👖 Pants for rent

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👋 Good morning. Think that feedback from your boss was hard to swallow? Be grateful you didn’t have to choke down an Amaropostia stiptica mushroom. It contains a compound that researchers believe is the most bitter substance on Earth. How bitter are we talking? One gram of the stuff would set off a human’s bitter taste receptors even if diluted by 100 bathtubs’ worth of water.

🏆 Smash that vote button so The Hustle can take home a Webby. And we think HubSpot Media’s My First Million and The Next Wave podcasts deserve some trophies, too.

NEWS FLASH

🎈 Michaels wants to party. The arts and crafts chain is adding 300 new balloon options and 500+ new products to its party supply offerings, looking to fill a market void after Party City filed for bankruptcy last year and closed its 700 US stores. Michaels has been cranking out lemonade from the defunct chain’s lemons: The retailer’s website has seen searches jump 155% for party supplies and 150% for balloons since January. It’s also bringing the parties themselves, with 5k in-store craft parties hosted last year, serving 42k attendees.

👍 OpenAI wants likes, too: The AI company is reportedly building a social network centered around ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities. One insider at another AI company told The Verge that X’s Grok integration had sparked jealousy in the industry, “especially how people create viral tweets by getting it to say something stupid.” It’s unclear if this new project would be its own app or part of ChatGPT, but Sam Altman did post to X, saying, “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app,” following reports that Meta was working on an AI chatbot app.

📺 Netflix has its eyes on a $1T market cap and $9B in global ad sales by 2030, according to anonymous insiders who attended a company meeting in March, per The Wall Street Journal. Netflix’s current market cap is ~$400B, and estimates put Netflix’s 2025 US ad revenue at $2.15B+. Strategies to reach these goals could include courting more subscribers to its ad-supported tiers, gaining more live events (which also have ads), and exploring proprietary ad tech and new ad delivery methods.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

The FDA approved a first-of-its-kind clinical trial that will test whether gene-edited pig livers could be used to treat humans with sudden liver failure. An estimated 35k people are hospitalized in the US each year for liver failure, and death rates are as high as 50%.
TikTok is introducing Footnotes, the app’s take on a community notes feature. US users can now apply to become contributors, and will be able to “add relevant information to content” on the platform.
Ikea will open its 11th Texas store — a 63k-square-foot, two-level location in Dallas — later this year. It’ll sell ~3.2k items, including food, but it’s actually one of the Swedish retailer’s smaller stores, designed for urban areas with limited space.

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

Netflix and feeling chill?

The streaming app wants to know all about your mood.

Netflix has started testing a new AI-powered search tool powered on OpenAI’s tech:

It lets users browse for shows using more specific prompts, like browsing by mood.
It’s currently available on iOS for some users in Australia and New Zealand, but will be rolling out in the US soon.

Intrigued? Read more about Netflix’s plans for implementing AI in its recommendations.

THE BIG IDEA

Care to rent some pants?

You can’t really become an Airbnb superhost unless you can afford a bunch of rental properties — but you can rent your jeans, apparently.

Several apps let people rent out everything from clothes to power tools, with some users making up to $36k a year, per Wired.

Interesting side hustle…

… but how does it work? Basically, find an app that deals with whatever stuff you have lying around and see if anyone will pay you to use it. A low-hanging fruit? Clothes.

Unlike platforms like Rent the Runway, which ship subscribers curated outfits they can try or buy, apps like Pickle, Celeb, and Tulerie allow users to rent their own clothes to each other.

Pickle claims it has 200k+ items — from casual outfits to designer pieces — available to rent for a fraction of what it’d cost to buy, and offers same-day delivery by local couriers.

In 2024, Pickle’s biggest users were earning $3k+ a month. Pickle takes a 20% cut.

But, wait, it’s not just clothes

Some platforms are for big-ticket items — Turo lets users rent their own cars — but many exist for smaller stuff. For example:

BabyQuip is for baby gear, which is handy for traveling families — cribs and car seats don’t really fit in an overhead bin. In 2023, one user told Business Insider that she was making $5k per month on the platform.
KitSplit is for high-end camera gear. Fees cover insurance of up to $20k in case of damage or theft.
UK-based Fat Llama is for basically anything — solar generators, DJ tables, pressure washers, VR headsets, you name it.

This model…

… appeals to younger consumers who are budget- and environmentally conscious — and that makes sense. The price of everything is rising, and many people can’t afford or don’t have space for single-use items.

Renting is cheaper, more sustainable, and less nerve-racking than trying to convince Amazon you didn’t just buy a karaoke machine for your birthday party with the intention of returning it.

One Pickle user did tell Wired it was occasionally inconvenient — like when a courier showed up at 1am — but that it made her feel “less guilty about the things I already own.”

So, at least you can feel better about consumerism while you’re making $40 to spend on more stuff.

🔗

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

The current difference in tariffs on women’s clothing versus men’s.

It’s nothing new: Women’s products in the US have been priced higher than those for men for decades — a practice known as the “pink tax.”

Now, with sweeping changes to tariffs, women in the US will likely face “pink tariffs” as well.

Women pay an average of $1 extra per garment, totaling $2B+ a year, according to research by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Ed Gresser.

If you’re already shaking your head, prepare to up the velocity: Women earned an average of 85% of what men earned in 2024, according to Pew Research Center, so those price hikes will sting even more.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1964, Henry Ford II revealed the Ford Mustang at the World’s Fair in New York.

🏝️ That’s cool: A map of obscure islands.

🖼️ That’s interesting: How William Morris’ prints became so popular.

🧘 How to: take better breaks.

🐢 Aww: I’ll never let go.

QUOTE OF NOTE

"It only takes one crew member to spoil an $800,000 holiday"

Is that so… We wouldn’t know, but megayacht owners like British billionaire John Caudwell certainly do. That’s why, despite high demand for crew members amid a booming yacht market, scoring a gig aboard a luxury vessel is no breeze.

High rollers have high expectations, and they can be hard to please. Josh Golder, a Miami-based superyacht owner, told WSJ that he’s fired 50+ people in a year, sometimes over things as simple as “saying the wrong sentence.”

SHOWER THOUGHT

As a child, you can’t swear because there are adults around. As an adult, you can’t swear because kids are around. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman, with help from Singdhi Sokpo and Hadley Deming.
Editing by: Ben “Would like to rent a bounce house” Berkley.

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