Peter Dering, CEO of San Francisco-based Peak Design, said his company s Everyday Sling bag became a target for Amazon to copy after it was the top-selling premium camera bag on the site by a longshot. It feels like somewhere in Amazon there s a bell that goes off, which says OK, this one s going to be worth our time to go make the knockoff, Dering said in an interview. And that sort of finally happened to us.
Dering decided to go public with his concerns. On Wednesday, Peak Design released an ad, titled A Tale of Two Slings: Peak Design and Amazon Basics, which co-stars Dering and pokes fun at Amazon s copycat product. Soon after the ad went live, Peak Design customers flooded Amazon s listing for the Amazon Basics Everyday Sling with negative ratings, enough that Amazon temporarily disabled reviews on the item.
Bird Song of the Day
From Peru, another
tour de force. Macaulay supplies waveforms for each audio clip, which is a good way to sort for what might be interesting. Most bird species have similar waveforms for all the clips (differences come from other birds, or buzzing insects, or automobile noises). Not so the mockingbird! Most of the waveforms differm even within species!
#COVID19
At reader request, I’ve added this daily chart from 91-DIVOC. The data is the Johns Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site.
I feel I’m engaging in a macabre form of tape-watching, because I don’t think the peak is coming in the next days, or even weeks. Is the virus gathering itself for another leap?
San Francisco-based footwear brand Allbirds is set to introduce what it claims is the first leather alternative entirely made from plant-based ingredients.
The brand says that the compostable material, called Plant Leather, has a carbon impact that is 40 times lower than animal leather and produces 17 times fewer carbon emissions than plastic-based synthetic leather.
The material contains natural rubber derived from the sap of the rubber tree as well as vegetable oil, citric acid and fillers like cork and rice husks plus natural pigments.
Allbirds claims Plant Leather is the world s first entirely plant-based leather
Originally developed by material innovations startup Natural Fiber Welding (NFW) under the name Mirum, the plant-based leather is now set to be turned into footwear that will hit shelves by December 2021.
YouTube
Peak Design published a YouTube video taking shots at a cheaper Amazon bag similar to its own.
The company said its bag has bells and whistles like a lifetime warranty and recycled materials.
Shoe brand Allbirds previously slammed Amazon for selling a look-alike shoe design.
Peak Design called out Amazon for selling a cheaper and less environmentally friendly version of its Everyday Sling bag in a new video released Wednesday.
The Amazon Basics bag looks suspiciously like the Peak Design everyday sling, the video s narrator says, but you don t have to pay for all those needless bells and whistles, like years of research and development, recycled Bluesign approved materials, a lifetime warranty, fairly paid factory workers, and total carbon neutrality. Instead you just get a bag, designed by the crack team at the Amazon Basics department.
Founded by Luke Haverhals, Illinois-based Natural Fiber Welding’s first product is Mirum, a leather alternative made from minerals and natural plant-sourced materials such as cork and coconut coir fiber. “Humanity’s dependence on plastic and other petroleum-based products has created a scarcity mind-set that is unsustainable both for everyone’s quality of life and the future of this planet. A new era, one of abundance, will come from the creation of technologies based on sustainable and regenerative methods,” says Haverhals.
Joey Zwillinger, cofounder and co-DEO of Allbirds, says the company is careful to invest in viable solutions. “Our view is that sustainable solutions are only effective if they can reach a mass scale, and many of the experimental alternative “leathers” we surveyed required scientific miracles, and many were too expensive to use commercially at large scale,” he adds.