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The ChompSaw is a power tool made for kids to cut, craft, and create with cardboard. Its unique design makes it perfectly safe for little hands to use and easily carve precise corners or elegant edges through old boxes. Developed by college friends Kausi Raman and Max Liechty, ChompSaw raised $1.2 million in less than a month on Kickstarter and has already sold more than 30,000 units online. The ChompSaw is a winner of Fast Companys 2025 Innovation by Design Awards.
Category:
E-Commerce
The evidence is mounting. There was a time when a college degree all but guaranteed a job. Not anymore. For decades, entry-level roles served as the primary on-ramp into the workforce for college graduates. They offered young professionals a footholdan opportunity to build experience, earn income, and grow into long-term careers. But today, that pathway is rapidly eroding. And its leaving an entire generation of educated workers without a clear way in. Todays college graduates are facing one of the most hostile job markets in recent memory, especially when it comes to entry-level roles. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a 9.3% unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders aged 20 to 24 in August 2025, almost double the average unemployment rate for all workers. In the U.S., entry-level hiring is down 23% compared to March 2020, which is more than the 18% decline in overall hiring, according to research from LinkedIn. Additionally, a 2023 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that fewer than 60% of graduates had a job six months after finishing their degree. The culprit? Its a cocktail of economic uncertainty, cautious corporate spending, and accelerating automation. When capital becomes more expensiveas it has with persistently high interest rates until recentlycompanies rethink where every dollar goes. In this new calculus, entry-level roles are often the first to be cut. These positions dont immediately generate ROI, require onboarding and training, and often take time to ramp up. Instead of hiring junior talent, companies are choosing to redistribute work across existing teams, lean more heavily on AI, or simply delay the hire indefinitely. Weve effectively created a hiring freeze for the next generation of workers. Freelancing as a New Path Forward Danielle Farage, a Gen Z content creator and workplace advocate, saw this play out firsthand. After graduating in the middle of the pandemic, she took a corporate job, only to be laid off shortly after. Instead of waiting for the job market to stabilize, she started her own business. Today, she runs a thriving career built on public speaking, marketing consulting, and digital content creation. I decided it was time to bet on myself, Danielle said. My generation is disillusioned with the old playbook. We want transparency, flexibility, and purpose. If companies cant offer that, well build it ourselves. Thats exactly what thousands of Gen Z workers are doing. The Upwork Future Workforce Index study found that 53% of skilled Gen Z workers are already freelancing, batting above the average of 28% of all skilled workers who are freelancing. Whats more, 53% of Gen Z freelancers are working full-time hours, many on sophisticated, strategic projects across industries like AI, creative design, and business consulting. They arent dabblingtheyre building careers. And counter to what many may think, Gen Z freelancers are nearly twice as likely to have a postgraduate degree as their employed peers. Theyre also using freelancing as a way to learn faster. They pitch clients, negotiate contracts, deliver outcomes, and adapt in real time. These are not the soft-skill-lite roles typically assigned to entry-level employees. This is a crash course in entrepreneurship. Rachel, a freelancer and former political science major, told me she turned to freelancing after a quarter-life crisis. I was burnt out working in law and policy, she shared. Freelancing gave me the flexibility to adventure, find a home, earn what I needed, and take care of myself while building a business that works around my chronic illnesses. The Paradoxical Skills Requirements for Entry-Level Roles The very traits employers claim to seekresilience, creativity, and initiativeare being honed more rigorously in the freelance economy than in traditional workplaces. Freelancing isnt just work. Its self-education. It teaches you how to sell your skills and ideas effectively, because every project starts with a pitch. It builds time management, as theres no manager keeping tabsyour schedule is yours alone to manage. It sharpens self-advocacy, requiring you to confidently price your value, set boundaries, and push back against scope creep. And it turns personal branding into a lived skill, as you become your resume, portfolio, and reputation all at once. As Danielle Farage put it, No ones going to sell you like yourself. And most full-time roles dont teach you that.” This reality is backed by research: Upwork found that Gen Z freelancers report higher levels of intrinsic motivation, self-determination, and creative satisfaction than their full-time peers. Many feel more connected to their work, not less. And while much has been said about AI eliminating jobs, Gen Z freelancers are actually ahead of the curve. They are significantly more likely to train themselves on generative AI tools61% versus 41% of their traditionally employed counterparts. These are the muscles Gen Z needs to buildnot just to survive todays job market, but to thrive in tomorrows economy. The Freelancing Fork in the Road Gen Z doesnt need to freelance for life, but its a smart first step. It offers a way to earn income while the job market remains uncertain, build a portfolio of real-world experience, and develop business, communication, and leadership skills at a much faster pace than many entry-level roles allow. Most importantly, freelancing puts Gen Z back in the drivers seat. No waiting for a recruiter to respond. No agonizing over rejection emails. Freelancing is about building skill, hustle, and forward momentum. And in a world where the entry-level job may not be coming back anytime soon, that kind of self-directed momentum might just be the most important credential of all.
Category:
E-Commerce
Across all sectors of the economy, there is a lot of churn in leadership right now going all the way to the top. The C-suite and its equivalent in many organizations has become a merry-go-round. When a new leader is hired into a key role, they must quickly get adapted to how things work in order to make positive changes while breaking as few things as possible. Great leaders have strategies to enable them to engage their new team quickly and institute change effectively. Here are four strategies that are critical. 1. Meet your team In a leadership role, you are likely to have many teams in your portfolio. In order to do anything successfully, you need to know who you have working for you, how their teams function, and which groups can be relied on to carry out their work. No matter how much intel you get from others before starting the role, there is no substitute for sitting down with the teams and getting to know them. This can take a while, so it may seem like a waste of time. But, talking strategically and tactically with the leaders who work for you can give you a sense of their capacity to understand, collaborate, and implement your vision moving forward. High-level leaders can never understand every detail of what every team is doing, of course. But, it is important for leaders to know the portfolios of the people who report to them, the strengths and weaknesses of those portfolios, and the pros and cons to the structure of the organization as it is. 2. Listen first Too often, leaders come in wanting to prove that they deserve to be in their role. So, they start by issuing orders. The assumption is that good leadership involves information flowing from the leader down to the team. Great leadership is collaborative. A leader must understand the situation in the organization, where the problems are, and what goals are just about ready to be achieved. That can only be done by asking good questions and listening to the answers. You want to find out the concerns of your direct reports so that you can develop plans to address them. You also want to understand the ways that the capacities of your teams can help you to achieve goals that are important to you. Youll only find that out by hearing what people are trying to tell you. Listening also helps to develop trust. People are more apt to want to follow your strategic recommendations when they are tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of their team. When the teams reporting to you feel understood, they are much more likely to engage and to adopt your goals as their own. Ultimately, great leaders get teams to work with them and not just for them. 3. Find a quick win Much of high-level leadership involves significant strategic plans that can take quarters or even years to implement fully. In order to get teams to follow you on that longer journey, it is valuable to demonstrate that you can achieve a goal. Through the conversations you have and the listening you have done to understand your teams, find a short-term goal that would lead to a meaningful step toward one of the major strategic pillars you would like to pursue. Then, engage with the teams that can help to achieve that goal and work with them to help make it happen. Provide the resources and guidance to move the project forward. The key for these quick wins to succeed is to use your growing knowledge of the organization to merge your strategic vision with the tactical strengths of your teams. That way, the success of the venture feels like something that could not have been done prior to your engagement with the team. That success helps to provide additional trust that longer-term projects will also succeed. 4. Transitions are better than purges Of course, no organization is perfect, and it is often necessary to move people and positions around. There may be great people playing the wrong roles. And sometimes, there are people on the team who are not contributing enough to warrant keeping around. There is often an urge to cut people immediately to make a clean break and move forward. And when a team is bloated and has a lot of redundancy, that is often necessary. But, the management and leadership members of the team are also are likely to have a lot of institutional knowledge that will help you to better understand how to achieve your aims. That is where slowing things down can be helpful. After all, the new people you put in place may be aligned with your vision for the future, but they may not know which processes in the organization were put in place to keep other demons at bay. Creating an overlapping period of transition can help new people to get up to speed on how to be effective in their new roles while also providing a humane exit ramp to those who will be moving on.
Category:
E-Commerce
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