• Some Canva employees will become overnight millionaires after the software maker launched an employee share sale valuing the company at $42 billion this week. The Sydney-based company cofounded by an Australian billionaire couple said it hit $3.3 billion in annualized revenue thanks to 27 million paid users. The tender offer hints at a potential IPO within the next year, experts tell Fortune.

Some past and present Canva employees will soon be overnight millionaires after the design-software maker launched an employee share sale valuing the company at $42 billion this week.

The Sydney-based company, cofounded by Australian billionaire couple Cliff Obrecht and Melanie Perkins, said its employee share sale is “already significantly oversubscribed,” attributing the demand to investor confidence in the software maker’s performance, according to a statement released Thursday. 

In an email written to staff on Wednesday and seen by the Australian Financial Review, Obrecht, who is also the company’s chief operating officer, said eligible current and former employees, or “Canvanauts,” will be able to sell up to $3 million of their vested equity at a price of $1,646.14 per share. The opportunity comes as Canva’s annual revenue hit $3.3 billion, according to a company statement.

The latest funding round was led by Fidelity Management and Research Co., an existing shareholder, and new investors J.P. Morgan Asset Management and its funds U.S. Equity Group and Growth Equity Partners, Canva noted in the statement.

“This round has been significantly oversubscribed, which is a huge testament to the incredible work of our team and the impact Canva is having around the world,” Obrecht said. “The overwhelming demand from both new and existing investors is a huge vote of confidence in our momentum and the scale of what still lies ahead.”

Marcus Bodet, cofounder of B.I.G. Capital, a private-investment firm that invests in and acquires tech companies, told Fortune the share sale is “significant” since it allows employees to cash out earlier than they’re typically able to. 

“Typically, employees are subject to a lockup and don’t get the benefit of immediate liquidation,” Bodet said. “Given the current market for high-end AI tech talent, this can most certainly serve as an additional lever to help attract and retain the best talent.”

Canva said it services 240 million monthly active users, 27 million of which pay to use its products.

The software company’s $42 billion valuation means Obrecht and Perkins’s combined wealth is now close to $20 billion, according to the Australian Financial Review. Before the latest funding round—when Canva was valued at $32 billion after it sold an undisclosed number of shares last October—the married couple ranked as the sixth-richest Australians, with a net worth of $14.14 billion AUD (about $9.09 billion), according to the Financial Review Rich List.

According to Forbes’s real-time data, the couple’s combined net worth has reached $11.6 billion. Obrecht and Perkins have pledged to transfer more than 80% of their stake to the Canva Foundation for charitable causes.

Canva’s possible 2026 IPO

All signs point to a Canva IPO in 2026, experts tell Fortune. Investors have long speculated that Canva is a candidate to go public.

ESO Fund cofounder Scott Chou told Fortune tender offers happen frequently, and have become more common in recent years as an alternative form of liquidity for employees given the lack of IPO and M&A activity. Figma, which recently completed a successful IPO and competes in a similar space to Canva, hosted a $12.5 billion tender in 2024 before going public at $18.8 billion. 

“Notably, Canva’s tender values the company above Figma’s current public valuation,” Chou said.

Chou said tenders like Canva’s signal a robust and growing business nearing an exit.

“At the same time, they also suggest an IPO is unlikely until at least early to mid-2026, since companies rarely run a tender right before going public,” Chou said. “Either way, it’s a strong showing for Canva and a sign the company may be on track for a 2026 IPO.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Canva

• McDonald’s has been criticized in recent years by price-conscious customers. CEO Chris Kempczinski recently admitted the menu has gotten too expensive. The fast-food chain reached an agreement with its U.S. franchises to price eight popular combo meals at 15% less than the total cost of buying the items separately, which will go into effect next month.

McDonald’s has been struggling to hold on to its low-cost image. Now fast food’s largest brand is trying to fix what many of its customers have been saying for months: Combo meals cost too much.

The global fast food chain that built its customer base on affordability is slashing its combo meal prices. The move comes just weeks after CEO Chris Kempczinski admitted the menu has gotten too expensive. 

McDonald’s and its U.S. franchises reached an agreement to price eight popular combo meals at 15% less than the total cost of buying the items separately, The Wall Street Journal first reported, citing people involved in the discussions. The lower prices will go into effect next month. McDonald’s will also reintroduce its “Extra Value Meals” branding with a $5 breakfast deal and an $8 Big Mac and McNugget special later this year, according to the report. 

McDonald’s did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

On a recent earnings call, Kempczinski said consumers’ value perceptions are most influenced by core menu pricing.

“Too often… you’re seeing combo meals priced over $10, and that absolutely is negatively shaping value perceptions,” Kempczinski said.

Kempczinski added the “single biggest driver” of what shapes a consumer’s overall perception of McDonald’s value is the menu board.

“We’ve got to get that fixed,” he said.

Over the past couple years, McDonald’s has been criticized online for its prices by value-conscious customers. A 2023 post on X about an $18 Big Mac combo meal went viral, igniting debate that the fast food chain had become too expensive. The post even elicited a response from the president of McDonald’s USA, who said the price of the meal was an “exception,” and the chain’s prices haven’t outpaced inflation.

McDonald’s decision to slash prices on core combo meals signals more than a marketing shift as the brand recognizes economic strains are affecting business. 

In May, Kempczinski said the company’s U.S. first quarter traffic this year from low-income consumers declined by “nearly double digits,” and middle-income consumer traffic fell by almost the same amount. He added traffic growth from high-income consumers “remains solid, illustrating the divided U.S. economy where low- and middle-income consumers, in particular, are being weighted down by the cumulative impact of inflation and heightened anxiety about the economic outlook.”

Despite the company’s U.S. comparable sales falling 3.6% in the first quarter—its worst showing since the pandemic—winning strategies like themed meals, including a recent collaboration with “A Minecraft Movie,” have lifted sales in the second quarter after two consecutive quarters of decline.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Getty Images—Nuccio DiNuzzo/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service

• Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol is ditching a merit system in favor of a uniform 2% pay raise for all salaried employees in North America this year. The move comes as the coffee chain looks to limit costs while investments are funneled into turnaround efforts. Compensation experts tell Fortune salary slowdowns are common amid economic uncertainty, but the 2% rate lags behind the national average.

Starbucks will provide a flat 2% pay bump to all salaried employees in North America this year as the coffee chain looks to minimize costs as part of CEO Brian Niccol’s turnaround efforts.

Under Niccol’s leadership, Starbucks has required some remote workers to relocate to its headquarters and tightened return-to-office policies for corporate employees. The flat 2% pay raise is a shift from the company’s previous compensation model that let managers weigh in on how much of a raise their salaried direct reports received.

The salary hike, first reported this week by Bloomberg and confirmed by Fortune, will apply to all salaried employees, including corporate employees, workers in manufacturing and distribution, and store managers. The uniform increase will not apply to baristas, who are hourly employees. 

Starbucks is hoping to turn around its business with Niccol at the helm, who had previously helped improve financial results at Chipotle. The coffee chain has asked executives to limit costs to help pay for efforts to create better service, improve wait times, and make stores more inviting, according to Bloomberg.

“As we make these significant investments, we need to carefully manage all our other costs,” the company said in an internal email reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. 

How Starbucks’ salary hike stacks up

The 2% pay raise lags behind the U.S. inflation rate of 2.7% and average salary increases measured by different surveys.

A recent Payscale survey found U.S. employers increased salary budgets by an average of 3.6% this year, and are expecting this average to edge down to 3.5% in 2026. 

Lexi Clarke, Payscale’s chief people officer, told Fortune the move to lower pay-increase budgets is not surprising as economic concerns like tariffs and policy uncertainty have pushed businesses to be more conservative. 

“Economic concerns have now overtaken labor competition as the primary driver of compensation decisions,” Clarke said. “Sixty-six percent of employers cite this as the reason for pulling back, up 17 percentage points from last year.”

A recent Korn Ferry survey found that in the U.S., an average of 3.6% salary increases are forecasted in 2025. This accounts for senior leadership positions, junior hourly roles, and everything in between. Six percent of survey respondents were retail companies.

Yet the survey also found that despite 88% of respondents anticipating revenue growth, one-third have already reduced salary budgets owing to economic uncertainty, creating tension between talent retention and cost management.

Korn Ferry North American workforce reward and benefits leader Ron Seifert told Fortune a modest pay increase of 2% can be counteracted by above-market pay. As of mid-August 2025, the average hourly pay for a Starbucks corporate employee in the U.S. is $15.23 an hour, according to ZipRecruiter.

As for a flat increase for all employees, Seifert said high performers may be compensated in other ways outside of their pay raise.

“We know most employers try to make sure that they’re taking care of their high performers and are mindful of the impact of the messages that they’re sending when they’re doing something different,” Seifert said. “My guess is that [the employers] also have other mechanisms for rewarding those individuals that just have not become as public.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Michael Reaves—Getty Images

• U.S. consumer packaged goods companies are shifting their supply chains in anticipation of stricter food regulations and to cater to the Make America Healthy Again movement led by President Donald Trump and RFK Jr. The industry is “more focused” on product shifts than tariffs right now, the CEO of Keychain, a sourcing platform that serves eight of the top 10 retailers, tells Fortune.

U.S. consumer packaged goods (CPG) giants are racing to get ahead of President Donald Trump’s Make America Healthy Again movement. Looming food regulatory changes and social media-driven consumer behavior changes are reshaping the intricate web of ingredient sourcing, manufacturing and marketing, and shifting supply chains.

Keychain, an AI-powered sourcing platform that serves some of the world’s biggest brands and retailers, including Amazon‘s Whole Foods, 7-Eleven, and General Mills, saw an uptick in projects flagged as “natural” from 6.81% in August 2024 to 21.7% by February 2025, according to company data.

Keychain founder and CEO Oisin Hanrahan told Fortune CPG companies and stakeholders in the industry are “more focused” now on RFK Jr.’s influence and the MAHA movement than they are on tariffs.

“From where we sit at Keychain and the conversations we’re having daily, MAHA is reshaping how CPG companies think about formulation and marketing, especially what counts as ‘natural,’” Hanrahan said in an exclusive interview.

For the sourcing platform, projects categorized as “natural” include keywords such as: natural, clean ingredients, clean label, no artificial ingredients, no artificial flavors, organic ingredients, better-for-you, non-GMO, and no seed oil. RFK Jr. has previously said Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils, despite scientific research refuting this claim.

Keychain has tallied more than 10,000 natural projects for each of the past three quarters, which amount to more than $3 billion in value.

Processed-food titans and produce growers are modifying advertisements and products to profit from the MAHA movement, which in some cases, has led to jumps in sales, The New York Times recently reported.

Keychain, which just closed a $30 million Series B funding round led by Wellington Management and existing investor BoxGroup, serves eight of the top 10 American retailers as well as small businesses. Hanrahan said everyone wants a piece of the MAHA pie.

“Brands are actively rethinking sourcing strategies, in some cases shifting to new manufacturing partners altogether to meet ‘natural’ positioning requirements,” Hanrahan said. “That’s not a small task.”

Sourcing reformulated ingredients, especially those that meet a “better-for-you” threshold, often comes with longer lead times, higher costs, or the need to entirely revamp supply chains, Hanrahan said. Notably, smaller brands looking to tweak their products feel the squeeze the hardest, lacking the financial and operational flexibility of the CPG giants.

Even for top retailers, rapid adaptation is key to staying relevant. 

“Larger brands might be better-positioned to absorb those costs or shift schedules, but even they’re feeling pressure to move quickly and avoid falling behind the consumer narrative,” Hanrahan said. 

But brands aren’t just looking to profit from the health trend, they also are staring down a regulatory reckoning underway.

Former President Joe Biden’s administration banned Red Dye No. 3 in January just before he left office, but Trump moved in April to expedite the shift as part of a larger phase out of  petroleum-based food dyes from the American food supply. 

Keychain’s real-time data and search tools have let brands and private labels dissect their sourcing at the most granular level, Hanrahan said.

“There’s more focus now, not just on finding an American manufacturer, but on breaking down every component—manufacturing, ingredients, packaging—into its origin and compliance,” Hanrahan said. As MAHA standards tighten, brands have turned to dual-sourcing or dual-manufacturing strategies, a shift first seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As for price changes to come from the MAHA shift, Hanrahan said counteracting forces will most likely keep food products’ sticker price steady.

“Reverting back to more natural ingredients actually reduces the cost, in some cases, of the raw ingredients and the bill of materials,” he said. “But shelf life goes down and production costs go up, which means you need better logistics and fresher supply chains.” 

Some manufacturers and brands are willing to make the jump for fear of losing health-conscious consumers and looming regulatory changes. 

After months of urgent responses to tariffs and trade disruptions, the action and anxiety in CPG boardrooms is now shifting to food regulation—what gets banned, reclassified, or relabeled next. 

“The market is already behaving as if the rules are here,” Hanrahan said. “Brands that are unable to keep up risk being left behind.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Gen Z has become one of the largest consumer bases for luxury Swiss-made watches. Now the Trump administration’s 39% tariff on Switzerland may change price-sensitive consumer behavior. But experts tell Fortune top watchmakers like Rolex and Patek Philippe may not see much of a demand shift as young luxury watch buyers crave the social currency that comes with the brands.

Gen Z’s fascination with luxury watches has been one of the more surprising consumer trends of the last few years. But a steep tariff hike on Switzerland could threaten its market: American youth.

Gen Z—alongside younger millennials—have embraced luxury timepieces as status symbols, posting them on TikTok and Instagram and helping reshape an industry long dominated by older collectors. A recent BCG survey found 54% of Gen Z respondents had increased their spending on luxury watches since 2021, and Sotheby’s estimated nearly a third of its watch sales in 2023 went to buyers 30 and under.

But a new 39% U.S. tariff on Switzerland could make this hobby more expensive, and potentially less attainable for first-time buyers. The duty, imposed during President Donald Trump’s latest round of tariffs, hits the world’s most important market for Swiss watch exports. From January to June, the U.S. overtook Japan and China as the top destination, with $3.17 billion ( 2.56  billion Swiss Francs) worth shipped, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.

“Companies cannot realistically absorb the tariff, which means retail prices in the U.S. will rise sharply,” Marcus  Altenburg, managing partner at Swiss law firm Goldblum & Partners, told Fortune.

For American buyers, especially younger ones, the math is straightforward: prices are going up, Anish Bhatt, a millennial “watchfluencer” with 1.6 million followers on Instagram told Fortune. While the 39% levy applies to an importer’s cost, not full retail, industry analysts predict a 12%-14% increase in store prices if brands pass on the cost to consumers.

“For many American collectors, the 39% tariff instantly turned new releases from Swiss brands into a luxury few can justify,” Joshua Ganjei, CEO of European Watch Company in Boston, told Fortune. “The pre‑owned market is now the best option for value and immediate availability—no import headaches and no sticker shock.”

That shift to secondhand is already underway, since availability in the primary market is so limited, Bhatt said.

Still, a 2024 report by Watchfinder & Co. found 41% of Gen Z aged 16 to 26 came into possession of a luxury watch the previous year—and individuals in this age bracket who are ready to buy a luxury timepiece said $10,870 would be the starting point for their next purchase. The same report found that Gen Z watch enthusiasts acquired an average of 2.4 first-hand watches and 1.43 pre-owned in 2023, with over half buying for themselves. 

Altenburg expects Gen Z and millennial buyers, who tend to be more price‑sensitive than older collectors, to gravitate to domestic pre‑owned and grey‑market sellers to sidestep tariffs. Ganjei said his company has “seen a dramatic increase in purchasing volume over the past few months as U.S. buyers shy away from international sellers.”

On the other hand, watchfluencer Bhatt said younger consumers still crave the “social currency” that comes with a Rolex, Patek Philippe, or Audemars Piguet, even if they pay more to get it. 

“They also understand the status that it gives them,” Bhatt said. The social cachet of a Swiss-made watch plays out daily on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and influencer channels, boosting aspirational demand, he said.

Bhatt doesn’t expect demand for the most coveted brands to vanish, but says mid‑tier Swiss names without top brand prestige could see sales slow. The added cost may also push Americans to buy while traveling in Europe—where they can sometimes reclaim value added tax (VAT)—and bring pieces back themselves, potentially avoiding tariffs altogether, Bhatt said.

“It could be that allocation of pieces is shifted toward other territories over time,” he added, “because they see demand increase in Europe or the Middle East and diminish a bit in the U.S.”

For the Swiss industry, the stakes go beyond sticker prices. Altenburg warned that sustained U.S. weakness could pressure employment and supply chains in watchmaking regions, while forcing brands to rethink distribution, pricing, and even corporate structures to blunt the tariff’s impact.

Bhatt thinks marketing to younger generations will also matter more in a cooling market. 

“When the market’s high, they rely just on brand value and brand name,” he said. “When the market is low, they need people to understand the rarity and complexity and difficulty in producing these rare watches.”

All said, the tariff probably won’t kill Gen Z’s fascination with luxury watches—but it could redraw the roadmap for how and where they buy them. 

The social media posts of vintage Daytonas and Nautiluses are unlikely to disappear. What may change is that, for many young Americans, the product may increasingly be secondhand, and possibly stamped by a boutique in Paris or Milan.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

• Steven Wang, the 23-year-old CEO of “dub,” a copy-trading platform, has been an investor almost all his life. Fueled by get-rich-quick aspirations, Wang told Fortune he’s seen how viral moments like rare meme-stock success stories have inflated his peers’ investment expectations and diminished their risk considerations. He hopes to change this.

When Steven Wang was in second grade, he convinced his parents to open a custodial stock account. Now 23 years old, he’s running “dub,” a copy-trading platform aimed at solving the financial-literacy gap among his peers.

A recent Harris Poll survey commissioned by dub highlights the contradiction: while 60% of Gen Z and 66% of millennials are investing in the stock market outside of their 401(k)s, just 17% of Americans feel “very confident” in their understanding of how markets actually work. Most believe investing, rather than a traditional 9-to-5 career, offers the fastest path to wealth—a dream increasingly shaped by viral TikTok finance videos or meme-stock success stories rather than grounded investment knowledge, Wang told Fortune.

Copy trading, the concept underpinning dub, allows everyday investors to automatically replicate the trades of more skilled market participants in real-time. Instead of picking their own stocks, users can select vetted traders, hedge-fund veterans, and other experienced investors to follow. Whenever those investors make a move, the same trade is executed in the user’s account, mirroring strategies and outcomes. 

“The ultra-wealthy are already betting on smart people to deploy their capital,” Wang told Fortune. “We’re bringing that experience to regular Americans.”

Wang grew up 20 minutes outside Detroit, the child of poor Asian immigrants who both worked in the auto industry. He watched the city’s decline after the Great Financial Crisis and the auto industry’s blows to blue-collar families, an experience that shaped his desire to build a more stable financial future for himself.

A self-described “hustler,” Wang sold Pokémon cards on the playground and flipped Air Jordans in grade school. Growing up, he nerded out on Warren Buffett books and Howard Marks memos, fueled by a self-professed “childish” vision to get rich through stock-market investments.

“I really learned the hard way,” Wang said. “I’m competing against hundreds of thousands of people on Wall Street trading for a living… [who] have decades of investing experience over me.”

By the pandemic, he was day trading from his Harvard dorm room—watching waves of new investors enter the market and lose big to “hype, misinformation, and bad timing.” Wang said that’s when he decided the tools of professional investors should be accessible to everyone.

dub is built to merge the accessibility of social media with the discipline of professional investing, Wang said. Users browse creators’ portfolios, analyze performance metrics, and choose investors to copy, with trades executed automatically in their own accounts. Creators are vetted, regulated, and compensated through royalties when others follow their portfolios—aligning incentives toward consistent performance rather than one-off meme stocks. 

Wang doesn’t avoid the paradox of dub—the company leverages the power of influencers, but also tries to build a layer of trust and accountability, he said.

“Every portfolio on dub has a transparent track record,” Wang said. “You can see exactly how each creator has performed over time. This isn’t about hype or going viral, it’s about verified results.”

Still, the platform operates in a market dominated by what Wang calls “FinTok”—financial influencers on TikTok and Instagram reels whose bite-size videos have become a primary source of investment advice for 62% of Gen Z, according to the Harris Poll survey. Wang understands the appeal: “Creators on TikTok can probably communicate better with my generation than any stodgy financial advisor can.” But he warns that social media’s lack of accountability can be dangerous. 

“If someone’s wrong on social media, they just delete the video and move on,” he said. 

A resurgence in meme stocks—shares pumped by online communities and detached from fundamentals—reflects a generation with both the desire to make money quickly and a reluctance to put in the harder, slower work real investing requires.

Wang insists dub is not about replicating that behavior under another name. The difference, he says, is a platform with regulated, vetted professionals, transparent performance data, and trade rationales written directly in the app. Users get more than a button to copy trades—they also see the thinking behind them. 

“dub’s not a substitute for deeper learning,” Wang admits, but it aims to make the process less intimidating while promoting gradual understanding.

Wang took steps to build trust with users from the moment he conceived of the app, and dub spent over two years working with the SEC and FINRA before launch, registering as a broker-dealer and investment adviser, and ensuring accounts come with standard investor protections, he said.

Wang believes in the markets as “the greatest wealth generator in the world,” but wants his generation to approach them with more even caution than he had as a new investor in the past.

“That’s the gap dub is trying to close,” Wang said. “We’re here to build trust, not trends.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Dub