Do your peeps keep telling you they “know a guy” who’s growing mushrooms in quarantine?

Hold your side-eye. They might be buying from Smallhold, an organic farm that pivoted to delivering grow-your-own shroom kits when the pandemic hit.

There’s no magic here — but it’s just one example of how mushroom-inspired businesses are sprouting up everywhere. 

The fleshy foodstuff is a hot commodity 

Especially when it comes to sustainability:  

• One biomatter business, Ecovative, is using material from mushroom roots — called mycelium — to build dining chairs and desk lamps. 
• Ecovative makes mycelium packaging that looks and feels a bit like Styrofoam — but it decomposes in 30 days, compared to Styrofoam’s 500+ years.  
• Vogue thinks products like mushroom-based makeup sponges could fix fashion’s plastic-waste problem. 

Chicken of the woods is about to be the chicken of your fridge

Ecovative is turning the specialty shroom variety into a replacement for bacon. 

According to the company, on a structural level, chicken of the woods actually looks a bit… beefy. 

Another rival, Meati Foods, is grilling shroomy steaks — perhaps hoping they’re juicy enough to topple the likes of Impossible Foods.

No industry is safe from the mushroom madness 

All these new, hypermodernist buildings are starting to look trippy. Maybe that’s because the construction biz is totally high on mycelium-based cement as an environmentally friendly alternative to concrete. 

An architecture firm called The Living built a circular “organic mycelium tower” for New York’s Museum of Modern Art a few years back, and more buildings might be on the way.

Plus, you can say goodbye to smoke alarms: Flats fashioned from fungi are fire-resistant.

All around the world, cardboard rustlers are ripping off recycling bins. 

Turns out a paper-stealing posse can pull a neat profit selling old cardboard in China, where it’s pulped and made into shipping boxes.

The bad guys make bank while governments get screwed

In Madrid, thieves take almost half the cardboard that gets put into recycling. After 42 of its members got popped, one gang was accused of stealing 67k+ tons of paper waste/year, worth $11.8m/year.

You might not care where your castoffs go, but municipalities are missing the cut they take from recycling revenues. Madrid lost ~$19m.

From dumpster divers to criminal masterminds

The recycled cardboard and paper market is expected to hit $5.4B in 2024 — up from $4.3B in 2017. It’s “beige gold,” as the BBC put it.

Meanwhile, Europol says cardboard poaching has become more than just theft — some players have organized international money laundering rings.

It’s some weird high-stakes drama for a bunch of empty Amazon boxes. But I guess one man’s recycling is another man’s… mountain of cash.

Hope your self-esteem is high today, because it’s time to learn about some teens who are richer than you. 

Roblox, a site that hosts millions of user-created video games, skyrocketed in popularity during the pandemic. Players spent 3B hours on the site in July, 2x the amount they spent in February.

And its independent developers (mainly young adults) are in for a major payday. 

They’re working hard and playing harder

Roblox says it has 2m+ developers, ~345k of whom are making money. It splits the profits (generated from in-game purchases) with game-makers 50/50.

Three years ago, 17-year-old Alex Balfanz dropped his cops-and-robbers game Jailbreak. It’s been played 4B+ times, and bagged Balfanz a seven-figure income.

Anne Shoemaker has made $500k from Roblox, mostly on the success of 2 games, Mermaid Life and My Droplets. She started her own gaming enterprise, Fullflower Studio, which now employs 14 contractors.

“People used to tell my mom, ‘Stop letting her play this video game; it’s not going to get her anywhere,’” Shoemaker told The New York Times. “And it’s getting me somewhere.”

Rats are having the time of their lives in quarantine. They’re taking over city blocks. They’re growing as big as rabbits. 

In Sweden, they’re getting their own Main Street. 

An art collective called AnonyMouse just debuted Ricotta Records, a hole-in-the-wall shop selling rodent-sized CDs and posters in the city of Lund. 

Stop in for chart-topping LPs from Lady Gouda, Destiny’s Cheese, Tailor Swiss, Rats Against the Machine, and Johnny Cashew.

We might be cooped up at home, but the rat economy is booming

Last month, AnonyMouse created Cicada Pharmacy — part of a string of mousy ’marts, including a French deli and an Italian restaurant.

The group, presumably made up of humans, formed in 2016 with a simple question: Where are rats supposed to shop? 

But its recent store openings seem well timed to the pandemic’s rat renaissance. 

AnonyMouse wrote on Instagram: “We would like to thank the municipality of Lund for inviting us and encouraging really small business owners.”

Route’s free post-purchase tool is the secret sauce for ecommerce brands

There’s a huuuuge missed opportunity out there for most online companies: The post-purchase experience. 

Great ones bring customers back. Outdated ones, well… not so much. 

That’s why ecommerce retailers are using Route’s free tool to revamp their post-purchase experience and blow customer’s minds. Just check the stats:

• 11.4% increase in net profits.
• 126% increase in customer engagement.
• 246% increase in post-purchase branded impressions. 

Try Route and see how adding Visual Tracking™, real-time delivery notifications and Amazon Prime-like support to your customer experience keeps ‘em coming back: