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Meet the ex-Amazon exec who pitched Prime Day to Jeff Bezos—and turned the slowest shopping season into a $14.2 billion sales empire

  • Prime Day is Amazon’s most important sales event of the year. It all started when Diego Piacentini, an Amazon executive, noticed the success of Alibaba’s Singles Day in China and pitched Jeff Bezos that his “everything store” do something similar. Today, Prime Day generates billions in revenue for the tech giant.

Amazon Prime Day is one of the most lucrative and influential retail events in the world. Last year, it generated a whopping $14.2 billion in sales, according to Capital One.

But the origins of this sales juggernaut trace back to a single executive’s vision and a pivotal pitch to Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos.

The genesis of Prime Day

In the early 2010s, Amazon’s international business was led by Diego Piacentini, a seasoned executive who had joined the company in 2000 after a successful career at Apple. As Amazon’s global footprint expanded, Piacentini was tasked with finding new ways to energize both customers and the company’s growing base of Prime members outside the U.S.

According to Brad Stone’s book “Amazon Unbound,” Piacentini was inspired by the explosive success of Alibaba’s Singles Day in China, which had quickly become the world’s largest online shopping event. So Piacentini pitched Jeff Bezos on Amazon having its own event, and Bezos was into it, thinking the primary goal would be to drive sales to Prime, the company’s subscription service.

After obtaining Bezos’s blessing, Amazon executives reportedly went back and forth on when to hold their event. But according to Stone’s book, Amazon leadership eventually opted not to go toe-to-toe with Alibaba’s Singles Day, which is held in November, and instead decided on having their own sale during the summer months, a traditionally slower time in retail. The logic there was customers would have enough money during the summer months since they weren’t doing all of their holiday shopping just yet, and that also meant there would be ample warehouse space.

Amazon Prime Day got the green light in January 2015, with the goal of launching on July 15 to coincide with Amazon’s 20th anniversary.

From ‘Project Piñata’ to ‘Christmas in July’

The internal codename for the Amazon Prime Day initiative was “Project Piñata.” Meagan Wulff Reibstein, a young product manager who spent seven years at Amazon before departing for a VP role at Zillow, was assigned to execute the plan. She traveled to Amazon’s international hubs—Tokyo, London, Paris, and Munich—to convince suppliers and partners to participate in the event.

The first Prime Day launched across nine countries, and the response was immediate. In Japan, the massive surge in traffic crashed the local website. Across Europe and the U.S., customers snapped up deals, even as some complained about limited inventory and underwhelming discounts.

Despite technical hiccups and mixed reviews, the numbers told a different story: 34.4 million items sold and 1.2 million new Prime members added in a single day. “It was Christmas in July quite frankly—a bigger day than Black Friday,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told investors on an earnings call the following week.

Amazon Prime Day has only grown since then. In its second year, Prime Day sales jumped by 60%. By 2019, Amazon expanded the event to be two days, and in 2025, the event now spans four days. It kicked off on Tuesday, July 8, and runs until Friday, July 11—a full 96 hours to take advantage of deals.

Prime Day has become a crucially important event for Amazon. Last year, consumers in 23 different countries purchased over 300 million items with an average order value approaching $60. Notably, 88% of all Prime Day consumers were Prime members, and 85% of customers had been Prime members for over a year. And people tend to buy lots of Amazon products, specifically: Last year, Prime Day shoppers bought more Amazon Fire Sticks than any other item.

For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Federico Bernini / Bloomberg—Getty Images

Former Amazon exec Diego Piacentini poses in Cernobbio, Italy, on Friday, Sept. 7, 2018.
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James Gunn said he thought his ‘career was over’ when Disney fired him: ‘I didn’t think I was gonna make another dime in this industry’

  • James Gunn, the writer-director for the box-office hit Superman, said in a recent interview he thought his career was over when Disney fired him in 2018 over resurfaced tweets. The day of his firing, it turns out, had a big impact on the way he viewed his career, and himself.

James Gunn is flying high right now. Superman, which he wrote and directed, has won two consecutive weeks at the box office, bringing in $235 million in its first 10 days. 

It’s an auspicious start for the inaugural film for Warner Bros.’ DC Studios and its rebooted DC Universe, which is also co-run by Gunn.

But less than a decade ago, he was in a very different place. In 2018, after Gunn criticized then-President Donald Trump on then-Twitter, right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich dug up old tweets Gunn had posted between 2008 and 2012, making jokes about pedophilia, rape, and the Holocaust.

He publicly apologized, but the ensuing media brouhaha led Disney to cut ties with Gunn, despite the filmmaker producing two of the company’s biggest recent hits, including Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy 1 and 2.

“My life was gone,” Gunn said in a recent episode of Armchair Expert, a podcast hosted by Dax Shepard and Monica Padman. “I thought my career was over. I didn’t think I was gonna make another dime in this industry. I thought I was gonna have to hold onto whatever I had made, which was nowhere near as much as I had hoped it would be, to last for the rest of my life, and live a really frugal life.”

As it turned out, Disney received a ton of criticism after firing Gunn. Actors from the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, as well as other entertainers, comedians, and journalists, slammed the decision. Bobcat Goldthwait, who provided a voice for the 1997 Disney film Hercules, asked Disney to remove his voice from an upcoming park attraction based on the movie in response to the incident. An online petition urging Disney to rehire Gunn got over 400,000 signatures.

“I had lost all the power I had, I had lost the ability to cast anybody, I had lost everything,” Gunn recalled.

He said this period of his life helped him have a realization about himself. 

“I realized that everything I had done was really to be rich and famous so that people would love me. And I wanted people to love me,” he said.

But hearing 8,000 people chanting his name at a Comic-Con event in Brazil still left him feeling empty.

Instead, after he was let go by Disney weeks later, Gunn said he “got so much love”—from Jennifer Holland, his then-girlfriend and now-wife, as well as the other cast members from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies like Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, and Dave Bautista. 

“I was overwhlemed with it, and I experienced being loved for the first time,” Gunn said. “I went to sleep that night going, you know, this started out as the worst day of my life, but I actually think it’s the best day of my life. Because I learned that I don’t need to tap dance till the bones are showing through my toes to get people to like me.”

In 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav announced Gunn would be one of the two new heads of DC Studios, helping oversee the creative direction of the new DC Universe across movies, TV, and animation.

It meant he could no longer work with Marvel Studios and Disney, which had rehired Gunn in 2019 to make Guardians of the Galaxy 3

But it did mean he would get to write and direct his own take on Superman, about his early years in Metropolis. Superman is now in theaters.  

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Matt Winkelmeyer—WireImage

James Gunn attends the Los Angeles Premiere of Warner Bros. "Superman" at TCL Chinese Theatre at TCL Chinese Theatre on July 07, 2025 in Hollywood, California.
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A James Beard Award-winning chef reveals how she overcame imposter syndrome in the world’s most elite kitchens: ‘It takes humility’

  • Karyn Tomlinson, who won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest in June, recently sat down with Fortune to discuss her career and its many ups and downs. During the interview, she spoke about how she’s dealt with imposter syndrome in some of the world’s most demanding kitchens.

Imposter syndrome was coined back in 1978 when psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes noticed many high-achieving women dismissed their success as a result of luck or charm, rather than competence. Today, imposter syndrome is highly common in the workplace, with roughly two-thirds of all employees, based on three recent surveys from the past year, saying they worry about being exposed as a fraud at work despite clear evidence of their abilities.

According to KPMG’s 2023 Mind the Gap study of 750 high-performing leaders, 75% of senior women across Fortune 1000 companies have felt imposter syndrome at some point. And younger women tend to feel it more than older generations, with Asana finding 78% of Gen Z respondents say they overwork to compensate for those same feelings of self-doubt.

Karyn Tomlinson, who just won the most prestigious award in the culinary industry last month, knows a thing or two about imposter syndrome.

“I started cooking professionally in my mid-20s, which was late compared to others,” Tomlinson told Fortune. “A lot of chefs I knew of had started dishwashing when they were 14 and then worked their way up.”

Tomlinson, who flew to France to study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at the age of 25 and with zero real cooking experience, said she found it “humbling” to share kitchens with people who had years of experience on her.

“I wasn’t street smart in that way,” she said. “And so I really felt like an imposter.”

Tomlinson would later get work in one of the most elite kitchens in the world, Fäviken, Magnus Nilsson’s Michelin-star restaurant in Sweden, which made the World’s 50 Best list.

“I knew I was smart, I knew I had experience, but in that particular context, I knew nothing,” she said. “I had to build up my confidence… over time, that all accumulates, but it takes humility.”

“I was really reluctant to show people if I didn’t know something, or admit I didn’t know something, or that somebody else—maybe I didn’t like very much or didn’t get along with or didn’t respect me—might actually have the answer.”

Tomlinson said she wrestled with feelings of self-doubt several times in her career, but winning the famed James Beard Award has helped with that.

“I’ve had really amazing people in my life who reminded me that everybody struggles with that—even people who look like they’re on top, or really know what they’re doing,” she said.

“There have been naysayers in my life, but there have always been other people who are encouraging, and I’ve been really grateful for those people. Sometimes, that’s all you need: Just one voice that thinks you can do it, and that even if you don’t know something, you can learn, and it’s okay if you don’t know it yet.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Karyn Tomlinson

Karyn Tomlinson in the kitchen.
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