- For Starters
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- Good taste
For Starters is a weekly newsletter for the next-gen of small business owners. It’s written by Danny Giacopelli, former editor of Courier mag and host of Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs podcast.
In this issue:
Inspiration ➠ Zissou-core
Advice ➠ Kardo’s founder
Ideas ➠ What’s mottainai?
Tools ➠ A poetry camera
FS Community ➠ Trends!
➠ Get inspired
A real place | larryscaphe.com
01. What’s your why? Small businesses are cool for lots of reasons. High on the list is the fact that, as a customer, you can understand the owner’s ‘why’ in a more direct way. You know them as people, their story, their motivations, why they do what they do. Take Larry's Ca Phe, a coffee shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, owned by Tuan Nguyen. So who’s Larry? The high school math teacher who, in 2000, travelled to Vietnam to adopt Tuan. Larry died in 2019, but he’s the inspiration for Tuan’s bustling new biz, a place “where teachers, adoptees, and the community come to enjoy delightful cups of coffee, fragrant teas, and small snacks.” (What’s Starbucks’ why? Free wi-fi?) ☕️ → Watch this beautiful 4 min film about Larry’s
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02. Putting paint where it ain’t. Speaking of coffee, Washington D.C.-based tāst just launched. Founded by artist/designer Reggie Black; photographer and creative director Obiekwe Okolo; and author Jason Reynolds, tāst approaches coffee as a sort of design platform 🎨
“According to Reynolds, the brand’s lead narrator, tāst is working ‘to put some paint where it ain’t.’ Just like the original Air Jordan would use design to catapult sneaker culture beyond the courts, tāst coffee has chosen to approach specialty coffee as a design challenge: How can creative expression and novel narratives break down barriers in specialty coffee culture? How can accessibility and belonging be expanded to center those traditionally left out of the frame?”
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03. It’s giving Zissou. Atlantic Coastal Supplies, a small Cornwall-based “provider of equipment & apparel for aquatic pursuits”, has just collab’d with none other than J.Crew. When giant brands work with small ones, cool things can happen. → Please put this in a window display in a mall 🤿
ACS x J.Crew
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04. Kiwi candlepreneur. Over in New Zealand, candlemaker Emma Sykes, who has Down syndrome, runs a soy candle company called Downlights – a social enterprise that offers job opportunities for other young people with Down syndrome or learning disabilities. Excellent. 🕯️ → Watch a 60-sec doc about her
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05. Tell me a story. Angelina Hong studied biology at Stanford, but found her true calling in food. (How many of us studied something a million miles from what we’re doing now? 👀 ✋). Today Angelina runs Gourmand Group, an agency focused on narrative storytelling for food industry entrepreneurs, along with a very cool supper club company called MOSA.
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06. I think we need a bigger space. When you move into your 6th warehouse in 12 years, you must be doing something right. Perth, Australia-based brand Oli, which specialises in hand-drawn and hand-printed t-shirts, marked the occasion on IG by showing the journey they’ve been on. 🚀
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07. THIS is a bigger space. Maybe Oli’s next warehouse can be on Osea? Not far from London is this secluded 280-acre private island with 38 buildings, an events venue, and a recording studio – on sale for a tidy £25m. Stormzy's recorded there. Rihanna’s been. Daniel Radcliffe and Jude Law filmed there. Owls, kestrels, muntjac deer, rabbits? They live there. Neolithic settlements? Viking burial grounds? Under your feet. → File this under ‘cool place to start something if you win the lottery’. 💸
Just please don’t open another Blank Street
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08. Dive bars & dumpsters. Is Valentine Texas Bar – located on State Highway 90 in West Texas and owned by entrepreneur Jeff Wilson, aka 'Professor Dumpster' (he lived in a dumpster for a year) – the “Diviest Bar in America”? Got all that? 🤠
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09. Not just for old white guys. Swang is a new golf collective in LA for people who have felt excluded historically from the sport. Their motto? Pull up, tap in 🏌️
“Founder Modi Oyewole created Swang to provide a space for the golf-curious and those who’ve been searching for like-minded folks to play with in the historically white- and male-dominated sport… ‘When I ask people how they found out about us, a lot of the stories are the same,’ says Oyewole, 38. ‘People never felt like this was a thing they could do. But with this, we are quite literally saying, f— all that. We can do this too. You can wear what you want. You can be you and still come play.’”
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10. Synergy. And a brand agency in London has opened up a shop above its office. Why not? 🛍️
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➠ Wisdom
Rikki Kher
In his own words, the London-born, Delhi-based founder of menswear brand Kardo, founded in 2013, recalls a time when he really stuck to his guns – and it paid off.
Very early on I met a guy from France who loved what I was doing. He came to my studio and wanted me to do some production work for him. He was starting a small brand.
What you're making is beautiful, he said. Why don't you give me your collection? I'll put it in the back of my car. I'm driving around to all my clients in France. I'll be your agent.
Sure! I didn’t have an agent. Here’s the collection, I said. Pack it in a suitcase, take it with you.
Two months later, I asked: Where are the orders?
Look, he said, I’ve taken it to 75 retailers across France. Fifty of them love what you do, but not a single one of them will buy it – because it's made in India.
That was the feedback. I was astonished.
He goes on: Can you put Kardo London on the label? Or Kardo Paris? Then I’ll sell it for sure.
I talked with my wife at dinner and was like, Here's my issue, what do you think?
If you put Paris or London on your label, she said, you'd be just like every other brand.
She was right. Fuck it, I thought. I'm going to write it in Hindi!
The next morning I went back to my studio and asked the team to print our labels with Kardo on top, and its Hindi translation underneath.
We were going to be unapologetically from India. It was basically a big fuck you.
And I swear: the moment we did that is the moment when Kardo started to take off.
Rikki shared so many good insights with us that, in a For Starters first, we’ll be linking to the full conversation with him on a special page next week. Keep your eyes peeled – and tell your friends to subscribe so they can read it, too.
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➠ Good ideas
Mottainai → If your restaurant only offers dinner service, what do you do with your space during the day? Kate Kaneko has come up with a solution: a company called ASANO. The idea – ‘the AM cafe to your PM restaurant' – is a sort of daytime cafe residency inside existing restaurants. It’s kicking off in NYC but the concept is coming to a restaurant near you soon. → Kate was influenced by mottainai, “the idea that waste is regrettable and everything has inherent value.”
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➠ Links, etc.
🛠️ Resources
Thiings → A library of literally thousands of extremely cute 3D icons that you can use for your projects. Have fun.
📚️ Reads
Does the Future of Italian Tailoring Lie in ... Chicago? Naples-based luxury label Kiton thinks so, which is why it’s established a pioneering new course for Windy City high schoolers. Esquire
A.I. Might Take Your Job. Here Are 22 New Ones It Could Give You. In a few key areas, humans will be more essential than ever. NYT
How I’m Fixing My Broken Attention Span. The infinite scroll has ruined our ability to focus. Is wasting more time the key to getting it back? Vulture
A Conversation with Cynthia Shanmugalingam. Apartamento
How creatives are surviving the 2025 slowdown. Things are tough for many creatives right now. We share some of the ways they're fighting back. Creative Boom
The 11-year-old designer dressing Pharrell, A$AP Ferg and Elle Fanning. Dylan’s T-Shirt Club has collaborated with Michelle Pfeiffer and conquered Cannes Film Festival – all before its founder has reached his 12th birthday Dazed
🧠 Findings
16% → Meetings after 8pm are up 16% from last year, according to the Work Trend Index Special Report from Microsoft. The average employee is also now sending or receiving 50+ messages outside core biz hours. → The trend is part of what’s being called “the infinite workday” ☹️
🙃 Fun
Poetry Camera. “Take a photo with the camera... poetry camera thinks... and prints out a poem about the scene.” Built in NYC, and using Anthropic's Claude 4 model. 📸
Sheep Inc has apparently made the world's first swim shorts made entirely from natural materials: merino wool and biodegradable mesh 🐑
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➠ Our community
Kyle x For Starters cap
→ In London this week I met up with FS subscriber Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick – the Barcelona-based, American writer behind the weekly newsletter The Trend Report™: “part essay, part culture analysis, and part whatever the universe offers us.” This is the pitch: “I watch the internet so you can spend more time offline 🌱” Been absolutely loving Kyle’s fresh POV and take on creativity and the world. Plus, he painted his own shirt. That’s cool.
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