últimas notícias

On the flurry of direct-to-consumer brands going public.

“Clearly, a lot of companies that have raised money are looking to access a broader investor base,” Blumenthal said, seeking to distinguish Warby — whose direct listing won’t raise new funds — from others. So far this year, 12 internet retail companies have gone public, compared with nine last year, according to Renaissance Capital. Performance of these and related retail names have been mixed: Shares of Honest Company, Jessica Alba’s wellness brand, are down 53 percent since listing, while Figs, the upmarket scrubs company, is up 29 percent.

Seen and heard

► “The term ‘paradigm shift’ is always overused, so people tend to ignore it. But that’s a good way of describing what’s happening right now.”

— Leland Miller, the head of the consulting firm China Beige Book, on how the struggles of the property developer Evergrande reveal “the beginning of the end of China’s growth model as we know it.”

► “I’m sorry to all my friends, but we’re not all going back.”

— Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce, on how many, if not most, of the company’s employees may continue working from home after the pandemic.

► “I had builders and developers explaining to me how it’s not possible to get concrete to do that, even as I walked them up to our 3-D-printed house. Now our biggest challenge is we’ve just got to make more printers.”

— Jason Ballard, the head of Icon, a construction technology company that has delivered more than two dozen 3-D-printed homes across the U.S. and Mexico.

Ike Perlmutter’s Palm Beach justice

Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire chairman of Marvel Entertainment, has been in an epic dispute with Harold Peerenboom, a neighbor in Palm Beach, Fla., for about a decade. It began with a disagreement over tennis courts and devolved into an eight-year libel case brought by Peerenboom against Perlmutter, claiming that the Marvel executive was behind a hate mail campaign against Peerenboom in retaliation. An envelope with traces of DNA from Mr. Perlmutter’s wife was cited as evidence linking the couple to the letters.