Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - November 28th, 2025

25:49So, for example, we want to monitor and we're developing optical devices for the NICU to monitor cerebral blood flow. But the heart rate of a neonate is 150. So we have to sample at a much higher rate than you would in an adult to get the same information. So we have to build specifically devices to the physiology. And then if you think of a head of a premature baby, it's very, very small. So I can't take a probe that we use in adults and just put it on a preterm. So we have to develop the devices to fit the size of the infants. I want to just go, and I feel like we touched on this earlier. I mean, we are Bloomberg Business Week.

26:24We are Bloomberg and very entrenched in financial markets. And I feel like the more I've been doing this, money just follows everything. Money is why people do things or don't do things. Is that really it? Is it just the market? I hate to even make it that way. The market size. And so you don't have medical equipment companies building the things because they just don't think the market size is big enough? That is a big problem. And I think that's where we're trying to get into more of a business perspective. Like if we do a small startup that starts to answer those questions, then a bigger company might buy it.

26:55But if we stay in the research realm, then it's sometimes really hard to go that last mile and get something into clinical practice. So how do you do that? How do you cross that? So what do you do? Yeah, this is what we're strategizing on right now is trying to figure out how we do those small startups, get industry interested. Right. And a lot of things we're doing right now, actually, one of the projects we're working on is, you know, AI strategies, right? And if we can get enough data on infants or fetuses and so on, we can start to build models that predict not just group outcomes, but we want to get to individual outcomes because that's what parents care about, right?

27:30So if we can figure out, get those models together. So that's what we're working on now is trying to create these AI models that are specialized for pediatrics and hoping to do startups around that particular concept. I have to ask one more question. Are venture capitalists interested? I don't know because we haven't really talked to any that I've heard about, but I think they always want something that's almost ready. So we're hoping to see a little bit further along. Yeah, a little bit further along. Okay, interesting. Can what we learn and what you understand through imaging about the brain's development be applied to how adult brains are treated?

28:02Everything in adult life has its genesis in infants, right? Yeah. We were all there once. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And some of the ways the adult brain responds is more prominent in a pediatric brain. So in some disorders, you go to pediatric models to see a physiology that's more prominent in neonates or infants but also occurs in adults. You know, in doing the research and the prep for our interview with you, there is a picture of a physician or a therapist doing some what I think is called therapeutic hypothermia to a brand new baby's head. Yeah. And my understanding is that oxygen deprivation around birth is one of the leading reasons that you actually see babies come into the NICU.

28:50Yes, that is one of the main reasons, yes. And the therapy for this is as simple as? Yeah, you cool them down or at least keep them normal thermic. Because when they have injuries, sort of the whole physiological response to an injury is to have a fever. And that is detrimental. So we want to keep them cool so that they don't set off these cascades of brain injury. And that's partly why we built this one device because we want to be able to monitor through the NICU stay and optimize management. But it's interesting, we don't even know what the right blood pressure for a newborn is. So this is why we wanted to have a probe that could measure cerebral blood flow to the brain, because there is no way to monitor whether there's enough brain or oxygen getting to the brain with the tools that we have right now.

29:35I feel like we never even talk about blood pressure when it comes to infants, right? Yeah. We just don't. But you need to know. Yeah. You did your residency and fellowship in the 1990s. Curious how imaging has changed since then. Oh, my gosh. Where do you think, how will it improve in the next, I don't know, 10 years? I don't know what's a smart benchmark. Yeah, yeah. When I was in training, MR was just starting, and it was very slow. So where we've come now is the acceleration acquisition is just incredible. What used to take us an hour to do, we can do in 10 minutes now. So the speed, the speed of acquisition is huge.

30:08We're also developing a lot of analysis that we can do after the images are acquired to give us more quantitative metrics. because the whole thing in medicine to get past the qualitative read of a radiologist, which is helpful, but we want to put more numbers on it so we can have a more dynamic range on how we describe each child. And therefore, we can get into better precision medicine and outcome prediction. So we're getting more to that quantitative aspect of imaging now, and not just brain, but all body parts, of course, and down to fetal age. Is it for kids, too, every case is very personal and individual?

30:46Or are there trends and things that you can help in so that one case can help another? Is there a body of knowledge that gets built off of this? Yes, there's a body of knowledge that gets built off of this. But this is where we come back to AI. I only can remember so much. You know, even though I've been in practice for a long time, things fall out. Joy of the craft. So this is where I'm really excited about AI because I can, you know, mine our databases to find where's an individual child just like that one I'm treated now. What did they respond to? What worked for them? And how are these two similar?

31:17So I combine the databases to start to come up with individual outcome prediction, which is what we're doing right now with databases we've got from some of the major trials for hypothermia. And so we can use this large database to try to take individual outcomes. You can say, well, I have a newborn with this pH that had these, you know, and I'm a mother of this age and put in features. and they could give you from that database an outcome prediction. So working on that and also working on making data more available to parents because I think a lot of parents are very frustrated with trying to read the literature, even if you're using chat GPT or open documents.

31:53It's really hard. It's really hard. And then you get group statistics. And then where does my kid fit in between the 25 % to 75 % good outcome or something like that? To get chatbots that can work with some of our databases. So anybody can talk to a physician, so to speak, to give the answers that they want. That's pretty remarkable because I just think about the tone of these chatbots and if there's a way that they can be – we talked earlier this week about what a challenge it can be for people to actually interact with them in a quote-unquote normal way. But is there a way for them to actually be empathetic and work with patients, work with parents, work with families?

32:41And forgive us, we've got about 40 seconds. Yeah, yeah. No, we're working on that, but I can't tell you all the secrets because we're going to start on that. You can't wait. No, you can go longer than that. Can I ask you something? When you guys do use AI in chat pods, do you have hallucinations? Like do the AI hallucinations? Or how do you, especially when you're dealing with medical prevention, there's a lot of safeguards we put around that. So it's, we have, again, this is sort of more the secret sauce that I can't talk about yet, but there are ways to constrain chatbots to give you reasonable answers that are statistically sound.

33:15All right, so when you can, will you come back? Yes, I will. Okay, good stuff. So appreciate it. Dr. Ellen Grant, Director of Fetal Neonatal Neuroimaging and Developmental Sciences here at Boston Children's Hospital. Thank you again. Thank you. You guys are all amazing. They're all behind us.

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36:15Or watch us live on YouTube. We continue with more of our conversations from Boston Children's Hospital. It was a broadcast we did earlier this month, a remote, where we spoke with some of the nation's leading doctors on matters related to health, health policy, and innovation when it comes to medical care, especially for kids. Well, a fixture at my high school and college was torn ACLs, volleyball, lacrosse, soccer, field hockey, the torn ACL, the surgery to reconstruct it, weeks on crutches, and then months of recovery. This is Dr. Martha Murray's world. She's orthopedic surgeon in chief for Boston Children's Hospital.

36:49She joined us from the hospital. Why do ACL tears affect women more than men? Well, it's a really interesting question, and it's been one of much debate for the last few decades. And there have been things like, well, it must be a hormone cycle, or it's the shape of women's hips and their valgus angles to their knees. But a really interesting study came out very recently from the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as Harvard University, with Dr. Danielson and Dr. Richardson, where they actually showed that the studies that say that women tear their ACL more frequently than men were often based when the women's teams were smaller than the men's teams.

37:21And the way they calculated exposures was the number of practices or games you played in, not necessarily your playing time. So if you're a man who's on a hockey team versus a woman who's on a hockey team, the women's teams were smaller, so those women were playing more, so they were planting, and hockey is a bad example, soccer would be better, But if the team is smaller, the women are going to be planting and pivoting and playing much more time per game or practice. So more stress, more use. More stress, more use, more tears. So maybe women and all things equal, maybe women and men don't have a different rate of torn ACLs.

37:55Correct. When they corrected for unit of exposure, so kind of game time playing rather than just a game, the injury rates look very similar. Wow. That's totally different than what? I mean, is this the standard now? I mean, do you think this is? It's relatively new work that's coming out, but it resonates with most of us who take care of women and men on their athletic teams. Yeah. I want to ask about your background, material science and engineering. I know Tim said not typical for a surgeon, but I think it's a really smart combination. Well, I have a doctor, a foot doctor, same thing, engineering.

38:30And like, he doesn't just deal with my foot. He thinks about, okay, what are you doing? What else is going on in your body? Tell me about that mix and why it's kind of unique and smart and ties things together. Well, for me, it was actually of necessity, right? So I was an engineering graduate student, and a friend of mine came into a party one night on crutches, as Tim was saying, who had torn his ACL. And I said, oh, are they going to go sew it back together? And he was a med student. He was like, you stupid engineer. We can't sew it back together. You have to take it out and replace it with a graft of tenet that they're going to take from the back of my leg, and then it's all this rehab.

39:02And I thought, that seems kind of excessive, right? Like, that's a lot to have to go through. And so I spent the next six months or so in the medical school library just reading everything I could about why didn't the ACL heal. And I realized nobody really had figured out why it didn't heal. They tried it, sewing back together, didn't work, so then went to grafts. And we've been doing grafts for 50 years, and nobody really asked why doesn't it heal. And so for me then, there was no biomedical engineering at that time. And so my choices were to continue on with my project, which was developing airplane wings that were invisible to radar.

39:33And I thought, well, that's a really cool project, but I really want to figure out this ACL thing. And my advisor was like, well, I guess you could go to medical school. This is a Netflix series in the making. Okay, well, the advisor obviously had an impact, and your friend obviously had an impact. But fast forward, you know, 30 years plus, and you have actually invented a new way to treat ACL tears, the bear method. You did figure out that there's a reason why ACLs don't heal like an MCL would actually heal. Why is that? Well, it's really interesting. So both the medial collateral ligament and the anterior cruciate ligament are ligaments.

40:07When you look at them under the microscope, they look very similar. But interestingly, when the MCL tears, you can go in a brace, and in about six weeks, that ligament will heal fine in your back playing soccer. In contrast, the ACL, when it tears, even if we try to sew it back together, it doesn't heal. And so we wondered why. And so we did a series of studies where we looked and we compared the two tissues and their response to injury. And what we found was that actually the response to injury was very similar in the two ligaments. So the tissue and the cells in the tissue were doing exactly what they were supposed to do in both tissues.

40:36But the difference was in the MCL, when it tears, the ends bleed, and that blood clots and forms what we call a hematoma between the two torn ends of the ligament. And then in contrast, in the ACL, because it lives in this fluid environment of the joint, The ends bleed, but instead of making a clot or hematoma between the torn ends of the ligament, the blood disperses through the fluid of the joint. And so the two ends never have that scaffolding, that biologic scaffolding, to hold them back together. So once we discovered that, then it was a fairly logical step to say, is there some way we could immobilize the blood in between those two torn ligament ends and get that biologic signal where it needs to be to encourage healing of the ACL?

41:12And that's really what bridge-enhanced ACL repair, or BEAR, is. So the magic is kind of the sponge that we've developed that can absorb the patient's blood. You can place that blood-laden sponge in between the torn ends of the ACL, sew the ACL back together, but now you have the biology plus the sutures and the repair, and the ligament will heal. So what is done in terms of numbers or percentage with the method that you pioneered, what you invented versus actual reconstruction and using other ligaments? That's a great question. So this is still fairly new. So we got FDA approval for this product in 2020, and so it's only been in practice for a few years now.

41:52There are studies coming out of Children's here, which is where we did the first studies, of course. But now other centers are coming along and doing follow-on studies, and those results are starting to come out. And it's very exciting to watch it grow. I'm also curious. You mentioned, like, FDA approval. Like, the approval process, is it a smart one? Is it the right one in terms of making sure that what's being done and studied, the R &D, that it's safe for when it's finally done on patients? Or is it preventing things from maybe put into use sooner? I'm just curious where you guys weigh in. You're in it.

42:25You're in it every day. Yeah, I think it's a delicate balance. But I would say in our personal experience, the FDA was an amazing partner. Okay. So we were able to get into an early adoption program where they actually met with us and helped us and put together a panel of experts that would help us figure out how to make this the safest possible product and the most effective product before we went to patients. And we found their advice incredibly valuable. There was a lot of conversation and back and forth. And just having them, it felt like it was a team effort because we were in alignment. I mean, as a physician, I was going to be shaking the hands of these patients and my partners were.

42:57And we wanted to make sure things were as safe as possible. So they helped us with that. Do we have data yet on long-term impact or long-term outcomes yet when it comes to the Bayer procedure? Yeah. Our longest data that we have is at about six years, and it's only in the small number of patients in those first studies that we did. But the reason that we want to study it longer term is because, as you may know, many of these patients will develop arthritis early in life. And as a pediatric orthopedic surgeon, I want to make sure we have a procedure that's going going to last my patients for 60 or 70 years, not have the knee break down in 10 or 20 years.

43:31And so we're very interested in this arthritis question with Bayer. And in our preclinical studies, we were able to see that arthritis was actually much less in the subjects that we treated with an ACL repair with the sponge versus a reconstruction. So we're interested in seeing if that same thing plays out in patients. And the early data suggests that it is true. But again, And that's very early data on small numbers of patients. So we're excited to see how that pans out. We're talking with Dr. Martha Murray. She's orthopedic surgeon in chief for Boston Children's Hospital. That's where we are, Tim and me, on this Friday.

44:04Preventive care. Like so much of what we talk about often when we're doing interviews is preventive care. And I feel like the whole health community has been thinking about this for a long time. So what's the preventive care so that as much as we don't want you unemployed, like how do we think about taking better care if we're living longer? Like, how do we think about this? So there's a couple questions on that. So one is, how do we help our teenagers reduce their risk of injury? And I think the main thing for that for our athletes when they're in it. Because we push kids when they're younger.

44:32I think a lot of parents really push kids. So some things we can do to help them is help them work on strengthening in addition to just play time. And another thing is cross-training. So not playing the same sport all year round or playing the same sport every day. Giving their body a chance to rest and heal between exposures to sport. It's as simple as that. I think so. Wow. Does ACL tear happen more in kids than adults? And if yes, is it because kids are the ones who are playing sports and we're just sitting at computers? I think that's probably part of it. Again, it gets to this exposure question.

45:02How many times do you plant and change direction? And so the peak of ACL injuries is really the high school athlete because everybody's playing a sport. And so we see a lot of them there. I want to ask you about social media and all of us sitting on phones or sitting in front of screens. Like, I just, I keep thinking that we're going to one day, I don't know whether it's 50 years from now, we're going to have a neck that basically goes over there. Or maybe not because we're going to have glasses on and that's how. Like, how do you think about this digital world? You're laughing, but. Can you surgically remove my phone from my hand?

45:30That's what Carol wants to know. But I do think about what it's doing to us. Well, look at it. Not just our mind. I got the ACL fix for you. I don't know if I can fix this social media problem. But physically, like, I'm just thinking, like, how, you know, kids are in their phones constantly and stuff and, like, the shape. Like, do we need to be thinking about what this is doing kind of to our spine and different things? I think so. But I also think things come in cycles, right? And we see now if you walk down the street, you see everybody's on their phone. I think we're going to five years from now, we're going to look back at that and say, why are we doing that?

46:00You know, maybe we'll start looking up at the sky more. I hope so. Yeah, that's what I hope, too. Yeah, I mean, gosh, that's like you're opening up. I know. I just I look around on the subway and just everybody and I'm just thinking the curvature and I don't know, whatever. What's the next thing you're working on or that you're excited about? I'm really excited about a product that we're working on for rotator cuff injuries. And it's a product that's injectable so that potentially... That's great. Yeah, you can have an ultrasound of your shoulder, see where the tear is, and then inject the product into the tear maybe in an office visit.

46:29So that's what we're working on, but very early days on that. Again, a challenge with pediatric patients as well? No, this is more adults, but we thought if we could make this work for a ligament, maybe we could try it for the rotator cuff tendon. And the nice thing about the rotator cuff is it is accessible by ultrasound and injection. And it's a pretty easy model for us to study. If we can make that injectable work there, then there's lots of other places we could apply it. Meniscus, other things. Did you ever figure out the invisible airplane wings? No. Not too late. Social media, invisible airplane wings, ACL.

46:59You guys are killing me. Well, we are glad you ended up going into pediatric orthopedic surgery. Is there another career you're going to add on after this? You could do it. You could do it. I'll try. This was so much fun. Yeah, it was fun. Thank you guys very much. Dr. Martha Murray, she's orthopedic surgeon chief for Boston Children's Hospital. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say, Alexa, play Bloomberg 1130.

47:36Plenty ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, a special holiday edition. As we dig into travel, spirits, and more, we're going to catch up with the founder and CEO of Farm Girl Flowers on running her multi-million dollar business. We'll hear about the consumer from her, and yes, we're going to talk even a little AI. Plus, we talk bourbon, gin, rye, ready to drink cocktails, and changing consumer habits with the CEO of the U.S. Spirits brand, Craftco. First up this hour, Thanksgiving weekend. No surprise, it is one of the busiest holiday weekends for travel.

48:09AAA projects nearly 82 million people will travel at least 50 miles from home over the Thanksgiving holiday period, which goes from Tuesday, November 25th to Monday, December 1st. This year's domestic travel forecast includes an additional 1.6 million travelers compared to last Thanksgiving. And if so, that would set a new overall record. Travel is less subject to inflation pressures, but if consumers are feeling the squeeze, they still may cut back their travel spending. Somebody who's got a pulse on travel spending is Mike Brown, who's president and CEO of Travel and Leisure. It's got close to 20 resort, travel club, and lifestyle brands, including Margaritaville Vacation Club, Club Wyndham, and more.

48:49Well, ultimately, we're a 100 % leisure travel company, and our demographic is around$110 ,000 of average income, average FICO over 730, average FICO score, age group, upper 40s, low 50s. And really, when you start to think about who likes to travel with us, no matter the brand, they want bigger accommodations, they want consistency of brands, and they want good value for their money. And that's really the space that we operate in. And If you think about these last five years where inflation is running high and you've already locked in your vacation dollars, the value component has been really strong and has propelled our growth here in the last five years.

49:34How much of your business is sales of new memberships versus people actually just using what they bought maybe years ago? Right. It's actually one of the best endorsements of people's love of the product is that every year about 65 percent of our incremental purchases are from people who already own with us and want either more space or more vacation time. The rest are from our new owner base who are dipping their toe in the water and seeing what this type of vacation travel is all about. so not only are we getting two-thirds of our sale roughly from people who already own with us what we also see is the people who've paid for their ownership already there's a 98 retention rate so two massive validations that once people own they really love the product and keep buying more so you know timeshares they they get a bad rap um and they have a bad rap i mean if you if you like just google get out of timeshare there are legal companies that specialize in getting you out of timeshares.

50:38You know this. You know the industry. Is your product different than what people know as timeshares? And why that bad rap? Look, it's interesting because I can even feel a little bit of uncomfortableness of asking the question because it has a history that predates the great financial crisis. But I think the untold story here and why I love coming on shows like yours beyond it being a great show is that the industry has dramatically changed. 85 % of the sales today are by companies that you might book your business day, whether it's Merritt, Hilton, Wyndham, Margaritaville, Holiday Inn, Disney.

51:20All of these are the brands that have come to the forefront in the last 10 years. And the value proposition, the way of vacationing with a brand you trust is not the reputation that it gained pre-great financial crisis where it was independent real estate developers. And I would just encourage everyone to do your own research about these type of advertisements. There's a lot of press out there that's shown some really negative stories about them, that's for people to do their own research. But what I will tell you is that our retention rate, as I mentioned, 98%, two-thirds buy more. And this is now a massively branded industry that it wasn't when it gained that reputation you're referring to.

52:07So what's like the trickiest component of your business? Is it properties, management, labor? I'm just curious. Yeah, it's a complicated business. We run a sales and marketing business. We run a management business. We operate the club so that we can get people from one of our 280 resorts to another. And we access the ABS market three times a year to sell our notes and gain cash flow. So I think it's the management of all of that together. When you look at our company's performance, the satisfaction of our customer base and the growth of our brands, we've been highly successful and shown growth and showed a way to grow.

52:57And it's shown through in our equity. But it's the experienced leadership to combine several very complicated businesses together to make sure that it's seamless for the consumer. and that we're also ultimately fulfilling our mission, which is getting people on great vacations. So I would say it's the complexity of the management as opposed to an individual component that's really hard to operate. I would just add that one component that has become more complex is the development of real estate has become a lot more expensive ground up. So we've moved to a conversion strategy in a lot of our new resorts.

53:34So I want to talk a little bit more about the demographics here of your clientele. And certainly, you know, with 20 different brands, it depends on what actual brand we're talking about. You did give us some age demographics and where people are generationally. But in terms of spend, what are they spending? What do you know about where, you know, in terms of their other demographics, like household net worth and what part of the economy you're able to get? Right. Well, what we find in our product is the vast majority, irrespective of the brands, are going to want to be in a situation where they want to know what they can expect from their vacation.

54:15And a Margaritaville guest is going to want a sand, a drink in your hand, that type of lifestyle. Whereas our newest brand, Eddie Bauer, these are people that want to hike in Zion National Park or get to the great outdoors and enjoy a family reunion. either way are financial demographics or what I explained earlier. But what we see as the travel trend is people want experiences that match their personal lifestyle as opposed to four walls, and then they have to go find their experience outside of the resort. So that's why we're launching Sports Illustrated brand, Eddie Bauer. We have Margaritaville, Club Windham, you mentioned.

54:56we see an opportunity to customize your experience inside the resort and outside, as opposed to over separating the financial demographics. I will say one of our big focus is to pull the average age down as we launch new brands over the upcoming years. You know, it's interesting. Like I do think about like how consumers relate to a specific brand. I I mean, that really moves the needle, doesn't it? Whether it's Sports Illustrated. I'm just curious. And how do you guys think about what brands you want to affiliate yourselves with? Right. If, you know, I have two children that are children, young men that are at a university up north.

55:42They're always boys to us, right? Or they're always kids. Yeah, they really are. They really are. But I'll tell you, if I were to go up to Ann Arbor and I have the option to stay in an unbranded hotel with four walls or something that affiliates itself closer to the university, there's a natural pull to it. And, you know, I can apply that if you're going to go to a beach destination, you have a chance. And if you're a parrot head and you want to be in that Margaritaville environment versus a resort, that's a brand that has thousands of resorts everywhere from the highways to the resort destinations, you're going to go to the Margaritaville location.

56:20And our club Wyndham has a similar type of affiliation. So we just find that people are moving more and more to the lifestyle that attracts them. And we are therefore developing brands that allow them to just do that naturally to enjoy their lifestyle inside of the resort and outside. And it's already been received with a lot of great reception. And we're excited about what we can do going forward. You have so many different brands. You mentioned Margaritaville. We talked about Wyndham, Eddie Bauer. What are you missing? Yes. I think there's a few things that we have to consider. We don't have anything in the luxury space today, what I would say pure luxury.

57:03There's a lot of opportunities to tie our type of product to cruise type of companies. And then, as is always the case, someone five years ago would have said, well, Eddie Bauer is not a hospitality name. but you immediately put that to an outdoor living lifestyle. And I think our challenge is there's the typical hospitality verticals, which would include luxury, but there's also just niche lifestyle opportunities that we will look for. But, you know, if I could just step back a second, the key to our success is whatever we do, we execute against it and we deliver on what we promise the street.

57:47and that success allows us more and more access to more and more brands. So I would expect that to allow us to move into these spaces that we currently aren't in. Well, I'd love to be sitting at Margaritaville vacation or a Margarita vacation club with a margarita in my hand. But having said that, before we go, Mike, any signs of stress, any signs of, of economic concerns as you look at your business or maybe what it tells you about the outlook here? Well, I would say my personal sentiment and what I'm seeing in our business is very similar to it was 30 days ago, which was there's still uncertainty out there, which causes us to be looking intently every day with any metric internally that would signal the economy is going one way or the other.

58:4030 days on from our earnings call, I would say that our performance and our outlook on the economy looks very similar than it did at the end of October when we reported. Our leisure travel demand is looking good for Q4. With the sound that the shutdown is coming to an end, I was starting to worry that we might start to see changes in behavior between air and drive to traffic. Are you seeing that at all? Just very briefly? We have not. And in fact, it looks like our 25 bookings here in Q4 are at or slightly above where they were last year. And we haven't seen a dramatic change. We've seen ever so slightly the change from fly to drive to.

59:22But I'm really confident that it had gone on another week or two into the Thanksgiving season, we would have saw a noticeable shift of people in New York saying, look, let me just get to a drive-to destination as opposed to flying to Orlando. I don't want to deal with the hassle with my free time. Fortunately, it looks as if we will avoid that. But at this point, we have not seen an indication that that has caused a change in leisure travel. Mike Brown, president and CEO of Travel and Leisure Company, joining us from Orlando.

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1:02:25Visit Bahamur.com today. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. Or watch us live on YouTube. U.S. consumer confidence led in November by the most in seven months on growing anxiety about the labor market and the U.S. economy. Now, a survey by the Conference Board released this past Tuesday also found that confidence fell across nearly all income levels after several months of increasing for most groups. A gauge of expectations for the next six months declined to the lowest level since April, while measures of present conditions slumped to a more than one-year low.

1:03:07The ongoing slide in consumer sentiment reflects lingering concerns about the impact of persistently high prices and a cooling labor market on Americans' finances, as well as the broader economy. The health of the U.S. consumer is something we always focus on with Christina Stemble. She's the founder and CEO of Farm Girl Flowers. We've been talking to her for several years now. That firm, by the way, she bootstrapped starting back in 2010, making bouquets from her San Francisco apartment. I got to say, it's come a long way. It's the first year that we're actually seeing any growth since 2020, but very small, a couple points.

1:03:41And that's very intentional. We're really focused on the bottom line. You know, we want to make sure all these companies are doing layoffs. I want to make sure we're not that, you know, we're actually, we have, I don't know, 10 or 12 open positions right now, which for a company our size is a lot. So we're just growing at a clip that we can do while maintaining our profit margin. How big is the company? We're about 35 million, you know, plus a little bit, but yeah. And how many people? Right under 30. So you have like a third of your positions are open right now, basically. Are you having trouble finding those employees?

1:04:13We're just going slow. We're looking for the right people. So we have a lot of applicants, but we're just making sure we're bringing the right people. Yeah, I think I've learned that having the wrong people is actually worse than just not having anyone. So that's a lesson. It is a good lesson. So in terms of 15 years, tell us about how you look back at the beginning and where you were and some of the stages you've gone through and then where you are today. Yeah, I just sat down and wrote 15 lessons in 15 years. I might share them at the end of the year. I was just trying to think about where I'm at now versus I feel much healthier right now, personally and professionally?

1:04:47And like, why do I feel that way? And I think the biggest lesson that I had written down was that nothing is as it seems. Like when I started, I wanted that founder story in Silicon Valley. I started in San Francisco. I wanted to be the cover of Inc. or Entrepreneur, one of the big magazines and, you know, where everybody was like, she did it. Look at that, you know, and it was like all my ego. I finally realized it was my ego and we grew really, really fast. And that like played into my ego. And I felt like that was my entire identity was all the press we were getting with our fast growth. And yet 2019, we did$34 million in revenue, and I did$36 ,000 in profit, and I paid myself$60 ,000.

1:05:23This is not a success story. But the outward world thought I was so successful, and I'm like, I'm barely scraping by eating ramen. So I think really figuring out that I needed to be smaller, like we talked about before, and focusing on profit margin, being a smaller company doesn't feed your ego anymore. But I finally figured out that like everything I thought the business world was, isn't like all these sales, all these like glossy pictures of people that made it. I'm like, yeah, it was like a fire sale most of the time. And it was like all these people I wanted to be that are the girl bosses that made it.

1:05:56I'm like, they don't own their companies anymore. And they're, you know, yeah. And it's, you know, it's interesting because we've talked a lot and I'm sure like through your head, you went through some journeys about like, where do I want to go? Do I want to keep doing this? Do I want to bring in partners? Do I want to do whatever? You know what I mean? And I'm just curious, you know, Tim, like I think about all the folks that kind of think about that kind of thing. Did you go through some of that? Absolutely. I mean, I built this to sell. Like I wanted to sell it in 10 years. I mean, how many years can you work 100 hours a week and not die, you know?

1:06:27So I wanted to sell it so bad. It's so harsh. But it's the reality, right? Totally. And then we got an offer from one of our big competitors, like this big company. And I thought, yes, we're going to make it. And it was a horrible offer. And so now I'm building to keep instead of building to sell. And it's a completely different thing. Like we're making, we're investing in things for five years from now. You're able to build to keep rather than build to sell because you built this company yourself and you didn't take on any financing, any funding, which is so strange for a startup that was built in Silicon Valley.

1:06:54Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I'm very fortunate. I'm in a CEO group with lots of CEOs that, you know, are constantly telling me how lucky I am, even though I have never felt lucky in this. because I don't go into every board meeting being worried I'm going to be fired right now. You're the boss. Yeah, I'm the boss. I'm like, you know, we bought a farm. No investors would ever let you buy a farm. We are farming now. That's a long-term goal. Well, I was going to say, last time you were on with us, we're going to get to the consumer in a second, but last time you were on with us, we talked about two things that really stuck out.

1:07:23One was the effect of tariffs. Did you buy a farm to offset the effect of tariffs? No, absolutely not, but it is going to help us. I mean, we bought the farm because we're like, Like, let's do this because it's hard to get this type of flower at this time of year where we think we can get it where we're at. We also built it because we're like, we're farm real flowers. Like, let's actually like. Shouldn't we have a farm? Shouldn't we have a farm and do that, you know? But, I mean, we're investing in, you know, we do think long term this vertical integration will allow us to keep a couple million dollars more in our pockets every year.

1:07:52Wow. Yeah. You gave us such an education, I think, about where flowers come from. And I think there's just this assumption we go buy flowers. I don't know whether we thought they were all in the U.S. and there wasn't, right? So much of the flowers coming in. Where's the farm? South, well, Oregon. We bought the farm in Washington. So we have a small farm in Washington. We also put in about 40 ,000 plants in Oregon last year as well. And will you be able to cultivate those flowers yearly? Like throughout the year? Although it takes three years for your first harvest. So again, that's why investors would never let you put the money into it now.

1:08:23And the flowers that you produce at those farms on that land only go to you or do you sell them to others? Yeah, we'll keep it, you know, Right now, the amount that we're growing, we can use that every year. If we decide to keep going, then we can wholesale it. It's another revenue chain for us. What percentage of the flowers that are grown there, does that satisfy of the flowers that you use in a single year? Oh, like a couple percent. Okay. A percent. It's still really, but you would never be able to get to the point because of the global supply chain where you could actually grow all the flowers you would want.

1:08:53No, never. And we don't want to. It's too much of a risk. I learned through COVID that I definitely needed to diversify more than I had. I mean, having our facility that made 92 % of our bouquets close down in one day in 2020 taught me that that wasn't very smart. So I'm definitely making sure we diversify now. Talk to us about tariffs and the environment. Like, I just think, again, why we love, many reasons we love talking to you, but you really give us an idea of what it's like to run a small business, although you've made it a bigger business over the years. But stuff coming out of Washington, tariffs, how has that changed?

1:09:27Has it gotten any easier? Yeah, no. We change, you know, and it actually hurts the consumers more. I mean, you know. Because you raise prices. We raise prices or we have to buy off the shelf instead of making custom things that are nicer for them. We have to do things like that. We have to make concessions because we don't want to price ourselves out of the market. Yeah. You know, we have to use different flowers, even though they're not the ones that consumers want. You know, there are things like that. I hate when florists do that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's not what we want to do. Right. And also, I think we're the poster child for having tried to do this, like, made in America, grown in America.

1:10:02Like, when we started, I only bought American-grown flowers, right? And we ran out of flowers in 2017. Just ran out. Now there's fewer farms than there were in 2017. Because labor's so high. Now, with immigration issues, I mean, there is, I mean, I just came a couple weeks ago. I was just down in our fields. And we were getting it ready for winter. I couldn't walk for three days after doing one week of work in the fields. Like there are not people here that are wanting to be farm workers, let me just say. So what would you say to folks who are like, no, pushing back on immigration, it makes sense.

1:10:36We have to be doing this. What would you say to folks who are listening or watching right now? I think that ship has sailed generations ago. There is no way, like, you know, we tried to buy American Grown. It wasn't possible. We're not going to bring farming back to this country unless we do something about immigration. There are too many ripple effects going on with why it won't work. Also, having production facilities of making bouquets in the United States. We do. We make about 50 % in the United States and 50 % outside of the United States. Can I ask you where outside? South America. South America.

1:11:08Okay. And most of them are in the United States, but the flowers are coming from South America. We have a few in South America that are making bouquets as well. And it doesn't work. Like, you know, I think, you know, Ford Motor Company is a good example of this when they're talking about open jobs. Or, you know, I talked to a guy that has an engine rebuilding plant in the Midwest that had 40 percent open positions. We just don't have those people. Yeah. You know, we're telling people go to college so you don't have to work a factory job. Nobody wants to work a factory job. You also have an aging population.

1:11:36Right. So we're not replenishing. So we talked about tariffs. We talked about farming. We talked quite a bit about your story to the consumer and the American consumer. How is the consumer in your view? The consumer has definitely shifted. I think just like what you were talking about, people right now, it's a little concerning with the economy where people are still spending a lot of money, but the people that can't spend a lot of money can't buy. So it's not the company I want to be where I'm only appealing to one type of consumer. So we're really trying to make sure that we're not doing that.

1:12:11But with tariffs and rising prices and everything, that kind of backs you in a corner what do you do? You know, I don't want every bouquet to cost$150 because how many people can afford$150 bouquet to send to the restaurant for their birthday, you know? So we're looking at things like - And it's a consumer. Like, I know I definitely cut back. It's like, you can't do as much as you would like to. Absolutely. And we're in the gifting space. So you just cut gifts out and we don't want that. So we're looking at trying to find ways to get closer to the end consumer so we can cut it in shipping instead of the flower cost and things like that that we can be a little bit creative with.

1:12:41Wreaths. How big, like, Do you do a lot of wreaths? We wish we could do more. We sell out of them all the time. We're working with a lot of new producers. They're high labor. Really? It is high labor. Yeah. So we are constantly looking. We work with small farms on our wreath making program. So very proud of that and trying to get more for us. I love. I have wreaths. It smells really good. It does smell really good. You walked into the studio. If you had to do a word to describe the outlook, how do you see it right now? Bleak but hopeful. Wow. Wow. Yeah, yeah. I think. And this is with somebody who's got business going, job openings.

1:13:18Yeah. Wow. In terms of the context of the last 15 years, apart from COVID, where is it? Like, what year are we in? 10 seconds. Or 15. Bleak, I would just say because of personally how I feel about what's going on. But like, we're doing okay. So I'm hopeful that we're going to make some changes. And you bought a farm. Yes, bought a farm. I love that. I want to be able to say we bought a farm. Christina Stamble, founder and CEO of Farm Girl Flowers. Always makes us feel good. This is Bloomberg. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app.

1:13:53You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say, Alexa, play Bloomberg 1130. All right, we've got something fun to talk about. Well, our Bloomberg Intelligence team is out with a really interesting note that could add to the woes facing the spirits industry. Oh, so not so fun. Well, use of weight loss drugs stand to deepen alcohol's demand slump in the U.S. and Europe as moderation in wellness trends gains ground. So by 2035, consumption of beer and spirits is expected to drop 20.3 % and 19.2 % respectively among GLP-1 users. That's here in the U.S. This is according to an analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence.

1:14:33Yeah, total losses could reach$28.5 billion translates to about a 3 % to 4 % sales drag in the U.S. and 2 % to 3 % in Europe. There's that going on. The whole alcohol industry globally has had to deal with tariffs coming out of the United States. So that's going on. And so we'll see, as the president and the administration has been looking at the cost of things, some rollbacks. I'm not quite sure how that will ultimately maybe impact the liquor industry, but we'll be keeping it up. Well, it's the economic backdrop that informs our conversation with Allie Anderson. She's CEO at Craftco. It's got a portfolio that includes more than two dozen spirits and liqueurs.

1:15:11Think bourbon, gin, rye, ready to drink cocktails and more. The company also does co-packing for other brands. She joins us from a distillery in Holland, Michigan. Last time you were on with us, we spent the whole time talking about tariffs and the effect of tariffs on your business. And that's just one element that's a headwind. Other headwinds include changing consumer tastes and how people think about GLP-1s and increasingly people taking GLP ones and that leading people to drink less. What is the environment for you out there right now? Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you for having me back.

1:15:41It's good to see you guys. All of the headlines, they seem pretty bleak, right? But I think that's what business is today, especially in the spirits industry. So what's the name of the game? You have to pivot. We certainly want to promote as much health as we can across all industries, but what we're looking at here is lifestyle shifts. And so the industry has to has to shift with it. You know, anecdotally, I was out to dinner with a friend a couple weeks ago, who was who was on a, you know, I said, you look great. And he said, I'm cheating. It's a shot, but we enjoy two cocktails and a lovely meal.

1:16:16So I think you see people making healthy choices when and where they can and what they're actually choosing what my friend shows that night was quality over quantity. And so those are the pivots and the shifts that we have to make industry as well. I'm super like that with chocolate. Like I just need a little piece of super good chocolate. I don't need a lot. And then I'm happy. And so yeah, same thing with alcohol. No, no, but let's go. Let's go there. Because I do think price point is something increasingly yes, health diet, that's certainly an aspect. But price point is certainly increasingly something that we know all consumers are looking at.

1:16:53We saw that play out in the recent elections in some of the States, like the economy does matter. The money that is in or not in your pocketbook, it matters. Absolutely does. And you know, I've got premium brands. I have brands that cross the spectrum. And so what we're seeing is, yeah, are consumers down, shifting just a little bit? Sure. But we're also seeing tremendous growth with products that are, you know, over$200. So I think you are seeing a disparity across all of the price tiers. But at the same time, like I said, you're seeing people redefine what premium really means. I think it's becoming maybe less about price point and more about what the purpose-driven value is, what the occasion in their life they're using.

1:17:40They're using alcohol to celebrate with. So I think, you know, at the end of the day, people want transparency. They want transparency in price. They want transparency in how we source, how we produce, how we give back, all of those things. In terms of the lineup that you have right now, you said people are choosing quality over quantity. Is there a certain you have a large range of what you do? I mean, dozens of different spirits and alcohols, liqueurs, ready to drink cocktails. Where's the strength? It's inconvenience, variety, innovation. I think people don't what we're seeing is people don't mind spending a little bit more for something that they haven't seen before.

1:18:22Right. And that could be with an RTD. So maybe it's maybe it's a little more expensive RTD, but it's a flavor combination they haven't quite had before. Or maybe it's a really luxury whiskey with a finish or a blending technique in our case that they haven't seen before. So, again, I think people we vote with our dollars. right and they'll they'll um they'll consume what they think is new interesting and what they can get information about what they connect with so rtd obviously ready to drink i've had certainly some of those hey you um sent over to our team um so that we could share with the audience some of the stuff that you guys i actually have next to me copper craft distillery um made in the usa holland michigan it's straight bourbon whiskey tell me about this one i'm actually gonna be it's been quite a day it's been quite a week it's been quite a year i'm gonna actually join you yes i join we're so sorry yes wait i'm gonna she's at the you're you're here in the studio i'm here i'm here in our pack hall is it the distillery i don't want to wait wait wait wait oh there we go okay i didn't want to sell it i didn't want to spill it okay so tell me but tell me about this because it isn't certainly a brand that i think i'm familiar with but you're right people are looking.

1:19:32I know when I go to buy a wine, I like to try different things. Right, right. So, you know, we're based out of Holland, Michigan. And you think, I get this question all the time. Isn't whiskey just in Kentucky? And the great thing about an American spirit is that it can be in all 50 states. And so for us, we're in Holland, Michigan, on the west side of Michigan here on the lakeshore. And we create, we've had this brand for many, many years. And I think what you've got is a straight bourbon whiskey. I can smell the whiskey sour that could also be made out of this. This is finished in rum casks.

1:20:06What does that mean? Well, it means we took an already amazing whiskey. I think the one you've got is eight years old. And we put it in. Oh, I don't have any casks in this room. We put it in a rum cask that used to hold rum. And we just let it rest for about a year. So it takes on a different flavor than something that would be finished in a different type of cask. But I see what you say. Like you don't, we, what you, this reminds me of my dad, um, who used to make whiskey sours for all of us as kids. And most of the times it was a lot more oranges and cherries in it than, than whiskey, but you could also just the variety.

1:20:41Um, I feel like the craft industry, even in liquor, like you just alone, it's just something really nice. Right. Like what did craft used to be? If we look back at beer, we think craft was small batch craft whiskey, small batch and And craft, much like the way we redefine premium, craft has evolved too. So like you just said, I've not heard of this before. What is this? And so craft is now evolving to be, what is that experience I can get? Who are the people that make it? How transparent are they about what they're doing? Can I go visit them? That's what craft is now. It's the process, the technique, the people, the story that you're telling about the whiskey or the spirit.

1:21:20The distribution of this is a question that I have because at least here in New York City, I don't know how it works in other parts of the world, but in other parts of the country, but you walk into a liquor store and I've talked to some of these folks in there. And again, it's changes depending on where you live, but it's a challenge to get smaller brands on the shelves, especially with the big brands, the large brands that own a good portion. they come in and say, okay, well, if you want to carry this, you have to carry this. And there's not much power that these small companies have. How do you make sure you get shelf space and shelf space that's like premium?

1:21:59What a great question. Relationships. Like any business, any industry really does come down to relationships. And for a small craft, right? We've got five brands. We cover 42 states and we're still crafts. What does that mean? We have to show up in market. You've got to show up at that retailer. You've got to show with the distributors, those distributors are still my customers. So it's built on relationships and making sure they know, just like we connect with our consumers online and tell those stories, make sure they know who we are and that we are a small business, that every single sale matters to us.

1:22:33And much like them, we're just trying to connect with consumers. So I think it's finding that common ground through relationships. Yeah, it always comes down to that. I feel like relationships for so many different industries. Hey, before you go, we've talked about Coppercraft and I actually sampled some, but you also shared with our team just to kind of look at kind of the variety and different places you go. Elderflower, I'm a little obsessed with Elderflower right now. And you've got Thatcher's Organic Artisanal. Artisanal? Yeah, you gotta move to Brooklyn. Artesian, artesian spirits. Oh, it's artesian, okay.

1:23:09Yeah, yeah, that's right. Sorry, sorry, I couldn't read it. I'm not looking at the word, but. I'm looking off my, because we took a picture. You've got Fox and is it Odeni? Odin. Odin. Okay, forgive me. Sorry, I'm looking at a small picture. But tell us a little bit about some of the other ones. And then Thatcher's vodka. It's not because I've been drinking. I just couldn't read the picture because I took a picture so I could read on air. Go ahead. I'll join you. I'll join you. We'll look at the end here. No, it's Thatcher's organic, right? It's, you know, we think about spirits. Does it really matter?

1:23:39Yeah, it sure does. something like that which is very culinary forward so you mentioned elderflower i bet we're drinking the heck out of hugo spritzes right now with that elderflower totally amazing right yes yeah and again that's that's a way to enjoy um maybe a little bit of lower proof but still still feel great and be festive and all of those things so uh you know then we've got like fox and odin is is luxury whiskey and that's we've got a beautiful double oaked that was just up for we had two of the top five finalists for the best special barrel finished whiskeys in the world a couple Sundays ago in San Francisco.

1:24:16So, you know, we're super proud. We're craft. We're competing against all these big guys. But because of what we're able to do with our size, with our expertise, you know, we can deliver some really luxury things to the market as well. And we do. That was Allie Anderson, CEO of Craftco. All right. So all of you who are maybe still eating some leftovers from Thanksgiving, it's kind of my favorite thing to have like pecan pie, pecan pie for breakfast. Hey, call it what you will, but just eat it, you know, whatever. But what you might have noticed over the holiday, over Thanksgiving, is that alcohol consumption, people are drinking less.

1:24:49Consumption here in the US when it comes to alcohol has fallen to its lowest level in decades driven by health fears, GLP-1, weight loss drugs that can actually dull alcohol cravings, and of course, rising cannabis use. About 51 % of respondents in a September Bloomberg Intelligence Survey said they now substitute cannabis for alcohol at least weekly. So up about five percentage points from last year. And that includes in the Thanksgiving feasts. Yeah, this is pretty wild. So the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Yeah. Some have started dubbing that Wednesday Green Wednesday. This is according to the BDSA.

1:25:24That's the cannabis market tracker. Yeah. It's the second biggest day of the year for legal cannabis sales in the U.S. Maybe everybody just wants to kind of mellow out before they see all their family. Why aren't you married? Why don't you have kids? Why don't you finish that degree? Anyway, all I'm going to say is whether you had a happy Thanksgiving or happy Danksgiving, I just hope you had a good and safe holiday. I like that Danksgiving. Check out this story. It's on the Bloomberg. There's a reason it was one of the most read when it came out. of Bloomberg News wrote it. Americans ditching wine to get high on gummies this Thanksgiving.

1:26:02So maybe that was your Thanksgiving as well. All right. That wraps up this Thanksgiving weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Tim Stenebeck. Wait, haven't you ever done the cousin walk? I don't even know what that is. It's a new story. If you know, you know. I guess you... Our producer, Sebastian Eskabar says. Okay, yeah. And I'm Carol Masser. Have a good and safe holiday weekend. Enjoy the leftovers. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m.

1:26:39Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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