🥤  Flip cup fashion

👋  Good morning, nerds. Go take a gander at that box of old Pokémon cards gathering dust — you never know if you’re sitting on treasure. WWE star Logan Paul just sold a rare Pokémon card in a diamond necklace case at auction for $16.5m, breaking the record for the most expensive trading card. With Pokémon cards outpacing the S&P by 3,000% in the past 20 years, it’s time to tell your mom, “I told you so.”

STARTING UP

Can a cartoon bee help people stay sober?

❌  The problem: Addiction recovery is still stigmatized, despite an estimated 464m people dealing with alcohol and substance abuse disorders globally, and support resources can be difficult to access. 

💡  The pitch: San Francisco-based Sunflower built Sam, a 24/7 AI sponsor in the shape of a cartoon bee. Users can track sobriety milestones in Sunflower’s app, connect with community members, and complete assignments based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. The company’s founder tells PitchBook he wants the app to become the Duolingo of sobriety.

🚀  The outlook: In 2025, the company grew from 200 early users to 100k+ monthly active users and recently raised $6m+ at a $60m valuation. But it will need to tread carefully — the American Psychological Society and plenty of other experts are growing concerned over AI’s role in mental health treatment.

NEWS FLASH

• Hey, remember NFTs? The Bored Ape NFT that pop superstar Justin Bieber paid $1.3m for in 2022 is now worth $12k, a 99%+ drop in value. Despite the cratering value of and interest in NFTs, Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs is still hoping to open a Bored Ape clubhouse in Miami for some reason.
  

• True romance: Score, the controversial dating app for singles with good credit, is back, this time with a basic tier — no credit check required — and a premium one for those who verify their ID and credit score. Founder Luke Bailey told TechCrunch that financial behavior predicts life stability, something he believes "compatibility algorithms should reflect.”
  

• Prediction model: AI startup Simile has raised $100m to develop a model that anticipates human behavior, such as consumer patterns, what questions analysts might ask during earnings calls, or how people might react to corporate announcements.
  

• Go ahead! Add that exclamation point! A study found that people perceive those who use exclamation points as warmer and just as competent as those who don’t, regardless of gender.

   

MARKETING IN 2026

Marketing must be more human

Digital marketing in 2026 is marred by AI search woes + AI slop on socials + behind-the-scenes AI automation… You get it. 

But on a web stuffed with subpar content, originality wins. Read this year’s State of Marketing Report for an inside look at industry trends, elite branding tactics, and the future of growing online businesses. 

1.5k marketers weighed in…

• What sets the best companies apart?
• Which trends should teams obsess over?
• How to build a profound + disruptive brand
• The highest-ROI marketing channels
• The rise of micro-influencer alliances
• Why short-form videos will keep on dominating
• AI prompts for Loop Marketing workflows

It’s everything you’ve dreamt of (and more). Don’t miss this year’s report.

THE BIG IDEA

From flip cup to sustainable fashion

Late-night beer pong and flip cup sessions inspire many seemingly brilliant business ideas, but most don't hold up in the cold, hungover light of day. 

One Johns Hopkins engineering student, however, saw potential in the red plastic cups from those party games (besides holding room-temp brewskis).

Tapping into her potential

Lauren Choi, founder of sustainable fashion company The New Norm, developed a way to convert those difficult-to-recycle cups into sweaters and beanies.

During her senior year, Choi invented a way to transform frat lawn trash into stylish clothing, per The Guardian. 

• Her team gathered thousands of cups from fraternities and fed them through a custom-built extruder.
  
• Choi took a weaving class to turn the raw materials into sample fabrics.
  
• After graduation, she secured grants from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and Reynolds Consumer Products (cup-maker Hefty’s parent company) to develop the product. 

The problem? Choi’s plastic-cup-based material still felt a whole lot like plastic cups — not cozy. 

It took an improved formula to create softer material, and now the company's yarn is produced in North Carolina and Virginia and shipped to Brooklyn, where 3D printers knit the material into clothing. 

The New Norm's first collection, made from 5k cups, sold out in two months, with beanies retailing for $45 and sweaters starting at $85.

Hold the microplastics

While other companies turn plastic waste into T-shirts, shoes, and even spacesuits, washing recycled polyester sheds significantly more microplastics than virgin polyester.

The New Norm, however, found creative solutions to common industry challenges:

• It uses continuous filaments instead of the short fibers used in most polyester so that fewer loose ends break away, minimizing microplastic shedding.
  
• The company's manufacturing uses no water, and 3D-knitting products eliminate the waste of traditional cut-and-sew production.
  
• The clothing's pastel shades come from the colors of recycled cups rather than added dyes. 

The global sustainable fabrics market was valued at $29B in 2024 and is projected to reach $71B by 2031. 

And Choi’s company has scaled production from tens of pounds of plastic per run to thousands in the past two years. 

I'll drink to that.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Can you leverage LinkedIn in a non-creepy way? Or write a four-sentence cold email that actually lands a meeting? Yes and yes — here’s how.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Annual cost of Bryan Johnson’s new Immortals program, a rigorous health regimen modeled on the exact protocol the longevity entrepreneur has abided by for the past five years and which he called the best in the world. But is it really, though? 

It doesn’t seem to matter to the 1.5k+ people who reportedly applied within the first 30 hours of its announcement last week, per Axios. Ultimately, only three people will be selected for the program, which will include “a dedicated concierge team, BryanAI 24/7, extensive testing, millions of biological data points,” and more. 

HOW YOU HUSTLE

Our readers are always cooking up cool ideas. Here’s our weekly spotlight on a Hustle reader working on something big.

Who: Natasha Bunten Cashen

What: Happy Gifter

The elevator pitch: “Happy Gifter is your personal gifting OS. It's powered by Gigi, your AI-enabled gift-finding sidekick who learns who your person is, what they love, then delivers thoughtful gift ideas in under a minute."

The origin story: “After yet another birthday party for one of my three boys, I faced a mountain of toys. Some were great, some ended up in the donate or dumpster pile pretty quickly. I just thought with all this waste of time and money there had to be a better way. Then I remembered the look on my kids' faces when they opened the thing they'd been hoping for all year… Those are the moments and connections we're creating so anyone can be the ultimate gift-giver.”

One truly innovative thing they’re doing: “It's a complete gifting OS with birthday reminders, new gift ideas you'd never have thought of, and a system that keeps it all organized for you.”

What are you working on? Tell us here.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1930, astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. 

💻  That’s cool: Laptop sticker art.
🗞️  Newsletter: Drowning in AI headlines? Mindstream filters the noise and breaks down what matters.

🐂  Game: It’s "The Oregon Trail" but instead of dying of dysentery, you get to read articles while you… take care of dysentery business. 

🦜  Aww: Bird talk.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Compared to restaurant soda prices, the gigantic movie theater sodas are seeming more reasonable. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Singdhi Sokpo, and Danny Jensen.
Editing by: Sara "Knit happens" Friedman.

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