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Dairy is having a moment. Influencers on social media are drinking raw milk, consumers are going back to cows milk, and Republicans are pushing for whole milks return to school cafeterias. But, while the plant-based milk world might appear in the rearview mirror, Oatly is leaning into coffee cultureand making some truly bizarre ads in the process. As part of a recent campaign called Blind Love, Oatly invited consumers to blind test whole milk and Oatly in coffee in a bizarre how-to video. In the accompanying ad, voiced by SNL alum Chris Parnell, the brand spoofed typical American pharmaceutical commercials, and presents a made up condition dubbed DOMP (Dormant Oatmilk Preference), to help viewers to diagnose themselves and discover their oat milk preference in coffee. Oatly knows what it is doing. Studies show that Gen-Z is more responsive to absurd tactics, and 72% of Gen Zers and millennials prefer humorous ads. It comes to no surprise then that oddball advertising is becoming increasingly common for Oatly (and other brands, too). Nutter Butter fills its TikTok with obscure brain rot content; Duolingos owl faked his own death; and Wendys irreverent comments have started a feud with Katy Perry. Yes, advertising is stranger than ever, but it’s effective. We always do it in a strange way, executive creative director at Oatly Michael Lee says. Late last year, the brand hired 31 professional Santas for a taste test switching milk and cookies with oat milk and croquembouche. Before that, another campaign featured “auditions” for an Oatly cooking show (spoiler: the casting tapes were the show). Oatly is very much in on the joke: on its website, the advertisement tab reads brainwashing. The ad campaigns track with Oatlys marketing evolution. While the Swedish brand was born in 1994 targeting those with dairy allergies, it wasnt until 2013 when they shifted strategies to appeal to wider audiences, including a major redesign. The brand originally boasted muted packaging, but opted for a more rebellious rebrand as it entered the American market. Now Oatlys carton, covered with playful typography and quotes like wow no cow, and its like milk but made for humans, is a staple in grocery store aisles and coffee shops. We had a very solid mission to convert dairy drinkers to plant based. But we were also human about it, and we had fun with it, Lee says. We did a lot of stuff that was very provocative that other brands wouldn’t have done, and so we had this kind of fearless, kind of punk quality. [Photo: Oatly] The plant-based revolution is declining Just a few years ago, almond and oat lattes dominated orders, and recently more niche plant-based alternatives like pistachio milk have peaked consumers interest, yet there is no denying alt-milk is taking a hit. From 2023 to 2024, whole milk saw a 1.6% increase in sales, while plant-based milks sales declined by 4.4%. For Oatly, its first quarter financial report revealed a 0.8% revenue decline compared to the same period the year prior, although it still expects to meet its first full year of profitable growth. While consumers with dietary restrictions will remain loyal to nondairy products, most of the time, picking between whole milk and alt-milk is a choice. The plant based group is really kind of a story of overlap, Darren Seifer, executive director and industry advisor for consumer goods and food service at Circana, says. 90% of [alt-milk users] are also using traditional dairy items. Like the perfect storm that allowed alt-milks to boom in the first place, a similar one is brewing elevating whole milk to cult status. Buzzwords like high protein, low-sugar, and gut healthy can be naturally occurring features in dairy, making it an attractive choice for users. We’ve seen so far in the last year in traditional dairy, there’s been a strong emphasis around health claims, Seifer says. Aligning with the health trends that we see popping up, that’s been helping to drive some of its growth. And again, because there is an overlap among those who use plant based it feels like it’s drawing them away from it. Additionally, financial factors like the higher price of alt-milk at a time of economic uncertainty might also be driving consumers away, Seifer explained, and cultural trends are also at play. We started to see people tell us that they’re trying to get away from artificiality again, Seifer says. From the rise of tradwives, Make America Healthy Again, and a disdain for oils, many consumers are now opting away from ultra-processed foods, artificial colors and sweeteners, and more. Define that as you wish, but that’s just the terminology that was thrown out there, he adds. And they might look at something like almond milk and say, well, that doesn’t occur naturally, so it’s processed. [Photo: Oatly] Brewing culture In the midst of shifting trends, Oatly is doubling down on humor and culture. Specifically, it’s tapping into coffee culture and baristas’ expertise, going where consumers might first meet their product: in a coffee shop. We want it to be easy for people to engage with us. So it has to be fun, it has to be cool. It has to be part of culture. So, coffee kind of plays that role for us, Lee says. Traveling from New York and Chicago, to London and Berlin, the over 60 baristas on staff spend time at coffee shops around the world, informing Oatly not only where culture is going, but how coffee fits into the mix. Every barista is not just a barista. They are tattoo artists. They’re in a band, they’re artists, they’re designers. And so that was a perfect way for us to follow coffee into culture, Lee added. Coffee culture is moving into fashion. It’s moving into nightlife. It’s moving into music. And since we have such a strong relationship with coffee, there’s kind of a license for our brand to do that. Leveraging the intersection of fashion and coffee, the brand recently released a global lookbook, presenting various summer recipes like an Ube matcha latte and a cherry bakewell dirty soda recipe, both featuring colorful editorial visuals. The company has been around for 30 years, and from our perspective, trends come and go, Lee added. We’re staying the course.
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E-Commerce
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Theres a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many namesembodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadershipbut the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership. At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldnt prefer a leader whos self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air. But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideologyone that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation. The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectivenesswho believe that if they feel right, they must be right. Its not just anti-rational; its anti-leadership. From Competence to Vibes At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the “15 Commitments”a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence. But its not the principles that are the problem, its their embodiment conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life. Take the idea of the whole-body yes. It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it’s an epistemic disaster. The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesnt feel rightin your gutits probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldnt do it. Or worse, you shouldnt have to do it. On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say no. Every debate becomes an attack on your authentic self. In other words: if you dont want to do something, your subconscious probably knows its ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue. An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. Its confusing righteousness with rightness, and its a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts. Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms. Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulatingretroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. Thats the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation. Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circlesthose stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution. These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They dont carry payroll. They dont answer to shareholders. They dont navigate hostile markets. Theyre not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good. In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership. The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesnt evolve leadershipit regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal knowing. In ancient traditionsfrom Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicismtrue wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance. In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making. In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions. In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch. In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct. Intuitions may point to the source of whats most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts. Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your truth, and act accordingly. This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom. Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone: The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movements epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone. I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piecefinally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, theyll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: Maybe Conscious Leadership doesnt apply so well in a military context, where you cant pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier. Or: Maybe your whole-body yes should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence. But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to do the work. Hres the tone: If you dont resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, its not because the framework might be flawed. Its because you arent ready. You havent evolved enough. Youre still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns. This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance. What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. Its a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model. The Real Danger: Corporate Adoption Without Accountability Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn’t its spread in coaching circlesbut its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership. This trend is more than aesthetic. Its structural. We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of staying above the line. Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response. But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already made it. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model ambition, competency-building, and hard-work that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place. In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears. For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously led are happy to pay lip-service to their leaders fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization. The disconnectbetween leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of businesssimply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions. What Leadership Actually Requires Real leadership doesnt require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming run. And above all, it means holding power not as self-expressionbut as responsibility. Leadership isnt about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. Its about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system. That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds. Heres another unsexy fact of life and businessthe best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family membersand that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms. Thats why Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called conscious leaders dont realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they havent reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals. Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They dont want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss. Theyd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, youre in a crappy business situation. This isnt a revelation worthy of a book. Conscious Leadership isnt wrong. Its just incomplete. And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model. Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need themthe type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won. After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitmentsindividual responsibility, curiosity, integrityought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy havent been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatorynot because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there. Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesnt need to be declaredits lived. So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with in the spirit of conscious leadership, then I suggest you turn tail and run.
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E-Commerce
From fantastical worlds to personalized Ghibli-esque portraits, social media is flooded with AI-generated images that were created by merely a prompt. But what may be a fun tool for the average user has become an existential threat for graphic design. And yet, surprisingly, graphic design jobs dont seem to be getting eliminatedyet. By analyzing job posting data between fall/winter 2023-2024 and fall/winter 2024-2025, Fast Company found that the number of job listings for graphic designers stayed flat, despite worries about AI platforms eliminating these particular jobs. There just haven’t been very many graphic-design based AI generators yet, says Daniel Lefcourt, visual artist and professor of art and computation at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); Since 2018, Lefcourt has used AI models in various courses, and for the past four years he has taught Generative Systems, a course that explores how to use generative technology in the design process. The class uses Invoke, a 2-year-old generative AI platform, and Runway. Only now are we seeing Figma and Adobe Illustrator starting to generate designs, and that’s pretty recent, he added. Before that, the tech wasn’t there yet to shift the design field in the same way. The element of trust While AI platforms such as DALL-E and Midjourney can generate overly produced fantasy-like images, it struggles with basic graphic design concepts like typography and uniformity. If you’re using a tool that can’t give you consistent results, that makes it challenging to embrace like a standard tool, says Elliott Romano, who is pursuing an MFA in graphic design at RISD. Romano spent 10 years as a digital product designer at cultural institutions, hardware startups, and enterprise software companies before deciding to be more of a generalist than a specialist when it comes to visual communication. He now explores the creative application of generative tools. I’ll be shocked if, as these things get better, they dont become a replacement of sorts, he says. I see the graphic designer becoming more of a creative director, and being able to come in and move things around. AI is “designed to hit the lowest common denominator” Jody Poole, a digital graphic designer who has spent the past 25 years working on campaigns for brands such as Coca-Cola, Comcast, and Kelloggs, recently shared on Reddit an experience hed had involving AI. He was completing a timed test that had been part of the application for a senior position at a marketing company. The design section of the test, he recalled, included questions like: The client wants you to design this promotional poster, but instead of coffee they want raspberry lemonade. What AI prompts would you use to design this? I was stunned, he said on Reddit. No thought to typography or colour theory or visual hierarchy. Just give us the prompts and let AI do the rest. Still, Poole recognizes that AI might be valuable for the design industry one day, particularly when it comes to translating and adapting a human-made design to reach wider and diverse audiences. There is a tidal wave of change that is happening within technology, and you either have to get out the surfboard and ride the wave, or you’re going to drown, he tells Fast Company. The change might even come with an upside, he explains, likening AI-design with fast fashion, which had the effect of making bespoke designs highly prized. AI is designed to hit the lowest common denominator, Poole says If you can rise above that, even a little bit, you become a unique, valuable talent out there. Lefcourt, for his part, isnt too worried for graphic designers, either. What these tools are doing is shifting us into an entirely new realm of visual culture, he says. To be a trained artist, to understand how images work, and how images are created, from the Renaissance to now, actually positions you pretty well for this new world that we’re entering into. This article is part of Fast Company’s continuing coverage of where the design jobs are, including this year’s comprehensive analysis of 170,000 job listings
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