Skip the slogans—real Women’s Day campaigns create impact that lasts
Updated
March 6, 2026 1:23 AM
Mother Armenia monument in Victory Park, Gyumri city, Armenia. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
Women’s Day offers brands an opportunity to show what they stand for through meaningful action. But the strongest International Women’s Day campaigns do more than say “thank you”. They speak to women’s everyday lives.
Instead of big, vague empowerment slogans, some brands focus on small moments that shape confidence and wellbeing. Think about how we compliment young girls, how safe public spaces feel, what comfort really looks like and how friendship plays help women grow. When a campaign is built on a real insight and backed by something practical, it lands harder and lasts longer.
If you’re a startup planning a Women’s Day initiative, there’s value in studying what actually works. The examples below show how clarity, credibility and usefulness can turn International Women’s Day into something that feels meaningful and on-brand.
To celebrate the International Day of the Girl on October 11, 2025, Dove launched #ChangeTheCompliment—a campaign that asked parents and caregivers to rethink how they praise girls. Instead of defaulting to looks-based comments, Dove encouraged adults to acknowledge qualities like resilience, intelligence and determination alongside beauty.
The idea was grounded in data from Dove’s 2024 Real State of Beauty report, which found that more than 60% of girls feel pressure to be beautiful. Dove brought the message to life through a digital film showing parents broadening their praise in everyday moments.
In Canada, the campaign expanded through a partnership with psychologist Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, who helped anchor #ChangeTheCompliment in expert insight. She linked the campaign’s core message to Dove’s long-running Self-Esteem Project, launched in 2004 to provide free, evidence-based tools developed with psychologists and body image experts. Some of these tools included “Confident Me”, a classroom workshop on body confidence and “Amazing Me”, age-appropriate lessons designed to support self-esteem at school.
What worked here is that it didn’t stay inside a brand video. Parents, teachers and creators joined in by sharing their own examples online, posting revised compliments, building quick classroom activities or filming short clips where they swapped appearance-based praise for character-based words. From social posts to simple at-home conversations, the idea travelled beyond the original film and made participation easy.
Startup takeaway: Don’t build a Women’s Day campaign around a fuzzy theme. Focus on specific, everyday behaviors your audience relates to and design your campaign to shift them. Specificity makes your message practical and memorable.
In March 2024, Tetley Green Tea Immune launched the “I Am More Than My Nickname” campaign in India to challenge a common social habit: labeling someone’s fitness based on how their body looks. In many communities, body-type nicknames are used casually. Some of them might sound harmless, but they can chip away at confidence and self-worth over time. Tetley’s point was simple: fitness isn’t a body size. It’s strength, health and well-being.
The campaign centered on a digital film featuring a young girl nicknamed “Golu”, a Hindi term often used to describe someone as chubby. Throughout the film, she’s judged before she even tries, with people deciding what she can and cannot do based on her appearance. As the story unfolds, she pushes back. The film closes with women of different body types holding placards displaying various nicknames, ending with a clear line: “My Body Can, Your Body Can, Every Body Can”. It’s a strong example of a brand taking a familiar social habit and giving people a new way to see it.
Startup takeaway: Look for one small, common behaviour your audience sees every day. Then give people a simple way to engage with it, whether that’s sharing a story, rethinking a phrase or calling out a habit. When participation is baked into the idea, the campaign spreads naturally.
For International Anti-Street Harassment Week 2025, L'Oréal Paris launched its “Never Your Fault” campaign as part of its Stand Up Against Street Harassment program. The campaign drew on L’Oréal Paris research with Ipsos showing the scale of the problem: 75% of women reported experiencing harassment, and 60% said they adjust their clothing or appearance in public.
The message was clear: harassment is never the victim’s fault, and public spaces should feel safer for women. That matters because a lot of women still end up internalizing blame and changing how they dress just to lower the risk.
The campaign also came with a clear next step. It builds on L’Oréal’s partnership with Right To Be, an international NGO focused on stopping harassment, which began in 2020. Through Right To Be’s 5D framework—Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay and Direct—the program teaches bystanders simple, practical ways to intervene safely in the moment.
Startup takeaway: If you’re addressing a sensitive issue in a Women’s Day campaign, don’t go about it alone. Work with experts who bring trust, depth and real tools. It makes your message stronger fast.
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In 2025, Van Heusen Innerwear marked Women’s Day with a single visual that many women immediately recognized. The poster showed a crumpled shirt with a bra placed over it, capturing that end-of-day moment of relief.
The slogan on the poster—“Happy Women’s Day has nothing to do with us”—makes the point that real comfort is personal, not performative. The message wasn’t really about taking off a bra, but about the pressure women carry all day, including the expectation to look a certain way, feel a certain way and still keep going. By leaning into a real, everyday experience, Van Heusen positioned itself as a brand that listens rather than lectures.
Startup takeaway: Skip the predictable in Women’s Day slogans. Find an honest, lived moment and build around it. When your campaign reflects real life, it feels relevant instead of seasonal.
In 2025, Mattel celebrated International Women’s Day by honoring real-life female friendship duos with one-of-a-kind Barbie Role Model dolls made in their likeness. The campaign focused on the idea that strong friendships help women grow, succeed and support each other. Instead of spotlighting individual achievement, it highlighted collective strength—women empowering women.
By featuring duos such as Alicia Keys and Ann Mincieli, Jordan Chiles and Jade Carey and other global pairs across sports, entertainment and advocacy, the campaign framed friendship as a source of confidence and ambition from girlhood onward. To make it practical, Mattel partnered with psychologist and best-selling author Dr. Marisa G. Franco, who shared simple advice for girls: take initiative in making friends, assume people will like you, express appreciation openly, try new activities together and prioritize quality over quantity in relationships.
Startup takeaway: If your Women’s Day campaign is built on a social insight, make it actionable. Storytelling helps, but tools, education and frameworks are what make it useful.
Across these International Women’s Day campaigns, the playbook is consistent: choose one real, everyday behaviour and shift it. Whether it’s the way we compliment girls, the labels we use, how bystanders intervene, what comfort feels like or how we nurture friendships, each brand anchored its message in something tangible and built action around it.
For startups, the lesson is straightforward: be precise in what you’re addressing, be credible in how you show up and make your message usable. Attention is easy to grab, but relevance is harder to earn and far more valuable.
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AI’s expansion into the physical world is reshaping what investors choose to back
Updated
February 12, 2026 1:21 PM
Exterior view of the Exchange Square in Central, Hong Kong. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
Artificial intelligence is often discussed in terms of large models trained in distant data centres. Less visible, but increasingly consequential, is the layer of computing that enables machines to interpret and respond to the physical world in real-time. As AI systems move from abstract software into vehicles, cameras and factory equipment, the chips that power on-device decision-making are becoming strategic assets in their own right.
It is within this shift that Axera, a Shanghai-based semiconductor company, began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on February 10 under the ticker symbol 00600.HK. The company priced its shares at HK$28.2, debuting with a market capitalization of approximately HK$16.6 billion. Its listing marks the first time a Chinese company focused primarily on AI perception and edge inference chips has gone public in the city — a milestone that underscores growing investor interest in the hardware layer of artificial intelligence.
The listing comes at a time when demand for flexible, on-device intelligence is expanding. As manufacturers, automakers and infrastructure operators integrate AI into physical systems, the need for specialized processors capable of handling visual and sensor data efficiently has grown. At the same time, China’s domestic semiconductor industry has faced increasing pressure to build local capabilities across the chip value chain. Companies such as Axera sit at the intersection of these dynamics, serving both commercial markets and broader industrial policy priorities.
For Hong Kong, the debut adds to a cohort of technology companies seeking public capital to scale hardware-intensive businesses. Unlike software firms, semiconductor designers operate in a capital-intensive environment shaped by supply chains, fabrication partnerships and rapid product cycles. Their presence on the exchange reflects a maturing investor appetite for AI infrastructure, not just consumer-facing applications.
Axera’s early backer, Qiming Venture Partners, led the company’s pre-A financing round in 2020 and continued to participate in subsequent rounds. Prior to the IPO, it held more than 6 percent of the company, making it the second-largest institutional investor. The public offering provides liquidity for early investors and new funding for a company operating in a highly competitive and technologically demanding sector.
Axera’s market debut does not resolve the competitive challenges of the semiconductor industry, where innovation cycles are short and global competition is intense. But it does signal that investors are placing tangible value on the hardware, enabling AI’s expansion beyond the cloud. In that sense, the listing represents more than a corporate milestone; it reflects a broader transition in how artificial intelligence is built, deployed and financed — moving steadily from software abstraction toward the silicon that makes real-world autonomy possible.