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It took me 35 years before I learned how to dress well. And it took about that long to learn who I was. That timing is not a coincidence, as anyone on our inaugural Best Dressed in Business list will tell you. For the first time in our three-decade history, Fast Company is celebrating fashion across the world of work: eight remarkable individuals ranging from athletes on the court of the WNBA to designers in the C-suite of Seoul to innovators at Apple. This editorial initiative is not about whether quiet luxury or that cut of jeans is still in. Its not about labels or influencers, either. Its about celebrating those who are comfortable enough in their skin to stunt across the professional world. Because most of all, dressing well requires knowing oneself. In some ways, the timing of this package couldnt be more fraught. Both high fashion and fast fashion are encountering new challenges in the face of shifting consumer tastes. But never before has culture afforded us the license to dress in so many different ways for any given circumstance. We live in an era of unbridled self-expression, fueled by social feeds and global retailers moving too fast to keep track of. This is an advantageous moment for individualism: There is no wrong way to dress anymore, and there are countless right ones. For a lucky few, work offers a path toward self-actualization. And the way we dress for that occasion is something we are here to celebrate. Mark Wilson [Photo: Samsung] Mauro Porcini, chief design officer, Samsung Mauro Porcini became the worlds first chief design officer at 3M, before taking the role at PepsiCo and, now, at Samsung. But as a designer seated in the boardroom, he admits to being constantly pulled between two worlds. His style captures this duality, and has served as a tool to be taken seriously as a creative in businesswhile helping him find peace within himself. Read more [Photo: Jamie Girdler (portrait)] Emma Grede, fashion entrepreneur Emma Grede is a mother of four who has spent most of her career building a fashion empire behind the scenesand behind the Kardashians. As the cofounder of Good American, Skims, and Off Season, she’s created a constellation of brands that reach into the closets of people around the world. But shes still managed to become a style icon in her own right by creating a rotation of classic pieces that she mixes and matches.Read more [Photo: Walik Goshorn (portrait)] Angel Reese, forward, Chicago Sky As an all-star forward for the Chicago Sky, Angel Reese is one of the most dominant players in the WNBA. But her draft class did more than add fresh competition to the league when it arrived with a splash in 2024. It awakened the spectacle of the sport, celebrating the uniqueness of players who broke free from their uniforms with expressive pregame tunnel walks. Read more [Photo: Chaymin Jay Barut (portrait)] Salehe Bembury, shoe designer One of the most in-demand designers in sneakers, Bembury has collaborated with New Balance, Crocs, Versace, Moncler, Vans, and other brands. With an aesthetic rooted in a combination of outdoor lifestyle and funky, organic shapes, Bembury has reimagined streetwear as something as biological as it is mechanical. His personal style is equally interesting. Read more [Photo: courtesy Autodesk] Dara Treseder, CMO, Autodesk Dara Treseder doesn’t have any interest in blending in. The marketing exec learned early in her career that stifling your perspective only has drawbacks. Now as the CMO of design software maker Autodesk, she embraces tailored, monochromatic outfits, often in bold, bright colors. It’s a way to stand outand to make your voice heard. Read more [Photo: Christopher Myers (portrait)] Namrata Tripathi, founder and publisher, Kokila With her Penguin Random House imprint Kokila, Namrata Tripathi celebrates marginalized voices in books for young people. But her quest for representation doesnt end on the page. At work, she has become known for her power saris, and for the influential message her style sends to younger colleagues. Read more [Photo: Apple] Wyatt Mitchell, senior design director, Apple As a senior design leader at Apple, Wyatt Mitchell spends a lot of time thinking about how aesthetics and design choices show up in our everyday lives. This obsession doesnt end at work; it extends to his distinctive personal style, which ranges from tailored suits to denim coveralls. Read more [Photo: Maggie Shannon (portrait)] Julie Schott, founder, Starface Julie Schott is known for selling Gen Z on her star-shaped pimple patches. But as she stepped into entrepreneurship, she ditched blazers and other wardrobe tropes for eye-catching track jackets and cherry red hair as a way to signal that her businesses are doing things differently.Read more Additional Image Credits Abdul Rauf/Getty Images, Akbar Nemati/Unsplash, Alex Kalinin/Unsplash, Annie Spratt/Unsplash, boonchai wedmakawand/Getty Images, Cami/Unsplash, Chris Henry/Unsplash, Chris Taljaard/Unsplash, Craig Manners/Unsplash, Dasha Summery/Unsplash, Divazus Fabric Store/Unsplash, Flavio Coelho/Getty Images, George Webster/Unsplash, Greg Rosenke/Unsplash, H&CO/Pexels, Jayanth Muppaneni/Unsplash, Kasia Sikorska/Unsplash, kastanka/iStock/Getty Images, Kelly/Pexels, Kirill Pershn/Unsplash, ksushsh/iStock/Getty Images Plus, Magdha Elhers/Pexels, malerapaso/iStock/Getty Images Plus, Maria Kovalets/Unsplash, MirageC/Getty Images, Nate Bell/Unsplash, Nimble Made/Unsplash, Olga Thelavart/Unsplash, Omar Al-Ghosson/Unsplash, Pawel Czerwinski/Unsplash, Rick Rothenberg/Unsplash, Shoaib Sheikh/Unsplash, Shubham Mittal/Unsplash, Steve Johnson/Pexels, studiocasper/Getty Images, Susan Wilkinson/Unsplash, Tanja Ivanova/Getty Images, Thomas Lipke/Unsplash, Tony Chen/Unsplash, Trail/Unsplash, Witthaya Prasongsin/Getty Images
Category:
E-Commerce
Nearly everyone in America recognizes the brand name La-Z-Boy, and most will remember it fondly as part of their childhoods. Far fewer see it as a brand they would actually buy today, but La-Z-Boy is on a mission to change that. The company is unveiling its first rebrand in 20-plus years to position itself as more than just your grandmas recliner. The brand has traded its minimalist, sans-serif logo for a retro script wordmark. It revamped its color palette and adopted a whole new brand voice that emphasizes coziness and comfort rather than just function. La-Z-Boy requested that Fast Company refer to these changes as a “brand refresh” (a term typically used as a safer, less extreme alternative to “rebrand”), but the sum of these swaps equals a full visual overhaul. The new look is part of La-Z-Boys Century Vision strategy: a business plan intended to prepare the brand for growth after its 2027 centennial anniversary. Christina Hoskins, the companys chief marketing officer, says the key to jump-starting that upward trajectory is to make sure that La-Z-Boy is not a brand that exists only in peoples memories. We started to suspect that we are a brand that’s on the verge of fading into history, and we didn’t want that to be the case, Hoskins says. [Photo: La-Z-Boy] The new La-Z-Boy La-Z-Boy is contending with a housing and furniture market battered by consumer concerns around inflation, the rising cost of living, and the economic whiplash of President Trumps tariffs. According to its fiscal year 2025 financial report, La-Z-Boy notched $2.1 billion in salesup 3% from the previous fiscal year but down from its 2022 high of $2.4 billion. As of this writing, the brands stock is also down nearly 10% compared to this time last year. Hoskins says that to set itself up for the future, La-Z-Boy has been working on expanding its retail network. This year, it built 12 new locations and acquired seven independently owned storesone of the largest annual expansions in company history. Originally, the goal of the refresh was to widen the companys consumer base alongside its retail presence by attracting a younger audience. However, as Hoskins and her team worked with partners at the branding agency Colle McVoy, they realized they needed to zoom out even further. After analyzing their existing branding and consumer feedback, they found that La-Z-Boys marketing focus was specific to the functionality of its furniture, whereas target consumers across generations cared more about the feelings the brand could evoke. There is a [target] consumer out there who wants comfort first, who wants a home they can live in, who wants peace over perfection in life, Hoskins says. The beauty of that is that we’re able to go in through this more emotional angle and tap into people’s values and beliefs, and then reach a broad consumer set. The outcome of that will be that we’re reaching younger consumers, but were not just chasing after the age alone. Over the past couple of years, La-Z-Boy has already begun quietly rolling out a more consumer-focused, playful voice via new brand activations. In 2023, the company debuted a national advertising campaign called Long Live the Lazy, which called on fans to reclaim so-called laziness and embrace JOMO (the joy of missing out). It also unveiled “The Decliner,” an AI-powered prototype chair that helped the reclinee draft text messages to cancel their plans. On opening weekend, the Decliner drove a 50% increase in sales and a 200% increase in web traffic. In 2024, the company followed up with Decline to Recline, an ad campaign poking fun at people who recline their seats on airplanes (and nudging offending passengers to use a La-Z-Boy at home instead). An accompanying petition to end airplane recliners, which La-Z-Boy published on its website, received more than 400,000 signatures. Through these campaigns, Hoskins says, La-Z-Boy showed up differently in the cultural zeitgeist than it ever had before, which opened peoples eyes to the new La-Z-Boy. From corporate to cozy Once the La-Z-Boy team identified this strategy, there was another issue: The new La-Z-Boyintended to encapsulate comfort, warmth, and a stress-free spacewas deeply detached from how the branding actually looked. We did a fair amount of consumer research that showed it felt sterile, it felt cold, it felt corporate, and it did’t match the experience of sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair, Hoskins says. La-Z-Boys then-logo, first introduced in 2003, featured a thin sans-serif wordmark with a small pop of icy blue. Diana Quenomoen, design director at Colle McVoy, says the wordmark felt like something you might find in a healthcare or tech field, not a piece of furniture youd want to sink into. Quenomoens team turned to La-Z-Boys 1927 script logo for inspiration. They drew a new version of the mark, character by character, that takes some cues from the originallike the connective flourishes and the Z appearing to be cradled between the other characterswhile also putting a modern spin on the script concept. Another core inspiration was the furniture itself, which shows in the plumpness of the letters and the wordmarks italicized setting, meant to mimic a chairs recline. From the beginning, one of our team members pointed to this logo and said, I want to [lie] on that, Hoskins says. We were like, Oh, we’re hitting on something here. The new identity also includes a warmer palette of burnt vermilion and soft celadon green, a custom monogram featuring the script letters LZB, and a wave-like color-blocked pattern. All of Colle McVoys work was collected in a new internal style guide thats meant to help La-Z-Boy maintain brand consistency as it works to expand its network of company-owned stores. The rebrand will begin rolling out digitally and via advertising channels on July 29. Physical storefronts will be updated over the next few years. It’s really exciting to see how we’ve captured what the brand is through the identity, and how that can inspire new thinking about shopper experiences, Hoskins says.
Category:
E-Commerce
The heat index in some Southern states topped 113 degrees over the July 26 weekend, but some retailers are already knee-deep in spooky season. Just as Christmas creep has kicked off the winter holiday shopping (and decorating) season as early as September in recent years, Halloween sales seem to be starting earlier and earlier these days. The Home Depot is looking to capitalize. The chain has unveiled its 2025 collection of animatronics and decorations to make your house the scariest on the block. Skelly, the company’s iconic 12-foot skeleton, will lead the charge once againand while inflation is on the rise and tariffs are looming, the Home Depot says its maintaining Skelly’s $299 price tag. Skellys got plenty of friends joining him at retail this year. The 2025 collection of larger-than-life ghouls includes a pair of 15-foot-tall animated scarecrows (Worricrow and Gally-Crow, to be precise), each with a 12.5-foot arm span. (Both are priced at $399.) Skelly will also have a few new pets, including a 5.5-foot sitting skeleton dog with LCD eyes ($249) and a 5-foot-tall skeleton cat. All the animatronics will go on sale on the Home Depot website (and app) on Monday, August 4. They’ll begin appearing in stores as Halloween draws closer. If you don’t have room for a 12-foot Skelly, the retailer would like to introduce you to Ultra-Skelly, a version roughly half the size of the original that can interact with passers-by via an app. Itll be priced at $279. “When trick-or-treaters approach the door, the 6.5-foot-tall skeleton can comment on each guests costume or greet them as they approach,” the company said in a press release. The animatronic will have five preset recordings and up to 30 seconds of custom recording with voice modulation. You can also interact with trick-or-treaters live by speaking through Ultra-Skelly via the app. Like the 12-foot model, it can be adapted for other holidays, if you’d like to go to war with your homeowners association and keep it up year-round. The Home Depot has collaborated with Universal Products and Experiences once again to introduce a new 3.5-foot animated Chucky doll, this time with his stitched-up look from Bride of Chucky. There will also be a 3.5-foot Tiffany Valentine (aka, the bride of Chucky from the same film) on offer. Both will cost $229. Other horror characters arriving in animatronic form are a 7-foot Frankenstein ($279), a 6-foot bride of Frankenstein ($279), a 5.5-foot Evil Queen from Snow White and a 6.5-foot Maleficent ($279 each). Jack Skellington and Sally make a return as well. All-new offerings include the Deadwater collection (featuring a 9.5-foot animated pirate ship for $399 and a 7-foot Megalodon zombie shark for $349) and the Gruesome Grounds collection, which, in addition to the 15-foot scarecrows, showcases an 8-foot dragon that’s about to take flight. Of course, you can always freak out the neighbors with a 9.5-foot LED spider. While consumers tend to get grouchy about December holidays arriving earlier and earlier each year, they dont seem to mind getting a head start on All Hallows Eve festivities. A recent study by RetailMeNot found that “Summerween” is something many consumers get excited about; some 27% of people surveyed were already planning for Halloween. Another harbinger of the seasonSpirit Halloween storeshas yet to appear, but the company said it expects to open more than 1,500 locations this year and is looking for 50,000 seasonal employees. Those stores are likely to open their doors in the coming weeks. There is, of course, a financial incentive for all this. People spent an estimated $11.6 billion on the holiday last yearand that’s likely to rise in 2025. If you do grab some new lawn decorations when they go on sale, however, you might want to wait until the temperatures fall a bit lower before you put them out in the yard.
Category:
E-Commerce
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