• Owala is exploding in popularity as Gen Z’s new favorite water bottle, with the company transforming from a family business to a social media sensenation.

Next time you’re at the gym, airport, or just walking down the street—take a close look at the water bottles people are carrying. You may easily recognize the long-popular Stanley cups or Hydroflasks, but the longer you gaze, you may notice dozens of multi-color bottles taking Gen Zers and Millennials by storm: the Owala.

The company has skyrocketed in popularity thanks to viral TikTok posts, a loyal fanbase, and strategic partnerships with major retailers. Each bottle comes in five different curated color shades and can be found lining the shelves of Target, Whole Foods, Dick’s Sporting Goods and more.    

Viral color drops, like the “Bowala”—an Urban Outfitters exclusive—have created demand on resale sites so high that fans pay over $100 for a bottle. Owala has also landed coveted branding deals with Disney (including Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney Princesses), NASA, Joanna Gaines, the San Diego Zoo, and more. Collectively, this marketing success has helped propel Owala to be the bottle of choice for thousands of Gen Zers.

But for many consumers, Owalas are more than just another water bottle, they’re a way to be seen, express personality, and even an emotional crutch.

More than just another water bottle–they’re emotional support

While the pandemic was a dark spot for many Americans, Owala saw almost immediate success. Michael Sorensen, CEO of Trove Brands—Owala’s parent company—says it is because the bottles became a source of positivity during a bleak time. 

“We all know how dark things got during those several years, and so I think Owala coming on scene as a bright spot and as a little bucket of joy, I think actually really helped a lot,” Sorensen tells Fortune. 

While most families sat at home in lockdowns, videos of nurses loving their FreeSip bottle helped the brand explode. They tapped into this with clever social media tactics like sharing the company’s tagline of being just for “the people who need to drink water” and emphasizing the mental well-being benefits of having a water bottle that matches your personality.

Owala’s true explosion came with users finding emotional solace in their bottles. 

“@Owala will forever be my fave emotional support bottle with how cute their designs are and how well it keeps me hydrated,” posted one user on TikTok. Another video, just of an influencer unveiling her new bottle, has garnered over 400k views. “It’s my child,” wrote another user. 

Collectively, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of Gen Z women in particular who have taken to platforms like TikTok to express that despite all the turmoil and stress in the world, their new water bottle will always stay by their side.

Using FOMO to build an Owala empire

In 2021, the company started doing giveaways on its website—dishing out free water bottles to the first 5,000 customers who could make it through checkout. Since then, the company has launched a website scavenger hunt to similarly give out free bottles and heavy discounts—and it’s translated into lasting customer engagement..

That’s how Susie So first stumbled on Owala. After receiving her bottle, she fell in love—so much so that she founded a Reddit community, which now has over 22,000 members. Every day, fans turn to the platform as a place to show off their latest finds, covet their wish list, and even try to purchase rare bottles. 

Owala has mastered the art of exclusivity to fuel demand and grow its fanbase. With every new bottle color drop—there have been hundreds released so far—only a limited batch hits the shelves, turning each launch into a race to buy before they sell out.

“They do a really good marketing strategy of creating FOMO (fear of missing out), so, it sells out pretty much within less than an hour of the drop. Once that happens, the aftermarket picks up,” says So, a mom of two who serves as the sole moderator of r/Owala.

Avoiding becoming just another trend is the number one hot-button internal topic, Sorensen says, acknowledging that there is not necessarily a shortage of water bottle options out there.

“When we look at the hydration market, we acknowledge a lot of other brands that are already in here, and they’re doing well, and they’ve got a loyal following. We’re not going to try to just be them again,” Sorensen admits.

What’s different, he says, is Owala’s ability to bring excitement for something as mundane as water drinking.  

“We hear from people over and over and over again: ‘So I was skeptic. It’s a water bottle, and then I take a sip and like, I’m enlightened,’” he says.

Owala’s overnight success was seven years in the making

Owala’s parent company, Trove Brands, was founded close to 25 years ago by Sorensen’s parents, Kim and Steve Sorensen in their Utah living room—where they invented the now widely popular BlenderBottle (used to make protein shakes). Since then, the company has expanded to six different brands. But just because his bosses are mom and dad, it doesn’t mean he has an easy ride of running Owala.

His parents’ philosophy on employing family is: they’ll give you a job in the warehouse, but otherwise you had to prove yourself worthy.

“They were always deliberate about having us report to non-family members and giving us a chance to sink or swim,” Sorensen says. “And that’s something that was important to me: making sure I felt like I was earning improving, not just being handed everything.”

During his studies at Brigham Young University, Michael joined the company as a marketing assistant, and as he describes it, threw some ideas around and worked his way up. His 10-year journey to vice president of marketing included many mistakes, but he says it helped him develop as a leader who deeply cares about a product from start to finish.

What’s important to remember, he says, is that Owala was not an overnight success.

The first attempt at launching the FreeSip water bottle largely failed, he admits, because they tried to put it under the BlenderBottle brand—and consumers didn’t know their bottle wasn’t necessary for blending. Instead, they learned from their mistakes and tried again: “Ultimately, we pulled it back off the market, and we said, we’ve got to build this the right way,” Sorsensen says.

“It took seven years to get the FreeSip bottle design to the point that it is today because we are obsessed about the user experience,” he adds. “We’re obsessed about quality. We’re obsessed about making things easy to clean.”

His advice for other entrepreneurs looking to successfully bring a product to market, even after a rocky start?

“There’s always an element of luck,” he says—but it’s persistence that turns luck into results.

“If you’re willing to put in the 80-hour work weeks. If you’re willing to eat, sleep, drink, breathe, your idea and your product, and you’re going to get out there and you’re willing to keep pushing through the failures, you’re going to be successful.”

Owala declined to share any financial details of their company.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

He really means it. Until a week or two ago, President Donald Trump’s conflicting statements left open a strong possibility that the leader of the free world was threatening sweeping tariffs as a cudgel to extract better terms from exporters, as well as succeed in pushing Canada and Mexico to curb the smuggling of lethal drugs across our borders, and that he wouldn’t unleash a trade war if he got all or even part of what he wanted. Now, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the president is determined to do exactly what friendly governments and consumers and businesses from New York to Sydney feared but didn’t really believe could happen in this day and age: reverse decades of global free trade, and build another “wall,” not the barrier along the Mexican border, but a protectionist barricade around America that repels even our closest allies and trading partners. That realization has sent stocks skidding. Following a peak of Trumpian euphoria reached in mid-February, the S&P 500 has tumbled 11% into correction territory as of market close on March 13, while the Nasdaq Composite has tumbled 16%.

Trump’s stated plan all along: impose tariffs of never-before-witnessed weight, mostly at 25%, on most if not virtually all imports from our four largest trading partners, China, the EU, Mexico, and Canada. It’s been a start-stop-reverse process. But now, Trump’s actions are matching his fiery rhetoric. Trump got going in early March by doubling import duties on China from 10% to 20%. In early March, he hit a broad range of products from Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs. At the same time, he partially retreated by granting a one-month reprieve on one-third of exports from the Great White North and one-half from our southern neighbor covered by the USMCA free trade agreement he himself had negotiated in late 2018. A call to the Oval Office placed by CEOs of the Big Three automakers won them a comparable 30-day reprieve for cars and parts from Canada and Mexico. Now he’s targeting global steel and aluminum, EU textiles, apparel, and agricultural products, and sundry other categories for future tariffs.

Trump’s targets are already firing back. So far, the EU, Canada, and China have announced $100 billion in new tariffs on U.S. imports to counter Trump’s offensive. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum blasted the steel and aluminum levies as “offensive, defamatory, and without support” and vowed to unveil tough countermeasures shortly. Asked by reporters if he’d reconsider the tariff wave planned for April 2, Trump responded, “We’re not going to bend at all.”

Since World War II, America’s never remotely hit this many countries with tariffs this high. The experiment is all so new that even approximating the impact on things like GDP and employment is difficult. But according to the world’s past experience with even much more modest protectionist measures, the overall course is predictable—and amounts to a radical wrong turn.

Tariffs explained—and why Trump loves them

To grasp why Trump’s the first postwar president to embrace big tariffs at all, let alone as a central economic strategy, it’s critical to understand his worldview. For this self-proclaimed master of the deal, the overriding force restraining U.S. prosperity is the imbalance between the goods we make and consume stateside or send oversees, and everything else we buy from abroad. Put simply, Trump is haunted by our “trade deficit” for goods.

In Trump’s telling, our trading partners rig the system to maximize sales in their home markets for products made within their borders, and minimize competition from our exports. In the contest, we’re like tennis players forced to start every game down love-30. Meanwhile, says Trump, past leaders have left the U.S. naively open territory to the inflow of goods produced in Shanghai, Ontario, or Monterrey that grab sales from the cars and steel produced in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Trump regards the gulf between the dollars we’re dispensing for imports, and the lesser euros, yuan, and pesos we’re collecting on exports, as a deadweight that severely restrains GDP growth, shutters plants, and kills jobs.  

His solution for shrinking that gap: the big tariffs that render goods from abroad much more expensive within our borders, digging a protective moat that encourages the stateside construction of factories for the likes of chips and autos—industries where U.S.-based players now struggle in outdueling cheaper versions made in China or Canada. Trump seeks to build a new paradigm where the U.S. manufactures a huge share of the products we now import, right in the U.S.A., notably across the industrial heartland. That way, our consumers and businesses would be sending hundreds of billions less of our dollars abroad to buy foreign-made goods, and spending the greenbacks here at home, sparking a boom in factory-building and a renaissance in American manufacturing. That dynamic would lower or eliminate that chasm between the immense dollars flowing out and the relatively piddling foreign currency coming in that so favors commercial counterparts and for Trump, represents America’s overriding economic problem. For the president, fixing that shortfall in trade represents the nation’s biggest opportunity for revival.

Trump doesn’t actually use the words “U.S. trade deficit” in his speeches or interviews. This macro, wonky term mainly appears in his policy papers, where his economic team vilifies the overall “trade deficit” and extolls the necessity of shrinking it. Instead, the president keeps pounding on how our import-export gaps with individual nations are victimizing the U.S. Those numbers prove that all our major trading partners are fleecing us, Trump insists. As he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on March 9, the U.S. “has been ripped off from every nation in the world, every company outside in the world.”

To hammer home that point, Trump cites highly exaggerated numbers for the deficits with the four giants we do the most business with, again suggesting that these overstated gorges represent losses for the U.S. and bounty for the invaders. At the World Economic Forum in January, Trump declared that the U.S. has a “$200 billion or $250 billion” deficit with Canada, and that our northern cousin “wouldn’t be a viable country” benefiting from their surplus achieved at our expense. “We have a deficit with Mexico of $350 billion,” he declared in February on Fox News. At a cabinet meeting on Feb. 27, Trump told reporters, “The EU has really taken advantage of us … We have about a $300 billion deficit with the EU.” Also last month, he alleged on Fox News Radio that the U.S. faces a canyon in China’s favor “like we’ve never seen before” of “over $1 trillion.”  Add it all up, and Trump is maintaining that the U.S. is suffering big-time from a $2 trillion trade deficit with the Big Four alone.

Those numbers aren’t even close. The true figures for Canada and Mexico are roughly one-third and half of what Trump claims, and his total for those four leading exporters to the U.S. is actually $709 billion, around one-third of Trump’s “rip-off” sum. (Our total deficit in goods was $971 billion, less than half what Trump claims for the Big Four alone.) The deficit with China hasn’t reached new highs at all, and is in fact going the other way: It’s shrunk by 40% in the past six years. Nevertheless, our divergence between imports and exports is huge and growing. The shortfall in goods expanded from $846 billion in 2019 to $1.2 trillion last year, and in January broke an all-time monthly record, vaulting to $156 billion.

The real issue is whether these deficits represent the near-crisis, and opportunity for repair so rich it merits “disruption,” that Trump’s advertising, or that the willingness of foreigners to finance our lavish government and consumer spending may be a good thing.

Why economists by and large despise tariffs

In the opinion of all the noted economists I interviewed for this story, and the extensive studies dedicated to the past impact of tariffs—the Trump 2018–19 version provides an informative case study—the president’s template will do nothing to achieve its goal of narrowing the gorge between America’s imports and exports. “It’s not clear why a trade deficit’s a problem in the first place, because nations are reinvesting the dollars we send them right back in the U.S.,” says economist John Cochrane of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “Canada and Mexico have placed big bets on integrating with the U.S. It’s not great economic policy to hit them with tariffs and insult them at the same time we’re trying to convince them to cut imports from China.”

Adds Andrew K. Rose, former dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and now dean of the NUS Business School in Singapore, as well as coauthor of a detailed study on tariffs: “Overall, Trump’s tariff policy is a disaster. Just look at the uncertainty alone. No one benefits from that, it just delays investment, and that’s unambiguously bad.” In seeking to enrich this nation, notes Rose, it’s the worst of trades “to go after your top allies in trade.”  

Perhaps the best summary comes from Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University. “You can’t win a trade war,” he says. “Starting one, as Trump is doing, only ensures that both sides lose.”

It’s hard to estimate the potential damage to the U.S. economy for two basic reasons. First, though Trump’s stance is hardening, it’s impossible to predict how much of his current plan he’ll scuttle if he wins big concessions on trade, or if the impact is so crushing and the public and business backlash so strong that he decides to switch course. Second, we have absolutely no precedent for tariffs the size that Trump’s proposing. Still, studies suggest that even if Trump enacts portions of his agenda, the blow to U.S. prosperity will prove severe.

The mind-spinning part is that we’ve never seen an increase this big, in almost 100 years of U.S. history. The Smoot-Hawley tariff program of 1930, widely branded as a major force in deepening and perpetuating the Great Depression, hiked the levies on U.S. imports much less than the breathtaking wallop promised under the Trump plan. That law lifted rates just over five points, from 13.5% to 19.5%. Trump’s crusade would beat Smoot-Hawley twofold.

In the Middle Ages, cartographers tagged untamed, treacherous, unexplored territory by the slogan, “Here lie dragons.” Donald Trump will be dueling dragons soon, and his best move would be one he’s good at, declare victory, lower his broadsword, and retreat.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In an automotive market that is rethinking the speed of electrification, BMW has renewed its backing of its EV strategy during the release of its full 2024 group report. However, with a significant drop in revenue compared to 2023—the last year has clearly been a tough one.

The BMW Group’s 2024 profits before tax were €10.971 billion, a fall of 35.8% over 2023. This was driven by a fall in automotive revenues of 5.6% to €124.917 billion. Eliminations (transactions between subsidiaries) also rose 49.9% to €24.333 billion.

Although BMW’s sales of electric vehicles have been flying in Europe, and even overtook Tesla’s in July 2024, shipments have not fared so well in China. The company’s combined sales of BMW and MINI cars in China fell 13.4% to 714,500 units, despite the overall Chinese market for passenger cars increasing by 23.1%. This has been attributed to much stiffer competition from domestic Chinese domestic brands.

Overall, BMW Group saw a 4% fall in automotive deliveries, with the biggest drop in its MINI brand of 17%, while Rolls-Royce shipments were down 5% and BMW’s down 2%. The company has stated that it is expecting further negative impacts in 2025 from the growing implementation of tariffs. Those levied so far have been included in its forecast of an earnings margin from 5 to 7% in 2025.

Despite the challenging 2024 and 2025 outlook, BMW Chairman Oliver Zipse was optimistic about the group’s future in his presentation of the 2024 report. A lot of this revolves around the company’s Neue Klasse strategy, a radical rethink of the brand’s designs, platforms and drivetrain focus revolving around sustainability, a key focus for BMW. The name harks back to the BMW Neue Klasse of the 1960s, which revived the company’s fortunes.

Most automakers agree that battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are the future. However, the pace of change has come into question amid the economic difficulties of the last few years. BMW has navigated these challenges more effectively than some automakers. While the company now has BEV offerings across most of its range, it has continued to produce most of these on platforms shared with vehicles powered by internal combustion, enabling an easier match between supply and demand.

Neue Klasse refocuses on BEVs primarily, but BMW still isn’t putting all its eggs in the electric basket. The company plans to develop internal combustion engine vehicles and hybrids for some markets, depending on customer demand. BMW is keeping its options open and is still promising a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in 2028. The company has been road testing a hydrogen-powered version of its X5 SUV since 2023.

BMW committed to the Neue Klasse in 2020 during the pandemic, a bold move for such uncertain times. It’s certainly putting money into the strategy. In 2024, BMW invested €9 billion in research and development and €11.8 billion in capital expenditure. Not all of this has gone into electrification, with some going into digital transformation and production facility development.

The first Neue Klasse car will be arriving this year, in the same category as the popular X5 and iX SUVs (which BMW calls Sports Activity Vehicles). Initially, this will be built in modernized plant in Debrecen, Hungary. The SAV will be followed quickly by a sedan in the BMW 3-series segment, built in Munich, and then four more new models within two years of the start of production. Neue Klasse cars will also be manufactured in Shenyang, China, and a brand-new plant in San Luis Potosí from 2027.

Although 2024 was a challenging year for BMW, and the turbulent tariff-led start to 2025 has sent shocks through automotive supply chains, the company is still looking towards a positive future with its Neue Klasse BEVs taking an increasingly important role.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com