 |
|
|
|||||
When Paule Tenaillon was head shoe designer at Chloé, she was responsible for designing hundreds of shoes a year. With each design, she had to consider many factors: The Chloé aesthetic, trends, heel height, materials. But there was one issue she didn’t think much about. “Comfort was never a consideration,” Tenaillon says. “Nobody ever asked me to make a comfortable pair of shoes. But it bothered me, because it’s important to me to wear shoes that are comfortable.” Now, Tenaillon is on a mission to make the most uncomfortable shoe in the world comfortable. Her shoe label, Nomasei, is releasing a stiletto model for the first time, full of small design tweaks that she believes will make the spiky heel more wearable. [Photo: courtesy Nomasei] Bringing comfort to a notoriously uncomfortable heel This week, the brand launches two stiletto designs, the “BeforeSunrise” sandal ($575) and the “Gattaca” pump ($595), which are both inspired by the sleek, minimalist aesthetic of the 1990s, when both of these movies came out. To make the shoe as comfortable as possible, the heel is relatively short at 3 inches high, making it just a smidge taller than a kitten heel. It is placed close to the ball of the foot, creating more stability and balance. The heel also tapers out and there is memory foam padding in the toe box, both of which relieve pressure. [Photo: courtesy Nomasei] Since the brand launched in 2019, customers had asked for stilettos. This presented Tenaillon with a new challenge, since the thin, pointed heel of a stiletto puts a lot of pressure on the ball of the foot. For months, Tenaillon created prototypes, which she had many women wear-test for comfort. Ultimately, the breakthrough came when she studied the design of tango shoes, which allow the dancer to pivot gracefully, while remaining stable. Inspired by dance shoes, Tenaillon has designed stilettos with a tapered heel that relieve pressure and support balance, along with two two buckled straps that adapt to the wearer’s foot, keeping it firmly in place. “I lived in Buenos Aires for five years, where I danced a lot,” she says. “Tango shoes are often stilettos, but women wear them to dance all night.” [Photo: courtesy Nomasei] Leaving A Luxury House Tenaillon and her cofounder Marine Braquet had spent their lives wanting to work in fashion. And for the most part, all of their dreams came true. They each made their way through some of the most storied Parisian brands. Tenaillon had designed for everyone from Givenchy to Chanel; Braquet, the former footwear designer for Chloé, previously worked for Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. But inside the luxury houses, things weren’t so rosy. Tenaillon says that when she started her career in the early 2000s, she was designing two collections of shoes a year. But in the decades that followed, the industry sped up, churning out more and more styles every few months, to keep customers coming back for more. This was also when fast fashion emerged, ripping off runway looks and selling them for a fraction of the price. In response, the luxury brands had to keep one step ahead. Tenaillon was so stressed, she ended up in the hospital from exhaustion. “We were just on a hamster wheel,” Tenaillon says. “Creativity just became poorer and poorer.” Braquet, who worked on the business side, was also burning out. “I just stopped loving my job,” she says. “But before we gave up on fashion, we decided we would give it one last shot.” So together, they sketched out a plan to create a shoe label that focused on the things they loved most about luxury shoes: craftsmanship, beauty, careful attention to detail. And they would throw in something else that the high end brands didn’t have: comfort. [Photo: courtesy Nomasei] Designing Wearable Luxury Shoes The founders launched Nomasei in 2019, creating a selection of heels and boots that start at around $500. They’ve partnered with an Italian factory that also makes shoes for Hermes, leveraging Baquet’s extensive experience manufacturing shoes for luxury brands. Nomasei sells products online in both Europe and the United States. But months after opening the business, the pandemic struck and the world went into lockdown. Nobody was interested in pricey designer shoes, so the nascent brand went into hibernation. Eventually, around 2022, people wanted to get out of the house again, clad in beautiful outfits. And after spending years wearing sweatpants and slippers, comfort was an even greater priority. To Tenaillon, this just reinforced her commitment to comfortable design. She has spent the past five years designing a selection of shoes that stand out aesthetically, but that women can wear all day. And unlikes her previous jobs, Tenaillon now has the freedom to design slowly with a lot of attention to detail. She takes time to review what is on the market, creating pieces that are unique. On the website, each product has elaborate notes from Tenaillon about her approach to the design. [Photo: courtesy Nomasei] When it comes to comfort, there are many tricks that can make a heel more comfortable. Part of Tenaillon’s strategy has been to create block heels that distribute weight more evenly. Most Nomasei shoes, including the popular Adora and Baghera sandals, have these wide heels. In some, like the Taxi and Frenchkiss, there is also a platform, which makes the heel feel less high. Shoes like Venus are very popular with brides because they go nicely with wedding dresses, while being very walkable. [Photo: courtesy Nomasei] Besides the heel, Tenaillon believes that customizing the fit of the shoe to the wearer’s heel is important. So most shoes come with many straps whose buckles can be adjusted to fit the ankle and bridge of the foot. And there is memory foam in the heels to provide some cushioning. All of these features have made Nomasei a cult brand, with fans that include Bella Hadid, Kristen Stewart and Nicole Kidman. Six years after leaving Chloé, Braquet and Tenaillon aren’t looking back. And indeed, they’re now competing with some of the brands they once worked for. But they believe that designing comfortable, well-made shoes sets them apart. “We’re two very different women, with different tastes, and at different phases in life,” says Braquet. “But we both love shoes and expect them to be comfortable. The same is true for our customers.”
Category:
E-Commerce
It is 6 p.m. You have logged off from work and are unwinding with a glass of wine. You turn on the TV, but instead of Netflix, you click on a new app called 6pm in Paris, and spend the next 30 minutes learning French. Not on your desk. Not on your phone. But on your couch, watching a short movie. This is the vision behind a new language learning platform that recently launched. 6pm in Paris merges Netflix’s addictive streaming format with the short lessons style of Masterclass. The concept is simple yet effective: Each week, you pick a short film from a curated collection of French licensed movies. Then, you dive into the story and language through an informal video lesson called After Short. You can watch the films with dual subtitles and adjust the playback speed to your preference. Diligent learners can also review a phrasebook of key words and idioms, then take a short quiz to reinforce their knowledge. While apps like Duolingo are pouring resources into AI and gamified learning, 6pm in Paris is choosing cultureand therefore the human experienceas its primary lens. A big part of our vision is to be a window on the language, and the people, and the culture, says CEO and cofounder Lea Perret, who dreamed up the company with cofounder and COO Julien Frei. If people take to the format, you can soon expect 6pm in Tokyo, and 6pm in Rioand basically 6pm anywhere. Julien Frei and Lea Perret [Image: 6pm in Paris] Learning as a lifelong journey Perret imagined 6pm in Paris as a way to help students learn French beyond the classroom. Most people will sell you methods to learn French in three weeks, but it doesn’t work like that; it’s a lifelong endeavor, she says. And if you want to spend a lifetime learning a language, it has to be entertaining, or else you will throw in the towel. Originally from Toulouse, France, Perret moved to New York 17 years ago and has been teaching French in the U.S. since then. In 2013, she cofounded Coucou French Classes, which provides in-person classes in New York and Los Angeles. Since the pandemic, her team also launched online classes to over 50,000 students. Today, the company remains profitable, but 6pm in Paris is here to fill a gap that Coucou couldnt: to help people immerse themselves in French culture. While Perret was at Coucou (she left to run 6pm in Paris) students would often ask her for additional resources to help them improve their French. In response, she would send them a 17-pager recommending, among other things, French books and TV shows to watch. (Yes, Call My Agent featured on the list.) These shows, however, can be too long, which can wear out the learner, and the subtitles can be either inaccurate or incomplete, completely skipping quintessentially French filler words like euh or eh ben. This approach, she says, can take learners away from real language experiences and make it harder for them to connect the spoken word with its written form. [Image: 6pm in Paris] The 6pm philosophy With 6pm in Paris, the team is hoping to address many of these challenges with shorter, more digestible films and customizable subtitles that were crafted in-house to perfectly match the dialogue. For now, the team has licensed more than 60 short films by local filmmakers. These range from sci-fi to rom-coms to documentaries. The shortest lasts a mere two minutes; the longest clocks in at 25. (My personal favorites so far are Cloud Paradise, and Amoureuxse, both of which boast excellent storytelling.) By next yearif the team can raise the $1.2 million they need to growthey want to start producing films in-house, which would allow them to tailor the content to various levels by, for example, streaming down the dialogue so actors don’t talk over each other. They also expect to launch a whopping 170 masterclasses covering grammar for all levels. The series will feature short, digestible episodes delving into French conjugation. We believe in grammar, we just think there is entertaining efficient way to bring it to people so it doesn’t feel like a chore, says Perret. The current selection is more suitable to someone with an intermediate understanding of French, but the team maintains this shouldn’t preclude anyone from subscribing to 6pm in Paris. In fact, they believe that segmenting learners by levelsand tailoring content accordinglyis the wrong approach. The 6pm in Paris philosophy is that one of the most essential ingredients to learning a new language is exposure. Sure, you can start by learning the phrase, ‘je m’appelle Lea et j’habite New York,’ but what’s point of knowing how to say that if you don’t understand what the person replies to you? she says. According to Perret, Americans are obsessed with talking, but even more important are listening and comprehension. By watching a short film in French, even with English or French subtitles, you can slowly soak up the language, notice how words are spelled, and train your ear before ever uttering a single word. As someone who moved to a French-speaking country at age 7 and was encouraged to sit at the back of the class and just listen, I can attest to the efficiency of this method. (I was fluent in less than a year.) [Image: 6pm in Paris] TV as a learning tool Research backs this up, and many studies show that watching TV shows, especially with O.G. subtitles, can be a surprisingly effective way to build your real-world language skills. According to a 2022 study from researchers in Turkey, 44 participants from Kosovo who watched Turkish TV series with subtitles for one to two years saw measurable improvements in all four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing.) Another study from Spain shows that university students who watched Friends over the course of seven weeks, and with English subtitles, learned more informal English (like slang and idioms) than those who used Spanish subtitles. Television might be the greatest source of first language input, and learning a foreign language by watching TV is more common than it might seem. According to a recent survey performed by the research platform AtomRadar for Fast Company, 43% of participants have tried to learn a foreign language by watching TV shows or movies. Of these people, 60% found it effective. AtomRadar, which surveyed a representative panel of 300 American adults over 18, also found that younger people are substantially more likely to have tried learning a foreign language through movies and TV, with 55% of 18 to 24 year olds having tried it, compared to only 30% of 55 to 64 year olds. (Once again, I can relate as I distinctly remember looking up the definition of rooting for someone after a love triangle materialized on the teen-cult TV show One Tree Hill.) 6pm in Paris isn’t the first company to recognize the potential for cinema to double as a learning tool. FluentU uses beginner-friendly movie trailers and music videos to teach you vocabulary and grammar in context. Lingopie offers a streaming library of foreign-language TV shows with interactive subtitles. And France Channel, which lets you stream French films and series otherwise unavailable in the U.S., markets its platform as a way to learn the language through immersion. Earlier this year, Duolingo, too, recognized the power of cinema with a Korean campaign in collaboration with Netflix. Korean course sign-ups had jumped 40% after the first season of Squid Game aired in 2021, so when season 2 rolled around in 2025, Duolingo launched Squid Game-themed vocabulary lessons, a TikTok filter that could test your pronunciation skills, a K-pop music video, and a music video featuring Duo the owl suited up as a Pink Guard. Is 6pm in Paris worried about all the competition? Not in the slightest. She notes that her team wasn’t inspired to start a new company to fill a gap in the market, but to meet their students’ needs. The outputs may be similar but the motivations are different. The company is still too young to gauge success, but the first few months show promise: After a beta run with Coucou students, the team opened up the platform to the public and leaned heavily on a marketing campaign to attract subscribers. So far, 1,300 people have joined (and 70% of users who started with a free 7-day trial have converted to a paid subscription). Three quarters of subscribers log in every week to watch the weekly film, followed by the after short. For now, you can only watch on your laptop or by casting to a Smart TV. But once the team secures more backing, they plan to upgrade to a more robust (and pricier) streaming platform that supports native TV apps. Some years down the line, you could soon turn on your TV, click on your 6pm streaming app, and choose which language you want to learn based on the culture you want to discover. I want it to be as easy as ‘you turn on TV, go to 6pm in Tokyo and discover many things about the Japanese culture, says Perret. I do believe there would be lot more understanding, and the world would be a better place if we knew more about each other.
Category:
E-Commerce
Near Atlanta, the diverse suburb of Morrow, Georgia, is an EV charging desert. If you live in an apartment in one neighborhood and own an electric car, you might have to drive 20 minutes to get to a public charger. Thats why a local green bank wanted to support a new charging station in the area. It should have been a simple project, beginning with a small group of six chargers. Then came Trump. Were talking about a project that could have been up and running by now, says Reginald Parker, president of Freedmen Capital Foundation, a green bank in Georgia. It had a months delay. Over the last month, prices have gone up. The market has changed tremendously. And that type of uncertainty for the project adds costs that small businesses, in general, are not ready for. Exactly the type of project that the green bank wanted to support Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan bill that Congress passed in 2022, there was funding for the work. Last year, the first national green bank opened with $5 billion in funding from the IRA. The organization started creating a network of state and local green banks. (Despite the name, these arent typical banks with deposits. Instead, they’re institutions that make green loans for projects like community solar installations or green building retrofits.) Freedman Capital Foundation, named after a late-1800s bank established for formerly enslaved people, was chosen to be part of the network. The new charging station was exactly the type of project that the green bank wanted to support. The communities that are EV charging deserts are the first and hardest hit by climate impacts, Parker says. Helping residents switch to EVs can help cut emissions. It can also reduce air pollution and help people save money on fuel. It also builds energy independence, he says. Oil and gas are derived from some foreign sources. Electricity is all domestic. One part of the charger project had already been funded. A grant from the Department of Transportation helped cover the cost for the local utility to set up the electric infrastructure needed for the chargers. The small organization that will operate the charging station, called TABT, is paying to install the chargers. The last piece of the fundingthe money to cover a loan for the equipmentcame from the EPAs Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a program created by the IRA. Trump pauses IRA funds On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order telling agencies to pause all funds under the IRA. At first, grantees under the EPA program could still access the money sitting in their accounts. But in February, Trump-appointed EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said that the EPA would revoke contracts for the fund. The agency made baseless accusations of fraud. It froze $20 billion in grants. Citibank, directed by the government, froze the money in the account of Coalition for Green Capital, the nonprofit running the national green bank. Freedmen Capital Foundation was able to get its funds from the nonprofit just before that account was frozen. But the EPA warned it not to move forward on projects. “Everything had to stop,” says Parker. At the same time, some of the EPA’s grantees, including the Coalition for Green Capital, sued to force Citibank to unfreeze the money. A federal judge blocked the freeze. Appeals are still underway, and the money at Citibank still isn’t accessible. But the first court order meant that Freedmen was able to begin using the money it already had. (Another piece of its funds, for technical assistance, got stuck in the freeze.) In March, the utility finished upgrading the electric infrastructure needed for the chargers. If the project had happened normally, TABT could have ordered the chargers in advance. Installation could have started right away; the process could have taken as little as a week, and the chargers could be in use now. But because of the delays from the EPA’s actions, nothing was ready to go. ‘Instead of making investments, we are wasting time and resources’ Freedmen Capital Foundation has been scrambling to finalize the loan for the project. Trump’s chaotic rollout of tariffs means that the cost of supplies for making EV chargersfrom steel to electronicswill jump. “If we weren’t able to move within the next week or two, the owner would be subjected to higher prices,” Parker says. Despite the delays, the project is unusual in that it’s able to move forward. Most projects that were set to receive funding through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund are now stuck in limbo, waiting for the next stage in a lawsuit. A judge may issue a preliminary injunction this week that allows organizations to access their money, though the government will immediately appeal and could try to claw the money back. From solar energy in Arkansas to hydropower in Alaska, local projects that lower energy costs and support domestic manufacturing arent currently able to move forward, forcing communities to wait for the jobs and economic opportunity theyre counting on,” says Brooke Durham, a spokesperson for Climate United, a nonprofit that received a $6.97 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grant that was frozen. “Instead of making investments and delivering on those promises, we are wasting time and resources fighting an unnecessary battle in court. This program isnt about politics; its about saving money for hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||