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In early September, when beauty retailer Sephora launched sales of Rhode, a line of skincare products from Haley Bieber, customers were more than ready for the drop. “[It] was the most successful launch in our history,” Artemis Patrick, president and CEO of Sephora North America, told the audience at the 2025 Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. During the opening weekend of sales, Patrick revealed, Sephora sold 192 Rhode products per minute. When she said this, there were audible gasps from the crowd. As a metric of success, the number is impressive. But it’s also representative of a broader strategy that Sephora has fully embraced in recent years. Under Patrick’s leadership, the company has engaged in a wide and diverse range of partnerships that are fueling sales and cementing its status as one of the most lucrative beauty retailers in the world. Since taking on the CEO role in April 2024, Patrick has been steadily expanding what it looks like to collaboratewith the brands that it sells in its stores, with outside organizations, with musicians, and with a growing network of content creators and influencers. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] Patrick discussed with Fast Company senior staff writer Elizabeth Segran the different ways Sephora is broadening its reach and appeal. There’s its founding partnership with the WNBA’s Golden State Valkyries, becoming official beauty partner for the new women’s three-on-three basketball league Unrivaled, its partnership with the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, its 80-musician collective Sephora Sounds, its handpicked group of beauty influencers known as the Sephora Squad, and its many, many partnerships with small and emerging brands in the beauty space. On top of all that, Patrick announced at the festival that Sephora would be expanding its partnerships even further with the October launch of My Sephora Storefront, a platform where content creators and influencers can create their own shoppable storefront on Sephora’s website. Patrick says the idea grew out of an overwhelming demand the company was seeing from content creators big and small to link up with the brand. “This last year we put the applications out for Sephora Squad and we got 14,000 applications. And we thought, Okay, this is a problem that we’re not able to really leverage these amazing content creators,” she says. So My Sephora Storefront was born. [Photo: Jonah Rosenberg for Fast Company] These unconventional brand partnerships and expressions have even gone into the realm of experience. The cover story for Fast Companys winter issue, which was all about how Sephora is conquering the beauty industry, started out with a scene in Atlanta at Sephora’s annual in-person festival. More than 8,000 tickets were sold, and despite there being a hurricane during the event, fans still showed up. Owned by the French luxury conglomerate LVMH, Sephora has 3,000 stores in 34 countries. LVMH’s selective retailing business unit, of which Sephora is a part, had more than $19 billion in revenue in 2023. Patrick attributes this success to being truly connected with the many brands that are sold in its stores, including ones that Sephora helped bring to the national stage. “I’ve been at Sephora for almost 20 years, and many of the merchants that I worked with then are still there today,” she says. Being so closely connected with the brands it sells has allowed the company to let each brand shine while also learning about gaps in its own offerings. Patrick says that’s led to a bigger diversity of what gets sold in stores, from lines centered on underrepresented skin tones to products for people struggling with skin conditions. “We do feel like we have this personal responsibility to the brands to tell their stories,” Patrick says. “The ones that are coming to us that we really love are ones who believe passionately and deeply that the world needs their product. And we want to make sure we help them.” This focus on building up brands and branching out through unconventional partnerships is all in service of expanding how Sephora connects with people. “It’s so much more than just a place to buy makeup,” Patrick says. “We do believe that it’s a place that people can come and be themselves, and express themselves, and not fit in but truly belong.”
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E-Commerce
BMW just made a subtle change to the logo on its latest car. The German automaker simplified the roundel on its new, fully electric BMW iX3 by removing the inner outlines of the logo. Most people won’t even notice. So why bother? As luxury automakers adapt to an electric future, they’re updating their branding too, and different companies have taken different approaches. Jaguar went for a big change ahead of a new product launch in 2026 with a new mark that’s lighter, rounded, and lowercase as compared to its old all-caps logo mark. Ranger Rover, meanwhile, split the difference, introducing a new secondary mark that gives the brand more flexibility. Newer EV companies often use a stenciling effect to give their brand names a sci-fi look, while General Motors’ rebranded 2021 mark also went shifted to a rounded lowercase. In broad strokes, the new logo on the iX3, the first in BMW’s next generation Neue Klasse family of electric cars, isn’t all that different from BMW’s very first logo in 1917. They’re both circular and use a blue-and-white quadrant, and though the company updates it occasionally to reflect changing design trends, the basics remain the same. The Munich, Germany-based company keeps the general idea, but updates it for the times. [Photo: BMW] In 1953, BMW swapped out a gold logo outline for white. In 1963, it changed the logo’s font from serif to sans-serif. A 1997 version used shading and gradients to create a chrome, metallic effect, and in 2020, BMW added minimalist, open version for communications only. Though BMW’s logo is believed by some to be a propeller, the circular badge shape actually comes from the logo of Rapp Motorenwerke, the aircraft engine manufacturer that became BMW. The white-and-blue quadrant pattern is actually a reference to the state colors of Bavaria. [Photo: BMW] The company says the propeller myth has become self-perpetuating, but Fred Jakobs, archive director of BMW Group Classic says it also “has acquired a certain justification.” For the new version on the roundel of the iX3, Oliver Hailer the head of BMW Design, told BMWBLOG, “We wanted to keep the heritage, but bring more precision to the logo.” If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Just spruce it up. The details matter, but sometimes a rebrand doesn’t have to be dramatic.
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E-Commerce
In South Africa, a field covered in yellow wildflowers doesnt look like an industrial site. But its a pilot for a new type of nickel mine: Instead of blasting holes in the ground to extract rocks, a biotech startup called Genomines is phytomining nickel through the use of plants that absorb the metal from the soil.The plant, a type of daisy, is known as a hyperaccumulatora species that naturally pulls metal through its roots and stores it at high concentrations in its stems and leaves. Using gene editing, Genomines made the plant three times larger and able to soak up twice as much nickel. The company, which just raised $45 million in a Series A funding round, plans to use its approach to scale up a sustainable, affordable supply of the critical metal.[Photo: Courtesy of Genomines]Its important because we need a lot of metal, especially for the energy transition in batteries in electric vehicles, says Fabien Koutchekian, cofounder and CEO of Genomines. Not only in batteries, but [nickel is] widely used in stainless steel as part of infrastructure. The problem is that with current traditional mining methods, we will not be able to produce enough.Its getting harder to find nickel ore to mine. Most of it comes from Chinese-run mines in Indonesia; high-grade reserves, used to make stainless steel, could be depleted there before the end of the decade. Lower-grade ore used in batteries might run out by midcentury.Nickel also exists in soil. But until now the concentrations have been too low to make extraction viable. The plants change the economics.The plants that we are using have the ability to concentrate the metal that they find in the soilthey concentrate it in their biomass, Koutchekian says. Weve managed to reach close to 7.6% metal within the plants.[Photo: Courtesy of Genomines]The companys pilot site in South Africa sits on land thats relatively high in nickel because of the way rocks naturally weathered in the area. That means it cant be used for farming, because other plants cant grow well. But its ideally suited for a phytomine.The crop grows within four to six months, absorbing the metal. Then it can be harvested, dried, and heated to produce battery-grade nickel oxide that can be sold and refined.[Gif: Courtesy of Genomines]Its inherently far more efficient than the existing system. Building a traditional, multibillion-dollar nickel mine involves not only a decade-plus of exploration, but another decade-plus of construction. Theyre the size of small cities, Koutchekian says. Once they’re operating, traditional mines also have to move tons of rock to extract a tiny fraction of metal.Using agriculture to get the material means that minimal infrastructure is necessary, and a system can be up and running in a year or two. Unsurprisingly, operations take far less energy than traditional mining. Since the plants also help capture CO2 as they grow, the whole process is actually carbon neutral. And instead of destroying ecosystems by blowing up habitat and creating new pollution, it helps remediate soil.Sustainability isnt the main motivator for its potential customers, Koutchekian says. Instead, they’re interested in cost: The approach saves so much energy that the product could be meaningfully less expensive than the status quo. The company expects to produce nickel oxide at around $10,000 per ton, versus an industry median of around $16,000 per ton (by the end of the decade, the average cost may rise to $19,000).With the new round of funding, led by the MIT spinout Engine Ventures, Genomines plans to use pilots to prove that its process is cost competitive. Then it will keep scaling up. The potential is large: The team has estimated that around 30 million to 40 million hectares of land worldwide contain sufficient nickel for the process. In theory, if all of that land was in use, the company says it could produce 7 to 14 times as much nickel as the traditional industry does now.
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E-Commerce
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