Football Billionaires

and LV Baby, Tom Sachs Drama & Microsoft Co-Pilot

Tourist Trapp

Mar 19, 2023

Clockwise from Top.

Football Billionaires

Raquel and I both had Friday off, and spent the day wandering around the West Village. When she doesn’t know where she wants to go, Raquel’s technique, which I only learned of a few days ago, is to look up the neighborhood in her Photos app, see where she has been before, and let that inform what do for the day. That’s how we ended up at Bar Pisellino, for example, and got to sample the obscure regional Italian coffee beverages on their menu (Raquel enjoyed her Bicerin).

We brought a huge haul of reading material from Casa Magazines, and read through the latest issue of Tatler. Full of obscure Britishisms1, it did include a piece on the new owner of English football club Sunderland.

It’s now owned by Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, a distant relative of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I had no idea JLD came from a very rich an influential French family. The Louis-Dreyfus Group controls a significant portion of the world’s agricultural trade, it seems, so much so that KLD was able to buy an expensive football club.

Billionaires continue to snap up English football clubs at a fast rate, where the Premier League is second only to the NFL in revenue per match. They have historically been great investments, and can bring prestige to someone who is already rich and successful. Current English Premier League clubs are almost entirely owned by billionaires at this point (Brentford the lone exception).

Baby Fashion

Louis Vuitton released its first baby collection, which includes this adorable baby suitcase and plenty of expensive booties and pastel knits. The pricing is in line with the rest of the luxury market (read: $400-$500 for baby shoes). The most extravagant piece is this $73K wardrobe, which we want to not like but it’s actually very cute.

There are a lot of factors driving luxury brands into the Kids/Baby business, including needing to diversify away from traditional revenue streams and building brand loyalty from a young age. This is a category that is going to continue to grow and grow!

The Artist’s Cult

Curbed came out with a very lengthy piece on artist Tom Sachs and the way he treats his studio assistants. Sachs has plenty of ties to the fashion world, including commercially successful collaborations with Nike and Tiffany. His wife, Sarah Hoover, is a writer and influencer with fashion industry connections.2

Among other allegations, former employees claim Sachs would throw objects around the studio, and would verbally abuse team members. Everyone describes the studio as a “cult.” Sachs, for his part, denies everything.

With the Curbed piece getting plenty of attention over the past week, Nike is re-evaluating its relationship with the artist.

We are very curious to see what prices of Sachs Nike collab do on StockX. The original Mars Yard sold for $9K(!) last summer:

Tom Sachs x Nike Mars Yard Price History

Since the article came out, prices haven’t dropped significantly in the past week for the Sulfur or Field Brown General Purpose shoe. That being said, Kanye West’s Adidas sneakers also seem to be holding their value, which seems hard to believe.

We talk more about Tom Sachs and some of the specific rules (“systems”) around meal time on this week’s podcast.

The Future of Work

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it will be tightly integrating artificial intelligence tools into its suite of Office products: Excel, Word, Teams, Outlook, Powerpoint. Think natural language prompts that allows the system to answer questions like “What were my top performing stores last week” or “How much of our SS23 orders have been received” with the user (i.e., you/me) having to dig through the data for the answer.

Another use case is having Co-Pilot, the name for the AI piece of Office, automatically generate and distribute notes following group meetings held on Teams.

I know that I still spend a significant amount of time summarizing and visualizing the data my business generates, and anything that speeds up the process would be a significant time saver.

Microsoft has a crazy demo on YT here.