Spirit Halloween is a hilarious meme. It’s also a monster seasonal business and real estate operation.

Starting with one location in 1983, Spirit now runs 1k+ pop-up stores and sells $500m+ worth of costumes a year (almost entirely in Sept and Oct).

Here's the story🧵

1/The US Halloween Industrial Complex is big:

◻️it's projected to do $10B+ this year (~33% on costumes)
◻️the avg. American consumer will drop $103 on candies, decorations and costumes.

Unsurprisingly, Spirit Halloween is a huge recipient of the spend.

2/The Spirit Halloween story begins in a California strip mall in 1983.

Retailer Joe Marver ran Spirit Women’s Discount Apparel when a neighbouring store — which sells costumes — shut down.

Marver saw how well the store did during Halloween and decided to copy the business.

Read 21 tweets

Trung Phan 🇨🇦

@TrungTPhan

14 Oct

We spend all day on Zoom, but the experience is terribly unoptimized for most people.

Here are 8 hacks to level up 🧵

1/ Default mic & camera off

We've all been there: you have a 3pm meeting, but just woke up at 2:57pm.

If you don't want your colleagues to see how hard you went last night, make sure the Zoom mic and camera are default OFF when you enter the chat.

2/ Temporary un-mute

In the unfortunate event that someone asks you a question and you have to answer it...

...PRESS AND HOLD THE SPACE BAR to temporarily unmute yourself. When you let go, you're back on mute.

Read 11 tweets

Trung Phan 🇨🇦

@TrungTPhan

13 Oct

NerdWallet started with $800 and an Excel spreadsheet. Now, the personal finance site is headed for a ~$5B IPO.

To get here, it mastered SEO including a genius hack that drives millions of organic page views: free finance tools (eg. mortgage calculators).

Here's a breakdown🧵

1/ Founded in 2009, NerdWallet began as a credit card comparison site but has expanded into mortgages, personal finance, investing and more.

The business model: NerdWallet offers free reviews/content/tools and receives affiliate fees if it drives conversions on finance products.

2/ Per SimilarWeb, NerdWallet gets 20m+ site visits a month. And 86% of that is via search (which is nearly all organic).

NerdWallet has a big editorial team (100+) to create content that ranks high in valuable finance searches.

It also offers ALOT of free tools.

Read 15 tweets

Trung Phan 🇨🇦

@TrungTPhan

10 Oct

OK, this was an interesting rabbit hole: "Famous corporate logo designs with a hidden message"

Here are 12 gems 🧵

1/ In Google's logo, 5 of 6 letters are primary colors. The only outlier is "L", a secondary color (green).

Per the logo's designer:"Instead of having the pattern go in order, we put a secondary color on the L, which brought back the idea that Google doesn't follow the rules."

2/ In the SpaceX logo, the letter "X" matches the trajectory of of the Falcon 9 Rocket.

Read 21 tweets

Trung Phan 🇨🇦

@TrungTPhan

9 Oct

This is awesome: David Brown is a gold-medal blind Paralympics sprinter (he competes with a guide).

The class that David Brown races in is called T11, referring to a totally blind athlete who can run 100m within 11 seconds.

🔗 vm.tiktok.com/ZM8eBqjFu/

Brown’s guide is Jerome Avery, a friend who’s run with him since 2014

🔗 pressroom.toyota.com/david-brown-an…

Read 4 tweets

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