Welcome to The Brand Yearbook: Class of 2023.

Inside, you’ll find the totally subjective (yet deeply considered) product of our preoccupation with Gen Z and how we believe brands can best serve their tastes, motivations and obsessions. 

We believe these brands connected most with Zs in 2023, capturing their mindshare and dollars, or have the most potential to do so, either due to market dominance or another unfair advantage. You’ll also find the playbooks we think they should be leveraging to stay on course with Zs.

Though not Zs ourselves, we are digital obsessives with backgrounds in editorial content, digital commerce and social platforms who spend inordinate amounts of time talking to our Gen Z brain trust and consuming as much information as possible about the generation roughly born after 1997 and projected to be the largest consumer base in the U.S. by 2026. 

 You’ll find recurring themes in these pages: drops, collabs and customization as table stakes, nostalgic IP as a ticket to ubiquity, participatory game mechanics driving virality, content and commerce finally tying the knot, and billionaire influencers, to name a few. The brands also speak to major shifts reshaping Gen Z lives, such as the rise of AI, digital campfire platforms and the collapse of traditional media channels. These brands all know how to garner the most valuable commodity in the world: attention.

 TL;DR: We reverse-engineered a roadmap for building a brand that’s guaranteed to win with Gen Z. So enjoy this masterclass in marketing, making and remaking culture. Then feed it into your AI chatbot and make it spit out a cheat sheet of strategies based on our prognostications so you can build your own. You’re welcome.

 Your Yearbook Editors,

Sara Wilson & Michelle Goad