According to Inc, 2025 has been a year of major business pivots and hard-learned lessons. Lululemon, facing a five-year stock low and tariff pressures, is testing a massive 17,000-square-foot “dynamic retail” store in NYC’s SoHo and another in Seoul. Starbucks, under CEO Brian Niccol, launched its “Back to Starbucks” campaign to combat declining sales by redesigning stores and aiming for four-minute wait times after years of over-reliance on mobile orders. Bustle Digital Group, after layoffs and site closures, is now projecting 2025 profitability with estimated earnings of $130 million, up from $110 million, by focusing on influencer memberships and events. And in a major founder return, Jamie Siminoff came back to lead Ring in spring 2025, joining other returning founders like Outdoor Voices’s Ty Haney and Kendra Scott.
Lululemon’s Big Bet
So Lululemon thinks the answer to competition and tariffs is… bigger stores? That’s a fascinatingly physical gamble in a digital world. The “dynamic retail experience” sounds cool, but it’s also incredibly capital-intensive. Here’s the thing: retail traffic isn’t what it used to be. Opening a 17,000-square-foot temple in SoHo feels like a move from a bygone era, a statement piece more than a scalable strategy. It might create buzz, but can it move the needle on a stock price that’s been languishing for five years? I think the real lesson here isn’t about evolving—it’s about the risk of overcorrecting. They’re trying to buy back relevance with real estate, and that’s a dangerous game.
Starbucks Rewind
Starbucks wants to be your neighborhood coffee shop again. But can you really put the genie back in the bottle? Brian Niccol’s plan to bring back handwritten cups and condiment bars is pure nostalgia. It’s a direct admission that the hyper-efficient, app-driven model stripped the soul out of the experience and hurt sales. The four-minute wait time goal is the real tell—they know the mobile order queue became a monster. But is this a sustainable fix, or just a marketing campaign? Wall Street’s skepticism is warranted. Retraining an entire customer base and operational workforce is harder than launching a new latte. This feels like a company trying to remember who it was, not necessarily figuring out who it needs to be.
BDG’s Pivot to Profit
BDG’s story is the cleanest lesson of the bunch: when the old model breaks, find a new audience willing to pay. Shutting down sites and laying people off is brutal, but the pivot to influencer memberships and events is a classic case of trading broad, ad-dependent reach for a smaller, dedicated community. Going from $110 million to an estimated $130 million in earnings by focusing on superfans? That’s a playbook more media companies should study. It’s not sexy, but it works. The risk, of course, is putting all your eggs in the “creator economy” basket, which has its own volatility. But for now, it’s a survival story that actually looks like a turnaround.
The Founder Returns
The trend of founders returning—Siminoff at Ring, Haney at Outdoor Voices—is 2025’s most dramatic plot twist. It’s a powerful argument that institutional memory and raw passion matter, especially in an AI era full of ethical landmines. Who better to navigate Ring’s facial recognition and privacy quagmire than the guy who built it in his garage? But let’s be skeptical for a second. Founder returns can also be a sign that professional management failed, or a sentimental Hail Mary. The world where Ring was invented is gone. Siminoff isn’t just a chief inventor now; he’s the CEO of a controversial Amazon subsidiary in an AI-powered surveillance state. That’s a different job. Sometimes you need the original visionary. Sometimes you just need someone who wasn’t there for the previous mistakes.
