Spike Carter

3 weeks ago | airmail.news | Spike Carter

SIP NOAM What a relief it is when gorgeous packaging isn’t just a gimmick to distract from a subpar product. NOAM features perhaps the most attractive-looking bottles of beer I’ve ever come across, and I can happily report the quality is a match. Founded in 2016 as a start-up at the Technical University of Munich, NOAM partnered with traditional brewer Paulaner to execute their vision.

3 weeks ago | airmail.news | Spike Carter

In 2018, the New England outfitter L.L. Bean discontinued their famed no-proof-of-purchase lifetime-returns policy, which the retailer had offered since its founding, in 1912. The new policy instituted a dramatically reduced, one-year return window, a sad shift that seemed to suggest the company’s waning interest in engendering customer confidence by producing items with longevity in mind.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Spike Carter

One sunny morning in 2009, with a group of friends, I took the train from Grand Central Terminal to Beacon, New York. I was 20, and despite being an obsessive creative I had never had a genuinely transcendent experience in a museum. Whether it was the mobs of tourists, sub-optimal lighting, or distracting placards, attending exhibitions in the city was for me a passive act of looking at art, not one of actually seeing it.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Spike Carter

track Traintrackr “I’ve always liked collecting and displaying data in different ways,” says Richard Hawthorn, founder of Traintrackr. Having studied electronics and telecommunications in college, over the years he designed more than 100 experimental printed circuit boards (P.C.B.’s) visualizing inputted data with L.E.D. lights. One particular P.C.B. he constructed tracked live MBTA trains in Boston. “People asked to buy them from me, and I realized I had a business on my hands,” he says.

1 month ago | airmail.news | Spike Carter

LOOK Mirage “A parallel universe for people who are looking for a dreamy, endless summery utopian kind of world” is how German art director Frank Rocholl has described Mirage magazine. “Dream cars, dream girls, interesting architecture and interiors or objects.” Rocholl co-founded the independent fashion-and-culture publication in 2009 with photographer Henrik Purienne.