Chanel

Football Stars Boost Luxury Handbag Demand

Male professional footballers — notably Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham and Kylian Mbappé — are increasingly photographed carrying high-end designer handbags, giving luxury houses extra visibility as sales soften in key markets. LVMH and Kering each reported roughly 3% year‑on‑year revenue declines in the first half, with Kering group revenue at €7.2bn from January–June and Gucci contributing about €2.8bn (down ~9%). Brands are leveraging players’ global reach and ambassador roles to push a growing 'man‑bag' segment: Haaland’s Birkin collection is estimated at €1.1m, and players often appear with Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana pieces. Industry analysis (via Bloomberg/Bain & Co.) estimates only about a quarter of the luxury‑handbag market is male, indicating significant room to expand demand through these celebrity-driven channels.

JD.com Raises Profit Despite Q2 Revenue Decline

JD.com reported Q2 2026 revenue of 346.4 billion RMB, a 2.9% year‑on‑year decline, while improving profitability: operating income rose to 4.5 billion RMB (from a prior-year loss) and net income attributable to shareholders increased to 7.1 billion RMB. The company cut marketing spend sharply while raising R&D investment, and generated stronger free cash flow. JD.com said it is accelerating investments in AI (JoyAI), autonomous logistics (thousands of unmanned vehicles across >20 provinces and new night deliveries) and new retail formats, and highlighted partnerships with Chanel and Costco (Costco named JD.com its exclusive e-commerce partner in China). The company also executed roughly $1 billion of share buybacks in H1 and continues a buyback program running through August 2027.

The Best Model Loses

The newsletter discusses the democratizing power of AI for personal projects, experiments the author ran to test new models, and several industry developments. Key items: the federal government reviewed Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol; Thinking Machines released Inkling, a 975B-parameter open-weights model intended to drive revenue via a fine-tuning platform called Tinker, with estimated pretraining costs of $10M–$20M (pretraining compute only); Meta announced a Hyperion data center expansion to 5 gigawatts costing more than $50 billion and faces a market narrative of becoming a compute “landlord,” with reports Anthropic is in early talks to lease up to $10 billion of compute from Meta; SpaceX’s Colossus deal with Anthropic is cited as roughly $45 billion over three years with short termination windows; and MLB issued a mid-season ban on generative AI in dugouts. The piece mixes analysis of business models, infrastructure, and short-term market dynamics.