🧸  The squishy toy boom

👋  Good morning. If your dream entrepreneurial venture is owning a local pizza shop (and whose isn’t, TBH?), then ready your wallet. Nantucket’s Pi Pizzeria, which has graced the island for 25 years, is up for sale for $12.5m. Its owners, who are retiring, say they hope to see the business live on and are searching for an owner “who wants to take Pi to the next level.” For the right person, this sounds like a very promising beginning to a new Hallmark movie. 

NEWS FLASH 

🐟  Drinking like a fish: Scottish startup MiAlgae is turning waste from Scotch whisky distilleries into omega-3-rich algae as a replacement for the fish oil used in aquaculture. The company thinks feeding algae with industrial byproducts could ease pressure on wild fish populations while doubling as an ingredient for fish feed and pet food. MiAlgae hopes to produce thousands of metric tons of algae each year — still just a fraction of global demand.

🥣  Enjoying the froots of your labor: For the last decade, tiny hands digging into cereal boxes have found, tragically, nothing but cereal. WK Kellogg Co. is now back in its old bag of tricks, reinserting toys into boxes of Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops. It’s a not-so-subtle play to bring nostalgic parents back into the fold after high-protein yogurts and frozen burritos have seriously dented cereal sales.

🍷  Tapping into a new market: The spirit maker behind the Aperol Spritz is eyeing a lane long occupied by beer brands: stadiums. When Campari went head to head with Big Beer, putting its bittersweet cocktail on tap at a Bad Bunny concert in Milan, it sold 22k glasses. So now it will target more sporting events and concerts as it looks to build on its momentum — Aperol sales are up 3.3% so far this year while many other booze brands have seen sales decline.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Bye, bye, this American rye: One of the US’s biggest whiskey distilleries, MGP, reported a 60% drop in whiskey (or "brown goods") sales in Q2. That’s on top of MGP’s announced ~25% drop in November 2025. Ouch.
  

• A nation subdivided: JPMorgan Chase said it’ll spend $750B over the next decade to help address the American housing crisis, aiming to finance 1m attainably-priced housing units (if you ignore sky-high mortgage rates).
  

• Take a peek: Startup Applied Electrodynamics unveiled WaveSight, a camera that uses radio waves to see through walls and make 3D maps of the pipes, wiring, and structural elements inside. 
  

• It’s all your Prime orders: Amazon shares reached an all-time high on Monday, sending the tech giant’s market cap over $3T for the first time.  
  

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THE BIG IDEA

The comfort and chaos of squishy toys

A year since the peak of Labubu mania, sales of the once-coveted plushy demons (which, unlike last summer, are now readily available on Pop Mart’s online store) have cratered.

But while Labubus may have fallen out of favor, toy sales are still going strong, up 13% YoY in April, per Circana data — much of it on the strength of a soft new plaything that consumers of all ages are trying to get their hands on: squishies.

What are they?

Squishies are soft, squeezable goop-filled sensory toys (like fidget spinners) that come in various shapes — cubes and balls, sticks of butter, dumplings, kittens, etc. — loved for their comforting, “therapeutic” effect, per The New York Times.

Like Labubus, they’re popular among both kids and adults, easy to collect, reasonably priced (when not resold), and many even come in blind boxes.

• NeeDoh, the most popular purveyor, sells brightly colored squishies for ~$3-$15. The brand says its sales, which doubled between 2024 and 2025, are on track to 6x this year.

Squishy, popular, dangerous

While the earliest versions of squishy toys first appeared in the 1960s, demand for the low-tech toys — which have experienced triple-digit growth over the past year — has surged in recent months, driven by social platforms like TikTok, where videos of ASMR-style unboxings, DIY tutorials, and squishy trading have garnered millions of views.

Their popularity has cleared out inventory online and in toy shops, and bred online challenges as well as knockoffs. And it’s all gotten a bit out of hand:

• Medical experts and public officials have warned against microwaving the toys, following an online trend that’s sent several people to the hospital with burns, and buying counterfeits over serious chemical risks.
  
• Less seriously, airports have issued their own warnings that gel-filled squishies in carry-ons could be confiscated at security…

… which doesn’t seem like as big a concern as third-degree burns and toxic chemical exposure — unless you’re the parent who’ll have to deal with the tantrums of a child who just lost their main squeeze.

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Number of electric vehicles that Tesla has built, according to a video posted by the company on X last week. The milestone is impressive, considering the 23-year-old company hit the 1m mark just six years ago, but brings CEO Elon Musk only a smidge closer to unlocking his $1T pay package, which shareholders approved last year but have (reasonably) made no easy task of.

Before the world’s richest man bags his next big payday, he’ll need to make another 10m EVs, secure 10m active subs for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, get 1m robotaxis on the road, and deliver 1m bots, per TechCrunch.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 2012, Oscar Pistorius became the first amputee runner to compete at the Olympics, finishing second in the men's 400-meter race and advancing to the semifinals.

📱  That’s cool: Touch everything in a digital museum.

🔤  Game: A daily deduction puzzle.

👀  Woah: Look at these optical illusions.

🦫  Aww: No photos, please!

SHOWER THOUGHT

One of the unspoken benefits of working from home is never having to use a public bathroom. SOURCE

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Editing by: Sara "Squeeze the day" Friedman.

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