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More than 100 years ago, Frigidaire invented the first self-contained electric refrigerator. Now, the American brand is introducing a hotter innovation. Frigidaire’s new oven lets you bake pizza at home, in an oven that can reach never before achieved temperatures for a home oven. Typically, residential ovens in the U.S. are capped at 600°F, though most top out at between 500°F and 550°F. Frigidaire’s Stone-Baked Pizza Oven, which retails between $2,299 and $2,500 (depending on the fuel type), comes with a specially designed stone tray that slots into the upper cavity, where temperatures can soar to 750°F, enough to get that crispy crust we all crave when ordering takeout pizza. [Photo: Frigidaire] An ode to pizza By some estimates, Americans consume three billion pizzas a year; 350 pizza slices are sold every second. Naturally, our obsession with ‘za translates into big money. In 2024, the market size of the U.S. pizza restaurant industry was just over $50 billion, while the frozen pizza market was worth $9.6 billion. “Everyone loves pizza,” says Natalie Walsh, senior brand manager at Electrolux (Frigidaire’s parent company). On any given day, 11% of the American population is eating pizza, and the majority of them are consuming it at restaurants or from grocery stores. So when Frigidaire first entertained the idea of a stone-baked pizza oven, they kept going back to the “what if.” “What if we could give consumers the ability to do that at home and make it a better and more fun experience?” says Walsh. Frigidaire’s innovation pipeline stretches across 35 years, so that conversation first arose sometime in 2021, when the team spotted the rise of specialty pizza ovens. These came in all shapes and formsdome pizza ovens, countertop electric ovensbut all of them required an additional appliance or access to outdoor space. Frigidaire wanted to find a way to integrate the capabilities of a stone baked oven inside a typical oven, so they took a page from their own book. Two years earlier, in 2019, Frigidaire had become the first brand to integrate an air-fry feature into an oven, mimicking the effects of a traditional air fryer, minus the appliance. Jacob Stork, who leads the North American food preparation product line for Electrolux, says that the feature has since percolated across the industry, and today, almost every new oven comes with an integrated air-fry. Could Frigidaire do the same with stone-baked pizza ovens? [Photo: Frigidaire] Getting to 750°F The Stone-Baked Pizza Oven relies on a specially designed, stainless steel tray that doubles as a heat shield and traps the heat in the upper portion of the cavity. The heat shield comes with a recessed slot in the middle, where the stone tray fits, while an edge on the tray prevents your pizza from falling through the back of the oven. Stone is so good at absorbing and evenly distributing heat evenly that some home cooks already use stone trays you simply slide inside a regular oven. “The stone does a lot of the cooking,” says Stork, but high temperature is an equally important factor to achieving that “leopard char” you would see on a restaurant-quality pizza. From the very beginning, the team at Frigidaire knew they wanted to achieve higher temperatures. “When you cook a pizza at the high heat of 750°F, the dough reacts so quickly to that hot stone that it immediately pops up, and that’s what gives you that really light and airy crust,” says Walsh. “It absolutely does make a difference.” Residential ovens in the U.S. are typically capped at 600°F for good reasonsafety regulators don’t want home cooks accidentally turning their kitchens into fire hazards. The rules, enforced by groups like Underwriters Laboratories (UL), exist because most home kitchens aren’t built like restaurant kitchens. They have less ventilation, tighter spaces, and a lot more flammable stuff nearby (think dish towels, wooden cabinets, that stack of takeout menus on your kitchen counter). The team worked closely with regulatory experts at UL and other agencies to get approval for a 750°F oven, which required extensive testing to demonstrate that the oven could maintain safe exterior temperatures, proper ventilation, and reliable safety shutoffs even at such elevated heat temperature. In order to bake your pizza at 750°F, Frigidaire recommends you preheat the oven for 30 minutes. The team has designed a clever user interface to guide you through the process: the screen tells you where to put the heat shield and when the oven is hot enough for you to insert your pizza. It gives you a 30-second warning before your pizza is ready, and if you want it more caramelized, you can easily add 15 seconds. At such high heat, it usually takes about two minutes for a pizza to cook, and about three minutes for the oven to reheat in between pizzas. [Photo: Frigidaire] Changing perceptions A restaurant-quality pizza at home may sound hard to believe, so for the team, tasting is believing. “From a marketing perspective, what I’ve had to focus on is how do you bring this to life for consumers that can’t taste it,” says Walsh. In August, the team will start driving around a mobile kitchen decked out with a stone baked pizza oven at sporting events and pizza festivals around the country. “The more slices we can get into the hands of people, the better,” says Walsh. There’s another challenge, which is that people still largely associate Frigidaire with fridges. (Refrigeration makes up for a larger portion of the company’s revenue, as well.) Like the Kleenex, or the Hoover, the brand name has become a shorthand for the object itself. “People still call [fridges] frigidaires,” says Walsh, which is not ideal for a brand that’s hoping to revolutionize the oven industry. Walsh recognizes the awareness problem. She knows that the company’s legacy is synonymous with reliability, durability, “and it evokes a really good emotion with our consumer.” But she believes there is room for innovation, too. “We definitely want to entertain folks,” she says. “We want to educate them, and we also want to have them walking away with a positive experience of the brand, and maybe change their perception a little bit.”
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E-Commerce
Picture this: Youre in a Zoom meeting discussing quarterly KPIs while simultaneously remembering its pajama day at school, mentally adding juice boxes to the grocery list, and wondering if your oldest child ever finished that social studies project on global warming. Spoiler alert: He did not. Welcome to the mental load. Its the uniquely infuriating traffic jam taking place in the brain of working parents everywhere. They end up managing not just their jobs, but their familys entire logistics operation with no staff, no overtime, and zero institutional memory. This is the invisible work behind the visible work. Not just doing things, but remembering, anticipating, organizing, and emotionally absorbing them. Its the difference between make the doctors appointment and realize child number two hasnt had a tetanus booster since 2017, locate the pediatricians number, find time between meetings, send calendar invites, and prep child so they dont scream bloody murder when they realize why they are at the doctor. And its mostly moms dealing with this. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2015\/08\/erikaaslogo.png","headline":"Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters","description":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting. ","substackDomain":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} A 2021 Pew Research Center report found that 74% of moms say they manage their kids schedules, compared to 22% of dads. And 78% or mothers say they are the ones responsible for household responsibilities. That includes remembering birthdays (even your in-laws), buying new socks before the old ones get holes, and knowing where every single thing in the house is. Its not that dads dont do anything. They do! Its just that moms are more likely to anticipate needs before they come up. You know, like gifted clairvoyants who can predict a lice outbreak just by glancing at a classroom newsletter. Why It Matters Mental load isnt just a little nuisance. Its a slow leak of cognitive energy. High mental load is linked to increased burnout, sleep problems, and feelings of resentment (shocking, I know). Its hard to be fully present at work or even mildly civil at home when your brain is running a 24/7 logistics hotline. So How Do We Fix It? I am going to skip the patronizing advice to just ask for help. Help implies the task was only yours to begin with. What you need is redistribution, accountability, and a few clever tactics. 1. Conduct a Mental Load Audit For one week, track every single task you do. Then share it with your partner, kids, or coworkers. And not passive-aggressively. Think of it as a performance review. This week, I coordinated three dentist appointments, fielded five school emails, replaced the printer ink, and planned four meals no one ate. How was your week? 2. Create a Cognitive Labor Budget If your household has a financial budget, you need one for mental tasks, too. Whos in charge of medical? Logistics? Emotional damage control? Divide and assign. Youre not being controlling; you are being efficient. The true definition of empowerment is when someone else remembers to send the camp deposit. 3. Use the One Free Fall Rule Let one ball drop. See what happens. Dont remind anyone to pack their gym clothes. Or spend 30 minutes trying to wake your grumpy teen. If disaster strikes, let it. Sometimes chaos is the only true motivator. Thats not sabotage. Thats professional developmentfamily style. 4. Replace Whats for Dinner? With a Rotating Chef Each week, assign someone else to meal planning. Not just the cooking. The planning. Including lunches. If you hear, Can we order in by Tuesday, congratulations. Youve proven your point. 5. Normalize saying, I Dont Do That Anymore. This isnt about giving up. Its about going sane. Youre allowed to say no to the PTA request to plan the spring benefit. Youre allowed to stop being the household stuff finder. You are allowed to NOT notice that the bathroom toilet paper hasnt been restocked. (Even though you did. Of course you did.) Shared accountability The solution to the mental load isnt a better planner, or a new app, or an extra hour in the day. Its shared accountability. And it starts with naming the load, claiming your time, and refusing to be the familys unpaid executive assistant. Because heres the thing: if no one else is worrying about the lunch boxes, the lice, or the PTA signup link thats closing in two hours, it might be time they started. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2015\/08\/erikaaslogo.png","headline":"Girl, Listen: A Guide to What Really Matters","description":"Ericka dives into the heat of modern motherhood, challenging the notion that personal identity must be sacrificed at the altar of parenting. ","substackDomain":"https:\/\/erickasouter.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Today, one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of the year is happening. The collaborative design software platform Figma, Inc. is expected to debut on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Wall Street will closely watch the results of the listing as a bellwether for investors’ appetite in tech-focused offerings. Heres what you need to know about Figmas IPO. What is Figma? Figma is an online collaborative design software platform. It provides tools for designers to craft the user interfaces (UIs) that many of us come across every day, whether that be in the form of websites or app interfaces. Figma, Inc. was originally founded back in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. Their goal was to create an easy-to-use suite of online design tools that could be used in a web browser. Those tools have now been embraced by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies and 78% of Forbes 2000 companies, according to Figmas Form S-1 Registration Statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Companies including Microsoft, Netflix, Dropbox, Slack, The New York Times, Airbnb, Zoom, and many more use Figmas tools to design their interfaces. As Fast Company previously reported, Figma says it had $228.2 million in revenue for the first three months of 2025. It also reported $749 million in revenue in 2024. Currently, the company says it has more than 13 million monthly active users on its platform. It says that two-thirds of its users are non-designers. What has Figma said about its IPO? Many CEO letters that are published when a company goes public focus on how they believe the company is primed for growth and golden pastures ahead. But Figma CEO Dylan Fields letter is a bit different. In it, he talked about the positive potential impact that the worlds shift to AI will have on Figma and design in general. He spoke about how, when it comes to artificial intelligence, he believes that despite its recent advances, the technology is still in its MS-DOS era. The sentiment is reminiscent of Jeff Bezos’s original letter to shareholders in 1997, in which the Amazon founder famously said it was “Day 1 for the Internet.” Field didn’t make grandiose claims about how AI and Figmas future moves would lift the newly public stock. Quite the contrary. After stating that the benefits of taking Figma public included brand awareness, liquidity, and access to capital markets, he cautioned that such benefits did not automatically mean the stocks price would rise. Even if we execute perfectly (we wontno one ever does) markets wax and wane, Field wrote. In addition, you should know that while weve built an efficient business, our primary goal is not efficiency. Our goal is to achieve long-term growth by supporting the rapidly evolving needs of designers.” Field went on to say that investors should expect Figma to take big swings when it comes to investing in its platform and acquiring other companies. That means at times we will make decisions that may not seem immediately rational, he explained. And, while we always strive to exercise good judgement, sometimes we will make the wrong calls. If you decide to invest in Figma, we hope you will take a long-term view and stay patient . . . When is Figmas IPO? Figma priced its shares on Wednesday. It plans to list its stock today (Thursday, July 31, 2025). What is Figmas stock ticker? Figmas stock will trade under the ticker FIG. What exchange will Figma shares trade on? Figma shares will trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). What is the IPO share price of FIG? Figmas IPO price is $33 per share. As Fast Company previously reported, this is up significantly from the original target price range, which was $25 and $28 each. The IPO share price was then revised upwards again to between $30 and $32 each. Its final IPO share price of $33 per share suggests that there was more demand for FIG shares than the company and analysts originally thought. How many FIG shares are available in its IPO? According to a company press release, Figmas public offering consisted of 36,937,080 shares of Class A common stock in its IPO. Of those 36.9 million shares, almost 12.5 million of them were directly offered by Figma itself. About 24.5 million shares were offered by Figmas existing stockholders. Its important to note that Figma only received the proceeds from the 12.5 million shares it offered. The proceeds from the 24.5 million shares sold by existing Figma shareholders went directly to those shareholders themselves. How much did Figma raise in its IPO? Figma says it received approximately $1.22 billion in its IPO, according to Reuters. How much is Figma worth? At its $33 IPO share price, Figmas market cap is now valued at $19.34 billion on a fully diluted basis, Reuters notes. Thats nearly equal to the sum of $20 billion that Adobe offered to buy Figma for in 2023. Investors will be watching Figmas IPO closely Figma is just the latest tech company to go public this year, but Wall Street will be watching how investors react to its listing in order to determine the wider appetite for tech IPOs for the remainder of 2025. Thanks primarily to President Trumps chaotic tariffs, a lot of uncertainty has been injected into the markets in 2025. Uncertainty tends to drive investors away, which can lead to muted results for companies that choose to go public during such turbulent times. If FIG shares trade up significantly in the next few days and weeks, it could make more investors more comfortable with other tech IPOs in the months ahead. Other recent notable IPOs in 2025 have included Chime, Circle, Hinge Health, MNTN, and Slide.
Category:
E-Commerce
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