The US town giving $500 FREE to families every month
100 families in Stockton, California, are receiving $500 per month over 18 months as part of the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED). With funding from the Economic Security Project, the families receive the cash on a prepaid debit card monthly, to do with as they please. The results are overwhelmingly positive.
Our take: When people can cover their basic needs they don’t have to work three jobs to make ends meet. SEED, like the Universal Basic Income project, lets people feel and be in charge of their own lives, giving them the freedom to improve them. A simple yet innovative solution to poverty and inequality.
How to diversify media? Give journalists a bed.
PressPad is the London-based firm diversifying the media by providing aspiring young journalists with rooms and mentorship. The firm links aspiring journalists from around the UK on unpaid internships to working media professionals who can house them. You can’t get a journalism job if you have no experience. You need an internship to get experience. Most (sadly) are unpaid and thus expensive. So often only those who can afford it take them up.
Our take: Journalism in Britain is 94 % white, 86% university educated and 55% male. PressPad is one way that can help solve this by enabling diverse candidates with part funding and a place to stay while interning. That can only be a good thing.
No trademark, no advertising, no logo copyright... How one brand of chili sauce still became the most profitable and biggest in the world
There’s nothing hotter (nor, ahem, cooler) than Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce. You’ve seen the bottles across restaurants and supermarket stacks the world over but the tale of how it became the most recognised (and arguably most tasty) chili sauce on the planet is one worth hearing.
Vietnamese refugee David Tran arrived in LA in 1980. On a whim he created his own hot sauce based on a sweeter one from the town of Sri Racha in Thailand. He named his company Huy Fong after the ship he’d escaped on, the Huey Fong, and branded his bottles with his Chinese zodiac sign: the rooster. By 2017 Tran’s company was selling 35m bottles annually bringing in over $109m in revenue. How such success?
Tran never trademarked the name, never advertised, nor charged for the use of his logo. He found that copycats led customers to his brand. Plus he never increased his prices, so it made financial sense for restaurants to stick with his sauce. The fact that anyone can use the logo for free saw everything from T-shirts to beer to popcorn branded with the Sriracha logo, making the sauce even more famous at no cost to Tran. To top it off a bottle of Sriracha was consumed by astronauts floating on the International Space Station.
Which just goes to show, a good product (Sriracha’s chilis are picked and processed within a day), and breaking all the rules of business can be the secret sauce of success.
Three of the Best: Conscious Trainer Brands
OBRA Socially conscious New York-based brand, Obra means ‘construction’ or ‘work of art’ in Portuguese, the shoes are made in Brazil and $10 of every online sale is donated to non-profits working with local youth communities.
ATOMSMinimalist and ongoing sustainable (they don’t use water in their dyeing process and all materials are said to be not harmful to the environment), Atoms is the only sneaker co to offer quarter sizes for the perfect fit.
ELLIOTT Copenhagen-based trainer brand is as an upcycled, vegan, 100% cruelty-free and ‘climate positive’ company, and the shoes look super cool too.
Pic credits: Pepi Stojanovski, Chris Liverani on Unsplash / Obra Shoes