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As the CEO of Patagonia, Rose Marcario stood out as one of the most outspoken voices in business against President Donald Trump during his first term. Under her leadership, Patagonia even sued the Trump administration after he issued a proclamation to shrink public land in two national monuments in Utah. Now, in the midst of Trumps second term, Marcario is no longer at the helm of the progressive outdoor apparel company, but she’s still taking a stand. As companies pull back on DEI initiatives, backtrack on climate commitments, and generally take a quieter approach to politics, Marcario is doubling down on her belief that businesses canand mustbe the greatest force for good, as she says. Its only a failure of imagination that makes us think any differently. This isnt a new fight for Marcario. As the CEO of Patagonia, she expanded the outdoor apparel brands environmental commitments, oversaw its foray into sustainable food through Patagonia Provisions, and embarked on ambitious political activism, including Patagonias fight to preserve public land. And she did all that while turning Patagonia from a $100 million company to a $1.5 billion company over the course of her 12-year tenure. Marcario left Patagonia in 2020. The following year, she became a partner at ReGen Ventures, a climate-focused venture fund investing in early-stage founders who are building regenerative technologies, such as making food from CO2 or cleaning up wastewater while also sequestering carbon emissions. Shes also now the chair of EV company Rivians nonprofit, Rivian Foundation, and founding board member of SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, a scientific initiative to map and protect the planets trillions of miles of underground fungi. (Marcario was also previously on the board of plant-based meat brand Meati, but left that role about a year ago; Meati is still part of ReGens portfolio.) Its these wide-ranging roles that allow her to double down on her vision. Being at ReGen gives her a breadth that she didnt have as a CEO, she says. Instead of just steering one company, shes supporting a swath of purpose-driven businesses, investing in solutions across agriculture, sustainable materials (like leather made from food waste), and more. That includes BurnBot, a startup that is mitigating wildfire risk with automated machines to carry out prescribed burns, for which ReGen led the $20 million Series A funding round in April 2024. Or Aigen, a fleet of solar-powered weeding robots that eliminates the need for harmful herbicides. ReGen led its $12 million Series A in 2023. Rose has delivered economic outcomes as good as anyonebillions in sales, exponential growth, category-leading profitability . . . and built generational brands that stand for things that everyone else shies away from, says Dan Fitzgerald, managing partner and founder of ReGen. Even at Patagonia, though, Marcario was thinking beyond apparel. She cofounded the Regenerative Organic Alliance, a program to certify growers on the most climate-friendly agricultural practices, and spearheaded the formation of Patagonia Provisions, the clothing companys sustainable food arm. Those efforts speak to Marcarios ability to be on the forefront of innovation, says Robyn O’Brien, a food and climate expert who consulted with Marcario when she was first conceptualizing Patagonia Provisions. In any industry, there’s always the tip of the sphere, the early adopters, the early whistleblowers. And she’s just consistently been that, says O’Brien. Supporting an array of purpose-driven entrepreneurs plays to Marcarios strengths. She possesses the rare ability to seereally seeand empower individuals, says Birgit Cameron, cofounder and former head of Patagonia Provisions. By working outside of Patagonia, Marcario can take her bold way of thinking and ripple it out to other companies and industries, Cameron adds. That was Marcarios goal. I left Patagonia primarily because I felt like I had more to offer the world, she says. Selling outdoor clothing at a time when our planetary crisis is so dire did not feel like the best utilization of my time and my skills. Focusing on entrepreneurship that is based on regenerating the planet, and creating a regenerative future, to me felt like a much more positive and impactful way to spend this next season of my career. A regenerative future means building an economy based on businesses and technologies that restore ecosystems and planetary resources, rather than just depleting them. We have to base our economic activity in the coming decades not on doing less damage, but on an economy that actively heals, she says. At the beginning of 2025, Marcario penned an op-ed in Time about the importance of this way of doing business. Our current destructive economic model is running out of runway, she wrote. That sounds alarming, and it is: The world is warming at record levels, and as the planet heats up, economic performance goes down. Every 1 degree Celsius that the Earth’s temperature increases can be linked to a 12% drop in global GDP. The Trump administration is exacerbating this crisis. The president has once again pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, decimated millions in climate research, weakened environmental protections, and has given industrial companies free rein to pollute. Hes also launched attacks against DEI programs, causing some companies to back away from their commitments to inclusion and diversity, including their support for LGBTQ+ rights. Marcario isnt shrinking in the face of those challenges. Its so important, as an LGBTQ person, to be out, to be visible, to support especially our trans community that is being used as a political tool right now in such a negative way, she says. It becomes even more necessary to double down and to show courage and leadership. Despite these challenges, she says shes still hopeful about the future, especially when she looks at ReGens portfolio. Along with BurnBot and Aigen, ReGen has invested in Arkeon, which turns CO2 into proteins; Banyu Carbon, which sequesters carbon dioxide from seawater; and Ulysses, which uses robots to restore seagrass; among other companies. These are all solutions that are about making the world better and more livable for everybody, Marcario says. [These companies are] not spending time debating whether inclusivity and diversity is a good thing. They know it, and they’re moving forward. Shes also excited to be working with chef Dan Barber who started Row 7 Seed Company, which has recently been rolling out its new non-GMO breeds of produce at Whole Foods, and shes looking forward to the debut of Rivians R2 electric truck, set to begin production in the first half of 2026. Marcario is supporting all these innovations because she doesnt change her values based on how the political winds are blowing. She advises other business leaders who want to have a long-lasting impact to do the same. Cultivate your courage, dont obey in advance, trust that customers will vote with their dollars and reward your commitments to your long-term values, she says. The brands of long-term views, strong identities and followership, they don’t equivocate.
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E-Commerce
Morgan Lombardi, Keurigs senior director of product management, believes pod coffee makers have become too big, too mechanical, and maybe even a little bit ugly. Weve seen that coffee makers, including our own, have started to feel more and more like a machine, she says. They are also getting increasingly bigger while kitchens are getting progressively smaller. Which is why Keurig is introducing the K-Mini Mate, a 4-inch-wide brewer that costs $79.99 and launches exclusively at Target starting June 29.After seven years watching consumer behavior at Keurig, Lombardi tells me she observed that people were starting to view their morning brew routine as an obligation rather than a moment of pleasure. Her team discovered that consumers wanted their morning coffee ritual to feel like this wonderful little momentrather than a mechanical click-CLACK! chore. The coffee maker needed to be gentler to the eye and to the touch, and it also needed to be much smaller. Both were hard challenges, she says, because the current puncturing mechanisms for Keurigs brewers are too unwieldy to allow for a subtler, smaller design.[Photo: Keurig]The space problem drives everythingKitchen real estate drives modern appliance design decisions. Nobodys kitchen is getting any bigger, Lombardi explains. Yet, coffee makers remain essential equipment to turn on human brains in the morning, and they need to be there 24/7not taken out of a cabinet. They require permanent positioning, she says, creating a design constraint that forces manufacturers to think smaller.The most significant technical challenge to achieve the smaller footprint involved redesigning what Keurig calls the puncture mechanism. Standard Keurig brewers use a mechanical crunching motion to pierce K-Cup pods; a big handle pushes down to move the array of needles that open holes in that pod. If you have ever used a Keurig machine, it feels a little like pushing down the handle to turn off the Death Star. The standard Keurig mechanism feels like you are crunching something inside, Lombardi says.[Photo: Keurig]To enable the smaller brewer size, the puncturing mechanism needed to be much shorter: The space between the brewer mechanism and the bottom of the brewer needed to be able to fit a travel mug [around 7 inches], she says.[Photo: Keurig]They managed to reengineer the mechanism and change its position, which allowed them to get rid of the crunching handle and turn it into a flat surface that matches the cylindrical shape of its front. The new mechanism doesnt give you the same hard resistance as the previous one, which allowed Keurig to use soft-spring open and closing. She thinks that this alone creates a feeling thats more human, making the act of making coffee more like a soft handshake and less like destroying coffee pods inside a plastic crunching machine.[Photo: Keurig]A new design languageThe resulting machine is much more attractive. The design language features softer radius curves compared with Keurigs standard angular aesthetic. The brewer uses rubberized touchpoints alongside ABS plastic construction to make it feel softer to the touch, too. A small rubberized tab on the top helps you to take the water deposit out, requiring just a finger to easily remove the top. The water reservoir also sits flat on counters without tipping over, like a water jar.[Photos: Keurig]The resultavailable in black, red, and greenis a machine that brews up to 12 ounces of coffee and is about 33% smaller than Keurigs previous smallest model. One that, perhaps more importantly, doesnt look like your great aunts brewer from yesteryear, but like a modern piece of design.The companys research revealed that younger consumers entering the coffee-maker market prioritize simplicity and visual appeal over advanced features. Generation Z buyers need coffee makers for college or first apartments, but they dont have strong preferences about brewing functionality.[Photo: Keurig]According to Lombardi, consumer response has been great during testing. From initial foam prototypes through in-home use studies, people fell in love with this productand theyre saying, you know, its small. I havent seen anything like this. Its just really cute. When can I have it?She also tells me that the K-Mini Mate represents the first product in what will become Keurigs new visual brand language across its entire lineup. Keurig updates its visual brand language every five years to match shifting consumer preferences, she points out. Future models will incorporate similar aesthetic principles while adding features like larger water tanks. So, thats definitely good news for Keurig fans everywhere.
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E-Commerce
How often do you leave work thinking, Wow, that was fun! Once a week? Once a month? Never? If you arent having funreal funit may be time to rethink your work life, says Bree Groff, author of Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously). The idea that work needed to be fun didnt hit home for Groff until her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2022. She took a leave of absence from her job at a New York-based transformation consulting firm to care for her and her father, who had Alzheimers disease. After her mother passed away, she went back to work part time with a new perspective. One of the things that became obvious while taking care of my parents is that at some point, well run out of Mondays, she says. They aren’t a renewable resource. So, what are we doing to our lives when we’re wishing away five out of seven days of every week? A common attitude is that work is called work for a reason; its something to get through to get a paycheck. The flip side is: Love what you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life. This phrase suggests that the solution to work being drudgery is that it should be your passion and your identity. That notion also didn’t sit right with Groff. Many of the leaders shed worked with were pouring themselves into their work, but they were also sacrificing their health, sleep, and relationships, hoping for a reward that would come someday in the future. It seemed to me that the answer was somewhere in the middle, Groff says. Every day that I spend at work comes out of the finite bank of days that I have on the planet. What would it take to have fun today? If youre not having fun, Groff offers two places to start. Micro Acts of Mischief Too often, people feel they need to be their most buttoned-up, professional, palatable versions of themselves at work. But once we put on a business mask, we stifle all of our vitality, play, and joy, Groff says. Instead, introduce micro acts of mischief into the day. These are moments of diversion to the work culture or routine. If you have to adhere to a dress code, for example, wear some ridiculous socks. Or add a joke or ridiculous font to a presentation deck. Or literally mix things up, she suggests. One day we rearranged the office furniture, pulling comfy chairs over, so we could all hang out a little bit better, Groff says. The facilities team wasnt pleased with us, but it felt a little mischievous, sneaky, and fun in a way that made our team chuckle. Micro Acts of Connections You can also cultivate fun through micro acts of connections, including camaraderie and self-expression. Groff recommends sending a coworker a direct message or email, expressing appreciation for something they did. You can also ask a colleague to grab coffee. Make it light, she says. The idea is to gain a sense of the people you’re working with, knowing a little bit about their lives outside of work. Where do they live? Do they have a pet? Its getting to know them as a human and not just about the work at hand. Also, look for places to show your personality by putting your own stamp on your work. This isn’t just for creative marketing professionals, Groff says. A barista at a coffee shop can make latte art. Or a project manager can make a brilliant project timeline. How can you put your stamp on your work? Connection and self-expression humanize the workplace, Groff says. We should like the people that we’re spending our days with. Sometimes, we’re spending more time with our colleagues than our families or significant others.” Are We Having Fun Yet? Groff says you can usually tell if you’re having fun, and you can always tell if you’re not. It’s almost childlike in its sensibility. I define fun as a sense of play, experimentation, and vitality. My metric for the day is: How many minutes have I spent laughing? Dont confuse fun-looking workplaces with fun work, Groff adds. Theres a difference between thinking of fun as icing on the work cake, or fun as being the cake itself, she says. If we look at fun as the icing, thats where Ping-Pong tables or happy hour get a bad rap. You cannot fill your days with Ping-Pong and happy hour, or nothing gets done. Id also argue that is a superficial sliver of fun. Having fun at work is using your skills in a way that makes you feel good because you contributed and made an impact on customers, clients, or other parts of the organization. While there is a business argument for having more fun at work, such as increased productivity and performance, the existential argument is much stronger. If I’m a manager, I don’t want to end my career thinking, I really extracted every last hour from that employee or I made them perform better for the business, Groff says. I want to make sure that these humans have made good use of their days on the planet. That they’ve gotten to contribute joyfully and profoundly.
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E-Commerce
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