Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

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Keeper of the flame. On Lower Clapton Road in east London, wedged between a burger joint and a shuttered leisure centre, you’ll find Ümit & Son – the UK’s last cine film shop. It’s been run for four decades by Ümit Mesut, a 65-year-old Cypriot Cockney projectionist who got his start at 16 as the “rewind boy” at Dalston’s Rio Cinema, paid in Bruce Lee posters. Walk in today and you’re met with a wall of 16mm reels, old VHS, yellowing posters and vintage projectors, with a narrow aisle snaking through to a 15-seat cinema at the back.

Now the shop is under threat from rising rents and business rates. So his old friend and collaborator, filmmaker Liam Saint-Pierre (the two run the cult 16mm film club Ciné Real together), is making a feature documentary about it called The Last Picture Shop.

Midway through filming, Ümit's brother BJ had an idea: what if they flew to LA and asked Quentin Tarantino – a fellow celluloid obsessive and ex-video shop clerk – to help save the place? So they went. They didn’t find him. But they’re not done filming just yet…

→ Watch the (amazing) trailer and back the film here 🎞️

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Books and screens 🫠 → Your inability to focus is a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time.

La Marzocco resale market ☕ → The 99-year-old Italian espresso machine brand has spawned a secondhand market in which rare ones fetch $$$$$ and scams abound.

The death of sterile 🐶 → Overly polished design photoshoots are finally putting real-life (i.e. people and pets) back into the frame.

Clippers ✂️ → A new-ish job role is taking off.

Glue work 🤝 → What was once a career-killer is now becoming a key workplace skill.

The tote-bag economy 👜 → Shop totes have become must-have items. “Once an afterthought, they now risk eclipsing the wares that their purveyors are principally known for.”

Personal encyclopedias 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 → Create a personal wikipedia about your family history using AI.

Candles in restaurants 🕯 → They’re everywhere now.

Strategic laziness 🥱 → The many benefits of downtime.

The aspirational pantry 🧑‍🍳 → Storage space, transformed by TikTok.

Reusing brand names 🔮 → Investors recently turned Silicon Valley’s fav shoe brand Allbirds into an AI company, and now a perfume company is resurrecting the IP of a long-closed NYC nightclub. What other juicy IP/names are out there for the taking?

The gulp 😨 → When you finish a project – write a book, build a product – but it’s not yet in the hands of a reader or customer. “This can be a dangerous time for the psyche of a creative person…”

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Minimal Gallery — Creative website inspiration for an era when all sites are about to look slick but identical and incredibly boring.

Flipbook — An infinite visual browser generated entirely on demand in real time. More context here.

BITE MARKS — A report from creative studio MØRNING on food culture and the algorithm.

The Tiny Tourist — A new travel-focused insights report from It’s Nice That, along with a practical playbook for creative teams.

120+ marketing tactics — From Tom Orbach, the writer behind the newsletter Marketing Ideas.

15 Claude skills and workflows — From FS subscriber Josh Lachkovic, founder of Ballpoint.

World Beautiful Business Forum — This upcoming conference in Athens looks pretty interesting.

The top 20 graphic designers of 2026 — As voted by in Creative Boom’s State of Creativity survey.

Emojis at Work — I’ve read the summary, but well done if you read the whole thing (ah sorry, I meant 👍)

The last quiet thing. Terry Godier

The “passive income” trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs. JA Westenberg

Folk tattoos for modern living. Ssense

Millions of boomer small business owners will soon retire. Will their companies just disappear? Guardian

The side hustle has entered its weird era. PYMNTS

What A Mess. Cake Zine

The monks in the casino. Derek Thompson

This Minnesota coffee shop created a smash-hit raspberry Danish latte. Then it invited the world to ‘steal’ the recipe. CNN

I had 261,305 unread emails: What I learned from my Inbox Zero experiment. City AM

Hiding in plain sight: how do creatives find inspiration in everyday life? It’s Nice That

How four friends turned a 70-year-old Finnish drink into a $325 million exit. The Food Stack

The things you can’t vibe-code. Here & There

How Sidney Baptista is redefining running for the Black community. Field Mag

Everyone has designs on custom embroidery. NYT

What 1,000-year-old companies know about resilience. Big Think

Creativity as resistance. The Creative Independent

He sold his grass-fed jerky company for millions, then he started one of the hardest businesses in food. Entrepreneur

40.6% → Women own 15.7 million businesses in the US – more than 40% of all businesses – which employ 12.6m people and generate $2.8 trillion in revenue.

31% → The rise in indie bookshop openings in the US from 2024 to 2025.

36,000 → The number of pets in China that receive acupuncture treatment every single day, as the country’s pet industry goes “full wellness.”

“Oh, to be an ice cream boat floating around Italy…”

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For Starters subscriber Callia Hargrove, founder of brand consultancy Backstory, has been digging into how founders and marketing leaders can use AI without losing their voice, judgment, or values in the process. Next Wednesday, she’s hosting a webinar with AI ethicist Rose Genele on exactly that – where AI belongs in creative work, and where it shouldn't. Grab a ticket and join. 🎟

Katherine Heath, meanwhile, has spent years helping other people grow their brands. Now she's starting her own: a small aromatherapy label called Cordelia’s House – and the first product is “designed for the moment before the day begins, a reminder to orient yourself before the day runs away with you.” Sign up to her newsletter to hear more. 💌

Speaking of newsletters, Segi Adewusi, the founder of jelly brand Flower the Fruit, has launched her own newsletter called Fruit Philosophy, which explores the structure and culture of fruit preservation: “I’m interested in how flavour is made and experienced, not just how it tastes,” Segi says. Have a read! 🍒

Freelancing can be hard to navigate, so Matthew Knight has just built a comprehensive step-by-step guide to help you get started. He’s calling it Flightplan and it looks fantastic and genuinely useful. Give it a go. 🧠

In book news, Atlanta-based Kate Arora has launched Velum Books, an independent press that publishes only anonymous and pseudonymous fiction – no author bios, no headshots, no pressure to have a huge social following. The idea came out of frustration with a publishing industry that increasingly expects writers to arrive with a ready-made personal brand. As Kate writes: “Was anyone treating anonymity as a way to mitigate the specific pains the internet has brought to authors and modern publishing?” Velum is open for submissions now. 📚

Bonnie Chung, who founded food brand Miso Tasty, is working on a book called How to Lose Your Business (Without Losing Your Mind). Miso Tasty, as she puts it, “collapsed dramatically, triggered by a Succession-style takeover attempt, followed by a miracle rescue by Belazu at the eleventh hour.” Her book is “part-memoir, part-cautionary tale, part-survival guide to separating from the thing you created with all your heart.” Keep an eye out – it’s gonna be good! ✍

And in Glasgow, Lola Hoad runs the brand design studio Good Call – “for good brands doing good things.” I recently asked what her biz dreams look like. Lola: “Getting good people who are doing genuinely wonderful things to be seen, heard and felt; building a small-yet-mighty team who care about impact and getting to the core; and building the kind of life that goes beyond my wildest day-dreams.” 👏

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