Go Flip Yourself.

🪡 🌁 Last week was special with Objet -we threw our second soirée in SF on Friday and got lucky to see some great folks share the love.

What Saumya and Colt are building is so important. Check their work out: Build IRL Newsletter #22. And especially if you’re living in SF, they always share some cool events you can join. That’s how I knew about the new IRL Movie Club for instance and got to watch the Join or Die documentary.

I can’t agree more with Caitlin and really liked her invitation to move from volume to value: Less Volume, More Value. I also agree with her ‘medium-hot take’: “volume-based growth lacks imagination”.

🍄 👜 Dirt also introduced their new column -Objet- in collaboration with us. They’ve asked five writers to write about a single object that is significant to them and will be publishing these essays in the coming months. For its first: Marlowe Granados on the cathartic potential of a second-hand bag: The Bakelite Bag.

I like to think of them [old things] as talismans of the past. I don’t just put them on display but use them as they were made to be used.

There’s also a sense that whatever it witnessed through my ownership is just a minor chapter in the bag’s life. It holds my secrets but also the mysteries of those that came before me. I can only hope to pass it on as the common thread between me and generations of stylish women.

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Let me tell you a story: I was wearing this white Ketchup t-shirt last Saturday during a 5k run in the Golden Gate Park. Julian might have been the first -definitely not the last- to come and ask me how much I like Ketchup. Later on while we were getting our morning coffee at Flywheel, someone came and asked me if I was also working at Heinz. That’s when I saw his sweatshirt -Ketchup related of course- and we all had a good laugh and started talking. First question from him being: 'where did you get this?' and since it’s coming from my favorite burger spot in France, it led us to talk about Lyon, the food scene, SF and so on.

San Francisco is great on all fronts but my personal writing. Objet n°2 is coming on Oct. 4th. If you want to embed memories into your clothing, RSVP here.

⏳ Since we’re talking about memories, handle them with care. Julia delivered a banger on Reboot: A Strange Kind of Memory.

Our brains can’t store every observation, thought or perception that passes through and that isn’t a bad thing. Constraints and selections are what allow us to stay sane in a world of complete sensory overload.

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⏳ Real long-term thinking is so underrated. I’d love to find a way to teach this skill to both our kids. Bill Gates framed it quite perfectly a while ago: “most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.“. Kyle delivered a banger here. I felt invited to reflect on my own life while reading the piece: Decades.

Long-term thinking suddenly makes short-term thinking appear incredibly silly.

🎹 I’ve always loved a good brand story so when I received Waqas's deep dive on Teenage Engineering, I felt excited right away. Why Teenage Engineering is so Cool. This is exactly the type of opinionated company and brand we'd like to see more of. Which makes me wonder: why are there so few in the world? How can we empower more people to launch weirder and cooler things?

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First and foremost, it's time to celebrate. I'm on my longest streak re: writing on this blog. I've been publishing every month since Sept. 2024, reaching a 13-month streak. The 2nd-longest was 'only' 11-month -I reached that mark twice in the past though. The best news still: I've no intention to stop. So I expect this 'record' to be beaten on a regular basis going forward -every month literally. What did trigger it?

🎨 We let disposable stuff put us -humans- in a state of disconnection and lack of meaning. Objects are evidence of human existence. This is why Ben’s piece Marks of Making resonated so much:

Objects that expose their “marks of making”, or artifacts of how they were constructed, are a reminder that everything is made. Nothing simply appears. In a time when most people are wholly detached from making anything they consume, it’s easy to lose sight of that fact. I’m not necessarily lamenting this disconnect, but I appreciate any design which reminds us (whether intentionally or not) that it was made.

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🎨 Henrik struck again. Look at that opener 👇 I was hooked right there. The whole thing looks like a great -and wise- ‘lesson’ to pass on kids: everything that turned out well in my like followed the same design process.

• If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding. Put simply:

  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.

  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.

  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.

It took Mathilde, Max and I, 4 weeks in San Francisco to gather 35 people to get a uniquely designed label with a chip inside sewn on their denim by local tailors; generating 200 taps during the night -playing a ‘tap them all’ game- which triggered 1,300 notifications total. Let’s unpack Objet's first soirée: La Première.

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🪡 We threw our first ‘denim soirée’ in San Francisco last Friday and we can’t be happier. Stella was one of the local tailor. Learn more about her and how she’s doing some magic with fabrics since age 8.

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