Archives for April 2022

Bookstores are back. And more local and niche than ever.

April 22, 2022 by Erica Carnevalli Leave a Comment

At Pillow-Cat Books in the East Village, animals have taken over. While there is only one real animal — that’s the shop’s owner, Cleo Le-Tan’s cat, who is always in the eight-months-old shop — the shelves are stocked with all varieties of species. There’s Elmo from Sesame Street, Snoopy from Peanuts, and of course Peter Rabbit. Le-Tan says the store’s organization makes perfect sense. “We can have any sort of photo book with animals or any novel with an animal, even just a pet,” she added. “So it’s kind of niche, but also broad.”

As the pandemic recedes, Pillow-Cat is an exemplar of a new breed of bookshop that’s hoping to stand out against the elephant in the room: Amazon.

Pet owners warm up to freeze dry taxidermy

April 18, 2022 by Cole Horton Leave a Comment

When it became clear that Pierre’s days were numbered, Derrick Holland began making arrangements for after his beloved Yorkshire terrier passed. The first order of business: preparing his “best friend” for the freezer.

Pierre was preserved indefinitely thanks to the handiwork of Chuck Rupert, one of the nation’s preeminent freeze dry taxidermists. For around $800, Mr. Rupert shepherded Pierre through a five-month process to extract all of the moisture from the Yorkie’s body while preserving his original size, shape and silky coat.

“Pierre looks the same now as the day we brought him home,” says Mr. Holland, 52, from Granite Falls, North Carolina. “While nothing is like having your pet back alive, this is the next best thing.”

“Let me ask my DNA” – when genes become our health advisor, family album and shopping buddy

April 15, 2022 by Lisa-Elena Rennau 1 Comment

If you were offered a prediction of how likely you are to develop a chronic disease throughout your life – would you want to know?

For Amanda Barrett, the answer was “yes.” Given some concerning traits in her family history, the 33-year-old mother from Smyrna, Tennessee, wanted to find out which genes she had potentially inherited and passed on. She turned to 23andMe, the Sunnyvale, California-based direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing platform, which in July 2021 first told her that she maintains a notable risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

Barrett didn’t wait long before making adjustments to her day-to-day routine based on the suggestions she’d received. “I have added things to my diet and make sure to get plenty of sleep as well as play brain games to keep my mind fresh,” Barrett says.

She’s just one in 66 million in the U.S., alone. In 2021, that number – or one in five Americans – had ordered a DTC genetic test, up 450% from the 12 million who did so in 2018, according to a Consumer Reports survey. The global consumer genomics market is expected to grow by an annual 19.4% until 2028, a report by market research company Grand View Research showed, as offerings expand to include not only evaluating disease risk and tracking back ancestors, but dietary and other lifestyle suggestions.

For startups in the genomics testing industry, along with well-established players like 23andMe, that growth presents tantalizing opportunities – particularly as investors see the traction as a sign of more to come.

Chicken Feet, Duck Heads, Kangaroo Tails (And Other Strange Things) Making Its Way To A Dog Bowl Near You

April 8, 2022 by Jasleen Chawla Leave a Comment

TikTok, in the COVID-19 pandemic, was largely thought to be an app showcasing funny dance videos. But as many pet parents already know, it’s also a great place to learn how to fix your pet a fancy feast.

But not the kind that involves kibble. Just as people increasingly care about what they put into their bodies, they also want to know that Fido is eating a nutritionally balanced diet, and oftentimes the only way to know that is by preparing it yourself

Cue the pet influencers. Cindy Ley is part of a growing genre of pet chef Tiktokers, who’ve gone viral as more people take their pet’s health to heart. While Ley said that she only started her TikTok account (@remithecanecorso) in January of this year, by the first week of March she has garnered over 66,000 followers. Ley credits her success to posting raw dog food content that contains tips, autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), and her journey as a dog mom to her beloved Cane Corso, Remi.

A tireless data scientist leader on a journey to make tech more inclusive

April 5, 2022 by Erica Carnevalli Leave a Comment

Gabriela de Queiroz, chief data scientist in AI at IBM and founder of R-Ladies and AI Inclusive.

Few people understand the gender imbalance women in tech face better than Gabriela de Queiroz.

While she was promoted to chief data scientist in artificial intelligence at IBM last May, she’s a rarity in the world of AI. At Facebook and Google, respectively, just 15% and 10% of AI researchers are women, according to a study in 2020 by the AI Now Institute of New York University. Another study by the Navigating Broader Impacts of AI Research pointed out that biased predictions are mostly caused by imbalanced data but that the demographics of engineers also play a role, as reported by VentureBeat.

She swapped press releases for pressed juices: Inside a PR maven’s mission to launch a health empire and empower her community

April 5, 2022 by Lisa-Elena Rennau Leave a Comment

On a sleepy street in Jamaica, Queens, lies an inconspicuous small shop. It’s a quiet corner in an easy-to-miss part of town, where a dark green awning adorns the entry to a juice bar.

In a family home a few steps away, the smell of steaming ginger tea fills the air. White block letters on a black stoneware mug spell out “THE BOSS”.

The clock shows 4:30 AM. Dawn Kelly’s day begins.

By the time corporate America awakes, Kelly has worked for three hours – responding to customer queries, making social media announcements, researching collaboration opportunities, and scheduling afternoon meetings with journalists.

She doesn’t own a PR agency, nor does she work as a communications executive in a large corporation – not anymore. Dawn Kelly runs The Nourish Spot, a salad and smoothie bar in Jamaica, Queens. But pressed juices haven’t always been her gig. Prior to opening her shop in 2016, Kelly had spent three decades working in public relations.

Careful! Students Could Drive Small Startups Out of Business!

April 5, 2022 by Ni Dan Leave a Comment

Zona Chen, a graduate student at New York University, just got her groceries delivered to her front doorstep within 15 minutes of placing the order on Getir. She only paid $5 for two bags of groceries, thanks to the free $25 given to first-time customers. Right after getting the groceries, Chen sent her boyfriend an invitation to use the app, which would give both her and her boyfriend a $25 credit to use.

“ I think I only spent like $20 on $100 worth of groceries this month,” said Chen, who has benefited from the growing legion of rapid grocery delivery services, which kicked off in the Big Apple since the pandemic began in March 2020

There’s Getir, Gorillas, 1520, Buyk, and JOKR and Fridge No More–all hoping to make inroads in an industry valued at $192 Billion by 2025.

To get there, however, they’re relying on giveaways. Free credits here, free delivery there. While those discounts may indeed drive people to try a new service–it remains an open question of whether they’ll buy it. For startups these incentives are risky. Sure you get people in the door, but they may not be the people you want–that is, like Chen, they may only stick around long enough to get a freebie.

Already, companies are feeling the weight of these tough customers. 1520, one of the fast grocery NYC-based delivery companies that emerged in the last year, has shut down after burning through around $8 million seed funding from venture capital firms.

Beyond the billboards: Shivani Persad is more than just a model

April 3, 2022 by Anita Ramaswamy Leave a Comment

Shivani Persad has walked the runway for fashion brands and appeared on Times Square billboards representing multinational makeup companies. Today, on our early-morning Zoom call, she is – quite literally – a model off-duty.

Meeting her is like meeting someone you’ve known your entire life, but only as an observer. I’ve done a double take upon noticing her eyes looking down at me from an advertisement as I bought underwear at Target, or as I perused skincare products at Costco. She’s ubiquitous – her image is everywhere all at once.

Yet, Persad is so much more than a pretty face. She’s a passionate activist and advocate.

The ex-vegetarian butchers helping New Yorkers eat better meat

April 1, 2022 by Cole Horton Leave a Comment

SOME PEOPLE WEAR their hearts on their sleeves. J. Fox wears his on a hat. The simple black baseball cap covering his mop of brown hair is stitched with just one word – “grassfed” – but it is a promise he has been making to customers for ten years.

Mr. Fox and his husband, Kevin Haverty, own Hudson & Charles, a whole-animal butcher shop which sells locally-raised, sustainable meat at two outposts in New York City. He knows these buzzwords make people’s eyes glaze over – “sustainable is even on shitty cereal boxes now” – but in his world, they are an ethos and not just a label.

“We give people an alternative to conventionally-raised animals that you buy in the supermarket,” Fox says. And when “conventionally-raised” can be code for “animals in cages having their beaks snipped off, wallowing in their own manure and getting prophylactic antibiotics because they’re living too close to each other and passing diseases back and forth,” the stakes are high.

Hudson & Charles is part of a growing crop of butchers who buy whole animals from farms, break them down and use as many parts as possible from nose to tail. This approach was long a staple of neighborhood butchers, but many met the chopping block in the mid-20th century with the mass industrialization of the meat industry and advent of grocery stores. As neatly-packed boxes of tenderloins and skinless chicken breasts became available, messy carcasses riddled with tendons and bones lost their appeal.

Archives for April 2022

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