Hi {{ first_name | default: there }}

I’m not sure I’ve had a week where I’ve felt more bombarded. It isn’t one thing, it’s everything at once: a new agent that edits video for you, three courses promising to teach you how to use it, a cold email about an outreach tool that writes cold emails, a founder on LinkedIn who built an app over the weekend and already has a waitlist. All of it before my first coffee. Content, courses, apps, outreach, and more content about the content. I’ve been doing this long enough to remember when the hard part was making the thing. Now the hard part is working out which of the ten thousand things being made is worth more than a scroll.

The honest answer is I’m loving it. Half of what’s arriving is noise, but underneath it is a shift I’ve been waiting a decade for, which is that production has stopped being the gate on anything. Two years ago, if you wanted a tool built for the way your business actually runs, you needed a developer, a budget and a quarter of your year, so most of us paid for the nearest off-the-shelf thing and bent our process around it. We built three last week, in between client work.

One is a content research tool that pulls stories and trends from every source we follow into one place, so the research for this newsletter takes an hour where it used to eat a day. One is a client proofing platform that replaced a $4,000-a-year subscription and does more, because we built it around how we actually review work rather than how a software vendor imagined we did. The third runs our lead generation and it’s working well enough that I’ll leave it there.

We’re now doing this for other businesses as Lento Labs: working out which app would genuinely change how you operate, then designing and building it around you. If there’s a process in your business you’ve been bending around someone else’s software, hit reply and tell me about it.

This week’s piece is about the other side of all this noise: a generation that checks everything a brand says before they believe a word of it.

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

For years I took the rainbow logos at their word. Every June my phone filled up with brands in six colours and captions that sounded like a friend texting, and when everything quietly went back to normal on the first of July, I didn’t notice at all.

Gen Z noticed, of course, and what finally made me look for myself was Target. It pulled part of its Pride collection in 2023 after a conservative backlash, then rolled back its diversity programs in 2025, and Twin Cities Pride, the festival in Target’s own hometown, turned down its $50,000 sponsorship after at least 18 years together. More than 1,400 people covered the money in under a day.

The checking that once needed a newsroom now takes a screenshot, a search bar and a slow lunch break, and Gen Z has been doing it since the first sponsored haul video they ever watched.

👉 Read the full piece

A Weglot study tells the story of a Spanish retailer that sells English titles but has no English version of its site. When people search in English, it appears 64% less often in AI Overviews and ChatGPT. When it does appear, the link often points to Google Translate’s proxy, a copy of the page hosted on a Google address, so the retailer doesn’t capture that traffic.

Weglot’s campaign for 2.0 drops you into a meeting anyone who has worked on a website will recognise, where one side wants to pay a professional translator to do it properly and the other wants to run everything through AI and ship by Friday. We went into the product to see whether it actually settles that argument, and found that most of what’s new happens before a single line gets translated.

Three years ago, we chose Weglot because it saved us from running a second website for every language, and after going through 2.0, that’s no longer the reason we’d stay.

👉 Read the full piece

At an autumn wedding at Heckfield Place, the butter arrived as architecture. The food stylist behind Healgoblin carved it into a tall conical obelisk ridged with sharp horizontal bands and set it on a crisp pleated plinth. Against the brick of the estate it stood the way a piece of clipped stone topiary might in the garden outside. It was still butter, of course, and was always going to soften as the evening went on, which is a large part of why it’s so good to look at.

Elsewhere, an artist has rebuilt the yellow plastic “Caution: Wet Floor” sign at full size in amber stained glass. A florist has packed the drum of an old Speed Queen dryer in a coin laundry with wildflowers and vines that spill out of the open hatch. Teenage Engineering’s EP-133 sampler borrows its keys and segmented screen from 80s pocket calculators and cash registers, and a wave of type designers are knitting letterforms out of mohair and bouclé. And the Gohar sisters, apparently unwilling to leave butter to the wedding caterers, are casting candles in the exact shape of a butter block, made to melt down into the dinner itself.

👉 Get inspired

When Fredric Baur died in 2008, his children stopped at a Walgreens on the way to collect his ashes and picked up a can of Pringles. Baur had designed that can, and he had asked to be buried in one, a request his family took for a joke until it became clear he meant every word of it.

Eighteen years later, Pringles has turned that errand into a Halloween sweepstakes, with a “will and taste-ament,” an “afterlifetime” supply of chips and “Once You Pop” bent into “Once You Drop.” The prize is a 200-year supply, and somebody at Pringles had to work out exactly what that costs.

👉 Read the full piece