MAKING THE TOUGH CALLS
much in common. Wolfe Herd, the 30-year-old cover subject of our October issue (“Herd Mentality,” page 68), is the founder and CEO of Bumble, a privately held company with a reported $300 million in annual revenue that’s best known for its dating app, in which women’s 2019 Design Company of the Year (page 40). But both have endured harsh criticism recently for high-profile business decisions. In March 2018, Wolfe Herd and her colleagues received threats of violence after she banned most images that contained firearms and other weapons from the Bumble app—a response to the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Parker’s September 2018 decision to run an ad campaign built around former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick led to a boycott called by politicians and conservative commentators. His decision this past July to stop distributing a shoe featuring a colonial-era American flag led to yet another. (Kaepernick and others had noted that the flag image had been coopted by white nationalist groups.)
