Old and new

3XN is No. 32 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023 . Explore the full list of companies that are reshaping industries and culture. Last year, the Sydney skyline got a strikingly modern addition: a 49-story office tower, built from a decades-old structure. The Quay Quarter Tower , in the city’s historic Circular Quay, stands on the site of a 1976 skyscraper that Danish architecture firm 3XN repurposed to create the new building. More akin to a face-lift than a birth, this kind of large-scale structural reuse has clear environmental advantages. By incorporating 65% of the original building’s floor plates and 95% of its concrete elevator shafts and stairwells into the new tower, 3XN reduced the overall material needs of the project. That slashed the so-called embodied carbon emissions that would have resulted from creating new concrete and steel for construction. The architects estimate that this approach saved 13,000 tons of embodied … [Read more...] about By using the bones of old buildings, this company lowers the carbon footprint of skyscraper construction

A good product will win you customers, but it takes a lot more to create, cultivate, and keep true, actual fans. The magic word for most is community, and the brands here, being honored as part of Brands That Matter 2022, have found ways to foster and excite growing communities around them. Decades-old brands, including Fender guitars and Magic: The Gathering, are using new content to stay relevant. For Fender, this past year was about building a content hub full of tools for the millions of new people who started to play over the past few years as a COVID-19-lockdown-induced new hobby. Magic: The Gathering has leaned into celebrating a more diverse set of players with its direct-to-consumer platform, Secret Lair. Meanwhile, three-year-old wrestling upstart All Elite Wrestling has taken on a Goliath by showing a different side of its diverse lineup of stars. Here are the brands making the most of fun and fandom: All Elite Wrestling As discussions around mental … [Read more...] about These 6 brands are growing by letting fans pursue their passions

Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies , 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including advertising , architecture , design , and more. Nature has typically been the first place that beauty companies turn to for solutions to aging and skin imperfections. Now there’s a new source—biotech—and it takes its inspiration from the pharmaceutical industry. The move toward lab-generated ingredients that promise to improve on what scientists would find in nature dovetails with society’s larger embrace of personalized medicine, including cell and gene therapy, says Sarah Broyd, a partner at Durham, North Carolina–based Clarkston Consulting who specializes in consumer healthcare and pharmaceuticals. “Even the mRNA technology used in some of the COVID vaccines has contributed to a greater general understanding of how biotechnology works, which has … [Read more...] about The 10 most innovative companies in beauty of 2023

One of the ways that gig companies have been able for years to define their workers as independent contractors is by exploiting the allure of individualism. The contractor has their freedom, the thinking goes, so why would they exchange that for a full-time job with benefits? “These words have gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers,” said John Patrick Leary, the author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism . It was part of what Reddit’s founder, Alexis Ohanian, has called “hustle porn,” cheerleading multiple jobs and their backbreaking exertions, giving a cheerful spin to the full 30% of Americans who do something else for pay in addition to their full-time jobs, according to an NPR/Marist survey. Hustling and nimbleness and the like implied, however, that there is a slinky joy in picking up gear at a studio and dropping it off across town or selling CBD oil part time. Once called drably “another job,” these … [Read more...] about The lie of the hustle

Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies , 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including advertising , beauty , design , and more. In this age of tumult, the world needs more than pretty buildings. The architects, designers, and firms in this year’s list of Most Innovative Companies are designing beautiful things, to be sure, but they are also thinking bigger and deeper about the production, the impacts, and the future of what they’ve designed. This year’s winning firm, 3XN , has created what could be a model-setting project: an office tower built mostly from the bones of the aging building it’s replaced. The approach not only slashed the building’s environmental impact, it demonstrated that creative, new designs don’t always need blank slates—or new construction! Other companies in this year’s list, such as Carmody Groarke and … [Read more...] about The 10 most innovative companies in architecture for 2023

Loom is No. 45 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023 . Explore the full list of companies that are reshaping industries and culture. Video communication has become de rigueur since the pandemic, but rather than just moving a meeting from a conference room to a screen, Loom does something different. It takes the short-form video phenomenon and turns it into an effective way for businesses to pitch clients, explain how a product works, or share information internally. Think of it like TikTok for enterprises. By allowing customers to create short videos (up to five minutes long) that can be watched anytime and shared as needed, the eight-year-old company helps its 18 million users across 350,000 businesses eschew time-sucking scheduled video meetings, both internally and externally. Those clients—which include Netflix, HubSpot, and P&G’s Tide brand—have been using it a lot. As of December, more than 215 million “looms” had been … [Read more...] about How Loom became TikTok for enterprises

Maven Clinic is No. 30 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023 . Explore the full list of companies that are reshaping industries and culture. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, employers now serve as a backstop for abortion access in this country. Maven Clinic is a virtual healthcare provider with a focus on women’s health, offering everything from OB/GYN care to egg freezing and lactation consultations. Today, it’s also helping the companies that offer its services as an employee benefit to navigate the new landscape for reproductive care. The month after the ruling, Maven saw a 67% bump in companies looking to add reproductive health benefits, and founder and CEO Kate Ryder conducted online workshops for hundreds of human resources leaders on how to upgrade their offers. The company’s three-year-old Maven Wallet app helps to reimburse patients if they need to travel out of state for care and speeds reimbursement from … [Read more...] about Why Maven Clinic is the highest-valued startup in women’s health

Holdfast Collective is No. 4 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023 . Explore the full list of companies that are reshaping industries and culture. In September 2022, Patagonia, renowned for being at the forefront of environmental advocacy, sustainable production, and progressive business practices, had a new declaration: Earth would be its only shareholder. What that actually meant was that founder Yvon Chouinard and his family had given up ownership, transferring the company’s voting stock to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the other 98% of its ownership to the Holdfast Collective , a new 501(c)(4) organization. Holdfast’s mission is to preserve wildlands and pursue other nature-based climate solutions, fund grassroots environmental organizations, and support politicians working to fight the climate crisis. Although other companies have used this organizational structure for philanthropic ventures, Patagonia is taking a different … [Read more...] about Patagonia uses capitalism to save the planet with the Holdfast Collective