2025: The Year Brands Grew Up
And what a year it was.
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2025: The year brands grew up
With the end of the year rapidly approaching, I wanted to treat this week’s newsletter as a reflection of what feels different this year for brands than it did in 2024.
My biggest observation: brands grew tf up. We saw less pretending the wrong data matters and more focus on community building, clearer goals, and investing in brand as an organizational stabilizer.
Here are a few observations I’ve made with some examples of brands.
Brands stopped treating growth as linear
Brand is being used as stabilizer during change
More leaders acknowledged that growth now comes in bursts, stalls, and inflection points. Instead of planning for smooth expansion, brands started preparing for moments of disruption: second locations, leadership changes, acquisitions, category shifts. Brand became something to stabilize the business during change.
Examples
Airbnb: Over the past few years (and especially reinforced this year), Airbnb shifted away from growth-by-feature toward brand as an organizing principle during category expansion. Their move to anchor everything around “Live Anywhere” and later Experiences was about giving coherence to a business that had outgrown a single use case.
Stripe: Stripe’s public positioning increasingly emphasizes trust, infrastructure, and durability rather than velocity. As the business expanded into more complex financial products, brand became a way to reassure customers through change.
Brand moments became unavoidable
Founder instinct expired / scale exposed gaps
Brands were forced to confront moments where what used to work stopped working. Founder instinct expired and alignment fell apart under pressure. Teams hesitated because decision rules weren’t clear. These moments surfaced brand gaps faster than any audit ever could, and companies that ignored them felt the drag immediately.
Examples:
Allbirds: Allbirds is a visible example of what happens when early brand clarity doesn’t translate cleanly into scale. Expansion into new categories and channels surfaced brand ambiguity, forcing a reassessment of positioning, product focus, and leadership narrative.
Peloton: Peloton’s post-hypergrowth phase exposed how much of the brand relied on momentum rather than clear decision frameworks. Leadership changes and restructuring highlighted the cost of not evolving brand from founder-era instinct into a scalable system.
Social matured from promotion to presence
We saw less broadcasting and more participation
Brands shifted from using social as a broadcast channel to treating it as an ongoing environment. The emphasis moved toward consistency, participation, and responsiveness rather than campaigns. Brands that performed well accepted that trust on social is built over time through active dialogue and community building.
Examples:
Duolingo: Duolingo won by committing to a consistent, participatory presence that feels native to the platform. The brand shows up daily, interacts with culture, and lets the community shape the tone without losing control.
Ryanair: Ryanair’s social strategy leans into responsiveness and self-awareness rather than polish. It’s a clear example of a brand understanding social as an environment, not a billboard.
Influencer strategy moved closer to the product
Credibility became more important than reach
Short-term, transactional influencer posts lost credibility. IMO they just don’t perform as well as longer relationship contracts with influencers who are truly brand-aligned. Brands invested more in creators who actually use the product and integrate it naturally into their lives. The work became less about reach and more about proximity, credibility, and long-term association.
Examples:
Skims: Skims’ creator strategy emphasizes long-term alignment and real usage rather than one-off endorsements. Creators are part of the brand’s ecosystem, not just a distribution tactic.
Stanley: Stanley’s growth has been fueled by creators who genuinely integrate the product into their daily lives. The content feels observational and unscripted.
Internal clarity became a competitive advantage
Brand as operating system
Notion: Notion’s brand clarity (internally and externally) allows teams to make decisions quickly without constant top-down direction. As the product expanded, the brand served as a shared reference point to stay consistent, in other words it served as a decision framework for the whole team.
Figma: Even amid acquisition drama and market uncertainty, Figma’s clarity around collaboration, openness, and community helped maintain trust and direction across teams and users.
As teams grew and pressure increased, brands that had clear decision-making, priorities, and guardrails moved faster than those relying on alignment or consensus. Brand strategy shifted inward, functioning as an operating system that kept everyone rowing in the same direction.
The Brand Moments Diagnostic
By the end of the year, a lot of brands feel “heavy”, where decisions take longer and the rules are muddy. My clients in this mode tend to find themselves re-explaining things they thought were settled. Their growth is still steady, but it just feels messy and energy draining.
That usually is a signal that the brand has entered a new phase it wasn’t built for yet. Which is a GOOD thing! I think of these inflection points as brand moments. They’re predictable. They repeat. And the fastest way to waste January is to misdiagnose which one you’re actually in.
The 5 brand moments
Let’s look at each of these moments, then a quick diagnostic to see if you are in one.
1. Founder-led → Brand-led: This is the moment when the brand still lives in the
