What companies like Michelin, Google, Patagonia, Spotify, Zillow, Stanley, and Amazon reveal about how enduring brands are built.
Over the last few months, I’ve been collecting stories about companies that have built enduring brands to answer a simple question:
Why do some companies become enduring brands while others quietly fade away?
If you’re building a company, launching a product, shaping a brand, or simply curious about why some businesses endure while others fade, I hope this essay gives you a different way to think about them.
At first, I looked at each company on its own. Michelin, Spotify, Patagonia, Zillow, LEGO, Liquid Death, Stanley, Instagram, and many others all seemed to have completely different stories.
As those stories accumulated, something unexpected began to emerge. Companies separated by decades, industries, and customers kept arriving at remarkably similar ways of solving human problems.
A single story can explain one company’s success. Looking across many stories begins to explain why similar ideas continue to appear across products, industries, and generations.
Creating Value Beyond the Transaction
The first pattern I noticed was about relationships.
Most businesses naturally focus on the moment a customer buys their product. Looking across these companies, I kept finding leaders who thought just as carefully about what happened after that moment.
Spotify Wrapped was one of the clearest examples.
People were already listening to music every day. Spotify didn’t need another reason for them to press play.
Instead, it found a way to make people reflect on a year of listening they had already completed.
At the end of every year, Spotify Wrapped transforms each listener’s history into a personalized story: favorite artists, most-played songs, listening habits, and moments that defined the year. In 2025, more than 300 million people engaged with Wrapped, making it one of the platform’s most anticipated annual experiences.
Wrapped gave listeners something new to look forward to while building on a habit that already existed. It created new value from something they had already done.
Zillow revealed a remarkably similar pattern.
Most people buy a home only a handful of times during their lives. If buying or selling a home were the only reason to visit Zillow, you would expect people to return every few years.
Instead, Zillow attracts roughly 220 million monthly unique visitors. Most of them aren’t buying a home. They’re checking what their own house might be worth. They’re exploring neighborhoods they dream about living in. They’re comparing homes they drove past over the weekend. Curiosity keeps bringing them back long before a transaction ever happens.
The Zestimate became more than a feature. It gave people a reason to maintain a relationship with Zillow between life’s biggest purchases.
The third story began more than a century earlier.
When Michelin published the first Michelin Guide in 1900, there were fewer than 3,000 automobiles in France. Selling tires was difficult because people simply weren’t driving enough to wear them out.
Michelin realized the problem was a demand for travel.
The company began publishing recommendations for hotels, mechanics, restaurants, and destinations worth visiting. More journeys meant more miles driven, and more miles eventually meant more tires needing replacement.
Over time, something unexpected happened. The guide became more famous than the product that inspired it. Today, Michelin Stars are among the most respected awards in fine dining, recognized around the world by people who have never owned Michelin tires.
What connected these stories was the way enduring brands treated the transaction. Their relationship with the customer continues to evolve after the first interaction, creating new opportunities to deliver value over time.
By this point, it had become clear that returning was only part of the story. Some brands weren’t simply attracting repeat customers, they were becoming part of how people saw themselves.
People Buy Identity, Not Just Products
The next pattern became impossible to ignore. Some products gradually become interchangeable while others become part of the way people express themselves.
Stanley was one of the clearest examples.
For more than a century, Stanley was known for making durable insulated bottles and food containers. It had a loyal following, particularly among outdoor enthusiasts and workers, but it wasn’t yet a mainstream lifestyle brand.
Then the Quencher tumbler appeared. On the surface, it looked like another insulated cup. It wasn’t built on a breakthrough material or a revolutionary technology. Yet within a few years, it had become a cultural phenomenon. Stanley’s annual sales grew from about $70 million in 2019 to roughly $750 million in 2023, driven largely by the popularity of the Quencher.
People didn’t just buy one. They collected different colors, waited for limited editions, and proudly carried them to work, the gym, school, and coffee shops. The tumbler became part of the way people expressed themselves.
The product hadn’t changed nearly as much as what it represented.
Liquid Death offers a more recent example of the same idea. At its core, Liquid Death sells water in a can. There is nothing fundamentally different about the water itself. What made the company remarkable was everything surrounding it.
Instead of looking like a traditional bottled water brand, Liquid Death borrowed the visual language of heavy metal. Skulls replaced mountains. Bold typography replaced clean blue labels. Its advertisements felt more like comedy sketches than beverage commercials.
The result was a brand people wanted to talk about. By 2025, Liquid Death had surpassed $260 million in annual retail sales, proving that even one of the world’s most ordinary products could become culturally distinctive.
Whether it ultimately becomes an enduring brand remains to be seen, but its early growth illustrates how powerfully identity can shape even the most commoditized products.
Patagonia arrived at the same destination through a completely different path.
The company makes jackets, backpacks, and outdoor clothing - products many competitors also manufacture. Its difference wasn’t simply better fabric or better stitching.
Over decades, Patagonia built a reputation around environmental responsibility, product longevity, and thoughtful consumption. Its famous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign encouraged customers to think carefully before buying something they didn’t truly need.
At first glance, the campaign seemed counterintuitive. Over time, it reinforced something much more valuable than a single sale. It strengthened trust.
For many customers, wearing Patagonia communicates something beyond a preference for outdoor clothing. It reflects values they want to be associated with.
What captured my attention wasn't the products themselves, but what they represented. A Stanley tumbler, a can of Liquid Death, and a Patagonia jacket each communicate something beyond their function. Those meanings weren’t created by the products alone. They emerged through years of consistent decisions about positioning, design, storytelling, and the experiences each brand created.
That observation led me to another realization: people rarely become attached to products alone, they become attached to what those products help them express about themselves.
Participation Builds Belonging
Another pattern slowly became impossible to ignore: people enjoy feeling that they are part of something.
Canva was one of the clearest examples.
Today, Canva is valued at more than $30 billion and serves over 230 million monthly active users.
Most people think of Canva as a design tool. The more I studied it, the more I saw it as a platform built around participation. Every day, creators publish templates for presentations, social media posts, resumes, invitations, pitch decks, and thousands of other designs. Those templates become the starting point for millions of other users.
A new customer rarely begins with a blank page. They begin with something another member of the community has already created. Every contribution makes Canva more valuable for the next person while giving its creators an opportunity to shape the experience of millions of others.
GoPro revealed the same pattern through a completely different lens.
GoPro builds cameras. Its customers built much of the brand. Surfers, climbers, cyclists, skiers, divers, and travelers uploaded millions of videos capturing moments that traditional cameras rarely could. Those videos became GoPro’s marketing.
Today, the #GoPro hashtag has generated billions of views across social media, while GoPro’s YouTube channel has attracted more than 11 million subscribers. Much of that audience grew by watching content created by GoPro users rather than GoPro itself.
Looking across these companies, I began noticing the same idea in places far beyond consumer brands.
Open-source software powers much of the internet because developers around the world continually improve projects they care about. Wikipedia has become one of the world’s most visited websites through millions of volunteer contributors. GitHub is now home to more than 150 million developers, many of whom build in public and improve each other’s work every day.
The products and communities are different but the underlying principle is remarkably consistent.
When people contribute something of their own - an idea, a template, a photograph, a line of code, or simply their time - their relationship with that community changes. They stop feeling like outsiders looking in. They begin to feel that they belong.
That sense of belonging is difficult to manufacture through advertising alone. It grows through contribution, recognition, and shared experiences over time.
As I continued comparing these companies, another observation emerged.
The Discipline of Simplicity
The strongest brands weren’t trying to do more, they were becoming clearer.
Instagram was one of the clearest examples.
It didn’t begin as Instagram. It began as Burbn, a mobile app that combined location check-ins, future plans, badges, messaging, and photo sharing. Like many young startups, it tried to solve several problems at once.
When founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger looked at how people actually used the app, one insight stood out.
People loved sharing photos. Almost everything else was getting in the way. Instead of improving every feature, they removed most of them. The check-ins disappeared. The badges disappeared. The plans disappeared. What remained became Instagram.
Within about two months, Instagram reached one million users. Less than a year later, it had grown to 10 million users.
The breakthrough came from deciding what no longer belonged.
Dropbox arrived at a remarkably similar idea.
When Dropbox launched in 2008, people already knew how to move files between computers. They emailed documents to themselves, carried USB drives, or relied on complicated file servers.
Dropbox didn’t invent cloud storage. It made cloud storage feel effortless: "One folder. Every device." That simple idea turned a technically complex problem into something almost anyone could understand. Today, Dropbox has more than 700 million registered users.
Google followed the same principle.
During the late 1990s, many internet companies filled their homepages with news, weather, stock prices, shopping links, email, advertisements, and countless other features competing for attention.
Google looked almost unfinished. A logo. A search box. Two buttons. Its simplicity wasn’t accidental. It reflected an extraordinary level of discipline.
What was interesting was that this idea extended well beyond product design.
Imagine someone offering you a Swiss Army knife when all you need is a steak knife. The Swiss Army knife can do far more, yet most people would still choose the steak knife for that particular job because its purpose is immediately clear.
Brands work much the same way. The companies that are easiest to remember are often associated with one clear idea before they earn permission to expand into many others.
Volvo became synonymous with safety.
Google with search.
Nike with athletic performance.
Clarity makes brands easier to understand, easier to remember, and easier to recommend.
By then, simplicity no longer felt like a design principle. It felt like a strategic discipline. It takes discipline to remove features that distract. It takes discipline to communicate one clear message and it takes discipline to resist becoming everything to everyone.
One question still remained: How do people decide which brands to trust before they've experienced them for themselves?
People Trust What They Can Verify
Trust rarely begins with advertising. Before people experience a product themselves, they look for evidence from somewhere else.
Airbnb was one of the clearest examples.
Staying in a stranger’s home once sounded like an extraordinary risk. Long before someone booked their first stay, they had to answer a much more basic question.
Can I trust this person?
Airbnb didn’t solve that problem with a bigger advertising budget.
It built one of the world’s largest trust systems. Verified identities, reviews from previous guests, host ratings, photographs, secure payments, and detailed descriptions gradually reduced the uncertainty that surrounded every booking.
Today, Airbnb has welcomed more than 2 billion guest arrivals across 8 million listings worldwide.
The platform became successful because millions of strangers learned to trust one another.
Amazon reached a remarkably similar conclusion.
With millions of products available, customers often know very little about what they’re buying. Amazon could describe every product itself. Instead, it allowed millions of customers to do it.
Today, Amazon hosts hundreds of millions of customer reviews, helping shoppers learn from the experiences of people who have already purchased the product.
For many purchases, the first thing people read isn’t the product description. It’s the reviews.
What became increasingly clear was that trust isn't something brands can simply claim.
The strongest brands made trust visible; sometimes through reviews, sometimes through transparent policies, recommendations, or communities willing to share their experiences.
People rarely expect perfection. They look for evidence.
Trust, I realized, grows when uncertainty shrinks. The companies that endure make it easier for people to answer one simple question: Can I believe what I’m seeing?
A Final Thought
When I see a successful company now, I’m less interested in what it sells than in the relationship it has built with the people who use it.
That relationship isn't created overnight. It's shaped gradually through product decisions, customer experiences, communication, trust, and every interaction people have with a company. Together, those decisions shape what a brand comes to mean in people's minds.
I started this essay trying to understand why some companies become enduring brands while others quietly fade away.
I finished it looking at companies differently.
Today, when I come across a remarkable company, I find myself asking different questions. Why do people keep coming back? What does the brand help them say about themselves? How has it earned their trust? What makes people feel they belong?
I don’t think those questions have definitive answers but I do think they’re better questions.
About the Author
Sahar Arshad studies remarkable companies to better understand people.
As CEO of OnVibe (an LG spin-off) and previously the founder of CloudMedx (YC W15), she has spent her career building AI products while remaining fascinated by the patterns that quietly shape enduring companies. Her writing explores branding, product strategy, human behavior, and the ideas that connect seemingly unrelated businesses.
Follow Sahar on LinkedIn for future essays exploring the hidden patterns behind enduring companies, products, and growth.