Issue 009

That's 6,000 out of around 1.4 million UK businesses with staff. The bigger lever is in the same announcement. More than 230 organisations, including big names in food and banking, have pledged to ask for Cyber Essentials across their supply chains, with £7 million set aside to certify their smaller suppliers for free.

We doubt price was ever what stopped most small businesses. A big customer asking for the certificate before signing will. Cyber Essentials is turning from good practice into the price of winning work.

Cuts are common across tech this year, with Atlassian, Block and WiseTech among them. What's less common is the way out. Unlike the others, Canva also didn't point to AI when it announced its cuts.

There's a difference between saying your people are your greatest asset and still valuing them once they're off the payroll. Canva hasn't made redundancy painless, but it may have written a better blueprint for doing it.

Wired headphones have been having a moment. Gen Z made them a fashion statement, helped along by Bella Hadid, and the sales followed. In the US, wired headphones grew last year after five years of decline, and were up 20% in the first six weeks of 2026. In September, Bose launched wired earbuds too.

For people who grew up with a Walkman, these are a memory. For everyone else, they're a style. Some trends are less about going backwards than finding new reasons to revisit the past.