Issue #00018: March 12, 2026

Hello readers,

An NBC News poll just dropped that stopped me mid-scroll: AI has a 26% favorability rating. That’s lower than ICE. Meanwhile, a new Anthropic study reports that architecture and engineering are among the professions most exposed to AI automation—up to 70% of tasks could theoretically be done twice as fast by robots. And yet only 6% of practicing architects are actually using it. The gap between fear and adoption has never been wider. 

I totally get it. How do you embrace a technology that’s supposedly coming for your job, strip-mining creative IP, and selling it back to its victims—built by people who make it very hard to root for them? I mean, have you seen these guys talk?

But, I’ll level with you, I’m in the 26% that loves it. So let me tell you exactly how I use AI as a heritage brand owner.

I run one of the most artistically uncompromising textile companies in the world. Our patterns are sacred. Our factory in Italy is a working museum. And I spend 14 hours a day at my computer right now experimenting with AI, not because I’m scared of it, but because it’s making me dangerous.

We put our entire brand history into NotebookLM and created a training module for how to sell our fabric. The results are phenomenal, and we’re rolling it out for a new brand partnership next month. I would have had to hire a team of graphic designers and copywriters to do this in the past. I now do it while sipping an Old Fashioned during overtime hours.

I sent my super smart assistant to Claude Cowork bootcamp to learn how to build bots to do the deep business research that used to eat entire afternoons—finding articles, tracking competitors, surfacing data. This newsletter wouldn’t exist without it.

I used to call a lawyer for everything. Now we handle 60–70% of our legal work with AI. I still go to the attorneys for the big stuff, but the day-to-day legal reviews are faster, cheaper, and better with AI.

And here is the biggest one of all, two years ago, we made a big bet and moved our entire company’s operations and CRM to big, bad Oracle’s NetSuite. A tiny company spending six figures on an Oracle product is kinda wild. And it’s paid off. We saw the future and were not afraid to embrace it. Now Claude is connected to our ERP, and tomorrow morning I have a meeting about giving it the ability to create transactions, not just read data. The back office that once required a small village will soon run conversationally—no more manual data entry, no more administrative drag. My team gets to stop feeding the machine and start growing the business. The mundane is replaced by the invigorating.

And because I run a remote business across the USA and Europe, I gave AI access to all of our chats, emails, and documents. Now it provides a weekly summary on each of our six to eight ongoing projects—where the blockers are, where things might critically fail. It saves every project owner, including me, hours of status-chasing every week.

There are more ways than I count on how we use AI to elevate our company. None of it touches our art… it simply gives us the space to focus more of our time on it. And the results are profound. My company is running better than ever, and I’m raising a team of leaders and giants, not training a group of monkeys to press buttons.

For high-agency people—the ones who control their own destiny and refuse to assign blame—AI is the greatest tool in the world. It’s a motorcycle strapped to my mind with 30 years of experience. It feels like I am in a gold rush and I can’t get enough of it.

My advice to business owners in our industry who are still on the fence: you can maintain your humanity, your authenticity, and your artistic integrity while running a much, much better business. And it’s never too late to adopt. I’m 50 years old, I still type with two fingers, and in the past few months I’ve dragged a hundred-year-old business into the AI age. What are you waiting for?

Anyway, keep reading to find out who lives in Miami’s “billionaire bunker,” how sponsored content died, and why Pussy Riot is mad at the Venice Biennale.

See you next week.

Mr. Thread

P.S. Don’t just read—play. We’ve woven a new mystery into this issue in our PLAYTIME segment. Five incorrect guesses last week! Nice try Sophia K., Chad S., Dianne M., Brenda N., and Teresa G. The answer was “peace.” Scroll to the bottom to join the fun.

Supreme court declines AI art
Reuters reports that the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Stephen Thaler, who sought copyright protection for a piece of visual art generated entirely by his AI system, DABUS. Lower courts had already ruled that AI-generated work without meaningful human involvement can’t be copyrighted. The Supreme Court let that stand.

The copyright law is clear: only humans can be authors. A photograph is yours because you framed the shot, chose the subject, clicked the shutter. With AI, you type a prompt and the model goes pattern-matching across other people’s work to generate something new. That’s the fundamental difference.

I think the court got this one right. AI-generated works that receive no meaningful human creative input have no business being protected. But AI-assisted works—where a human originates the idea and AI helps manifest it—that’s a different conversation entirely. We mentioned Philippe Starck’s AI chair last week. He set the brief, the algorithm proposed structural solutions, and the result uses less plastic than any comparable production chair. That’s a designer using AI as a paintbrush. And if you are on the creative side, that is the model I would look to for success (if that just so happens to be your thing!)

The gold rush moves south
The New York Times reports that Mark Zuckerberg just closed on a $170 million estate on Indian Creek Island in Miami—the most expensive home purchase in Miami-Dade County history. Indian Creek Village is a man-made island sealed from public access by a gated bridge, and locals call it the Billionaire Bunker.

Florida is one of the most underrepresented states on the AD100. If you have real taste and real ambition, the market is wide open: the billionaires are there, the demand is there, but genuinely great design talent is shockingly thin on the ground. A sunny place for shady people just became the hottest luxury real estate market in the country.

The broader Southeast is the same story. Wealth migration is accelerating—and it’s driven entirely by economic policy. On the same day Washington state announced a 9.9% income tax, Howard Schultz announced he’s moving Starbucks headquarters to Tennessee. Starbucks is an iconic Seattle brand. That tells you everything.

A central part of our strategy this year is focusing on establishing business in these regions. They get as much of our budgets now as California used to get. Sounds crazy but it’s true. I really don’t see this trend going anywhere anytime soon. The more blue states keep imposing tax policy that hurts corporations and the wealthy, the more red states like Florida will be there with open arms welcoming them to their tax base. The cycle will get worse.

Who gets the refund?
This week Ray Allegrezza of Furniture Today writes: “Somewhere right now, a furniture importer is sitting at a desk staring at a stack of invoices, a calculator, and a bottle of aspirin wondering one very simple thing: How exactly is this refund supposed to work?” The courts have spoken—Trump-era IEEPA tariffs were illegal, and the money importers paid must be returned. But as Allegrezza points out, the tariff money didn’t sit quietly in a vault. It spread through the entire supply chain. Now the government has to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Nine home companies have already filed suit seeking refunds, including City Furniture, American Furniture Warehouse, Flexsteel, Rugs America, Jaipur Living, and Culp Inc. For a company our size, going it alone is brutal—legal retainers, document preparation, a mountain of customs entry numbers to match.

We’ve spoken to a couple of lawyers, and what we really wish existed is a class action. Every company in the D&D Building is affected by this. Where is the industry-wide lawsuit? Why aren’t industry organizations like the DFA and DLN stepping up to advocate for its members instead of throwing another cocktail party? This is exactly the kind of moment where an industry organization could actually earn its keep.

For now, we wait—or we lawyer up on our own. Neither option is cheap.

Using real estate listings for lead generation
During my extensive research this week for Mr. Thread I discovered a fascinating resource that should get every luxury salesperson hot and bothered.

Every week, Donna Olshan publishes the most detailed luxury real estate report in New York City—every contract signed above $4 million, with listing photos, broker names, and sale prices. According to Realtor.com, Manhattan saw 43 luxury contracts totaling $422 million last week, the highest weekly count in 10 months. The most eye-watering deal is a condo at Extell Development’s 50 West 66th St. asking $35 million. Second: a $29.75 million combination unit at the Waldorf Astoria Residences—roughly 4,700 square feet, five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and a 1,300-square-foot terrace to watch the sun set over Manhattan’s skyline with a cocktail.

For fabric houses, furniture brands, and interior designers, this is pure prospecting gold. Every one of those 43 buyers needs to furnish a home. We’re looking into building a tool that surfaces the top-priced home sales across the five biggest states every week. In the meantime, read Donna’s report and start cold-calling. This data is free, it’s updated weekly, and almost nobody in our industry is using it.

People hate AI, but prefer its writing
You just read my slobbering love letter to AI above, but here’s the paradox of 2026: the public can’t stand it. And yet, The New York Times ran a a blind writing test with 86,000 readers—and 54% preferred the AI-generated passages over the human ones. Journalist Molly Jong-Fast called the results “a moment in hell.” I failed—predictably. Though I’m not sure that says more about me than it does about the test.

People hate AI in the abstract and prefer it in practice. That’s exactly how I’ve experienced it in our workplace. We ran an AI-generated Easter post on Instagram a year ago—it went viral. After a few more posts, engagement flatlined. We abandoned AI for content entirely and went in the other direction: full analog. Our brand team is now shooting everything with a cinematic, old-school aesthetic. Heritage brands built on craftsmanship can’t afford to look artificial in any way. The smartest companies are using AI everywhere behind the scenes and keeping it out of every client-facing touchpoint. 

Spaces that heal
Homes & Gardens just published a piece on LALA Reimagined, a design firm founded by Azar Fattahi and Lia McNairy that creates therapy centers where the rooms themselves are part of the treatment. Lighting, color, texture, and spatial flow—all calibrated to reduce anxiety, support children with special needs, and create environments where people feel safe enough to recover. Designers who position themselves as experts in healing spaces will own a market that’s enormous and almost entirely untapped. Hospitals, therapy centers, retail environments, homes for families with special needs—this is where our industry can use beauty to make the world better.

The slow death of sponsored content
Business of Fashion reports that 68% of shoppers are frustrated by the volume of sponsored content on social media, and 65% follow fewer fashion influencers than they did a few years ago. The scripted captions, the gifted product, the discount codes—consumers have figured out how the sausage is made, and they’re over it.

At my company, we still believe celebrity association matters. But we do it differently. In April, we’re bringing celebrities to our factory for a red carpet event. They’ll walk around for weeks afterward talking about it. The difference between “I was paid to post this” and “I want to be where that person was” is the entire game. If the fashion industry is admitting this model is breaking, the interior design industry should take note.

Furniture crashes Paris fashion week
Vogue and WWD both covered Matter and Shape, which returned for its third edition in Paris’s Tuileries Garden, running March 6–9 alongside ready-to-wear shows. Seventy exhibitors, impeccable curation, and a guest list that blended fashion and design, including Ann Demeulemeester, Luca Guadagnino, Byredo, Birkenstock 1774, and Bang & Olufsen. The 2026 theme was “Scale,” exploring relationships of proportion between objects, bodies, and spaces. Unlike trade shows that feel like flea markets with as many booths as possible, this one was beautifully curated. Cultured magazine called it “the design world’s favorite Fashion Week detour.” Brands looking for alternative channels to grow should pay attention.

Last Week’s Common Thread: PEACE
No one got the right answer last week, Threaders! The word was PEACE. Dust yourselves off, because the points are ripe for the taking today. Who’s going to break the streak? It’s playtime!

The Stakes: Every correct guess earns you an extra raffle entry, so play every week to boost your odds! We’ll draw the winner on April 22nd and announce them in the April 23rd issue. Our lucky winner gets:

Good luck, Threaders!

Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle

Enjoying Mr. Thread?
How can we make this better? Reply to this email and tell us. We read every message and genuinely want to know what you think.