Category: Company News

As fans place their bets on which team will win the Super Bowl, advertisers are also placing (multi-million) bets that their commercials will pay off.

This year brands are spending $5.25 million dollars per each 30 second spot. It’s the biggest ad spend ever, and CBS is expected to bring in $500 million in revenue from in-game ads, even while the TV audience is shrinking.

Last year, 103.4 million viewers watched the big game, down 7 percent from the year prior. However it’s still by far the largest TV audience event of the year. In comparison, only 26.5 million viewers watched the Oscars in 2018, according to Nielsen data.

Sports’ premiere game is “really attractive for advertisers, especially as consumers are watching on platforms and devices where there’s not always ads,” Jeanine Poggi, Ad Age’s senior editor, told CNBC’s “On the Money” in an interview. This year, she said commercials are expected to be more light-hearted and humorous in tone.

Coca-Cola, for the first time in more than a decade, will not be running an ad during the game. Instead, the company will run its spot just before the national anthem. The animated commercial promotes the idea that Coke is enjoyed by everyone no matter their race or beliefs.

“Of course the national anthem has been a source of controversy over the last two seasons, and I think Coca-Cola is really using it as a moment to bring people together,” Poggi said.

The anthem has become a polarizing moment for the National Football League a few years ago, ever since Colin Kaepernick knelt during the song to protest racial and social inequities.

Forget spit. Some companies are betting men will be willing to send them another, perhaps more personal, piece of their genetic code: sperm.

Start-ups, including Legacy and Dadi, are selling kits online that men can use to collect their sperm wherever they please, mail it back and freeze it for months or even years. These companies are pitching the addition of convenience and comfort — minus a trip to the doctor.

At-home genetic tests have already gotten people comfortable with swabbing their cheeks or spitting in a tube and sending off their DNA. More recently, start-ups like Hims and Roman have started selling erectile dysfunction pills over the internet. These companies have championed putting the consumer in control of their health.

Similarly, these direct-to-consumer sperm freezing kits say they’re empowering men to be more proactive about fertility. Even though men are responsible for issues in one-third of infertile couples, some people still view fertility as a woman’s issue.

Doctors applaud efforts to get men talking about fertility. However, they worry men might not get the full story.

“I think in general there’s a little bit sky is falling mentality that may be a little misguided with what [companies are] saying,” said Dr. Jesse Mills, an assistant urology professor and director of the men’s clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Most men who freeze their sperm are likely to are at risk of becoming infertile, including people about to start chemotherapy, get a vasectomy or are members of the military, police officers and firefighters.

They typically consult with a doctor first. If they decide to go through with it, the doctor hands them a cup and escorts them to a room where they can collect. The process can be more clinical than comfortable.

Khaled Kteily, founder of Legacy, said he first thought about sperm freezing four years ago when he spilled a cup of hot tea hospitalized him second degree burns. The tea “thankfully” landed on his thigh and not “elsewhere.” It got him thinking about how even though he didn’t want kids now, he does want them in the future.

Then one of his friends, who was 30 at the time, found out he had cancer and needed to freeze his sperm immediately before starting chemotherapy. The whole process cost about $1,000. That got Kteily thinking about what would happen if you could make it less expensive.

“If you could freeze it, why not?” he said.

Legacy plays with this idea. The homepage of its website reads, “Protect your most valuable assets.” Dadi’s homepage says, “Stop the clock start your future.”

Legacy and another start-up, Dadi, sell kits online. Men receive them within a day. They ejaculate into the cup and mix the semen with a preservative solution. They put everything back in the box and ship it back to the lab where it’s then analyzed and frozen.

Both companies send patients results. Neither requires patients to connect with a doctor.

Legacy has patients fill out a questionnaire so it can give them recommendations. When people get results outside of the normal range, Legacy offers to connect them to a genetic counselor who doubles as a fertility specialist. Dadi does not offer to connect “customers” to doctors.

Mills, the urologist, said he would love it if men got their sperm analyzed before they started thinking about kids instead of after they have spent years trying and failing. However, he worries people will be misled about their chances to conceive as they age or the costs and risks that come with sperm banking.

Men don’t have a rigid biological clock to conceive like women do. Studies have shown sperm does lose some quality as men age, but most of the declines come when men are in their 60s or 70s, said Dr. Jim Dupree, assistant professor in the department of urology at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

“To my knowledge, I have not seen any meaningful data saying a man in his 30s has significantly worse sperm than a man in his 20s,” he said.

Freezing sperm can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on how long it’s stored.

Legacy offers three different options, with the least expensive costing $350 for one deposit and short-term storage at $20 per month and the most expensive costing $5,000 for three deposits and 10 years of storage. Dadi sells its kit for $99 and storage for $9.99 a month or $99.99 annually.

Once men want to thaw their sperm, they may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to actually use it since they can’t just use it the old fashioned way.

Doctors can try inserting the sperm into a woman’s uterus, a process known as IUI, or manually combining it with a woman’s eggs, or IVF. More likely, frozen sperm is used for IVF, Mills said, which can cost more than $10,000 per attempt.

“It’s cheap to bank sperm, whatever sperm cryopreservation tool you use, whether traditional or direct-to-consumer at-home kits,” Dr. Mills said. “That becomes a rounding error in the whole fertility equation.”

Dadi CEO Tom Smith says the goal is to start the conversation. His company sends men videos of their sperm to “humanize and normalize” it.

“Infertility is not a women’s issue when looking at the data,” he said. “For us, we’re trying to educate that insight and promote conversation.”

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he will keep the U.S. military in Iraq, in order to keep a close eye on Iran, which is a “real problem,” according to a CBS interview that will broadcast on Sunday.

Trump’s decision to draw down military forces in the Middle East has been met with fierce criticism, and helped prompt the departure of James Mattis as Defense Secretary. But in an interview with CBS, the president suggested the U.S. would at least maintain a presence to keep an eye on Tehran.

“I want to be able to watch Iran … all I want to do is be able to watch,” Trump told CBS’ “Face the Nation” adding that he was not planning a military strike on Iran.

“This is what a lot of people don’t understand. We’re going to keep watching and we’re going to keep seeing and if there’s trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we’re going to know it before they do,” he added.

Trump then explained that since the United States has spent a “fortune” on the Al Asad Air Base in western Iraq, which he made a surprise visit to in December, the U.S. will hold on to it.

“We have an unbelievable and expensive military base built in Iraq. It’s perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle East rather than pulling up,” he said.

In wake of a number of public differences he’s had with intelligence officials regarding their assessments of threats to the U.S., Trump said he trusted them–but wouldn’t always agree with what they said.

“I have intel people, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree,” Trump said during the CBS interview. “I am going to trust the intelligence … but I will say this: my intelligence people, if they said in fact that Iran is a wonderful kindergarten, I disagree with them 100 percent. It is a vicious country that kills many people,” he added.

His comments came on the heels of criticisms he made last week regarding assessments the nation’s top intelligence chiefs gave to lawmakers.

During a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, the heads of various intelligence branches testified about the looming threats facing the United States. When asked about Iran’s nuclear program, CIA director Gina Haspel said that “technically they’re in compliance” — a finding that contradicts Trump’s claims.

A day after the hearing, Trump said that the intelligence agencies should “go back to school, saying on Twitter they were wrong.

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During his interview with CBS, Trump called Iran “the number one terrorist nation in the world” and blamed Tehran for manufacturing violence in the Middle East.

“So when my intelligence people tell me how wonderful Iran is- if you don’t mind, I’m going to just go by my own counsel,” he said.

General Motors new Regal GS is a lot of things. It’s a competent sports sedan. A stylish liftback. A German car in an American outfit. A comfortable cruiser. A stellar value.

It’s not, however, what you probably expect from a Buick. That’s good news for the brand and better news for prospective buyers.

You can get the Regal in three styles. The TourX is the lifted wagon that does duty as a crossover alternative, a role we thought it handled well. There’s a regular sedan, though it should be noted that the “sedan” moniker isn’t completely descriptive. All non-wagon Regals have a liftback and folding seats, making them a stylish alternative to a hatchback.

Last, there’s this: the Regal GS. It’s the high-performance version with a 3.6-liter V-6 engine providing 310 horsepower and a nine-speed automatic transmission. More importantly, the GS gets adaptive suspension and performance brakes that lead to a more dynamic driving experience.

Though the company did once make the GNX muscle car, Buick is better known for cruisers like the LaCrosse. You’d be forgiven for assuming that it doesn’t have the chops to build a modern sports sedan, but the Regal comes to us from Opel. The company, which used to be General Motors’ German wing, but now belongs to France’s PSA Groupe, is no stranger to fine-tuning sports sedans.

As a result, the Regal has suprisingly good handling for a big sedan on a front-wheel drive platform. The all-wheel drive system, fitted to all GS models, certainly helps. The Buick’s adaptive suspension is also integral to the impresive dynamics, with seriously different driving modes that help the GS handle highway hauling and backroad burning without any fuss.

Plus, you’ll also find an impressive list of equipment. Our $44,115, fully loaded model had a comprehensive suite of active safety features, a Bose sound system, active noise cancelling and some of the best seats of any car we’ve ever tested. They bear the seal of AGR, the German campaign for better backs, and feature a delightful massage feature to compliment the supremely comfortable buckets. The next-cheapest car we’ve sampled with massage seats was the Volvo V90 Cross Country, while some six-figure cars don’t have the feature.

The Regal also has GM’s MyLink infotainment system. It’s starting to look a little old, but MyLink still functions extremely well and is easy to use. Add to that a liftback and a gargantuan cargo area and it’s easy to make a case for the Regal GS as the most usable sports sedan on the market.

Finally, we have to address the exterior. Simply put, this is one of the best-looking sedans on sale today. It’s definitely the best-looking Buick we’ve seen in decades, garnering compliments and genuine “that’s a Buick?” responses from friends who saw it.

Inside, you probably won’t be as impressed. The Regal doesn’t have a bad interior, but — when the chassis can genuinely rival sports sedans from the likes of Audi — a ho-hum interior is a mark against the sporty Buick.

GM still liberally applies flat black plastics to the interiors of almost every car, despite about a decade of moaning from the automotive press. The design of the Regal’s interior works around this relatively well, with the cabin still looking good overall. But when you touch things, it becomes clear that the accountants still run GM. For $44,115, I don’t want to feel a lot of rubberized plastic.

Similarly, the powertrain doesn’t feel special. It may handle well, but the engine-transmission pairing isn’t anywhere near as advanced as offerings from true luxury brands. The 3.6-liter V-6 is the same motor we’ve seen in dozens of GM products and continues to deliver good power without much excitement or character. No turbos, no special sauce; just a big V-6 that gets the job done.

The transmission is similarly nondescript, with it hunting for gears during aggressive driving. This wouldn’t be as annoying if you could manage it while keeping your hands on the wheel, but the Regal GS is inexplicably the only sports sedan we can think of that doesn’t offer paddle shifters. If you want to select your own gears, you have to use the gear shifter on the center console.

Simply put, the Regal GS isn’t the best-driving sports sedan you can get. However, it does well as a feature-focused premium car that happens to drive well.

For more than a decade, billionaire Eddie Lampert was arguably able to run Sears like his kingdom.

The hedge fund titan who combined Sears and Kmart in 2005 led Sears Holdings as its chairman, CEO and largest investor. The company had public shareholders and a board of directors, but Lampert had unique discretion guiding its fate. That fate was tortured. Under his stewardship, Sears closed over 3,500 stores, slashed roughly 250,000 jobs and saw its share price fall from $193 a share in 2007 to less than a dollar.

Now, bystanders in that destruction are finally having their day in court. Sears unsecured creditors — people owed money by Sears who are unprotected by collateral — will head to U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains on Monday to protest Lampert and air their grievances. Unsecured creditors are objecting to Lampert’s $5.2 billion deal to buy Sears out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund ESL Investments, the only deal that would stave off liquidation. In a litany of filings that piled up over the past two weeks, they have accused Lampert of everything from “stealing assets” to “years of misconduct” that reads like a “Shakesperean tragedy.”

Lampert, who helped prop up Sears for years through investments from ESL, is Sears’ largest creditor, and its most protected with collateral.

The fate of the 126-year-old chain will be decided upon by Judge Robert Drain in what is expected to be a two-day hearing on Monday, Feb. 4 and Wednesday, Feb. 6. Drain has already shown a propensity for pushing Lampert and Sears to draft a deal that would save jobs, having twice granted the parties more time in order to craft a resolution when it seemed like they had reached a breaking point.

Sears’ unsecured creditors include the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal government oversight organization that guarantees Sears’ pension, which is more than $1 billion underfunded. The group is arguing that Lampert’s deal to buy Sears will undo an agreement the PBGC struck with Lampert in 2015. To help fill the pension’s losses, Lampert granted the group a lien and royalty fees from some of its most valuable assets: the Kenmore, Craftsman and Diehard brands.

The PBGC is arguing that as part of Lampert’s deal to buy Sears, Lampert will get back full access to Kenmore and Diehard, leaving it and its 90,000 pensioners empty-handed.

The group also includes mall-owner Simon Property Group, whose CEO David Simon told investors the company is putting Sears in its “rear-view mirror.” The mall owner has said the ability to replace shuttered Sears stores in its malls with higher paying tenants has helped its business. It could, arguably, be in Simon’s best interest for the company to go out of business entirely.

A focus for the unsecured creditor committee, which filed a roughly 100-page objection against Lampert, will be deals Lampert did under his tenure. The group argues his unique control gave Lampert “undue influence to siphon value” on favorable terms. The deals include Sears’ spinoff of Lands’ End in 2014 and transactions with Seritage Growth Properties, a real estate investment trust Lampert created through some Sears’ properties a year later.

Lampert, for his part, will defend himself through his legal team, as he did with ESL’s court filing on Friday. The filing accused Sears’ unsecured creditors of efforts to “poison the well” against ESL, with “page after page of its pleadings with smears and false narratives that are completely irrelevant” to his proposed acquisition of Sears. Lampert has argued that all transactions done under his watch were approved the company’s independent board.

ESL stressed that the offer will save 45,000 jobs and was approved by an independent restructuring committee made up of the independent members on its board, including restructuring experts like William L. Transier and Alan Carr, a former attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

At issue on Monday will also likely be the motivations behind Lampert’s efforts to save Sears. Its unsecured creditors have cast doubt in the altruism of Lampert’s efforts. They say his proposed deal is “nothing but the final fulfillment of a years long scheme to rob Sears and its creditors of assets and employees of jobs while lining Lampert’s and ESL’s own pockets.” They also doubt Sears’ post-bankruptcy viability and its ability to avoid a second trip to bankruptcy court — a fate several other retailers have recently endured.

There is reason for concern.

Under Lampert’s guidance the company hasn’t turned a profit since 2010. The department store industry continues its decline: department stores accounted for 14.5 percent of all North American retail purchases in 1985 but only 4.3 percent last year, according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. Sears’ peers, like department stores Bon-Ton and Mervyn’s, have gone out of business while rivals like discount retailers Walmart and Target have poured money Sears and Kmart do not have into their businesses to be among the ones left standing. Those investments include partnerships with other retailers, acquisitions and investments in delivery and online technology.

While this past holiday season was a strong one for the industry as a whole, Sears in December, the most crucial month for a retailer, posted of a loss of $193 million.

People familiar with Lampert’s thinking say he continues to believe in the value of Sears’ assets, like its home services business, as a collective whole, whereby it cant take advantage of its store footprint. Its DieHard and Kenmore labels still represent value and quality to a number of shoppers that grew up with those brands.

Lampert maintains his faith in the power of his ability to convert shoppers from its loyalty program, Shop Your Way, into in-store purchases, a belief that people say drove much of his optimism in the years leading up to Sears’ bankruptcy, despite its continued financial losses. ESL projects Sears will achieve positive earnings growth of $25 million in 2019.

It has said its go-forward business plan will include a continuation of a strategy the store had begun to test in the years leading up to its bankruptcy. Among the things it has tested are smaller stores focused on selling its most popular products like appliances and mattresses.

Lampert also argued in court documents this week he is putting money where his mouth his. ESL is committing more than $300 million in cash to fund the offer, including buying out other senior debt holders, and at least $193 million in credit.

“ESL therefore has much to lose if [its] go forward business plan is not successful,” the documents stated.

WATCH:Sears was the Amazon of the 1930s. Here’s where the retailer is today

For more than a decade, billionaire Eddie Lampert was arguably able to run Sears like his kingdom.

The hedge fund titan who combined Sears and Kmart in 2005 led Sears Holdings as its chairman, CEO and largest investor. The company had public shareholders and a board of directors, but Lampert had unique discretion guiding its fate. That fate was tortured. Under his stewardship, Sears closed over 3,500 stores, slashed roughly 250,000 jobs and saw its share price fall from $193 a share in 2007 to less than a dollar.

Now, bystanders in that destruction are finally having their day in court. Sears unsecured creditors — people owed money by Sears who are unprotected by collateral — will head to U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains on Monday to protest Lampert and air their grievances. Unsecured creditors are objecting to Lampert’s $5.2 billion deal to buy Sears out of bankruptcy through his hedge fund ESL Investments, the only deal that would stave off liquidation. In a litany of filings that piled up over the past two weeks, they have accused Lampert of everything from “stealing assets” to “years of misconduct” that reads like a “Shakespearean tragedy.”

Lampert, who helped prop up Sears for years through investments from ESL, is Sears’ largest creditor, and its most protected with collateral.

The fate of the 126-year-old chain will be decided upon by Judge Robert Drain in what is expected to be a two-day hearing on Monday, Feb. 4 and Wednesday, Feb. 6. Drain has already shown a propensity for pushing Lampert and Sears to draft a deal that would save jobs, having twice granted the parties more time in order to craft a resolution when it seemed like they had reached a breaking point.

Sears’ unsecured creditors include the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal government oversight organization that guarantees Sears’ pension, which is more than $1 billion underfunded. The group is arguing that Lampert’s deal to buy Sears will undo an agreement the PBGC struck with Lampert in 2015. To help fill the pension’s losses, Lampert granted the group a lien and royalty fees from some of its most valuable assets: the Kenmore, Craftsman and Diehard brands.

The PBGC is arguing that as part of Lampert’s deal to buy Sears, Lampert will get back full access to Kenmore and Diehard, leaving it and its 90,000 pensioners empty-handed.

The group also includes mall-owner Simon Property Group, whose CEO David Simon told investors the company is putting Sears in its “rear-view mirror.” The mall owner has said the ability to replace shuttered Sears stores in its malls with higher paying tenants has helped its business. It could, arguably, be in Simon’s best interest for the company to go out of business entirely.

A focus for the unsecured creditor committee, which filed a roughly 100-page objection against Lampert, will be deals Lampert did under his tenure. The group argues his unique control gave Lampert “undue influence to siphon value” on favorable terms. The deals include Sears’ spinoff of Lands’ End in 2014 and transactions with Seritage Growth Properties, a real estate investment trust Lampert created through some Sears’ properties a year later.

Lampert, for his part, will defend himself through his legal team, as he did with ESL’s court filing on Friday. The filing accused Sears’ unsecured creditors of efforts to “poison the well” against ESL, with “page after page of its pleadings with smears and false narratives that are completely irrelevant” to his proposed acquisition of Sears. Lampert has argued that all transactions done under his watch were approved the company’s independent board.

ESL stressed that the offer will save 45,000 jobs and was approved by an independent restructuring committee made up of the independent members on its board, including restructuring experts like William L. Transier and Alan Carr, a former attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

At issue on Monday will also likely be the motivations behind Lampert’s efforts to save Sears. Its unsecured creditors have cast doubt in the altruism of Lampert’s efforts. They say his proposed deal is “nothing but the final fulfillment of a years long scheme to rob Sears and its creditors of assets and employees of jobs while lining Lampert’s and ESL’s own pockets.” They also doubt Sears’ post-bankruptcy viability and its ability to avoid a second trip to bankruptcy court — a fate several other retailers have recently endured.

There is reason for concern.

Under Lampert’s guidance the company hasn’t turned a profit since 2010. The department store industry continues its decline: department stores accounted for 14.5 percent of all North American retail purchases in 1985 but only 4.3 percent last year, according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail. Sears’ peers, like department stores Bon-Ton and Mervyn’s, have gone out of business while rivals like discount retailers Walmart and Target have poured money Sears and Kmart do not have into their businesses to be among the ones left standing. Those investments include partnerships with other retailers, acquisitions and investments in delivery and online technology.

While this past holiday season was a strong one for the industry as a whole, Sears in December, the most crucial month for a retailer, posted of a loss of $193 million.

People familiar with Lampert’s thinking say he continues to believe in the value of Sears’ assets, like its home services business, as a collective whole, whereby it cant take advantage of its store footprint. Its DieHard and Kenmore labels still represent value and quality to a number of shoppers that grew up with those brands.

Lampert maintains his faith in the power of his ability to convert shoppers from its loyalty program, Shop Your Way, into in-store purchases, a belief that people say drove much of his optimism in the years leading up to Sears’ bankruptcy, despite its continued financial losses. ESL projects Sears will achieve positive earnings growth of $25 million in 2019.

It has said its go-forward business plan will include a continuation of a strategy the store had begun to test in the years leading up to its bankruptcy. Among the things it has tested are smaller stores focused on selling its most popular products like appliances and mattresses.

Lampert also argued in court documents this week he is putting money where his mouth is. ESL is committing more than $300 million in cash to fund the offer, including buying out other senior debt holders, and at least $193 million in credit.

“ESL therefore has much to lose if [its] go forward business plan is not successful,” the documents stated.

WATCH:Sears was the Amazon of the 1930s. Here’s where the retailer is today

Hosting a Super Bowl party this weekend? You can still do that without throwing financial responsibility to the wind.

This year, Americans are set to spend the second-highest amount of money ever on their Super Bowl parties, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey, which surveyed more than 7,000 adults from Jan. 2 to Jan. 9, before it was known which teams would play. Of those Americans planning to watch, 60.9 million plan on attending a party, 44 million people plan to host a party, and 13 million people will be watching at a bar, the NRF found.

People watching the big game will shell out an average of $81 a person, totaling in $14.8 billion, the NRF said. Football fans spent the most money during Super Bowl L back in 2016, when the Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers. That year, the average was $82.19 per person, the retail association said.

Nearly 3 out of 4 of the respondents in the federation’s poll said they plan to watch the game this year. Yet the survey found that among the 35 to 44 age cohort, those game watchers were willing to spend the most on a Super Bowl fete–an average of $123.26.

Source: NRF’s 2019 Annual Super Bowl Spending Survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics

But why has the amount of money people are willing to spend periodically risen?

“The amount has changed because more and more people are having bigger parties,” said Kemberley Washington, CPA and member of the American Institute of CPAs’ national CPA financial literacy commission. “Costs have continued to rise because of inflation.”

From putting together the perfect outfit each morning (hello, personal shopper app) to cooking a gourmet dinner when you get home at night (thanks, meal delivery kit), there’s no shortage of shortcuts to improve your lifestyle.

Yet only recently has the elite world of interior design become more available — and more affordable — in a similar fashion.

“The classic interior design model may be out of reach or not the way you want to shop,” said Lee Mayer, the founder and CEO of Havenly. “So many of us are used to consuming online, and having the flexibility of working with people in synchronicity.”

A slew of online decorating options have popped up in the past few years, including Havenly, Modsy and Homepolish. These start-ups offer services to virtually decorate your room, most without even setting foot inside, and for as little as $20.

“We should have a place to live in that makes us feel better every day,” said Noa Santos, CEO of Homepolish. “It’s far more than a trend — it’s an evolution of how we think about our well-being and our home.”

To that end, here’s a look at some of the services currently available and what they will cost you:

What you get: If you’d like some quick advice on a piece or project, for just $19 you can have a “consult” through the app or site. Alternatively, a $69 minidesign gets you a concept with up to two revisions or you can opt for a full design package, which costs $179 and includes one design concept with a revision, a custom floor plan and a 3D rendering.

The range allows for flexibility, “whether you need the perfect lamp or to pull a whole room together,” Mayer said.

How it works: Complete a questionnaire, or style quiz, and choose from a few designers. A Havenly stylist will deliver a list of curated products complete with accessories, sourced from suppliers such as Crate and Barrel, Target and Pottery Barn. You can order directly through Havenly, which is how the company profits.

It’s best for customers who want to do it themselves, but need some validation or help making the right choices, said the company’s head designer, Shelby Girard.

The idea is that you’ll have a “partner in crime,” Mayer added. “But the designer is doing the hard part — finding the furniture and delivering something that works for you.”

We tried it: Feedback plays a big role here, so the closer you work with the designer, the more likely you are to be happy with the result. Ultimately, I liked the selections and affordable price (see the final concept for a living room below).

Despite playing no active role in the Super Bowl game itself, 11.8 percent of your coworkers will call out sick on Monday to recuperate after sustaining minor injuries, head trauma or fatigue.

Maybe it’s the 105 million pounds of guacamole or the 50 million cases of beer Americans tend to consume at Super Bowl festivities that leaves them in such a deep food coma or so hungover that clocking in 10-and-a-half hours after the game ends seems too much to bear.

Whatever their reason for playing hooky, more than a tenth of employees plan to be out of the office Feb. 4, according to a survey conducted by Monster, meaning you can look forward to a quiet day at the office (which will be great if you’re nursing your own hangover, but also could mean extra work.)

Of course, some might rally and not go through with using a sick day or vacation day. Monster found only 9.4 percent of people have ever actually called out sick post-Super Bowl celebrations.

If you’re one of those employees not planning on going in on Monday, there’s a good chance your boss or hiring manager might be absent, too.

Monster also surveyed the heads of companies and heads of hiring at various size organizations, and found that these individuals were even more likely to say they’d taken the day off — almost 14 percent had called out sick the day after the Super Bowl to recover from partying.

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