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P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve put our first Guess the Price mystery near the bottom. Honor system only… no Googling the sheep, okay?

📊ECONOMY

Free billion-dollar market research
Arhaus absolutely kicked ass in the second quarter. Net revenue hit a record $385 million, up 7.4%, and comparable written sales rose 12.5%. The top line for me is that about 90% of its 2025 sales came from clients who live within 50 miles of a showroom. If you are a furniture or interiors company thinking about your brick-and-mortar strategy, this should answer your questions.

Also, orders supported by an Arhaus interior designer carry an average value more than four times that of a standard order. Our industry continues to be the MVP of big-box retail furniture stores. Shocker!

But wait. The report reveals that Arhaus recovered $37.8 million in previously paid tariffs, and $23.8 million lowered its second-quarter cost of goods sold. We’re all paying more for furniture, and they got a very nice lift to the bottom line. D’oh! To its credit, Arhaus says it will reinvest some of the recovery in growth and use another portion against higher fuel and shipping costs.

The 1stDibs results went the other way aesthetically. Its press release looks like a high-school project, which is crazy for a design business. The actual business is doing fine: revenue rose 5% to $23.3 million and gross merchandise value climbed 7%, even as active buyers fell 10%. The business is the business is the business. 1stDibs is 1stDibs. They’re not really growing that much.

These reports are free, but no one in the business really reads them. Arhaus paid serious money for the market research sitting inside that investor deck: a $27 billion US interior-design services market, a trade channel, a showroom strategy, a supply-chain map. Guys, you can get free billion-dollar market research if you just take the time to read these things. I don’t know why I geek out on this stuff. I get my business education from it.

Check this out from the Arhaus document. I’ll say it again: Their customers who work with designers spend more than four times as much. That is a public company telling Wall Street, in plain English, that people need interior designers.

“GMV of $96.0 million came in above the high end of guidance, up 7%, our strongest growth rate since late 2024.”

— David Rosenblatt, CEO of 1stDibs

Falling into a K-hole
I don’t want to jinx it, but things are looking up. Inflation eased slightly in July and mortgage applications rose after a brief dip in rates. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared the K-shaped economy over and said lower earners were beginning to catch up. But the housing market didn’t get the memo. In the first five months of 2026, sales below $200,000 fell 14.4%, while sales between $1 million and $2 million slipped just 0.6%.

Look at the chart. Doesn’t it look exactly like a K? The expensive homes are up there and the cheaper ones are down there. We just saw it in Arhaus too, in real economic data. For now, if your clients sit on the upper arm, they’re still spending.

“Housing doesn’t support that story right now. The entry-level tier isn’t stabilizing.”

— Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com

💰OPPORTUNITIES

The paintings in the trash room
Bloomberg writes that nearly $1 trillion of art is expected to pass between generations over the next decade. The next generation won’t want all of it, museums don’t have room for it, and auction houses will only fight over the very best pieces. That leaves a great quantity of paintings and sculptures looking for a home, a buyer or, in the worst cases, a thrift store.

When I was younger, my father called me in his eloquent but thick Egyptian accent: “Come, come to the office.” He was moving his law firm out of the MetLife building, right above Grand Central, and told me to look through some old company files before they were shredded. I opened a small room absolutely rammed with boxes. It was a shit-ton of crap. Ninety-eight percent old financial and legal documents.

Then I found a weirdly shaped box in the corner. It looked like a frame was inside. I pulled it out, looked at the signature, and realized it was an original painting by the founder of one of my companies. I kept going. There were 12 of them, absolute treasures. They now hang over my mother’s sofa.

The bigger opportunity is the money moving with the art. My generation is reaching the point where we’ve had good careers, the kids are leaving, and we’re ready to invest in the forever home. We’re finally going to buy the great fabrics. That wealth is landing in the hands of people like me, ready to spend it on interiors.

I will keep yelling it from the mountaintops… there is no better time than now to be building in our industry!

“The next gen don’t want it. They want something different.”

— Philip Hoffman, chairman and founder of the Fine Art Group, via Bloomberg

Washington is hot, hot, hot, hot
Washington, D.C.’s luxury market is setting records. Inventory is down and prices are soaring. A Georgetown house just sold for a city-record $28 million, and agents say cabinet officials, tech leaders, and AI executives are competing for trophy properties. Many want the house turnkey and fully furnished. They don’t want to lift a finger.

We’re feeling it too. It’s a great market for us—great clients—but it’s so sketchy. Why is it hot? Washington is booming. Maybe these folks got rich off insider trading (have you seen Pelosi’s stock tracker?) Or AI. Or Trump Media’s new paid Truth API feed that I just read about.

The direct feed is called Truth API, and reportedly costs as much as $100,000 a month. It doesn’t give traders a post before Trump publishes it, but it can deliver his market-moving announcements milliseconds before ordinary users see them. If this isn’t the most brazen form of corruption I’ve ever seen in my life. Because if Trump posts tonight, “I have a deal with Iran,” the markets are going to move tomorrow, right? Oil is going to move. Not to mention the prediction markets.

In completely unrelated news: Click the button below to subscribe to Mr. Thread Insider.

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Can you imagine selling faster access to the news you’re giving out as president? I’m not bashing only Trump. I wouldn’t put this kind of caper past other presidents, only you’d never hear about it. Anyway, I don’t know whether any of that has anything to do with a $28 million house in Georgetown. But when this much money is appearing this close to power, I think I’m allowed to ask: why are you guys all so rich around there?

Look, the design opportunity is real, whatever you think of the politics. These buyers need designers. They’re purchasing speed and taste, and they want to bring their toothbrush—not their contractor.

“We’re in an AI race. These people are driving the market.”

— Daniel Heider, executive vice president at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, via The Wall Street Journal

📈TRENDS

Human-made is the future
Fast Company argues that “human-made” is becoming the next big flex for luxury buyers, something I’ve been trumpeting since Journal #00001. As AI cheapens creative work, visible human curation becomes scarce. Organic food, craft beer, and handmade furniture are already showing us that customers will pay a premium for a story they can believe.

We’re on the right path. A large language model could scrape Mr. Thread and rebuild a perfectly serviceable version in five minutes that sends you links to interior design news. But it can’t give you commentary from 30 years of industry experience and it probably wouldn’t make fun of Gary Friedman every other week. That’s why readers constantly tell me Mr. Thread is a better read than the tired old trades.

What does this mean for us? Keep leaning into handmade, human storytelling, and authenticity. The demand for it will keep exploding in direct opposition to AI.

“The more AI-assisted creation becomes the default, the more conspicuous—and commercially powerful—unadulterated human involvement becomes.”

— Ben Sherwood, via Fast Company

The robot becomes an artisan
Architects are now 3D-printing buildings from local soil, lime, and agricultural waste. TECLA used 350 layers of raw earth to build two interlocking domes in Massa Lombarda, Italy. Near Barcelona, IAAC students and researchers created a separate project, Teixit, printing local soil into expressive walls. The nozzle leaves a delightfully natural texture directly in the structure. Check it out.

This is 3D printing as artisanal work. It takes mud out of the ground, and a robot turns it into a building. And it’s beautiful. We spend a lot of time worrying that machines will erase the human hand. This one is making art out of dirt, using AI and modern technology. I love that contradiction!

“This digital approach transforms robotic execution into an expressive medium guided by human minds.”

— Moises Carrasco, via ArchDaily

I need a third place
This one really resonated with me. Working from home can be very lonely. I’m desperate for a third place—a coffee shop where you can gather your thoughts, a library where I bump into people who like to read instead of scrolling, a shared workspace that gets me away from computers and social media to meet other like-minded entrepreneurs. Imagine a theater with a members’ club where you meet your buddies for a bourbon and then watch a movie. Who better than designers to create these places in our lives? We’ve lost a lot of them. Well, I have some good news… it seems they’re coming back.

Designers are rebuilding the space between home and work. This week, Hospitality Design’s report finds cafés with play areas built into the architecture, cinemas with real bars (not the depressing one at your local AMC), and mixed-use buildings combining coworking, wellness, food, and cultural programming. Come for coffee and stay for a workshop!

Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ former CEO, understood this years ago: Home, office, and then the other place. That was the insight. But the third place doesn’t have to be one coffee chain with the same chairs everywhere. It can be a cinema, a bathhouse, a hotel lobby, a library, a kids’ café, one of those Korean spas where they scrub salt into your whole body and make you feel like a fish. Just some place with enough of a heartbeat that you don’t feel lonely. That’s a real design problem, and a very good business opportunity.

Summer reading tip: Read the origin story of Starbucks and Howard Schultz in this excellent biography.

“We wanted to allow for people to be with a group or equally be alone but close to others and still feel welcome.”

— Rachel Coll, cofounder of TiggColl, via Hospitality Design

Autumn’s quiet color rebellion
Veranda just put out its fall color forecast and it says designers are about to move on from years of caramel, burnt orange, and chocolate brown. They’re pointing to green-tinged neutrals, smoky purples, and softened marigolds. None of it is loud. Every shade has been dirtied up a little, which apparently is the only way we can cope with color now.

“Color never moves in a straight line—it’s always an evolution rather than a revolution.”

— Ruth Mottershead, creative director, Little Greene

This is good news for designers whose clients say they want color, then select Swiss Coffee. You can give them a wine red that reads almost brown, or a purple with enough gray to not offend. Personally, I still want the proper stuff—strong color, a little danger, a room that doesn’t look staged for resale. But if softened marigold is the gateway drug, I’ll take it. Let’s get the people hooked.

🏭 INDUSTRY

The human touch is the watermark
The EU’s new AI transparency rules took effect this month. The rules say providers must make “synthetic” output detectable, while deepfakes and certain text must be labeled “made by AI.” Standard editing and some B2B uses may be exempt, but fines can reach €15 million ($17.3 million) or 3% of worldwide turnover. Ha-ha-ha!

My textile company will now have to put a disclaimer on our website when we show a beautiful AI rendering of our fabric on a sofa. Seriously? I understand protecting people from deep-faked videos of politicians and celebrities, but this feels like an overreach.

The bureaucrats don’t understand the line between bad actors and good actors, so everybody gets lumped in. And where does it end? Do I have to confess every time a retoucher corrects the lighting, expands an edge, or upscales a photograph—all of that is AI. And anyway, what about McDonald’s? Their photo of a Big Mac looks nothing like the burger they serve you, and I don’t recall ever seeing a disclaimer under the golden arches.

“Published text that has undergone human review or editorial control does not need to be labelled.”

— European Commission, Article 50 guidance

Lonni Paul on winning work when the phone stops ringing
Business of Home asked five designers how they find projects when business slows. Lonni Paul gave the best advice: stay visible. She uses quiet periods to reconnect with past clients, architects, builders and trades, while improving her portfolio, updating her website, and pitching. You may not win a project tomorrow, but the right client might remember you.

Getting new business as an interior designer is nerve-racking. It’s feast or famine out there. You can spend months chasing leads and making calls and hear nothing back. Then the projects come. In this K-shaped economy, fewer designers are getting access to the clients with the big money. You have to fight harder to reach them. Lonni is right on this one. Just keep showing up, keep your relationships warm and make sure your best work is impossible to ignore.

“Rather than focusing on selling, I focus on consistently showing the quality of our work and the experience we provide.”

— Lonni Paul, Lonni Paul Design, via Business of Home

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• COOKFOX has opened the Bruce Springsteen Center near the places that shaped his music. The Boss says the building feels like him.

• ArchDaily rounded up some joyful ice-cream shops. Apparently the universal design language of dessert is color and childish fun. Correct.

• Check out this design magic. Broadway’s “The Lost Boys” set becomes nearly 20 locations without a video backdrop. My wife and daughter tell me the house is the star.

• In the surprise hit movie “Backrooms”, fluorescent big-box emptiness supplies the horror while old furniture supplies the soul. Frightening commentary on what happens when design is intentionally ripped out of architecture.

• Summer Thornton turned a bland Cabo retreat into a kaleidoscope of Mexican craft. Twelve thousand color samples later. She went wild. I couldn’t help but dream of living in her brilliant design work.

• Usher’s Architectural Digest house tour has the house “performing” by day and “confessing” at night. Somebody get that poor sofa a therapist.

• I really want to eat at Graciela. It was designed by the super-smart team over at Home Studios from NY. Rustic interiors serving old-school Argentine steaks. Sounds like my happy place.

• Here are some groovy eclipse glasses.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Guess the price: Salvador Dalí’-inspired sheep

Check out our new weekly guessing game made just for our community of design fanatics. Let’s see how good you are at guessing prices of the objects we sell in our zany world.

Each week, we’ll share an image and clues about an item for sale. The person who guesses closest to its listed price wins!

Here are some clues:

✅ Set of 4 side tables
✅ Manufactured by BD Barcelona and Deyrolle
✅ Designed by Oscar Tusquets, inspired by Salvador Dalí
✅ Made from animal skin, metal and wood
✅ Approximate measurements: 34.3” W × 10.2” D × 28” H (head) and 23.2” H (back)

Playtime Instructions:

1. Guess the asking price (in U.S. dollars) for this rare set of four limited-edition Xai sheep tables.

2. Click the button below to submit your guess.

Submit your answer here

Honor system, please—no using Google to look up the answer! (If you do cheat, we still get the engagement, but you’ll have to live with yourself!)

The Stakes
Whoever gets the closest guess each week wins an entry into our grand prize drawing! We’ll be holding the final drawing on October 15th—the more weeks you win, the higher your chances! Our winning threader gets:

• A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.

• Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

This one was super fun. I found so many incredible paintings across every style and period imaginable of the Sun. I ended up going with some more modern, abstract selections.

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🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00006

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Melissa Lentz on the robots already sitting on the org chart
Melissa was my coach. She saved my ass after my beloved startup went belly up, and then COVID shut down my factory at my other company. Her advice on how to navigate change as an artistic heritage company was invaluable.

That’s why we’re talking to her. Before founding M. Hatter Consulting over a decade ago, Melissa worked at Ogilvy, Tribal DDB, and MRY. She has since advised many of the world’s biggest brands on change, and now rebuilds companies to operate in this faster-moving world, so change is something they drive instead of something that runs them over. She is also certified in Hogan, a psychometric assessment, which is where we started.

Read more

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

Melissa Lentz on the robots on the org chart

Melissa was my coach. She saved my ass after my beloved startup went belly up, and then COVID shut down my factory at my other company. Her advice on how to navigate change as an artistic heritage company was invaluable.

That’s why we’re talking to her. Before founding M. Hatter Consulting over a decade ago, Melissa worked at Ogilvy, Tribal DDB, and MRY. She has since advised many of the world’s biggest brands on change, and now rebuilds companies to operate in this faster-moving world, so change is something they drive instead of something that runs them over. She is also certified in Hogan, a psychometric assessment, which is where we started.

Read more

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00005

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

The summer trend report.

This week, we hunted through the latest batch of industry trend reports to pull out the insights that actually matter to you.

Now, I never advocate for following trends blindly. But understanding what the market is feeling is essential. It forces us out of our own bubble. It exposes new opportunities and points out any obvious blind spots. Our goal at Mr. Thread is to serve as your design sherpa, giving you the context you need on your journey to build a resilient creative business.

Here are the key takeaways from the Summer Trend reports…

Read more

Hello readers…

How is it August already? Across Europe many of the factories send their staff on a month’s long vacation. My phone is quiet enough that I can hear myself think. This is my time for obsessing and planning.

Two weeks ago we published our exclusive on how Chinese factories are reverse-engineering the RH catalog. It is still the most-read thing we have ever put out, and the number keeps climbing. We’re still getting mail about it.

Mehnaz R. called the investigation “Equally exciting and scary,” and Freddy V. sent this: “Terrifying issue. Huge disinflationary force, but I think/hope, more so for large companies producing at scale. Scale = some degree of commoditization. Unique skill sets and craftsmanship may help smaller, more nimble brands have some kind of moat… but I may be smoking my own supply.”

Imagine this: You fly to Foshan, China, for two or three weeks. You hire a local agent who knows the lay of the land. You get introduced to owners, walk the factories, you take notes, and you come home with a source book of the 20 best ones. You hire a digital marketer. You build one simple sales funnel. And the most you spend is a couple thousand dollars on some airline tickets.

Your customer is every American who needs a new sofa or armchair, but is getting crushed by inflation and can’t stomach the prices at the big box stores. She visits RH, or Arhaus, or wherever, and sits on the sofas until she finds the one she wants. She photographs the fabric tag, and sends it to you. You order it direct from a factory in Foshan that builds it to the same spec, at half the price, and ships it direct to the customer via sea freight. You keep 20 to 30 points in the middle and everybody in the chain is happy.

Think about it. Every RH, West Elm, Crate & Barrel, and Arhaus in the country is your showroom. The entire sales script is: wherever you live, there’s a furniture store on Main Street. Go sit on the sofa you like, take the fabric sample, send me a photo, and I’ll take care of the rest. Now add the dining table, eight chairs, a second sofa, and six armchairs, and you’re talking real money.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on the rise of the million-dollar company with one employee. I’ve written more about it below in Opportunities. This is one of those companies. There is no such thing as building an easy business. But I swear to you, this is as close to a business in a box as there is.

Of course, I’m conflicted. I’ve spent 30 years defending the people who make things, and this is a business that exists entirely because someone else built the gallery, hired the salesperson, paid the designer, and printed the catalog. But as we found out in the original piece, nothing about it is illegal. But is it ethical? Post a comment below, we would love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

In the meantime, keep reading to find out which color is the new summer trend, and why the pyramids are making a comeback.

See you next week!

Mr. Thread

P.S. I’m late to this, but I love to play Housle! We’re working on a new game that might be a bit like this.

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🏭 INDUSTRY

Perigold and the Spotify problem

Wayfair absolutely crushed their Q2 earnings and their stock is soaring this week (up over 25%). Here’s why: they have brilliantly executed on their high-end strategy with Perigold. The K-shaped economy strikes again.

Wayfair’s CEO Niraj Shah told investors this week that Perigold, its luxury side hustle, now clears $400 million a year (you should read his opening remarks—eye opening). That’s only 3.6% of Wayfair’s US revenue, but it’s grown double digits every year since it launched in 2017, including more than 20% in both 2024 and 2025. Well-heeled customers are spending nearly three times what a Wayfair.com shopper spends on disposable furniture.

Perigold targets 15 million high-income American households, carries nearly 3.5 million SKUs from 1,500 brands, and relaunched its trade program earlier this year with deeper discounts for designers. Every year they ask one of my companies to list and we keep saying no, because our secret sauce is our people who sell the product. We don’t want to sell on Wayfair. It’s tempting though to join the platform where everyone else is. But you know? Ask any musician how Spotify worked out.

Wayfair’s logistics network is unmatchable. And because of their scale, they can sell at better prices and deliver other people’s products faster. They also have search, personalization, and a checkout that rocks—none of us could copy this, even if we had decades to do it. Remember, Perigold doesn’t own a stick of what it sells. It’s just a marketplace. So what is actually being built here is the backbone of our industry, and whoever owns the backbone is the gatekeeper.

But it’s a trap. If you list your fabric there it becomes just another red swatch in a sea of a thousand red swatches, ranked by an algorithm. And you just handed over the designer relationship that is your entire business. And if you stay away, one day you’ll find all the demand has been aggregated over there and you’re invisible. Musicians never chose Spotify. They got strong-armed onto it, and now there’s a wall between them and their fans, and the algorithm only feeds the big acts. Either way, you’re renting space and paying a tax on your own sales to a multi-billion-dollar tech company sitting in the middle.

There is another version of this, where the independents band together and take the economics of consolidation on our own terms, without handing anyone a controlling interest in our businesses. That one requires us to move first. But organization has never been our strong point.

“Prior to Perigold, the wealthy customer had no real digital destination that matched the way she actually wants to shop. The best design brands in the world were locked behind exclusive showrooms available to the trade only or scattered across single-style, single-category competitors.”

— Niraj Shah, CEO, co-founder of Wayfair.

Free fodder for Foshan

RH gave WWD a sneak peek at its 496-page 2026 RH Modern sourcebook on Monday. It includes the Pietrasanta sofa collection by Amsterdam-based Jan te Lintelo, Pleated Crystal lighting by Alison Berger, the Montaigne collection from Thomas Bina and São Paulo’s Ronald Sasson, and the Latitude oak collection Bina designed with Edward Robinson. It follows June’s first RH Estates book. RH posted $3.44 billion in net revenues for fiscal 2025. We stayed neutral on our own RH exclusive two weeks ago because the reporting deserved to speak for itself.

But now when I look at this catalog, I just imagine it pasted on the wall in Foshan factories, while the workers race to copy it. Gary Friedman keeps commissioning the world’s best designers, and you know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

“The Sourcebook presents the largest curated and fully integrated assortment of modern furnishings, lighting and décor under one brand in the world.”

— RH, via WWD

💰OPPORTUNITIES

Party of one

Stripe took a look at all its customers, and noticed a lot of solo operators on its platform pulling in more than $1 million a year. In fact their ranks doubled between 2023 and 2025. The number crossing $10 million nearly tripled in the same stretch. The Wall Street Journal found Ben Broca, 40, who launched an AI tools company from his living room in Sausalito last December, added 10,000 paying customers, and is on track for $10 million this year with nobody else on payroll. He’s employee of the month, every month.

Claire Vo coded an app while working full-time as a tech executive, listed it at $1 a month, and now has 100,000 users and is on track for seven figures of profit. New business applications in the information sector are up nearly 45% in a year, according to Bank of America Institute figures cited by the WSJ. The middleman business I described up top is this same arithmetic pointed at furniture. I run Mr. Thread with the support of three freelancers, and I keep telling the team, we’re aiming at $10 million.

There is no better time than now to build the business of your dreams. AI has made things so much faster and cheaper to get off the ground. Let’s go out and do it!

“I think people over-index on how easy AI is and under-index on how much I did to get to this point.”

— Claire Vo, founder, via The Wall Street Journal

The great wealth transfer hits UK property

London buying agent Jo Eccles wrote in the Financial Times about two entrepreneurs who built and sold an AI company in nine months and went looking for London property with £5 million ($6.7 million) each. One estate agent assumed they wanted a one-bedroom rental, because they were 20 and wearing jeans and trainers.

I was in London last week, where the Sunday Times 40 under 40 Rich List features 34 entirely self-made captains of industry. On that side of the pond, an estimated £5.5 trillion ($7.4 trillion) will pass between generations by 2050. Every client Eccles has represented who spent £20 million ($26.9 million) or more in the past five years has been in their thirties or forties. The great transfer of wealth has started. I’ve been writing about it here for a while, as regular readers will know. I believe there’s a massive boom coming to our industry, and the ones who are prepared will benefit from it!

“Clearly, agents who assume that ample funds and traditional trappings of wealth still go hand in hand are missing a trick. And in my experience, many young, wealthy buyers are keen to build new relationships on their own terms, often preferring to appoint their own advisers rather than rely on existing family relationships, keen to demonstrate they can stand on their own two feet and make decisions independently of their parents.”

— Jo Eccles, founder and managing director of Eccord, via the Financial Times

📊 ECONOMY

A vote of no confidence

The Fed held short-term rates steady on July 29. The 30-year Treasury yield rose 0.11 percentage points to 5.20%, its biggest one-day move since March and its highest level since 2007. The 30-year breakeven rate, the market’s read on inflation three decades out, had its largest one-day jump since the day after the 2024 election. If these numbers mean nothing to you, and you’re the sort of person who changes the channel when they start talking about this on TV, let me tell you, this flows straight through to us. The Mortgage Bankers Association put the 30-year fixed at 6.81% for the week ending July 31, and purchase applications fell 4% on the week and 3% on the year. People aren’t buying houses, which means they’re not refurbishing houses.

Trouble at Etsy

Etsy is cutting 220 jobs, about 12% of its staff, most of them in product and engineering. The company insists this is not cost-cutting and not AI, and the quarter backs that up. Sales came in at $668.3 million against a $649.1 million estimate. It also sold Depop to eBay for $1.4 billion, five years after paying $1.6 billion for it. Ouch. The number worth your attention sits further down the release. Etsy now has 5.7 million sellers, up 5.9%, and 87 million active buyers, down 0.4%. Supply is growing and demand is not. The shares fell about 7%. The writing is on the wall.

“You’ve heard me say that our first priority was to get the business growing again. Our ultimate goal, though, has always been to take Etsy to the next level of growth so we can fully deliver on our mission and our potential. We are now at the point where we need to make that shift — to build the team, culture, and organization that will make that possible.”
— Kruti Patel Goyal, CEO of Etsy, in a memo to staff, via CNBC

Keeping the American dream alive

JPMorganChase says it will pump $750 billion into housing through 2035 under its American Dream Initiative, more than $200 billion above what it put in over the previous decade and close to a 40% increase. It wants to build or preserve 1 million affordable units, help 500,000 homebuyers ( including 200,000 first-timer buyers), and hire 850 new home-lending advisors. In San Francisco it has committed $200 million to a single 342-unit building. I think it’s interesting that a commercial bank is now underwriting national housing supply—something the federal government should be doing itself.

“An affordable and resilient housing market is essential to driving economic growth and increasing opportunity. We’re focused on helping more people access quality housing they can afford—and we’re working across the real estate community, local governments, and nonprofits to scale housing solutions throughout the U.S.”

— Michelle Herrick, head of commercial real estate for J.P. Morgan

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SITDOWN WITH MR. THREAD

Bill McIntosh and Martin Raffone on becoming their own worst clients.

William McIntosh Design is the New York firm behind highly polished, livable interiors in some of Manhattan’s most desirable addresses — 432 Park Avenue, the Plaza, the Puck Building, Herzog & de Meuron’s 160 Leroy Street — plus projects in Miami, Palm Beach, San Francisco, London, and retreats including St. Barths and Morocco. Bill McIntosh and Martin Raffone run it together and are married to each other. Bill takes the architecture, Martin takes the textiles and furnishings. Between them they have been featured by Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Departures, and 1stDibs Introspective. We caught them at their house in Litchfield County, Connecticut, where a 1980s bathroom is currently in pieces on the floor.

Hello guys. What are you excited about right now?

Martin: Our renovation on our house. We have a 200-year-old house that currently has a 1980s single bathroom, and we are ripping that out and turning it into two bathrooms. The contractor just removed the old floor, and we got to see the structure of the house, which is amazing. How they built houses 200 years ago. It’s all post and beam and old timbers. It is sort of exciting, not only from a historic point, but having to design spaces for ourselves is sort of a treat.

How is the process different when you’re designing for yourselves rather than a client?

Martin: It’s insane.

Bill: It’s sort of the classic story. When you’re doing it for yourself, suddenly you become a total idiot. You’re the worst client. Never wish it upon yourself. Decision-making is prolonged, and the things we do so instinctively, almost without overthinking—is just belabored.

Martin: My favorite little anecdote to this: we went to Waterworks to look for tile for our bathrooms, of which we need four. We go there all the time and we can select tile for client projects in literally minutes. She started pulling out the sample boards, and I turned to her and I said, “How the hell do you work this thing?” And she turned to me and she said, every single designer that comes in here who’s doing their own project has the same reaction. They just have no idea what they want.

Bill: It’s like 40 years of experience out the window.

How does your design partnership work when it’s your own home?

Martin: We’re really in alignment when we’re working on client projects. Bill has a very particular component to the work, which is very architectural, and I sort of do more of the textiles and furnishing, so we mesh together incredibly well.

Bill: We get the big picture lined up, and then you always know what to go back to when you’re making decisions throughout the process.

Martin: But when you’re doing your own project, it’s harder to have the big picture. The house is 200 years old. It’s very simply designed on the interior, and that’s sort of the storyline—which, if this was for clients, we would refer to constantly. When we’re doing it on our own it’s hard to reference. And suddenly we become very budget conscious.

Do you still check all the boxes—the mood board, the scope of work—or are you winging it?

Martin: We’re winging it. But we did have lots of inspiration images. We knew we wanted a walk-in shower with beautiful little tile. We’ve been planning this for years, so we knew that. But when it comes to the point of actually jumping off the bridge, that becomes more stressful. Do we really want to spend that much money on this beautiful tile?

I just got the West Elm catalog in the mail. Every page is brown. What’s going on?

Martin: We did get that catalog. It all looks like Pierre Yovanovitch. I think these companies are quite clever. It’s like fast fashion—they are quickly absorbing the zeitgeist of design, and they are able to produce and pump it out there so quickly. We both looked at it and we remarked that it was pretty amazing. It really is knockoffs of Pierre Yovanovitch furniture and of his whole mood.

Bill: When West Elm first came on the scene it had a freshness to it. This isn’t necessarily fresh, but maybe it’s fresh for them, because they went really down in the toilet, I think, for several years. So it seemed a return to at least design.

Martin: It’s pretty, but it doesn’t interest me, because I can clearly see where they’re deriving all of this from, and I think it’s incredibly trendy. Pierre’s work is beautiful, but I’m sort of tired of it. You need Pierre’s architecture, the chateau in Provence. Put that furniture on Third Avenue in a little co-op and you’re not quite getting it.

Why do you think the big retailers are looking backwards? I’m thinking about RH and Michael Taylor.

Bill: Security. It’s a financial sure bet. If everybody’s just following the trend, the beige, soft, curvy furniture styles, you’re going to pump out as much beige, soft stuff. But try and determine where the trend came from, because certainly some corporate design team didn’t come up with this look.

Martin: They’re sucking it all off Instagram. They need to bring something to market, and then they blanket everything in cream bouclé, because you know that it’s easy to live with. RH recently changed their whole tune about custom color. Before that, you couldn’t get anything on their upholstery except beige fabric. And they’re looking back because that’s sort of the trend. We’ve been cycling through trends. We started with mid-century modern, which just was exhausted, and then we moved into the ’60s, and now we’re up to the ’80s. Michael Taylor.

“We don’t really need Instagram because we have our own Instagram in our brain. It’s like, remember that door we saw in Paris 20 years ago, and it was shiny and it was purple.”

— Martin Raffone, William McIntosh Design

You say “trend” like it’s a naughty word. When you’re working for clients, how do you create designs that have longevity?

Martin: We try never to make them trendy.

Bill: The people who come to us are not trend followers, and maybe it’s because they’re not necessarily young. They’re more established in their lives and financially. We’re not dealing with 20-year-olds or even 30-year-olds. When somebody looks at our work they see things that are just not trendy. So they’re not coming to us for that. I don’t think anybody’s of such strong fiber that you’re not going to be tempted by a trend here or there, and maybe it keeps things kind of youthful and present.

Martin: We’re not immune to it, and trends often come from good places. Pierre Yovanovitch is doing intelligent, beautiful work with gorgeous colors and fabulous textures, and of course that’s going to enter into the work. We’ve been to his showroom, we’ve used some of the furniture he’s producing. But trying to recreate somebody else’s design because it’s trendy—no one has ever asked us to do that, and we wouldn’t want to. It wouldn’t be interesting.

What else has your eye at the moment?

Martin: Speaking of RH. It’s interesting that Gary is going back to traditional brown furniture. I don’t know if you could call that a trend, but it seems like people are starting to talk about antiques again, which I think is a nice idea. Anything not ’60s or ’70s. Real old brown furniture. I like to mix things that are historic, and we really go deep dive into references. We’re currently working on a beach house where the client went and stayed at a hotel in Puglia, and that’s been the genesis of the design of their house. Not that we’re trying to create a Pugliese retreat on the ocean, but all of those textures and colors—and then we expand the story to include all of Italy. Because we don’t really have a signature look, each project brings its own story.

Bill: At the other end of the spectrum, we just wrapped up a little renovation of an ’80s beach house in the Hamptons. All angles and curves. It was so much fun. We knocked it out in less than a year, 10 months, and it was simple, easy. It looked like what it was supposed to look like, which totally tuned in with the clients’ vibe. That was a total joy.

Last one, for both of you. Favorite city?

Martin and Bill [In chorus]: I think it’s Paris.

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly condensed for clarity.

Find out more at: williammcintoshdesign.com

🤖 TECH

Christmas is already in the cart

Attentive surveyed 600 US consumers and found 71% plan to start their holiday shopping before Black Friday, and 46% before November even begins. Two-thirds (67%) have used Gemini, Perplexity, or ChatGPT to manage a purchase in the last three months. Among Gen Z that number is 80%. Of those shoppers, 58% ask AI about a specific product, 51% compare brands and features, 45% want a recommendation, and 43% hunt for a deal. Setting discounts aside, free shipping is the top motivator, at 68%. It’s the first week of August and here’s where we’re at: customers are using LLMs to make their December decisions. If your descriptions, dimensions, materials, and lead times are not designed to attract artificial intelligence, you’re on the naughty list already.

“Consumers are discovering products, comparing options, and deciding which brands they trust long before the holiday rush. The retailers that win this holiday season will be the ones using AI to understand and deliver on individual customer preferences, serve timely, personalized experiences across every channel, and strengthen relationships well before promotions begin.”

— Jema Birkmeyer, vice president of strategic sales at Attentive, via Retail Dive

📈TRENDS

The rise of grandma hobbies

The New York Times spent two days at Green Door Folk School, a farmstead school in northern Michigan that teaches basketry, spoon carving, quilting, felting, and natural dyeing. As you can imagine, Millennials and Gen Z are the majority of its students. John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, the oldest still operating in the country, now runs a waiting list for a teen program. It’s the same at Ely Folk School in Minnesota. More than 100 folk schools operate across the US, and Pinterest searches for beginner sewing projects have quadrupled in a year, driven by users under 34.

Every one of those hobbies runs on what we already make. Soft goods, fabrics, thread, batting, trim. Knitting, sewing, crochet, quilting — the crossover between the home textile world and the grandma hobby world is enormous, and the quilting industry on its own is massive and growing faster than anything in our category. One of my brands is researching a niche ancillary line into it right now. Two things are pushing this. People have more time on their hands because of AI, or work from home, or whatever you want to call it, and they want off their screens.

Underneath that is anxiety. You make something beautiful with your hands and it does something for you that feels so much healthier than doom-scrolling. We talk constantly at one of my brands about beauty and suffering, about how it helps the human condition to make something beautiful while you are hurting. Then you look at the finished thing—a puzzle, a plate, a little cushion you crocheted—and you made that. Wonderful.

Some people are already doing it. Jacob Long has spent more than a decade making American wool manufacturing cool again, and he’s high on my list to interview. The Urban Electric Co. made a hand-built lighting factory in Charleston. And look at Hellman-Chang’s marketing: Eric Chang carving furniture in a Canali suit and a silk tie. Making things with your hands is finally being sold as glamour. It’s only taken this business 30 years to work that out.

Anyway, the quilting business is enormous and growing fast, and I’m testing a way to get into it with my company. The kids are now paying real money for the privilege of doing badly, by hand, something a machine could do in 1910.

“Grandma hobbies reconnect us to ourselves. These activities are hard, in that they require time and concentration to master. But they also offer clear and fulfilling rewards.”

— Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University, via The New York Times

The summer report

Sherwin-Williams published its Colormix 2027 forecast, 1stDibs pulled together the year’s best indoor-outdoor rooms, and Elle Decoration named contrast piping the furniture detail of the season. And a West Elm catalog landed in our editor’s mailbox this week drenched in one earthy color—can you guess what it is? The whole summer report is in Mr. Thread Insider, below.

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• Jisu Yoon has invented a collapsible hand-woven a sofa out of shape-memory alloy.

• ArchDaily has rounded up six houses shaped like pyramids, which has pleased this Egyptian.

• UNESCO has added 13 buildings and ensembles by Aino, Elissa and Alvar Aalto to the World Heritage list, along with 10 in Tashkent. Soviet concrete is finally cool.

• MAD spent eight years on a 2 million-square-foot culture complex on Shenzhen Bay. It is quite frankly, stunning.

• Herman Miller has pulled three Alexander Girard patterns out of its own textile archive and had Pendleton weave them into $325 blankets. I want one.

• Somebody has built a listening museum for 36 mechanical keyboards. Get ready to lose a couple of hours.

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

I must admit. This was a tough week for finding art. I just couldn’t find any inspiration that made sense with this week’s content. But alas, after exhaustive work searching through the archives, I found an interesting one. He is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and the critic John Ruskin is said to have called him the “Worst painter of the 19th century.” I found that kind of harsh, but I do get how his very literal paintings can come across as cheesy. Nonetheless, I loved the subject matter and the vibrancy of the brushstrokes, realism, and color that has brought this week’s journal to life!

Enjoying Mr. Thread?

How can we make this better? We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER #00005

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section.

The summer trend report.

This week, we hunted through the latest batch of industry trend reports to pull out the insights that actually matter to you.

Now, I never advocate for following trends blindly. But understanding what the market is feeling is essential. It forces us out of our own bubble. It exposes new opportunities and points out any obvious blind spots. Our goal at Mr. Thread is to serve as your design sherpa, giving you the context you need on your journey to build a resilient creative business.

Here are the key takeaways from the Summer Trend reports…

Read more

IN THE WINTER OF 2025, Chloe McGrath* flew from her home in New York to start a new life in Hong Kong with her husband. She soon found herself at the window of her new apartment, looking out at the twinkling skyline—thousands of towers, lit up at night, stacked with seven and a half million people on a strip of land wedged between the mountains and the sea. “It was an adventure moving to Asia,” she says. There was only one problem: their apartment was totally unfurnished. It was like living in an empty box.

“The furniture options in Hong Kong were really limited,” she says. There were designer Italian galleries priced for hedge-fund money, or IKEA and Zara Home. What she wanted was something more like Restoration Hardware. “The RH-style stuff that’s really popular, especially in America, it’s actually quite minimalistic,” she says. It was also expensive. What if they spent a fortune on sofas, and Hong Kong didn’t work out?

At first Chloe outsourced the problem. A woman in Hong Kong made her living sourcing furniture directly from Chinese factories on behalf of expat clients, and Chloe hired her. She ordered a few essential items, and they were affordable and well made. “But she has a little bit of a different style than us,” she says. And so she set out to do it herself.

On Reddit Chloe discovered a small, obsessive community that had figured out how to buy furniture directly from Chinese factories that copied famous American brands like RH and Arhaus. She started chatting with sellers on WeChat and WhatsApp. One was a sales representative who went by Rose, who handled international sales for a factory in Foshan called Zhenúr. Rose sent her a catalog. It ran to 148 pages.

The PDF was bilingual and organized like RH’s doorstep-sized catalog. There were chairs, coffee tables, side tables, dining tables, even outdoor furniture. The first thirty pages were sofas—long, low, modular designs in cream and ivory and dove gray, photographed in airy white rooms, just like RH. The prices were astonishing. “They’re able to make basically anything you would get from a Western retailer for a fraction of the cost,” Chloe says.

Read more

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our members-only section. This is where we dive deeper into the big story of the week.

Caitlin Penny
Caitlin Penny trained as a designer, then took a job dressing the interiors of private jets for Gulfstream Aerospace, where she first crossed paths with Rose Tarlow. A decade ago she joined Tarlow’s Los Angeles furniture and …

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Hello readers…

I’m writing this from the wrong side of the road. We’re somewhere between Richmond and Windsor, it’s pushing 35 degrees here (that’s mid-nineties in real money) and I keep clipping the curb on the left because I’m used to driving on American roads. This is my one family vacation of the year. Kew Gardens this morning (no shade where we walked, it felt like standing in a desert) and Windsor Castle tomorrow. The kids demanded the Ted Lasso pub. We found the Ted Lasso pub. Believe!

A confession about vacations: I have never once set an out-of-office. I push everyone at my brands to take real time off. Go be with your families and decompress. But I sell fabrics. I’m not a brain surgeon. If you have a fabric question, call me. Taking an hour on the road to work on this journal is not stressful. I love it too much for it to feel like work.

We just toured Buckingham Palace, and to be honest, the interiors were “meh.” I expected something grander. Then we walked into the Palace of Westminster, and the Lords Chamber took my breath away. I’ve been to every Newport mansion, every Venetian palazzo, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the Lords Chamber is the most beautiful room I have ever stood in. The carving, the gold leaf, the color, the works. It’s over the top, but it all came together anyway.

I found myself lecturing my kids about it. I told them, this room is a paradox. This is the house of a lot of criminals. Think how many people you could feed with the money behind one square inch of one statue in one corner of that palace. But without governments and crooks commissioning at this level, nobody makes anything this beautiful, and beauty at this level inspires the next generation to greatness.

London gets it, by the way. My kinda place. Every restaurant and hotel room in this city gets the lighting and the proportions right. We ate in a room covered, ceiling included, in one very risky green, and they somehow pulled it off. This may be the most design-literate city on earth, which is why it’s such a strong market for my brands. I even spotted a wallpaper in Parliament that looked like one of our own designs, and I’ve already told my youngest son to start working on the next palace commission. The wall coverings in there now are beautiful and predictable. We can do better.

Back in the ol’ USA, the government dropped new tariffs last Friday, a California recycling law landing on textile houses, a designer was arrested in Lake Arrowhead, and Missouri is leading the way on the professional licensing idea we’ve been hoping for. Government gives and government takes, I guess.

And thank you to everyone who shared last week’s RH exclusive. That one was our most-read issue ever.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

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🏭 INDUSTRY

Interior motives.
This one caught my eye. A 58-year-old Lake Arrowhead interior designer is sitting in the West Valley Detention Center facing nine felony and misdemeanor charges, including grand theft and diversion of construction funds. According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, a client paid her firm, Coronado by Design, $67,500 in October 2024 to remodel a kitchen and three bathrooms, then the designer ghosted them. According to Houzz, her project budgets range from $100,000 to $2 million, and detectives believe there could be more victims. Money flows through a designer’s hands by the millions. Clients hand money to unlicensed strangers and hope for the best, and on most projects nobody checks. Which leads me to the next story…

“[The designer] delayed the project with various excuses for nearly a year.”

— San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, via SFGATE

Licensed and bonded.
We have been calling for this forever. On July 13, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed Senate Bill 1233, an omnibus licensing bill that converts interior designer registration into full licensure and gives NCIDQ-certified interior designers the right to sign, stamp, and seal their own blueprints, no third-party architect required. Designer Kerry Schuette and her St. Louis colleagues won it the hard way, borrowing a play from Missouri’s cattle ranchers who lobby the state capitol every single week. Interior design is now regulated in 31 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and 20 of those allow sign-and-seal. Ours remains the one profession anyone can claim by waking up tomorrow and printing a business card. Clients rarely question an architect’s fees. A license, or stamp of approval, like the black rooster on a bottle of real Chianti, is how our industry could earn the same respect.

“They walk in with their big cowboy hats and their big belt buckles and everybody knows it’s Wednesday at the capitol. We made the decision to strategically speak to every senator and representative that we possibly could.”

— Kerry Schuette, founder of VVell Studio, via Business of Home

Off the charts.
A quick thank-you. Last week’s exclusive on the Chinese factories reverse-engineering the RH catalog reached 216% of our typical audience — our most-read issue we’ve ever put out. People passed it around and talked about it all over social media, especially on Reddit. Our chemical testing surprised people most: a Duke University lab screened sofa fabric from RH and from a Foshan dupe factory, and both came back clean. One Redditor summed up the mood better than I could. See below. If you missed the story, catch up now. If it made you smarter, send it to a colleague. This is how a four-person editorial team thrives.

“Luxury furniture pricing has always been a performance art, so honestly whoever outperformed them deserves some kind of award.”

— Redditor sam-otter90, via Reddit.com

The $76 million fixer-upper.
Ken Fulk is on the A-list of designers; he’s the man behind Sean Parker’s “Lord of the Rings” wedding and the Carbone restaurants, and a great longtime client of one of my brands. In 2022 he paid $13.3 million for four storied West Marin properties owned by the late chef Margaret Grade, vowing to resurrect the legendary Manka’s Inverness Lodge. Instead he inherited $2.3 million in undisclosed hotel taxes, zoning nightmares, and a renovation loan that has ballooned past $17.1 million. Now foreclosure lurks on the horizon. Fulk is now suing Grade’s estate and associates for $76.3 million, and his own description of the deal explains the whole disaster: “handshakes instead of documents.” Get it in writing, even with a dear friend. Especially with a dear friend.

“Ken works well with tech billionaires and oligarchs and people who literally have no idea what to do with their vast amounts of wealth. Ken has plenty of ideas of what they can do with their vast amounts of wealth.”
— Mayer Rus, West Coast editor of Architectural Digest, via The San Francisco Standard

📊 ECONOMY

Nobody moves, nobody buys.
Georgia Furniture Mart, the Atlanta-area dealer that opened in 1986, is shutting its two stores, joining Big Lots, Value City Furniture, American Freight, and 17 independent dealers that have shuttered this quarter, according to Furniture Today. Per eMarketer, sales at furniture stores are down about 8% since 2022, and the first two months of this year fell another 4.8% year over year. With mortgage rates and home prices this high, housing turnover sits near historic lows, and people who don’t move don’t buy wardrobes.

“The combination of elevated mortgage rates and home prices has pushed housing turnover rates near historic lows. And if people aren’t moving, there are fewer consumers in the market for a new couch or dining table.”

— Zak Stambor, senior analyst at eMarketer, via Business of Home

🤖 TECH

The end of busywork.
Avoice, a Y Combinator-backed startup, says it has built the first AI agents that can run the entire back end of an architecture studio. They claim the AI can handle specs, schedules, invoicing, timesheets, and all the boring operational stuff. Project management is information flowing back and forth. Is it in stock, how many yards, what’s the price per yard, when does it ship, where is it going. That is the easiest work in the world for AI, and its arrival in design firms will be a monumental shift. I’ve signed up for demos of these platforms as a potential client. I’ll write full reviews for Mr. Thread Insider readers August, so you don’t have to sit through the sales calls.

“An email lives in Gmail. The spec lives in one tool. The schedule lives in a spreadsheet. QA markups live in a PDF. The budget lives somewhere else. Every time something changes, someone has to manually stitch it all together.”

— Chawin Asavasaetakul, co-founder of Avoice, via Dezeen

🧵LOOSE THREADS

• A recent book, Claying Architecture: Making Machine and Material Kin, gathers 30-plus architects and researchers on clay 3D printing: 10,000 years of mud meets the robot arm.

• Enjoy some color porn: A Dictionary Of Color Combinations Vol 1 (Japanese Edition).

🎲 PLAYTIME

Congratulations to Rachel vdB., Hillary E., Justine B., Tullia P., Amy G., and Freddy V. for correctly solving our final word of the season: EXPAT! Outstanding work, threaders!

Thank you for an amazing Playtime season 2!
A big thank you to all threaders who played along.

🏆 The grand raffle winner

Congratulations, Martin R.! You’ve won the grand raffle draw! You will be receiving:

• A featured spotlight for you and your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.

• A special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

🎉 Special Honorable Mentions: A massive shoutout to Tullia P. and Hillary E. for topping our leaderboard with the highest overall points this season! While the random raffle draw crowned our single grand winner, your weekly precision throughout Season 2 was an incredible feat.

Playtime Season 3 is brewing!
Thank you all for being such loyal threaders. Rest up, because Playtime Season 3 is already brewing behind the scenes with fresh clues and new surprises. Keep an eye on your inbox for our upcoming launch date!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

Mr. Weft here, Mr. Thread’s British editor, taking over as art director for the week. This edition’s art is by Sir John Lavery, a Belfast-born, Glasgow- and Paris-trained painter of great rooms, active from the 1880s to the 1940s. Lavery is best known as a society portraitist, though he also recorded the great ceremonial and legal interiors of his day. In the Commons, members address each other in the third person, and a Privy Counsellor is ‘the right honorable gentleman.’ It’s hard to explain to Americans, but in English, that phrase is also a devastating insult. Try it yourself.

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our new members-only section. This is where we dive deeper into the big story of the week

A SIT DOWN WITH MR. THREAD

Caitlin Penny

Caitlin Penny trained as a designer, then took a job dressing the interiors of private jets for Gulfstream Aerospace, where she first crossed paths with Rose Tarlow. A decade ago she joined Tarlow’s Los Angeles furniture and textile house, moving from sales into operations, and today runs the business as Managing Director. That means Governor Newsom’s new law is her problem. Signed in September 2024, SB 707 makes California the first state to hold clothing and textile makers responsible for collecting, repairing, and recycling what they produce. Penny, who also chairs the board of the West Hollywood Design District, is registering Rose Tarlow now, and thinking hard about what a law written for fast fashion means for a house built on furniture designed to last forever. We had a lot of questions…

Read more

Dear Readers…

I started Mr. Thread to solve a problem in my own business. All the news, trends, and data I needed were scattered everywhere. The macroeconomic news that drives our industry was nowhere to be found. There is no index that tracks our niche. Between stock prices, index funds, interest and mortgage rate…

Read more

Hello readers…

Welcome to our new home. Last week we packed the boxes and moved Mr. Thread to Substack, and it feels right. That surprises me, because putting myself out there has never come easy. I’ve never wanted to be on TV, and I don’t chase interviews. Being a media voice holds zero appeal. Yet every Thursday I hit send on my opinions, and my stomach drops for a second. Then I remember I’m just a guy behind a monitor with no shoes on, and the feeling passes. Substack suits me.

I’m not a fan of the idiocy that drives short-form social media. I hate posting for self-promotion, and I’m not comfortable enough to be good at it (that’s a conversation for my therapist). For years, though, I watched the big content creators with a little bit of envy: the reach, the creative output, the networking. But a long-form journal gets me all of that without having to take a single selfie or beg people to “like and subscribe!”

Through Mr. Thread, I’ve already met people I had no other way to find: like a couple of hungry new founders who reached out last week. They’re running a genius new tech startup that is going to dramatically change the furniture, textile, and wallpaper industries. I’ll tell you about it in a future issue. And a young entrepreneur who’s building a Warren Buffett-style holding company in the high-end design space. And the lunch I had in Venice with a mill owner from Connecticut trying to make manufacturing cool again and return the pride to “Made in the USA.” The hits just keep coming, and I am so grateful for it. This newsletter has already made me a 10x better entrepreneur.

It’s funny to think that the idea for this journal came to me because I couldn’t find the trend data one of my brands needed. I solved my own problem, and thousands of you showed up. But…a warning if you’re a designer thinking about starting your own newsletter: the best interior design writing on the internet is on Substack right now, direct from the artists, and the bar is high. A newsletter will eat hours you don’t have. You better learn to love it, or there is no way it will succeed.

It’s uncomfortable to put yourself out there, over and over, until the right people notice. That’s what this week’s issue is about. A client is out there right now asking her friends for a recommendation. Give her a way to find you.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. 5 Correct Guesses Last Week. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

🏭 INDUSTRY

Don’t be a gatekeeper.
I’m new to Country Life magazine, but my British editor tells me it’s been in print since 1897. They just asked the UK’s best interior designers, architects, and country house experts to name the greatest craftspeople in Britain. Included are master carver Clunie Fretton (the Houses of Parliament, the V&A), shell artist Linda Fenwick, master mason Matthias Garn, and dozens more. A designer’s value lives in their sources: the perfect brass door handle, or an enviable handmade tile.

Most designers guard those names like state secrets, and for your own firm, that’s rational—shorter lead times, no clients going around you, and sources are hard-won intellectual property. But what’s good business for you is bad business for the industry. Your maker going out of business is a nightmare. So share the name; the craft survives, and the referral comes back around. One of my brands has never formally advertised in a century—it’s all based on word of mouth. Call it karma.

And a word for the makers reading this. A list like Country Life’s is the greatest free marketing a small workshop will ever get, and they won’t come knocking on your door. You have to put yourself out there. Ask your designer clients the uncomfortable question: “Do you know another designer who would love my work?” Then email that person and tell them who sent you. Your best ambassadors already buy from you—recruit them.

“When we were building the new Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, we were nearing the opening date and needed someone to carve the head of Pluto at speed. The amazing Clunie Fretton managed to carve the piece in the required timeframe and, now installed, it looks convincingly like a piece of genuine Baroque sculpture.”

— Francis Terry, architect, via Country Life

Picasso didn’t bill by the hour.
AD PRO opened its Grow Your Business special feature by asking which billing strategy is best for your firm—flat fee, hourly, or cost-plus—and their dozens of experts landed on “hybrid” as the new industry standard. After 30 years of working with interior designers, I can tell you that there is no perfect model. Each one has its own limits for either you or your clients. Hourly caps your income; you’re selling your time like a slave. Square footage invites the client with seven revisions. Markup turns you into a wholesaler with financial incentives misaligned with your clients. For sure, hybrid can help protect both sides, but then you get into complicated billing that becomes a painful time suck on its own.

I wish our industry could just price our work as the true artists that we are. Andy Warhol didn’t price his famous Polaroid portraits by the hours they took—he priced the art, the prestige, and the desire. Some designers have definitely reached this level, like Michael Smith or Axel Vervoordt. But breathing that rareified air is something that takes decades, and we all have to start somewhere.

The real work is finding a model you can sell with confidence in your market ($500 an hour works in New York and dies in Charlotte), then wrapping it in an airtight contract.

“Ninety percent of the time we charge a flat design fee when we start a job, which is worked out according to budget and the scale. Then we charge 35% commission on the wholesale price on all products.”

— Vicente Wolf, designer, via Architectural Digest

Out of the building.
Schumacher is at it again, and there seems to be no limit on its hold as the top dog in the high-end textiles space (at least from a growth perspective 😉).

According to Home Textiles Today, Schumacher will open two showrooms and design shops in Florida this September—3,000 square feet in Jacksonville by local designer Stephanie Jarvis, 6,000 in West Palm Beach by Palm Beach native Celerie Kemble—each carrying 7,000-plus fabrics, wallpapers, and trims, plus a serious Patterson Flynn rug presence. A fabric house going standalone brick-and-mortar is very, very brave, and I’m rooting hard for it. If Schumacher kicks ass with this model, it cracks open our design-center problem—maybe there is life outside the D&D Building after all. The brand has history in the state, too: Madonna’s Miami sitting room was dressed in creamy Schumacher damasks back in 1994.

“Florida is one of the largest centers of design in the country, and both Jacksonville and West Palm Beach have their own distinct identities, with a clear sense of who they are and how they live. We’ve designed each location to honor that, intending to bring the breadth of what Schumacher, Patterson Flynn, Tillett, Backdrop, and our broader family of brands have to offer in a way that feels tailored and genuinely relevant to each market. Florida is one of a kind, and it deserves design resources that treat it as such.”

— Emily Romero, Schumacher North America president, via Home Textiles Today

Japan’s best-kept secret.

Business of Fashion just mapped how Japanese mills won over global fashion: $6.2 billion in textile exports last year, denim for Levi’s, silk brocade for Chanel, Dior, and Gucci. The showstopper is Hosoo (I’m obsessed with it), founded in Kyoto in 1688 with roots in the city’s sixth-century silk trade and run today by the 12th generation of the same family.

You almost never hear about Japanese textiles in the D&D Building, and I can’t fully explain why—the distance, maybe, the language barrier, or a cult following that keeps it niche.

Our industry is starving for new stories, and this one has been building since the sixth century.

“One of Japan’s greatest strengths is its ability to connect tradition, industrial precision and material innovation. [They] embody a very particular relationship with time, craftsmanship, touch, material and mastered imperfection.”

— Ariane Bigot, associate fashion director, Première Vision, via The Business of Fashion

💰OPPORTUNITIES

The room is the spa.
JW Marriott Tokyo just debuted Mindful Rooms, a pilot by Yabu Pushelberg that builds wellness into the architecture itself—circadian lighting tuned to the local time zone, furniture angled toward natural light, and acoustic mapping calibrated to quiet the nervous system. The spa is no longer down the hall; the room is the spa.

Pay attention, because hotel rooms are how trends enter your clients’ homes—they sleep in one once, then call you wanting something just like it. Add AD PRO’s Longevity Home report and the analog-room movement, and the Overton window on wellness design is wide open. This is a service you can start selling today, and the designers and brands who learn the science first will own the niche.

“The truth is, we didn’t start out saying, ‘Let’s design a wellness hotel.’ That was never a checklist item. The starting point was much more human. We’ve both traveled for decades—long flights, jet lag, disorientation, that strange feeling of arriving somewhere before your body has adjusted. You become aware of what helps and comforts you and what doesn’t.”

— Glenn Pushelberg, cofounder, Yabu Pushelberg, via Surface

Higher education.
I was astonished to read in Home Accents Today that college families will blow past $100 billion in Back-to-campus spending for the first time—$103.5 billion, up 16.6%—according to the National Retail Federation. Dorm and apartment furnishings are the second-biggest category at $14.0 billion, up from $12.8 billion last year, with 67% of families buying. Wow. I’ve seen the appetite firsthand: every kid in my orbit who leaves for college asks me for pillows from one of my brands, in fun colors. And dorm design is already a real business. Mary Margaret Designs in Madison, Mississippi, does full-service dorm design and installation—soup to nuts—and has been featured everywhere from the Today show to People. A $14 billion market deserves more than a Pottery Barn run.

“The rise in college spending is being driven by increased purchasing plans across multiple categories. The percentage of consumers planning to purchase electronics has increased significantly this year, while several other categories are also attracting more shoppers than previous years.”

— Phil Rist, EVP of strategy, Prosper Insights, via Home Accents Today

📊 ECONOMY

Mobile homes, upwardly mobile.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act just became law without the president’s signature—the first genuine federal effort to build more housing in over 30 years. It cuts red tape for developers and bars large investors from snapping up single-family homes.

But the buried provision that matters most to us: manufactured homes no longer have to sit on a steel chassis, or pretend to be mobile. That one rule kept modular housing looking like trailers for decades. Now factory-built homes can have second stories and real architecture at a fraction of stick-built cost. This business should explode.

Somebody is going to draw a beautiful mid-century modular plan for folks to drop on a plot in Malibu, and get very rich. Now imagine these homes being delivered decorated and furnished. The opportunities are immense for all sides of our industry. This is GREAT NEWS!

“Manufactured homes are generally faster and cheaper to build than stick-built homes. But they have never been widely adopted because to meet federal standards, they have to be built on a steel chassis, which is expensive and also limits the size and style of home you can build (you’re basically limited to what looks a lot like a trailer). But under the new bill, they won’t need to have that steel chassis. And that change will allow other kinds of factory-built, modular homes to meet federal standards. They could have second stories, for example. They won’t need to pretend to be mobile.”

— Ronda Kaysen, housing reporter, via The New York Times

The fun tax.
CNBC reports “funflation” has followed Americans indoors. Xbox and Apple raised device prices in late June, Nintendo hiked the Switch 2 by 11%, and streaming and gaming subscriptions have surged 53% since 2019—while electricity is up 45%. That’s not a typo—electricity is up 45%. PNC’s card data shows Gen Z and millennial consumers cut home-entertainment transactions about 4% in June. When going out costs a fortune and staying in does too, the home has to earn its keep. Quietly, that’s the best argument going for the analog room, because billiards tables, libraries, and record players never send a price-hike email.

“The ability to play games and get out of my own life for a second was a major way for me to have some sort of happiness. Now, the overall economy is getting worse, and I don’t have any distractions from it.”

— Alyx Green, graduate student and gamer,

Green shoots, with an asterisk.
The CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor clocked June as the ninth straight month of retail growth, with core sales up 10.08% year over year. Furniture and home furnishings stores rose 4.92%—with an asterisk, because last June was depressed by tariff whiplash and the comparison flatters everybody. Still: after the parade of ugly reports and uglier stocks we’ve covered this year, I’ll take it. We’ll take every tiny flash of light and hope it turns into something strong. It’s early. Watch July.

“The summer shopping season got off to a strong start in June. Consumers took advantage of summer sales events, and many got an early jump on back-to-school shopping.”

— Matthew Shay, NRF president and CEO, via Home Accents Today

Luxury finds its pulse.
Well, this is definitely some welcome news for those of us selling to the luxury client. Richemont’s quarterly sales jumped 20% at constant exchange rates to €6.33 billion ($7.2 billion)—analysts expected half that. The US, luxury’s growth engine, ran up 27%, and Bernstein said the report “smashes expectations.”

Before anyone declares the luxury winter over: Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels are jewelry houses, and jewelry kept its scarcity while Gucci and even Hermès diluted theirs by putting their handbags absolutely everywhere you look. Richemont protected its brands from oversaturation, and it’s being paid for that discipline now. LVMH, Kering, and Hermès report at the end of the month, and I’ll get my popcorn ready to settle in and read them. If the strength turns out to be macro, celebrate—luxury buyers who are buying again eventually spend fortunes on interiors.

🤖 TECH

Low country, high demand.
The Financial Times just dug into how Charleston became a magnet for creative entrepreneurs: the county’s population grew 5% from 2021 to 2025, downtown’s median home price has jumped 191% since 2019 to $2.5 million, and office space runs $32.54 per square foot against Manhattan’s $66.82. No surprise here.

My company counts some of its greatest clients in Charleston, and the late, great Dave Dawson saw it early—he left California to build Urban Electric there. Last week I told you to find your niche and go where you’re needed. Charleston is what that looks like when it works. If you visit, eat at Poogan’s Porch (the shrimp and grits). Thank me later.

While I’m on the topic of award-winning food, why isn’t there a Michelin Guide for the interior design industry?

“Nobody is going to a dinner party talking about how late they worked. It’s not that they’re not working hard, they just value the other aspects of life equally.”

— Stefanie Brechbuehler, cofounder, Workstead, via the Financial Times

Millions for a shack.
News just in: Nantucket leads the nation in pricey vacation homes—55% of the island’s housing stock, the highest share of any US market, per Realtor.com. The luxury tier starts at $14.1 million, the steepest threshold in the country; the median listing hit $4,925,000 in June, more than double a decade ago; and $1 million to $2 million buys a median 1,011 square feet. Half the island is conservation land, so nobody is making more of it. It’s charming and untouched, like storybook pictures, and super exclusive.

For designers, enclaves like this are where budgets lose gravity. The clients are already there, waiting on a ferry with a checkbook. Go prospect the little islands.

“Many times people come here with a budget and criteria, and sometimes they find that. Regardless of increasing their budget by 20% to 50%, it still doesn’t give them what they want. There’s very limited supply, huge amount of demand.”

— Bernadette Meyer, broker, Maury People Sotheby’s International Realty, via Realtor.com

📈 TRENDS

Flatpack futures.
The Wall Street Journal reports Gen Z and millennial collectors have turned vintage IKEA into investment pieces. The 1971 Impala lounge chair—about $354 in today’s dollars when new—is listed for over $12,000 on 1stDibs. The average IKEA item on Chairish now runs nearly $1,000, and a Verner Panton IKEA chair bought for $350 lists for $2,900. It’s baseball-card collecting for furniture.

The irony is thick: the company that democratized design has spawned a collectors’ market most people can’t afford. The lesson travels to every brand—discontinued special collections in durable materials become collectibles. Check your garage.

This could also be an incredibly lucrative side hustle for a designer—who has a better eye for spotting the pieces that’ll make a killing on the secondary market?

“I really appreciate that there’s a limited number of them. I definitely see it as an investment piece and a piece of art, but I wouldn’t sell it.”

— Gina Fuchs, collector, via The Wall Street Journal

Furniture with commitment issues.

IKEA’s new Kompishäng collection hits US stores July 31. There are 11 pieces, zero assembly, designed to move “with your body alone,” including nesting stools, a foldable desk with a built-in handle, and a jute bag that doubles as a planter. IKEA developed it with London twentysomethings who move every year and own no car, and the logistics make sense when people buy their first homes later than ever.

But the spirit is what I love. This is furniture made to leave the house—carried to the park, set down on a sidewalk for an impromptu café, or hauled to a friend’s for cards. Very Gen Z, and gloriously anti-algorithm. Good week for IKEA.

“This table isn’t just a temporary solution. It’s designed to accompany life’s transitions—equally at home in a first apartment, a family house, or even a retirement space.”

— David Wahl, IKEA designer, via Dwell

Grandma’s revenge.
House Beautiful is calling it: grandma’s floral sofa is back. It’s the micro-trend inside the maximalism macro we’ve tracked all year—pattern finally landing on the biggest object in the room. At my brands, we watched people spend a decade too scared to put our boldest patterns on a sofa; too much gold, too much color. Those same patterns are flying onto sofas again, and I love it. The sofa has been hiding in witness-protection neutrals for years, and rooms felt like it.

One warning from a fabric man: choose the wrong pattern on the biggest object in the room and it’s a fucking disaster. Curate hard.

“We primarily use florals on sofas because sofas are one of the largest pieces of furniture in a room, and they can feel so heavy. Florals give them a little visual movement and make the space feel lighter.”

— Lucy O’Brien, principal and owner, Tartan & Toile, via House Beautiful

🧵 LOOSE THREADS

• Former fashion designer Matthew Ames has opened Walker Street Market in the Berkshires—70-plus makers of handmade furniture, ceramics, and textiles in one restored Lenox storefront. This is what craft retail should look like.

• A 3,000-year-old Egyptian painter’s palette still holds its original pigments—colors that have outlasted every trend since the pharaohs. Makes me proud to be Egyptian.

• Designer Max Sinsteden drenched his Rhode Island cottage in Schumacher’s Stars and Stripes collection—we’re staying in the American spirit one week longer.

• The Home Textiles Sourcing show makes its West Coast debut in Los Angeles July 21–23. I think it’s the Dunder Mifflin of textile shows, with some of the wackiest fabrics you will ever see. If you’re attending, reply with a field report and take some pictures for us.

🎲 PLAYTIME

Tough crowd, threaders: 5 correct guesses last week. Hats off to Jeffrey W., Tullia P., Victoria & Son Team, Jan W., and Ericka S. for identifying the cloth known to every gambler: BAIZE!

We’re down to our last 2 games before the big raffle on July 29th! Every single guess stacks up your points, so don’t sit this one out. Threaders, it’s playtime!

The Clue: Photographers and self-promoters are obsessed with it, you can get arrested for it, and it can even kill you.

1. Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.

2. Click the button below then type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

Submit your answer here

The Stakes
Every correct guess earns you points that accumulate for our upcoming raffle. The more you play, the higher your chances of winning. We’ll be holding the grand draw on July 29th! Our lucky winner gets:

• A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.

• Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART

Obviously this week’s art is inspired by putting yourself out there. In my search for racy paintings, I discovered the nudes of Amedeo Modigliani.

Amedeo Modigliani died broke at age 35. A century later his nude portraits sell for nine figures plus.

He never waited to be validated. He sketched strangers in Montparnasse cafés and traded the drawings for meals. He painted everyone in his orbit. His only solo show got shut down by police on opening day, and he kept working anyway.

We chose his art this week because it’s a reminder that visibility comes before validation, not after. Modigliani put his work in front of people relentlessly, long before the market cared. The world can’t buy what it never sees so put yourself out there!

🕵🏼‍♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our new members-only section. This is where we dive deeper into the big story of the week.

Yesterday, Business of Home ran a two-hour workshop, “The Inbox Influencer,” led by Ericka Saurit, a brand strategist who led brand work at Airbnb and built brand experiences for TAG Heuer and Estée Lauder. If you’re thinking of launching an email newsletter to boost your business, I took the class, and here’s what you need to know.

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Saurit’s thesis is t…

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Hello readers…

I’m writing to you from an empty house. My youngest son is at camp, my middle daughter is off to Venice, and my oldest is in Texas with his buddies. For the first time since I became a father, I’m starting to feel what it’s like to be in an empty nest—while running a century-old heritage brand, a large team, and complicated global operations from a home office in the middle of America, in a tie-dye shirt, on a Thursday.

For about a minute I felt sorry for myself. It’s lonely at the top and all that nonsense. Then I pictured the guy in a wool suit on a packed, steamy subway platform in Manhattan, sweating through his shirt, an hour and a half from home, staring at spreadsheets and deadlines and thinking about the boss he hates. I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything.

None of this freedom came for free. In 1969, my mom and dad left their parents, a dozen siblings, and hundreds of cousins behind in Egypt and boarded a Pan Am flight with no money and no English. I was born surrounded by immigrant hustle and that’s what pushes me forward in business. I believe my enthusiasm for risk is predisposed in my DNA. So a part of it is inherited, but it needed a big injection of inspiration to become reality.

The greatest lesson my father ever taught me: having a boss is the hardest way to be rich and free in America. But to earn the freedom of working for yourself, you have to be blind to risk, and have a supreme belief that hard work and skill will always find a way.

He lived by his words, and that has profoundly impacted my life. I was born a confused spirit but I grew up to learn that to be happy, I needed freedom. Being able to own my own businesses while enjoying my life and family has become my greatest accomplishment. And it has become my mission to inspire others how to do it. Even my own supremely talented staff—while it’s bittersweet, I give them this same advice. I’m profoundly proud of any of them who find the way to grow and one day be their own boss, even if that means they have to leave my company to do it.

Speaking of risk, RH just hitched itself to a Formula One team. Yinka Ilori bet his first furniture collection on a high-street partnership, with the cheapest piece costing just twelve bucks. John Constable, whose paintings hang throughout this issue, walked away from the family business to paint clouds.

Maybe I’m getting philosophical, but I believe taking chances with skill and courage beats safety every time; you just have to put the work in. If your gut has been telling you to make the call, send the email, or start the crazy side project, consider this journal as proof that it works.

One more thing: today we launch Mr. Thread Insider, a members-only section at the bottom of every issue. It’s where we go deeper on the data and the reports behind the headlines—plus the takes too spicy for the free edition. It’s for those who like to take a few risks themselves. Scroll down and take a look.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. 11 Correct Guesses Last Week. Let’s see who has the “eye” to claim the win this time and secure a spot for our grand prize draw. Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

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Industry

Family and the industry
The design industry is about family, relationships, humanity—and you see that most clearly when tragedy strikes. There’s no other industry I’d rather be part of. We use beauty to heal suffering in the work we make, but it’s how we treat each other that truly lifts us up.

This week, the design world lost one of its own: Dave Dawson, co-founder of Urban Electric Co. Many of our readers may not know who this man was, and we think you should. Beyond how awesome a human he was, the company he built, Urban Electric Co., and the organization he created, the Makers Alliance, are some of the finest examples of creativity matched with business excellence—and the magic that combination can create. And when you instill that with a kind and uplifting culture, you truly have a one-of-one model we can all look to as we grow our businesses.

We wanted to share some of the outpouring of love and support for him:

@allisonelebashinteriors:
“He was a beacon of light and a true legend, leading the design world in all the best ways.”

@rhbirdwell:
“Dave Dawson—you are the best leader, dad, husband and friend I’ve ever known.”

@eric.chang.design:
“We are all better business people, leaders and human beings because of what he created.”

@schumacher1889:
“He led with generosity, warmth, and genuine kindness, embracing those around him in a way that left a lasting impression on everyone fortunate enough to know him.”

@twenty2wallpaper:
“Dave helped cultivate a creative community of American makers - the Makers Alliance.”

@rachelhalvorson:
“Dave Dawson always used to say, ‘How you do one thing is how you do everything.’”

@erikampowell:
“His pursuit of excellence and quality and beauty are legacies that are tangible.”

Leave a comment

Opportunities

Pole position
RH just announced a multi-year partnership with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team this week. That makes RH the team’s “global interior design and luxury furnishings curator.” I didn’t see this one coming. Beginning late 2026, RH-designed hospitality spaces will roll out trackside in Abu Dhabi, then Miami, Monaco, and Silverstone, plus the team’s U.K. headquarters.

Say what you want about Gary Friedman—and I have—but this is thinking big. Here’s my challenge to you: name the Fortune 500 company nobody in our industry has thought to call. One of my brands could land Ferrari with the right path into the company and a compelling enough pitch. So could yours.

A warning from someone with skin in the game: I’ve done exactly one licensing deal in 15 years, and I’m only now signing my second, because this time I know what to vet—the partner’s audience, their culture, creative control, and every line of the contract. Take the risk, but with your eyes wide open.

“The Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team has established the benchmark for precision, innovation and performance, making this a natural collaboration between two organizations united by an unwavering commitment to excellence. Together, we have the opportunity to create immersive environments unlike anything experienced in sport, blurring the lines between driving and design.”

— Gary Friedman, RH founder, chairman, and CEO, via Furniture Today

How to blow your own trumpet
Architectural Digest just published “30 Ways to Get the Word Out About Your Firm.” There’s nothing groundbreaking in here, folks. Podcasts, giveaways, pad your email signature. Meanwhile, every survey of interior designers reports the same number-one anxiety: where the next project is coming from.

The AD100 sit on waiting lists two and three years deep while the other 99% refresh their inboxes. And before you pack for New York because contracts on $10 million-plus condos nearly doubled last quarter—38, up from 21—don’t. A million designers had the idea before you.

In my opinion, the real formula for success for any designer looking to grow their business has three parts: a portfolio presented beautifully online, a digital marketer you’ve recruited and briefed properly, and networking like it’s your job—because it is. None of these are easy. They take risking some of your own money, plus hard work, savvy, and a healthy dose of humility to ask others for help. But if you do them, and do them at an exceptional level, you will rise above 99% of your peers and start winning new projects—until you have to tell new clients, “Get on the waiting list.”

Then, find your niche, and don’t make it Manhattan. Hot markets like Charlotte are full of wealthy clients settling for the furniture store’s in-house designer. Go where you’re needed.

Trends

Design can heal
Brescia, Italy is getting a new Main and Children’s Hospital from Park Associati and Carlo Ratti Associati: 745 beds, winter gardens at the end of every wing, a children’s building of three stacked cylinders wrapped in therapeutic gardens, and a one-kilometer Green Ring of squares and paths stitching the campus to the city. You gotta see the images.

Construction starts in 2028 with an initial 274 million euros ($313 million). This is the trend I root for hardest—our cold, gray institutions finally treating design as medicine. The IIDA’s new 196-page Futures Readiness Index predicts designers will soon tie fees to health outcomes. Design a home that lowers a client’s blood pressure and charge for the result. The flip side is getting sued when the anxiety readings go the wrong way. Getting paid your value is this industry’s second-biggest complaint, right behind finding the next job, and outcome-based fees are the first serious answer I’ve seen.

“With Green Ring, the hospital once again faces the city. A large semicircular atrium, like a smile, welcomes those arriving. The buildings open to the light, air, and the landscape of the Brescia Prealps.”

— Carlo Ratti, founder, Carlo Ratti Associati, via Dezeen

A little bit of joy for $12
Yinka Ilori launched his first full furniture and homeware collection this week—40 pieces with U.K. high-street retailer Dunelm, the start of a three-year partnership. Five chairs, a mushroom lamp, rugs, curtains, a bed, all channeling the eclectic 1960s and ‘70s spirit of the home he grew up in and the Leicester community where Dunelm began as a market stall in 1979. The cheapest piece is £9 ($12). The lamp is £65 ($87). The swivel chair is £299 ($400), and the bed is £799 ($1,065).

High-end brands have chased Ilori for years; he picked the affordable one because it gave him free rein. I love this. The kid who buys a $12 piece of good design today is the client commissioning custom work in 15 years.

Scarcity has its place—we covered that lesson with RH—but beauty is good for the soul at every price point, and the brands that remember it grow the whole pie.

“I’m really proud of this collection, and I think it’s really going to change the way brands think about how they can make design a lot more accessible. Sometimes we forget that many people who want good design can’t afford it, and this collection really, I hope, is going to change the way we think about that.”

— Yinka Ilori, designer, via Dezeen

Selling Americana
Business of Fashion’s guide to Selling Americana at 250 reveals brands caught between opportunity and anxiety. Search interest in “western,” “varsity,” and “American flag” has jumped fivefold since 2022, and Ralph Lauren’s America-forward bet helped push sales up 15% last year. Yet almost none of the major players—Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, J.Crew, Gap, L.L.Bean—said “anniversary” out loud. Only Lingua Franca threw a public party (and they hate Trump).

The takeaway for interiors is that consumers have already separated the aesthetic from the politics. And Americana as a style is having a moment. I personally love everything about it (with one of my favorites being this year’s Holland & Sherry new collection with the brilliant William Peace.) The translation is straightforward: maximalism, plaids and checks, wood, natural materials, earthy tones. Sell the heritage and richness, skip the flag-waving. Brands are too nervous (or cowardly?) to claim the moment, which leaves that whitespace open for whoever’s willing to take it.

“The idea that someone can be labeled as a Trump supporter based on what they’re wearing and is worth getting mad about just started to feel very tired. People got very burned out on trying to assign profound meaning to every aesthetic choice.”

— Biz Sherbert, writer of the American Style newsletter, via The Business of Fashion

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Economy

“A sea of red”
I follow the stock market obsessively so you don’t have to, and there are red lights flashing across the board. The broad consumer discretionary sector (XLY), which represents non-essential goods and services, is down 1.78%, dragging down names like Home Depot (-2.57%) and Lowe’s (-3.64%).

Meanwhile, homebuilders D.R. Horton (-4.43%) and Toll Brothers (-4.00%) took an even harder hit. Luxury isn’t providing its usual safe haven either: Kering (-4.98%), Hermès (-4.24%), and Estée Lauder (-3.13%) all pulled back sharply.

Over on the Mr. Thread watchlist, the pain is concentrated in furniture and e-commerce, with Lovesac plunging 9.06% and Wayfair down 6.98%. Ouch. A tiny handful of outliers bucked the trend: 1stDibs (+3.24%), Flexsteel (+0.62%), and First Industrial Realty (+0.33%).

Blame the headlines—markets hate a ceasefire that won’t hold. Nobody knows if the bombing is over. We do know uncertainty is terrible for people buying sofas.

Tech

AI GEO search
Google made AI Overviews the default this past May, and the era of scrolling blue links ended with it. My wife, a late adopter of tech, still refuses to touch ChatGPT, but even her Google searches are robot-assisted now, and it’s not ending there. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index puts generative AI at 53% population-level adoption within three years—faster than the personal computer, faster than the internet. A new discipline called GEO (generative engine optimization) has already spawned an industry.

I’m sounding the alarm because your clients have stopped searching. They’re asking a machine for recommendations, and the machine answers with whoever it trusts. BCG’s new consumer study says 79% of luxury consumers already use AI to research purchases, and they trust it twice as much as social media and influencers.

At one of my brands we saw this coming a year ago and rebuilt our content strategy around deeply informed articles backed by a century of subject-matter expertise. AI loves that type of content. If you sell anything online—fabric, furniture, or design services—this is the only marketing initiative you should be thinking about this quarter.

“SEO is link math—backlinks, rankings, click-through. GEO is citation math—does the model extract you, attribute you, and surface you inside the answer?”

— Ronn Torossian, founder, 5W AI Communications, via Architectural Digest

Loose Threads

• A superfan spent 900 hours building a miniature Love Island USA villa, an homage to the prestige, high-brow show that has elevated the art of television.

• A girl’s best friend is now on sale: De Beers is slashing diamond prices for a shrinking group of buyers.

• Elle Decor revisits Madison Square Garden, Penn Station, and New York’s landmarks law

• Our founding father just got a fresh coat of spackle. George Washington’s Mount Vernon is getting a loving restoration ahead of America’s 250th.

• Egypt has uncovered a lost Byzantine-era city in the Western Desert—my homeland never stops giving.

• Farewell to Aldo Spinelli, the Poliform co-founder who helped carry Italian design to the world. A giant of our trade.

• Mayor Mamdani approved a record $323 million in culture funding for New York City. Whatever your politics, that is real money for beauty.

Playtime

Congratulations to Adrienne L., Amy G., Hillary E., Tullia P., Cindy G., Matt Q., Freddy V., Martin R., Ginger S., Rico V., and Todd S. for correctly guessing the word of the week last issue: FAHRENHEIT! Great work, threaders!

🚨 We’re down to our last 3 games before the big raffle on July 29th! Every single guess stacks up your points, so don’t sit this one out. Threaders, it’s playtime!

The Clue: The cloth known to every gambler.

1. Piece together the mystery word based on the clue provided above.

2. Click HERE to submit your answer.

3. Type your answer in the subject field and hit send!

The Stakes

Every correct guess earns you points that accumulate for our upcoming raffle. The more you play, the higher your chances of winning. We’ll be holding the grand draw on July 29th! Our lucky winner gets:

• A featured spotlight for you/your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.

• Another special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.

Stay sharp,

Mr. Needle

This week’s art

This week I went looking for paintings about risk, with a somber vibe, in light of the sad passing of Dave Dawson. I landed on John Constable. Constable was the son of a prosperous mill owner, groomed to take over the family corn business, and he walked away from all of it to paint clouds and hay carts. He courted Maria Bicknell for seven years against her family’s wishes and married her anyway. The Royal Academy finally admitted him at 52—by a single vote. Hope you enjoy his work as much as I do.

Mr. Thread Insider

Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our new members-only section. This is where we go deeper into the big story of the week.

What luxury buyers want now.
Boston Consulting Group and Altagamma surveyed 10,000 luxury consumers across 11 countries for the 12th True-Luxury Global Consumer Insights study. We read it so you don’t have to. Five things worth your time…

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Business of Fashion and McKinsey just surveyed more than 2,000 luxury clients across the US and China. We read the 65 pages so you don’t have to. Here are the five things you need to know…

1. Craftsmanship is no longer the differentiator. It’s all about feeling now. Craft now ranks 9th of 10 desirability drivers in the US and dead last in China. Emotional c…

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🎣 We love our readers
Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better business, make more beauty, and leave the world a little better for it. That’s it.

If you know a colleague or designer who'd benefit from our weekly journal, we'd love it if you shared the…

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June 18th, 2026 - Go Knicks 🏆

Hello readers…

Three years ago I ran a contest at my company with a cash prize: drop our fabrics into Midjourney and show me the most creative interior you could dream up using our fabrics. These were the clumsy early days—you had to write prompts through Discord, and I made little screen-share …

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🌻 Spread the word, make more beauty
Face it. Making beautiful things is one of the hardest ways to make money — and the creative industry, for all its ingenuity, runs some of the most complicated businesses on earth. 

Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better bus…

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🌻 Spread the word, make more beauty
Face it. Making beautiful things is one of the hardest ways to make money — and the creative industry, for all its ingenuity, runs some of the most complicated businesses on earth. 

Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better busi…

Read more

🌻 Spread the word, make more beauty
Face it. Making beautiful things is one of the hardest ways to make money — and the creative industry, for all its ingenuity, runs some of the most complicated businesses on earth.

Mr. Thread is the work of a four-person team driven by a single mission: help a creative industry do better busine…

Read more

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If you know someone who'd find our weekly journal useful, we would be very grateful if you send them the below link. Thanks!

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