City profiles

Yusaku Maezawa

The billionaire founder of Japanese retailer Start Today has come up with a startling idea to sell more clothes online. To tackle the perennial problem of how you “try before you buy”, says Elaine Moore in the FT, Maezawa, 42, has shipped out hundreds of thousands of stretchy “Zozosuits” that gauge the wearer’s body shape. This costly move has contributed to a 26% drop in profits and may completely backfire if “bashful shoppers” don’t prove keen to wriggle into an “unforgiving bodysuit”, photographing themselves from every angle and uploading the pics onto the company’s app. “Who needs to go through all that for a slightly more fitted T-shirt?” Might it not be simpler to consider “a more retro solution” for trying on clothes – good old bricks and mortar.

James Bond

The James Bond franchise is “a dependable hit machine for Hollywood”, says The Observer. But figures for the latest in the series, Spectre, show that, for all his tailored suits and fancy gadgets, “007 has to work very hard to generate a decent return”. Spectre cost $245m to make and returned $880m at the box office. But once the Broccoli family (who own the screen copyright), the author Ian Fleming’s estate and the actor Daniel Craig took their slices, distributors Sony and MGM were left to share a net profit of only $98m. Tight margins may help to explain the recent departure of the next Bond film’s director, Danny Boyle, over “creative differences”. His reportedly “radical pitch” for a “woke” Bond was so risky financially that it was “always in danger of being in the ejector seat”.