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Toyota opens Woven City as a living lab for future lifestyles

Woven City by Toyota, Japan

Japan – Toyota has opened its experimental Woven City at the base of Mount Fuji, creating a testbed where residents live alongside prototypes of emerging technologies such as flying taxis, robot pets and drones that escort you home at night.

First announced at CES in 2020, the development brings together staff engineers, researchers and their families in a fully connected environment designed to trial innovations in real time. Smart homes are equipped with robotics to support daily routines, while autonomous e-Palette vehicles move people and goods around the city. Toyota envisages future applications that include robots capable of learning how to fold shirts, highlighting the project’s ambition to integrate AI and automation into everyday life.

Initially home to about 360 people, the community is expected to grow to more than 2,000 residents, who will play an active role in shaping how technologies evolve. Woven City signals a new era of consumer research and prototyping, where ideas move beyond labs and into the lived experience.

Find more insights on the future of cities in our Future Spaces topic.

Strategic opportunity

With residents actively shaping innovation, consider how to shift from user feedback to continuous co-creation, embedding consumers directly into the product development cycle

Stella McCartney launches luxury live-stream shopping platform

Global – Stella McCartney has introduced Shop With Stella, an interactive shopping event co-hosted by actor Eva Mendes and powered by Swedish video commerce platform Bambuser.

Streamed on 22 September from a fictional HQ dubbed Stella Corp, the QVC-style show blended live product demonstrations, real-time Q&A and instant shopping.

By weaving storytelling with community, the brand is engaging an emerging luxury demographic.

Digital engagement is increasingly central to growth, with consumers expecting interactive, personalised experiences that go beyond static content. According to Bain & Co’s latest Luxury Goods study, digital engagement and younger consumers are driving the industry’s next wave of growth.

Our report The Future of Live Shopping highlights how social commerce is evolving into a key strategy for building authenticity and connectivity between brands and buyers. For luxury fashion, this reflects a broader industry shift towards entertainment-led retail experiences.

Stella McCartney and Veuve Clicquot, UK

Strategic opportunity

Use shoppable storytelling formats that merge entertainment and interactivity to create communities around products, deepening brand engagement and converting attention into meaningful sales

Stat: The fashion industry’s hottest climate risk is factory workers’ health

Photography by cottonbro studio, Global

Global – A September 2025 report by the Fashion Revolution movement reveals that the fashion industry is failing to measure dangerous factory temperatures, which threaten workers’ health and risk trillions in economic losses.

According to the What Fuels Fashion? report, a staggering 0% of brands disclose factory data on heat and humidity, even as extreme temperatures leave garment workers fainting, falling ill and losing income as productivity drops.

What’s more, the industry’s greatest share of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels for heat in facilities like dye houses. Up to 100% of this process heat can be electrified using available technologies like heat pumps and electric boilers, which would also improve workplace safety by lowering temperatures and clearing the air.

This opportunity is being missed as progress stalls. This unmeasured climate risk is both a human rights issue and a financially material one for investors, with global productivity losses from heat stress projected to hit £1.8 trillion ($2.4 trillion, €2 trillion) annually by 2030 (source: International Labour Organization).

Find more insights about the future of manufacturing amid climate change in our Sustainability topic.

Strategic opportunity

Consider incorporating heat risk data into ESG reporting and linking executive incentives to improvements in worker safety, reducing exposure to reputational and regulatory risk