Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 69 G20 SPECIAL EDITION 2025 i Fast Company South Africa

As the year draws to a close, we've found ourselves reflecting on its deeper significance. It has been a time of disruption, change and redefinition and will likely be remembered as the year that shifted the way we see the world. No doubt, you have your own reflections on what 2025 has meant—for your business, your community and your outlook on the future. We've attempted to capture some of that energy and meaning in this issue of Fast Company (SA). More than just a print edition, it will take pride of place in our digital archives. Here's why: 2025 will go down in history as the year global leadership converged on the African continent. While we remain champions of startups and the innovators who build from the ground up, this…

MERE WEEKS INTO HIS NEW ROLE as CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol joined an earnings call with investors and trumpeted an iconic brand. But it wasn't Starbucks. “Bringing the Sharpies back to our baristas,” Niccol declared last October, would “give them the opportunity to put that additional human touch on every coffee experience” by writing each customer's name or an inspiring note on their cup. “We're tracking down the Sharpies,” Niccol later told CNBC, estimating the company would need about 200,000 of them. The comments drew attention—Starbucks even followed up with a TV ad featuring baristas jotting on cups—but in a way, they revealed more about Sharpie than they did about the coffee giant. Sharpie defines a category. It's simultaneously universal and personal, instantly recognisable, and ubiquitous. It's such a…

TECH LOGOS ARE BLUE. CORPORATE IDENTITIES ARE dull. Big-box stores are boring. These kinds of assumptions are common among consumers who came of age during what's known as the era of “corporate blanding”, and Jones Knowles Ritchie (JKR) wants to break them all. Over the past year, JKR has been entrusted to rethink the public face of iconic companies such as Yahoo, Mozilla, and Walmart. By questioning norms and injecting a hint of playfulness, the agency breathed new life into client identities—all with an eye for longevity. The approach has paid off: In 2024, JKR notched 29% year-over-year revenue growth in new sectors including tech, retail, nonprofit, media and entertainment, and finance. Tosh Hall, JKR's global chief creative officer, says the company's process always starts the same way: “We go…

AFTER FRIDA LAUNCHED ITS AT-HOME FERTILITY products in 2023, its ads and marketing frequently met with censorship, flagged on social platforms for being “too adult” and “too explicit”. “We faced systemic, algorithmic barriers when trying to educate women digitally about this physical transformation into motherhood,” says Frida founder and CEO Chelsea Hirshhorn. In 2024, the brand decided to create a way around the censors to get its educational content to the women who needed it most. The elegantly designed Frida Uncensored campaign and platform included age-gated digital content designed to bypass censorship and give women unfiltered, practical health education. The unfiltered content offers direct, candid product demonstrations, how-to videos, and illustrations without fear of censorship. It is intentionally built off-platform to host honest, medically backed tutorials that would otherwise be…

They used to say all roads led to Rome. Today, all roads—digital, economic, even political—run through a handful of private servers sitting behind corporate firewalls. The 21st century's new world order isn't shaped by land borders or oil pipelines. It's shaped by algorithms, platforms, and policies written not by lawmakers, but by engineers and executives. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rise of Meta Platforms Inc—the company formerly known as Facebook. With its grip on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, Meta isn't just a tech company. It's the gatekeeper to global communication. A private empire with public reach. And in South Africa, that reach extended to a civic lifeline called GovChat. GovChat wasn't built in San Francisco or Seattle. It didn't come with billion-dollar funding rounds or celebrity…

DURING NEW YORK FASHION WEEK IN FEBRUARY, A wood-paneled boutique popped up in SoHo next to Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta. On the racks were tailored, wide-leg jeans and simple black Henley dresses that signalled understated elegance. But unlike those of neighbouring boutiques, the clothes weren't from a storied European maison de couture. They were some of the newest collections from Scoop and Free Assembly, two brands led by Brandon Maxwell, creative director at the House of Walmart. The pop-up—which featured items priced between $8 and $75—was part of the Bentonville, Arkansas–based retailer's strategy to get its products in front of urban shoppers who might not be familiar with its growing array of fashion-forward budget brands. The SoHo stint was just one of the ways chief merchant Latriece Watkins—a 25-year…

MESSING WITH A LEGACY BRAND THAT'S BEEN around for nearly two centuries carries some serious risk. When that brand is The New York Times, it's even more serious: You're jeopardising the daily loyalty and trust of nearly 12 million subscribers. In October 2024, when the product team at the Times launched its most hefty app redesign since its 2008 launch, Emily Withrow, the newspaper's SVP of product, says the team saw a huge opportunity to enhance engagement: “We produce all of this journalism and have all of this lifestyle content that helps people live informed, joyful lives, but there was no direct pathway to it.” The goal, she says, was to create a more fluid canvas, allowing the app to reflect the range of stories and content available to readers…

IT MAY SEEM LIKE THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SINGLE-HANDEDLY PULLED THE PLUG ON STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM, BUT IN REALITY, IT WAS SPUTTERING FOR YEARS. INSIDE THE RISE AND FALL OF AN UNPRECEDENTED ERA OF BUSINESS—AND WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. “Capitalism as we know it is dead.” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made that proclamation at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2019. “We're going to see a new kind of capitalism,” he went on. “IF YOUR ORIENTATION IS JUST ABOUT MAKING money, I don't think you're going to hang out very long as a CEO or a founder of a company.” Benioff's remarks were striking, but not shocking. He was merely articulating what had become the conventional wisdom among business leaders in that moment. After decades of serving shareholders alone, CEOs were now embracing…

COMPANY OF ONE BY PAUL JARVIS Company of One offers a refreshingly contrarian perspective on business success—one that centres on the idea of staying intentionally small. Rather than following the traditional path of relentless scaling, Jarvis makes a compelling case for building a sustainable business that prioritises autonomy, simplicity and meaningful work. This isn't about freelancing on a per-project basis, nor is it about launching a startup with ambitions of rapid growth. It's about building a business that stays lean, independent, and controlled by you. Staying small, Jarvis argues, provides the freedom to avoid many of the downsides of conventional growth—endless meetings, managing staff and the stress of scaling. It also allows more room to enjoy life's richer rewards. In Company of One, he lays out how to adopt this…

NIGERIA: • Flutterwave: This African fintech company provides payment infrastructure and technology for businesses to make and receive payments globally. RWANDA: Zipline is a US company that started and honed its operations in this East African country, enabling the delivery of medicines via drones. KENYA: • M-Pesa: A leading mobile money service, launched in 2007, it allows users to send and receive money, pay bills and access other financial services, even for those without a traditional bank account. • Ushahidi: The word means “testimony” in Swahili. The open-source platform is used for crowdsourcing, mapping, and monitoring events such as elections, disasters and conflicts. SOUTH AFRICA: • Pelebox: A smart locker system for collecting chronic medication, designed to reduce long waiting times at medical centres. • Aerobotics: Uses AI and smartphone…

Recognising the interdependence of water, energy and food systems is crucial when it comes to securing essential services, fostering economic growth and protecting vulnerable communities. This nexus is particularly significant in South Africa and the broader Global South, where water scarcity, energy instability and food insecurity are deeply interconnected issues, each exacerbating the others. According to the UN, extreme weather events linked to climate change are rendering water supplies scarcer and more unpredictable. Unreliable power sources are compromising sanitation processes, resulting in untreated sewage contaminating water bodies and increasing water purification costs for service providers. Water pollution poses significant risks to human health, contributing to waterborne illnesses—and severely impacting ecosystems—as toxic elements enter the human food chain through contaminated fish and aquatic organisms. The failure of many municipalities to maintain…

AFTER MORE THAN 20 YEARS OF PLANNING AND construction, Cary, North Carolina, has turned a 3 hectares section of its downtown into one of the country's most multifaceted public parks. OJB Landscape Architecture designed a mix of active recreation areas, botanical gardens, pavilions, event spaces, cafés, bars, and cleverly camouflaged floodwater retention basins. Those basins—including several rain gardens and a central pond—hold back the flooding that had regularly ravaged neighbourhoods to the south. A creeklike children's splash pad plays up this connection to water, and winding elevated walkways overhead highlight the site's dramatic 11 metres elevation change. Hundreds of trees, including 600 new ones, provide a lush respite in the city centre. Built for $65 million in bond funding, the park has created a gathering space for Cary's 150,000 people.…

BOLDHUE'S FOUNDATION DEVICE STEP INTO AN ULTA OR SEPHORA, and you'll find hundreds of bottles of foundation in many shades and formulations. But despite the abundance of options in the $8.4 billion foundation industry, many people struggle to find a colour that matches their complexion. Less than 7% of foundation on the market caters to black consumers’ skin tones. Karin Layton and Rachel Wilson, founders of BoldHue, are solving this problem with technology. Layton, a former aerospace engineer, spent five years building a machine that scans your face in three places then instantly dispenses customised foundation. The $295 countertop device comes with cartridges in five colours that mix to create the correct colour; a replacement cartridge costs $20. “Consumers spend a lot of time and money trying to get the…

DOCTORS ARE TIRED. ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN Medical Association, around 45% of physicians report at least one symptom of burnout. Could a more thoughtfully designed workplace help? At first glance, Northwestern Medicine's new Faculty Office Centre could be mistaken for a spa: a carved stone reception desk, artwork that depicts a birch forest, nap rooms, massage chairs, a lounge, and a café serving chef-made meals. “We tried to infuse a sense of nature and Zen-like peacefulness because doctors have so much stress through the day,” says Mark Hirons, principal and senior design leader at CannonDesign, the architecture firm that masterminded the space. The centre is a new model for workspaces in academic medicine, a field that has typically lagged behind in workplace design. Instead of dated private offices, doctors and…

1973 Climbing activist Yvon Chouinard starts a company called Patagonia that considers the environmental toll of its products. 1982 Paul Newman cofounds a salad dressing company called Newman's Own. When it comes to profit, he decides: “Let's give it all away to those who need it.” 1982 1985 Ben & Jerry's begins diverting ice cream proceeds to local community services. 1991 Starbucks offers all employees shares of the company, known as Bean Stock. 1999 Stanford's business school opens its Center for Social Innovation. 2003 Tesla launches. Elon Musk becomes CEO in 2008, establishing electric vehicles as high-design, aspirational objects. 2006 An Inconvenient Truth hits theatres, raising public consciousness about the connection between individual behaviour and global warming. B Lab is founded by Stanford grads wanting “to make business a force…