Press Enter / Return to begin your search.

How Goodwill Is Refining Its Stores To Appeal To A Wider Audience

The charity organization has been opening stylish, well-curated boutique stores in affluent areas in an effort to expand their retail operation.

Upon entering Rare, a boutique in Anaheim, California, customers are greeted with chicly dressed mannequins and standing racks full of designer clothing. Vintage furniture is arranged in a lounge area in the corner, below a cluster of hanging succulents. In the back of the store, behind a set of very DIY-looking book shelves that double as a reading area, a sign printed on a wall of stacked books boasts, “We are anything but ordinary. We are Rare.”

Read Full Story

Read More

An Ex-Apple Engineer Takes On The Furniture Industry With Couches You Can FedEx

Campaign, a Bay Area startup, yanks buying furniture into the 21st century.

Brad Sewell—formerly a design and manufacturing engineer at Apple—thinks we’re buying furniture all wrong. The problems, as Sewell told Co.Design, lie in high shipping costs, lengthy shipping time, and crappy materials that won’t hold up over the years. His company Campaign, which launched this week, seeks to upend the way we think about our furniture.

Read Full Story

Read More

New Installation Invades Central London With 100,000 Balloons

Charles Pétillon’s Heartbeat looks like a giant cumulonimbus cloud hovering above visitors’ heads at London’s Covent Garden.

Paris-based artist Charles Pétillon has a reputation for filling abandoned spaces with ethereal balloon formations. For his first installation in a public space and his largest undertaking to date, Heartbeat, he injects London’s lively and historic Covent Garden with 100,000 hovering white balloons.

Read Full Story

Read More

Obama Administration To Open Wearable Tech R&D Center In Silicon Valley

The White House and the Department of Defense are working with the private sector to build flexible, wearable electronics.

The Obama administration and the Pentagon are giving the wearables industry a big push. On Friday, defense secretary Ash Carter will announce that the Department of Defense is investing $75 million in a “flexible hybrid electronics” innovation center in Silicon Valley; in addition to the Pentagon’s contribution, the new institute will receive more than $90 million in funding from academia, corporate interests, and local governments for a total of about $171 million.

Read Full Story

Read More

Staff Recommender: Zacqary Adam Xeper, Who Makes This Website Pretty

The best things on the Internet this week, curated by Fast Company employees.

Zacqary Adam XeperPhoto: Celine Grouard for Fast Company

Name: Zacqary Adam Xeper
Role at Fast Company: I’m a web developer, specializing in front-end—that means the stuff that happens on your device, as opposed to the stuff that happens on our servers. I make things look pretty for you. Ever looked at one of our slideshows on your phone? Aren’t those spinning 3-D cards cool? You’re welcome.
Twitter: @XerxesQados
Titillating Fact: In my spare time, I am a purple fox named Xerxes. If you’re in downtown Pittsburgh on that one weekend in late June/early July when the streets are overrun by people wearing full-body mascot-style animal suits, I’ll probably be one of them. Yes, I’ll be overheating; that’s what happens when you go outside in the middle of summer wearing a couch. But I do it anyway.

Read Full Story

Read More