Since our founding in 1989, we have focused exclusively on building iconic and enduring consumer brands. Our category-first approach is aimed at truly understanding what matters most to consumers in order to subsequently identify the specific categories and companies that will benefit from those consumer preferences. At the heart of this approach is our constant pursuit of grasping how various types of trends—demographic, psychographic, technological, geographic, and socioeconomic—will drive and impact consumer preferences and purchasing decisions. While our objective—to invest in and build consumer businesses that are rooted in emotional connectivity and thereby in sticky relationships that we can scale—has remained the same over time, we have had to adapt our thinking, our capabilities, and our methodologies to the shifting market environment.