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Aging gracefully is a tall order for any company, but the 2025 Brands That Matter heritage brands honorees have stuck around in style for decades—and in one case, even centuries. Along the way, they’ve adapted to the times and grown even stronger in the process, whether that means embracing design overhauls, creating innovative new technologies, or staying on the pulse of Gen Z trends. Here are the brands proving that age doesn’t necessarily make a brand old-fashioned in 2025. Bath & Body Works Bath & Body Works began as a mall staple in 1990, and 35 years later, it could easily have fallen by the wayside like so many of its peers. But instead, it is Ge…

The early stages of building a brand are critical. Beyond identifying their audience, brands also have to connect with them while demonstrating their utility. For the five companies recognized as 2025 Brands That Matter honorees in the on the rise category, in four years or less they have managed to do both those things with aplomb. Whether it’s Unrivaled’s unique NIL and athletic proposition for WNBA athletes, Scarlett Gasque’s ability to tap into underserved shoppers, or Alan-1’s efforts to give the arcade game an upgrade for avid players, these brands have proven their strengths. Alan-1 Alan-1 creates arcade and video game products inspired by the 1980s. In …

After the initial sprint of getting a brand to last for five years, there’s always the possibility of hitting a wall. Companies that emerge during cultural moments might be tempted to shift. But the 2025 Brands That Matter honorees for established excellence, which have been in business for 5 to 14 years, have managed to stand out by finding new ways to hew to their original ethos. In doing so, they underscore what set them apart in the first place and position their brands for future growth. Actively Black Founded five years ago, activewear company Actively Black donates more than 10% of its profits to organizations focused on Black mental health, healthier f…

Once a brand hits its stride, it can be tempting to coast. As these 2025 Brands That Matter enduring impact honorees demonstrate, longevity (in this case, 15-plus years in business) can inspire innovation. That’s particularly true when it comes to finding fresh ways to engage longtime consumers—and court new ones. From Clinique leaning into its longstanding reputation among dermatologists to Lundberg Family Farms getting its shoppers to care about the cutest aspect of regenerative agriculture, there’s a wide range of ways these brands kept from resting on their laurels. Blumhouse As the horror film production studio marked 15 years, this past year, Blumhouse h…

A brand that isn’t thinking globally is limiting its reach. The four 2025 Brands That Matter global honorees know that and have worked hard to make their messaging reach beyond their home countries. All based outside the United States, these brands demonstrated that good messaging and authentic connection have no nationality. 1Password People don’t like to think about their digital security, so Toronto-based 1Password has become an expert at making it fun, and doing so using sports as the backdrop. The brand used its sponsorship of the Presidents Cup golf tournament in fall 2024 to debut its “What Not to Do” campaign. With more than 12 million impressions, the spot…

Marketing leaders have always been vital to the long-term success of beloved brands. But never before has the CMO position been more complex—and more essential to driving business results. This year’s honorees come from a wide variety of product categories—from toys and games to media, beauty, and food—but all demonstrate remarkable skill in navigating a diverse media landscape with platforms and campaigns that deepen their brands’ cultural impact, strengthen audience relationships, and achieve meaningful business outcomes. These leaders were selected based on the ambition, sophistication, innovation, and performance of their brand initiatives throughout the year.…

The 2025 Brands That Matter United States honorees aren’t just united by their shared geography—they are all identifying their target audience and meeting them exactly where they need to. Whether solving a uniquely American problem, as GoodRx does in addressing the cost of prescription drugs, or pioneering innovation that can help people globally like Owlet, these companies are showing how American brands can step up in authentic and impactful ways. GoodRx GoodRx has built its brand equity by being present where its customers need it—the pharmacy counter. Over the past year, the prescription savings platform introduced a feature that gets users to engage with …

It’s all fun and games, until there are billions of dollars involved. But these Brands That Matter honorees manage to tap into our love for sports and entertainment in ways that only help boost that passion. BritBox Read about how BritBox’s first major brand campaign showcased the craftsmanship of British TV. NBA Read about how the NBA made its app a destination for fans by building a network of creators it equipped with editing tools and 25,000 hours of game footage. State Farm As crazy as it sounds, this is an insurance company steeped in culture. This past year, State Farm pushed its Super Bowl ad to March Madness, due to sensitivity around the L.…

Whether talking about underwear brands hand-selecting the perfect models to break the internet or the endless wooing of Gen Z and its style sensibilities, there was no shortage of creativity among the fashion brands that set the trends over the past year. Here are the 2025 Brands That Matter honorees in the fashion space that innovated on how style showed up for consumers in the past year. Bogg Bag When the function of a tote bag meets the versatility and kitschy-cute style of Crocs, the possibilities are endless. So proves Bogg Bag, a brand that’s constantly riffing to create collector’s items and limited-time variants of its signature design by switching up …

In a crowded field like food and beverage, companies must do all they can to stay ahead of the pack. The 2025 Brands That Matter honorees in the space used inventive campaigns, celebrity influence, and nostalgic throwbacks to stand apart. Corona brought its product to Olympian heights, and Sprite reinvigorated a classic slogan with a new generation of talent. Sometimes achieving brand relevance is as easy, as Heinz proved, as putting a little mustard on it. Califia Farms A recognizable presence in the plant-based dairy aisle, Califia Farms spent the past year recommitting itself to values of health and sustainability. In response to consumer demands for more organi…

Health and wellness is a product category littered with broken promises and bad pitches. These Brands That Matter honorees have created work for products that aim to uplift, help, and encourage across a wide range of challenges and issues, big and small. Bobbie Many new mothers feel pressured to breastfeed their children but cannot for a variety of reasons. Bobbie has been working to change the narrative around using formula through advocacy and education efforts, while offering an organic product that still meets the FDA’s nutrition requirements. Its “Ask for Help” campaign with Meghan Trainor revealed that 86% of mothers felt frequent or constant negative emotio…

Increasingly, the media and entertainment brands that thrive are ones that can build on their core business in creative ways. Two of the 2025 Brands That Matter honorees in the media and entertainment world—Ebony and Essence—are legacy Black publications that have grown their audiences and cultural cachet by building events around their flagship editorial product. Overtime is partially a sport brand, but it’s also a company that knows how to engage with younger consumers around sports—that’s how it’s gotten noticed by major brands and other sports leagues. Those three examples of the six outlined below, are just some of the ways companies are rethinking what a me…

In case you haven’t been deluged with enough day-themed holiday shopping sales yet, the travel industry will try to tempt you with some seemingly tantalizing travel offers on December 2, aka Travel Tuesday, traditionally the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. But whether the travel deals are actually steals may require you to do some research in advance and read the fine print so you don’t face some unexpected fees once you’re on vacation. If you regularly book through a specific travel provider and have a sense of what you normally pay, that will help you to better suss out whether you’re actually saving money. Knowing what a specific trip or ticket would normall…

For the past decade, quantum computing has struggled to balance promise and practicality. While the world’s most advanced systems remain engineering marvels, they’re bedeviled by the same flaw: the fragility of qubits—the fundamental units of quantum data—and the delicate hardware required to control them. A single fluctuation, for example, can collapse a quantum state, invalidating a computation. Most quantum systems also depend on large-scale refrigeration colder than deep space, with cryogenic racks that often occupy multiple rooms. Scaling quantum systems demands exponential increases in cost, energy, and environmental stability. So while the U.N. has designated 2…

On November 14, hotel and short-term apartment rental chain Sonder Holdings filed for bankruptcy, just days after suddenly announcing it would be “winding down operations immediately,” abruptly kicking guests to the curb and sending employees scrambling for answers. The company had faced major, unforeseen costs from a deal signed in August 2024 to integrate reservation systems with Marriott International and promote Sonder listings through the hotel giant, according to a statement issued four days earlier. Sonder had long been an outlier in the short-term rental space, which was a big part of its appeal to investors. Most of its competitors—short-term rental companies…

Inside a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology late last year, scientists gave an AI system a new task: designing entirely new molecules for potential antibiotics from scratch. Within a day or two—following a few months of training—the algorithms had generated more than 29 million new molecules, unlike any that existed before. Traditional drug discovery is a slow, painstaking process. But AI is beginning to transform it. At MIT, the research is aimed at the growing challenge of antibiotic-resistant infections, which kill more than a million people globally each year. Existing antibiotics haven’t kept up with the threat. “The number of resistant bacteria…

Apparently any place looks better if you just say it’s Japan. That’s according to a TikTok trend, dubbed the “Japan effect.” First reported in Casey Lewis’s youth trends newsletter After School, the trend has users making slideshows of two images. For all intents and purposes they are the same, except one is labelled with the original location and the second is labelled Tokyo, Japan. The idea being that the “Japan effect” is so strong, just the location tag can filter how we perceive an ordinary street or an average American neighborhood. Scrolling through the comments, those watching these TikTok videos genuinely believe the second image looks better than the f…

Panera Bread is spending millions to overhaul its menu in an attempt to lure back the customers it’s lost in recent years. In a downward fast-food spiral, Panera hasn’t significantly increased its revenue since 2023. Now, the company says it’s putting money back into better ingredients, staff, and its cafés. The St. Louis-based chain, known for its sandwiches, soups, and salads, hasn’t been delivering on its signatures. Panera last year started using the cheaper iceberg lettuce in its salads, for example, and customers weren’t happy. “You know what guests told us?” said Paul Carbone, CEO of Panera Brands, the parent company of Panera Bread, Einstein Bros. Bagels,…

AI image generators used to be terrible at handling text. Even once the models mastered hands with five fingers, the presence of mangled, nonsensical, vaguely Cyrillic-looking text was a dead giveaway that an image was generated by AI. Not anymore. Today’s most advanced image generators have slowly improved their text generation. OpenAI’s image generator within ChatGPT handles basic text tasks fairly well. And design-centered models like Ideogram are great for simple, practical text tasks like creating video thumbnails. This week, though, Google has released Nano Banana Pro, an updated version of its wildly popular AI image editing tool. Nano Banana P…

Below, Tim Elmore shares five key insights from his new book, The Future Begins with Z: Nine Strategies to Lead Generation Z as They Disrupt the Workplace. Elmore is the founder and CEO of Growing Leaders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing emerging leaders. As a speaker and coach, he has helped organizations from universities to Fortune 500 companies connect more effectively across generations. What’s the big idea? Many leaders are scratching their heads over Gen Z. The old playbook doesn’t work anymore—but figuring out how to engage and collaborate with this generation is what turns good leaders into great ones. Listen to the audio version of this Book B…

Many of us have heard of “boomerang employees”—someone who leaves a company and later returns—but there’s a newer version showing up in the workplace: the layoff boomerang. Maybe you’ve seen it yourself. A coworker disappears after a round of cuts, only to show up again a few months later. Same desk. Same job. Sometimes even a bigger paycheck. According to research done by Dr. Andrea Derler at workforce analytics firm Visier, 5.3% of laid-off employees now get rehired by the same organization after a layoff. But the most surprising part isn’t the number—it’s that it’s been happening for years. We just didn’t know. “What surprised me the most was that …

One of the most pervasive rules of business is compete-to-win or perish. But as more organizations struggle to navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous landscape, some innovative leaders are choosing to collaborate over compete. This is particularly necessary within the organization, where collaboration may be considered beneficial in theory, but in practice, the rules of engagement still revolve around competition: colleagues become rivals over promotion opportunities, recognition, and advancement. The competition within the organization makes it harder to navigate the disruption and certainty on the outside. How do leaders banish in-h…

It’s almost the end of the year, and for many, that means health flexible spending account (FSA) funds are set to expire. FSAs allow employees to set aside pretax money to pay for healthcare expenses such as copays, some medications, and deductibles. But many people aren’t aware that the funds don’t always roll over into the next calendar year after December 31. Sometimes, employers will provide grace periods of up to two and a half months past the end of the year to allow for extra time to use your FSA funds. Others may allow you to carry over up to $660 per year. But 33% of employers have a hard deadline, so if you don’t use your funds by the end of the year, they’r…

If my three-decade journey in the corporate world has taught me anything, it’s that in business, as in life, the only certainty is uncertainty. In the past 20 years, periods of upheaval, from pandemics to financial crises to AI hysteria, have restitched the fabric of how we work, travel, and communicate. While this uncertainty can generate tension and turmoil, it also forges the best leaders. I’ve seen bosses and colleagues navigate all types of volatility, where the margin between success and failure can come down to a single action or inaction. So, what distinguishes leaders who can successfully shepherd teams through uncertain times from those who can’t? I beli…

The narrative is familiar: Revolutionary technology arrives, promising to liberate women from domestic drudgery and professional constraints. The electric oven would free housewives from coal-burning stoves. The washing machine would eliminate laundry day. The microwave would make meal preparation effortless. Yet as historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued in her landmark book, More Work for Mother, these innovations didn’t reduce women’s workload. They simply shifted expectations, creating new standards of cleanliness and convenience that often meant more work, not less. So when we speak of AI as the solution to professional and personal burdens, skepticism is warranted.…