Latest news with #Persson
Fashion United
20-05-2025
- Business
- Fashion United
H&M Foundation names Global Change Award winners
H&M Foundation, the non-profit funded by the Persson family, which founded fashion retailer H&M, has named 10 early-stage innovations that will 'reshape the fashion industry' from clean tech recycling in China to community-powered circularity in Ghana as winners of the Global Change Award (GCA) 2025. The annual awards aim to spotlight 'groundbreaking ideas aimed at decarbonising the fashion industry,' focused on supporting early-stage fashion innovation to accelerate the industry's journey toward net-zero. The 2025 award winners come from across the globe, including four from the UK, Germany, India, China, Ghana, Sweden and Bangladesh, covering innovations focused on responsible production, sustainable materials and processes, mindful consumption and 'wildcards,' for those 'unexpected, cross-cutting or catalytic ideas'. Each winning innovation in this year's contest is geared towards halving the industry's greenhouse gas emissions every decade and reach net-zero by 2050, 'in a way that's just for both people and planet,' and includes ideas such as smart recycling and heat pumps designed to replace outdated gas and oil steam boilers to radically inclusive circular systems. Annie Lindmark, programme director at H&M Foundation, said in a statement: 'GCA is about more than specific innovations. It's about reimagining the entire fashion system. One innovation alone won't fix fashion – we need to shake the foundations and innovate how we innovate. 'That's why we back bold thinkers at the very start of their journeys. These changemakers aren't just solving problems, they're challenging outdated systems and showing us what a new future could look like. It's time to stop tweaking and start transforming.' Each winner will receive a 200,000 euro grant and take part in the year-long 'hands-on' GCA Changemaker Programme offering a mix of 'innovation support, systems thinking and personal growth'. The 10 Global Change Award 2025 winners Within the Responsible Production category, two start-ups from the UK have been recognised, including Thermal Cyclones, a 'revolutionary industrial heat pumps can replace traditional boilers and reduce energy consumption by over 75 percent,' and Pulpatronics, which offers metal-free, chipless RFID paper tags that are 'recyclable, cost-effective, and made with carbon-based ink' geared towards the future of sustainable traceability. The category also awarded funding to China's DecoRpet, a low-temperature decolourisation process that 'slashes energy use while delivering high-quality recycled PET for new textile production'. In Sustainable Materials and Processes, the UK's Brilliant Dyes was recognised for its work harnessing the power of cyanobacteria, creating biodegradable dyes with a low-energy extraction method. They are joined by German start-up CircularFabrics and its NyLoop technology, which recovers high-quality nylon from blended textile waste, closing the loop on one of fashion's most used materials, and A Blunt Story from India that makes Uncrude, a plastic-free sole made from bio-based and recycled materials as 'a clean break from fossil-based footwear'. The category also features the Decarbonization Lab from Bangladesh, a dedicated research and development space pioneering low-emission with a focus on textile treatments and dyeing techniques, 'to modernise outdated industry practices' and Sweden's Renasens, a waterless, chemical-free technology, which turns blended textile waste into raw materials with no depolymerisation and no pollution. In Mindful Consumption, the UK's Loom was honoured for its 'intuitive tech platform that connects users with designers to upcycle unworn clothes into one-of-a-kind pieces'. While in the 'wildcards' category, the Revival Circularity Lab from Ghana receives funding for its creative hub in Accra's Kantamanto Market that turns textile waste into value, 'empowering artisans and building local circularity'. Karl-Johan Persson, founder and board member of the H&M Foundation, added: 'To truly decarbonise fashion, we need to reimagine every part of the value chain – from how fibres are made to how garments are reused. 'These changemakers remind us that transformation starts with imagination and action. Their ideas demonstrate concrete ways to challenge the status quo and move the industry towards a net-zero future.' Since 2015, the GCA has supported 56 innovations with a combined grant of 10 million euros, all focused on the evolving needs of the industry's greatest challenge – decarbonisation.
Forbes
01-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Sustainability Leaders Confront Fashion Industry On Carbon And Waste
As we leave Earth Month 2025, and with prospects for any positive legislation or government environmental action at the national level in the U.S. stymied in the short-term, sustainability leaders are turning their attention to state legislatures, foundations, and the nonprofit sector to help achieve their goals. One of the largest polluting industries, which remains largely unregulated, is the apparel and footwear – or fashion -- industry. But that lack of regulation may change if environmental leaders in California, New York and other states are able to get a version of the Fashion Act passed in state legislatures. As introduced in New York, the Fashion Act would mandate that any apparel or footwear company doing business in New York that has global revenue of $100 million or more be required to map their supply chains down to their raw material providers. Once these supply chains are mapped, companies would be required to reduce the negative environmental impact of these providers by setting and achieving climate reductions in line with the Paris Agreement, work with suppliers to effectively manage their chemical use, and take steps to improve the lives of garment workers in the industry. The environmental impact statistics are staggering. While environmental leaders remain cautiously optimistic of some legislative help at the state level in the United States, and many countries in Europe have initiated efforts to rein in the industry, there are no real global standards or regulations, and little attention to this crisis has historically been shown by many companies or foundations. One notable exception is the H&M Foundation, which is committed to supporting the textile industry's journey to halve greenhouse gas emissions every decade by 2050, while promoting a just transition both people and the planet. Funded by the Persson family, the H&M Foundation recognizes change makers, leaders, and innovators who are working to transform the industry. Since 2015, its Global Change Award has backed 56 trailblazing teams, helping to move innovative ideas toward real world solutions. Another is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (UK and US), which is committed to furthering a circular economy designed to eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials, and regenerate nature. Through evidence-based research, the Foundation seeks to contribute to solving global challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss, and through its support of organizations and individuals, it creates learning opportunities through circular economy courses and resources for teachers and academics. The nonprofit Apparel Impact Institute leverages data to identify solutions that stand to make a meaningful carbon reduction in textile production, and it uses this portfolio of solutions to help suppliers create customized decarbonization plans, implement programs, and secure financing for improvements. Its Fashion Climate Fund is aimed at empowering suppliers with subsidies to jumpstart carbon technology assessments and efficiency programs, and to assist in the development of industry leaders engaged in cutting-edge research, comprehensive reports and the convening of key stakeholders. While tackling a huge global industry that employs over 430 million people and is valued at over $1.84 trillion is a monumental challenge, sustainability leaders are hoping to slow down the 'fast fashion' trend by both requiring companies to reduce their carbon emissions and use of water and encouraging consumers to purchase less and recycle their clothes rather than discarding them. The future of the planet may require no less.
New York Times
20-04-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
A model, upside and a draft-day slide: How the Devils landed Jesper Bratt before he was a star
Sitting in the stands of the KeyBank Center in Buffalo, Jesper Bratt was full of stress. He had put on a white button-up dress shirt and blue tie for Day 2 of the 2016 NHL Draft, expecting to go in the second or third round. But pick after pick passed, and no one called his name. The second round slipped away. Then the third. Then the fourth. Then the fifth. At one point, Bratt turned to his dad, Conny, and agent, Joakim Persson. Advertisement 'I think they just forgot about me,' he told them. 'I think that they just forgot that I exist.' A daunting thought entered his head. Did he travel all the way from his native Sweden for nothing? What if no team thought he was worthy of getting picked at all? Finally, in the sixth round, he got good news. A Boston Bruins scout reached out to Persson to tell him they would likely take Bratt when they picked at No. 165 overall. Persson passed word along to his client, and the forward started to process the fact that he could be headed to Boston. But as he and Persson talked, he missed another development. His younger brother, Filip, got his attention. 'Oh my God,' Filip said to him excitedly. 'You just got picked!' Bratt never heard his name. Luckily, Filip did, and he broke the news to Bratt that he was headed to New Jersey. The Devils had picked at No. 162 — three slots ahead of the Bruins, who wound up with Oskar Steen. New Jersey got the steal of the draft. Nine seasons after that summer day in Buffalo, Bratt ranks fifth in his class in points (447), eighth in goals (150) and sixth in games played (552). He set a career high with 88 points this season, leading a Devils team that is heading to the playoffs for only the third time in the past 13 years. During the 2016 first round, some scouts at the Devils' draft table were dejected when the Avalanche took Tyson Jost, a player they loved, at No. 10 overall, according to a team source. New Jersey had the next pick. But thanks to Bratt's draft-day slide, a bet on upside and a statistical model, the Devils managed to land a franchise-altering player late in the draft. Persson said many teams have reached out to him about his client since. 'It was one of our biggest mistakes,' he's heard them say. 'How could we not take him?' Bratt's talent might be clear now, but there were reasons teams overlooked it in the lead-up to the 2016 draft. Bratt played for AIK in the second Swedish league in his draft year and had only 17 points in 48 games. In the eyes of Paul Castron, the Devils' director of amateur scouting, those numbers weren't a huge reason for concern, considering Bratt was a teenager playing against men. But New Jersey also noticed he didn't produce a ton at the under-18 world championships, during which he had only four points in seven games. Advertisement Bratt knows he didn't have the strongest tournament. He also remembers that, perhaps because he was coming from a professional league, the Swedish coaches trusted him in defensive situations at the tournament. That meant more time on the penalty kill and fewer opportunities on power plays. 'A lot of teams kind of questioned themselves if I was good offensively to get that role that they wanted to draft me for,' he says. Then there was his size. He is still only 5-foot-10, 175 pounds and was listed at a few pounds lighter in 2016. 'Back then — we're going on 10 years now — there was still some concern about the small players in the NHL,' Castron says. '(Bratt is) probably a testament that that's kind of gone away now. Pretty successful small players, and Jesper has been one of them the last number of years here.' Bratt wasn't necessarily wrong for thinking he would go in the first few rounds. Indications Persson got from teams were that Bratt would go in the third, and he was one of 114 players invited to the combine. The Athletic's Corey Pronman, then with ESPN, put him at No. 50 in his pre-draft rankings. His speed, edgework and agility jumped out instantly, Castron says, and he was skilled with the puck. 'Every time you see him play, he's creating chances, making plays, getting opportunities,' Castron remembers. 'In the back of your mind, you're saying, 'This kid might just break out one year (and) light it up.'' Bratt had talked to New Jersey scouts in the lead-up to the draft, and he met the late Ray Shero, the team's general manager at the time, before a combine interview with some of the team's other staffers. Shero was headed to a meeting with other general managers, but he assured Bratt he'd read the report after. Other teams showed more pre-draft interest than the Devils. The Rangers had drafted Robin Kovács, one of Bratt's AIK teammates, the year before, so their scouts came to plenty of his games. He talked to Boston multiple times, too. Advertisement The Devils might not have had as much contact with Bratt, but they still ranked him somewhere around No. 65 in the 2016 class, Castron says. That might not compute with the team waiting until the sixth round to take him, but Castron says other players ahead of him on their board were still available at each of their picks. 'If we had known he was going to do what he's doing now, we would have taken him in the second round,' Castron says. All players still available late in the draft have perceived warts. At that point, Castron believes scouting groups should look for a player with one or two attributes that could make them an NHL player. For some, it could be size. Others could have elite toughness or a competitive edge. Bratt had speed and skill. He also had a proponent in Sunny Mehta, then the Devils' director of hockey analytics, and his statistical model that ranked players before the draft. That model's final rankings, according to a team source, put Auston Matthews as the No. 1 player in the class, Patrik Laine at No. 2 and Bratt at No. 3. Mehta, now an assistant general manager with the Panthers, was skeptical about that high a ranking, but after New Jersey took Michael McLeod in the first round and Nathan Bastian in the second, he started pushing hard for Bratt. The upside was there, and the Devils finally took their swing in the sixth round. The pick didn't take long to look good. After another season with AIK in Sweden, Bratt came to North America. He went to the London Knights Ontario Hockey League training camp, then attended the Devils' training camp. Before he left London, he packed his winter clothes in a suitcase that he left behind. That way, on the off chance he made the Devils' roster, they would be easy to mail to New Jersey. That proved to be a smart decision. Bratt showed enough that Shero and then-coach John Hynes made him, at the time, the lowest-drafted teenager to play in the NHL since 1995-96. He never went back to London. Nowadays, Bratt is a known entity. He's made an All-Star Game, and he signed an eight-year, $63 million contract in 2023. Still only 26, he's part of the Devils' long-term core. 'Everybody in the league that pays attention would see the talent,' Devils coach Sheldon Keefe said ahead of Game 1 against Carolina. 'It's obvious.' Advertisement But before it was obvious, Bratt was an anxious 17-year-old going through a draft day slide. The stands were mostly empty when New Jersey picked him. After celebrating with his parents, brother and agent, he walked onto the draft floor, where a Devils' staffer handed him a jersey and hat. 'It was a team that believed in you,' Bratt says now.'You've been walking around a whole year, two years, your whole childhood almost, waiting for the day you get drafted, and then it finally happened. There was some relief, but there was still some hunger for me.' He hasn't forgotten how long it took for a club to call his name, and he hasn't forgotten all the teams that didn't pick him. He's still rewarding the one that did.
Bloomberg
09-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Billionaires Start to Buy Their Own Stock Amid Market Turmoil
Some of the world's super-rich are increasing allocations to their major listed assets amid the bedlam in global markets, defying fears of the worst stock meltdown since 2020 being far from over. The billionaire Persson family behind Hennes & Mauritz AB repeatedly boosted their stake in the Swedish clothing giant as US President Donald Trump's tariff policies decimated markets, investing about 776 million kronor ($78 million) overall, according to regulatory filings.
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The billionaire free speech warrior who built Minecraft
There are two primary modes in Minecraft, the wilfully basic video game phenomenon that's sold more than any other in history. Users can either play in 'Survival Mode', in which their character must gather resources, defend themselves against hostile invaders and contend with things like depleting hunger and health; or they can play in 'Creative Mode', where everything is limitless, nothing can harm them, and they're free to do exactly as they please. It would be reasonable to say that Markus 'Notch' Persson, the 45-year-old Swedish creator of Minecraft, has played life in both modes now – once as a shy, workmanlike coder; then as a man with enough money to live like King Midas for the rest of his days. And on balance, he might well prefer the former. 'The problem with getting everything,' he once lamented, 'is you run out of reasons to keep trying.' This week, almost 15 years after Minecraft was officially launched, a family-friendly blockbuster movie adaptation, A Minecraft Movie arrives to prey on the purse strings of parents everywhere. As far as intellectual property goes, producers are surely hoping they cannot fail: as a game, Minecraft is still being played by well over 200 million people every month. By the sounds of it, those parents are about to have another reason to resent the phenomenon that's stolen their children's brains. Minecraft was never going to be easy to adapt, even by the standards of most video games – the graphics are rudimentary, the scenery is mostly Lego-like blocks, and as a 'sandbox game', the whole point was that players wander around creating their own stories, rather than complete tasks and quests. As it was, it sounds like A Minecraft Movie's director Jared Hess, whose previous work includes co-directing Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, found the process a challenge. According to our critic, the film 'doesn't come even remotely close to working out how to turn its source material into the stuff of, or even backdrop for, an engaging feature-length plot [...] Still, with a monetisable fanbase that big, who cares about storytelling?' Over the last few weeks, the film's stars, Jack Black and Jason Momoa, have done a manful job of pretending to know what they've just made, but one person – arguably the one who could best explain Minecraft to confused non-players – was conspicuously absent from the promotional trail, bar a few typically odd tweets. Persson, the singular, reclusive man responsible for it all, wanted nothing to do with the film. But then, in fairness, he's wanted nothing to do with Minecraft for a long time. The story of how Persson wrote the code for the biggest-selling video game of all time all on his own, and in one week, has become legend in gaming circles. In that community, he is better known as 'Notch', his online alias, and he still largely resides online, often stirring up controversies and occasionally appearing as a quasi-hero figure to the alt-right. Indeed, aside from Elon Musk, Persson must be one of the most active and engaged billionaires on X. Persson was born in Stockholm but spent the first seven years of his life in Edsbyn, a small locality in central Sweden known for its carpentry. Lego-obsessed but forced outdoors, he has described wandering endlessly in the snowy forests and mountains nearby, exploring the landscape and making his own fun. His 'nerd' father, a troubled man who worked on the railways, taught him to use the family computer, a Commodore 128, which gave Persson a new kind of landscape to explore – one with infinite possibilities. At the time, computer magazines would print strings of code for readers to transcribe and create a playable game. 'My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,' Persson once told the New Yorker. 'After a while, I figured out that if you didn't type out exactly what they told you then something different would happen, where you finally ran the game. That sense of power was intoxicating.' His parents divorced soon afterwards, leading him to move with his mother and sister to the Stockholm suburbs, where he became a loner. 'I started spending time at home, just programming, just games,' he said. He was particularly obsessed with the 1993 first-person shooter Doom, so much so that he reverse-engineered it – something he regards as his second-greatest achievement (the first is inventing Minecraft). Though he began a job designing games after dropping out of high school, 'really it was the puzzle-solving nature of programming that appealed', and so started a side-project in 2009 making a sandbox game with deliberately crude graphics. That became Minecraft. 'I expected it to be about six to 12 months of work, and hoped that it might earn enough money to fund development of a subsequent game,' he later said. In reality, the game was downloaded more than six million times in the first 12 months after he published it, so much so that Persson was struggling to keep up with player requests and tweaks. With the company he launched, Mojang ('gadget' in Swedish), Persson became a hero in the gaming world. He was not programmed to be a CEO. 'I've never run a company before and I don't want to feel like a boss,' he once said. 'I just want to turn up and do my work.' It was his belief that 'studios make games to make money, indie gamers build games just to build games' – a credo that assumed he was not in it for the money either. Two years after launching Minecraft, he gave his £2.2 million dividend back to his few employees, and would treat them to parties in Monaco, lavish gifts and bonuses. 'The money is a strange one,' he says. 'I'm slowly getting used to it, but it's a Swedish trait that we're not supposed to be proud of what we've done. 'Also, what if the game stopped selling? But after a while, I thought about all of the things I'd wanted to do before I had money. So I introduced a rule: I'm allowed to spend half of anything I make. That way I will never be broke. Even if I spend extravagant amounts of money, I will still have extravagant amounts of money.' There was a belief that Persson's principled stances meant he would never sell Minecraft to a Big Tech company – not least because he repeatedly said he wouldn't. Having created something with tiny costs and vast profits, he already had more money than he could ever know what to do with, he told Craig Ferguson in a very rare (and surprisingly funny) talk show appearance in 2013. Ferguson, like most people over 18, had absolutely no idea what Minecraft is. Persson had arguably made not just the most successful video game ever, but the most successful cult product ever, too. At one point it was googled more than the Bible and Harry Potter. As it was once put by Ian Bogost, a video games professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, 'it doesn't compare to other hit games, it compares to other hit products that are much bigger than games. Minecraft is basically this generation's Lego or even this generation's microcomputer.' Persson wore a fedora and gave very few interviews, but his Twitter account, as Notch, was garrulous, spiky and sarcastic. This invited trolls. As Mojang's profits mounted and more and more people bought the game, the pressure of being a god was beginning to weigh on him. Rumours of a takeover swirled. 'Anyone want to buy my share of Mojang so I can move on with my life? Getting hate for trying to do the right thing is not my gig,' he tweeted in June 2014. Three months later, Microsoft purchased Mojang for $2.5 billion. With the click of that deal, Persson made himself a billionaire – and entirely washed his hands of Minecraft. 'It's not about the money,' he wrote in a final blog post. 'It's about my sanity.' That's when his life started getting weird. That Forbes interview, in 2015, caught up with Persson after his first few months of being a bored billionaire. At the time he had bought a $70 million, 23,000-square-foot mega-mansion in Beverly Hills (reportedly beating Jay-Z and Beyoncé to the purchase) with eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, iPad-operated fountains, a $200,000 'candy wall', a replica of James Dean's motorcycle, and Chanel and Yves St. Laurent fire extinguishers. He regularly spent over $180,000 per night in Las Vegas nightclubs, began posting Instagram pictures from private jets and super yachts, and, somewhat inevitably, started DJing. One of his tracks is called 'Satan Looks After My Children [mellow breakbeat]'. 'Good times,' he captioned one nightclub photo at the time. 'Expensive times.' In the interview, Persson came across as a sad, lonely figure who had it all, but no one to share it with – literally, he once complained about the lack of quality on Tinder in Sweden. This all attracted great ridicule, and talk of tiny violins, but he kept underlining the point in tweets. 'Hanging out in Ibiza with a bunch of friends and partying with famous people, able to do whatever I want, and I've never felt more isolated,' one read. 'To people out there with real problems: I'm sorry the whining of a newly wealthy programmer gets more attention than yours. Stay strong,' went another. 'I'm very happy about the money, and I'm very happy about my health. I'm not happy about the isolation,' was a third. Persson has remained on Twitter, now X, in the years since, even as he's retreated further and further from the public eye. He would occasionally stray into controversy, including in 2017 when he decided to opine on race. 'It's ok to be white,' he wrote, at a time when writing that on the internet was like dropping a match at a petrol station. 'Privilege is a made-up metric used to silence and repress,' he carried on. On other occasions, he endorsed QAnon, the far-right political conspiracy theory, erred towards the line when talking about IQ differences between nationalities, and didn't amuse many when he sarcastically declared: '#InternationalWomensDay You're an inspiration and a cook!' But he did amuse some, and emboldened a certain very online, very libertarian fanbase. They may be 10-a-penny now, but a billionaire free speech warrior who tweets mildly offensive thoughts just to 'provoke' was a novelty eight years ago. Q is legit. Don't trust the media. — notch (@notch) March 2, 2019 #InternationalWomensDay You're an inspiration and a cook! — notch (@notch) March 8, 2019 Sometimes he even spent his money on ensuring others could get away with trolling. In 2018, Persson donated £10,000 to a charity campaign run by controversial Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie, and then £20,000 to YouTuber Mark Meechan, aka Count Dankula, to help pay for his appeal after he was fined for filming his girlfriend's pug Buddha giving Nazi salutes. Eventually, Microsoft, which had grown increasingly uneasy with Persson's behaviour since they bought Minecraft from him, scrubbed all mention of him from the game. They excluded him from Minecraft's 10-year anniversary celebrations, too. All the while, the game has only grown. 'We're just getting started. As much as we create, our fans just want more Minecraft,' Microsoft's head of Minecraft, Ryan Cooper, said recently. That includes the film, which is auspiciously titled 'A' Minecraft Movie, rather than 'The'. If it even gets close to breaking even, expect many sequels. All the while, Persson, who decided the film looked 'goofy' but not in a bad way, carries on tweeting, carries on programming, carries on spending, and still hasn't released his follow-up game. It has always been said that, as a game, Minecraft is blissfully pointless, such is its lack of structure. But in the life of Markus 'Notch' Persson, there is at least a lesson. Creative Mode may be more fun than Survival – but after a while, you simply run out of things to do.
