You probably know who makes your favorite Aritzia top, where your Corner Juice smoothie comes from, and which Sephora aisle you’re going to disappear into for an eternity. But do you know who owns those companies?
For Gen Z, the answer may be more complicated than most would think. The brands we interact with every day can be owned by founders, families, shareholders, investment firms, etc. We tend to think about brands based on the identity they create for themselves and push to the public through PR campaigns. They might feel cool, independent, sustainable, or somehow made specifically “for us.” But behind that identity lies a business structure that determines who makes those decisions and what the company’s priorities are.
This matters because Gen Z is not just becoming a larger consumer group. We are also entering the workforce and eventually becoming the people making these corporate decisions ourselves. Before we can understand the business world we are entering, it helps to understand who actually owns it.
What is Private Equity?
Private equity firms essentially pool money from investors, use that capital to buy companies, seek to increase their value, and eventually sell them for a profit. The business model is straightforward, but the consequences of their business decisions trickle down into our everyday lives.
Your Shopping Cart Is More Corporate Than You Think
Do you ever stop to think about who actually owns the brands you love?
Brandy Melville can be spotted on hundreds of girls around UVA, making it almost synonymous with Gen Z fashion. The privately held company is associated with the Marsan family, although its ownership structure is far less transparent than that of a publicly traded company. Brandy Melville has built an exclusive brand identity that appeals heavily to young women from middle school through early adulthood. But how does a brand become one of Gen Z’s most recognizable names while revealing so little about the business behind it?
Target, on the other hand, represents a completely different model of ownership. Because Target is publicly traded, it is not owned by a single private equity firm/individual. Instead, its shareholders include major institutional investors such as Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock. Target’s 2026 SEC filing lists State Street as holding 7.9% of the company and BlackRock as holding 7.2%. Institutional ownership is not the same as private equity.
That distinction matters. Institutional ownership is not the same as private equity, and a publicly traded company operates under a different structure from a privately held one. Yet both examples raise the same question: does it matter who owns the brands we buy?
For a generation that often values authenticity and supporting small businesses, understanding what happens behind the brands we love to buy from may be more important than we have previously thought.
Okay, But Why Should Gen Z Care?
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey gathered responses from more than 23,000 people across 44 countries. Interestingly, only 6% of Gen Z respondents said reaching a senior leadership position was their primary career goal. Instead, learning and development ranked among the top factors influencing where they choose to work. Even more telling, 89% said having a sense of purpose was important to their job satisfaction and overall well-being. This raises an important question for the private equity industry: What happens when a generation increasingly values purpose, flexibility, and personal growth enters a business environment in which companies may be owned by investment firms whose primary responsibility is to their investors?
Now We’re the Employees
The companies we buy things from are also companies that we could potentially work for one day. For Gen Z, understanding who actually owns a company goes beyond just knowing where our money is going. It is also about understanding who has influence over the workplace and what can happen when ownership changes. This is where private equity becomes pretty relevant. A company backed by private equity can have very different financial objectives and a different timeline than a small business still owned by its founder or a publicly traded company. This does not automatically mean that one type of ownership is better than another, but the ownership structure can definitely affect the workplace and how employees experience it.
For Gen Z, especially as more of us enter the workforce with different ideas about flexibility and work-life balance, this is worth understanding. The ownership of a company might seem like a pretty insignificant detail at first, but it can actually have a bigger effect on employees than people realize.
So… Is Private Equity Actually Bad?
It would be pretty easy to make this whole article into an argument that private equity is bad and small businesses are good. But honestly, it is not really that simple. Private equity can provide companies with substantial capital to grow or make improvements they might not have been able to afford otherwise. On the other hand, there is also criticism that the pressure to generate profits for investors can cause companies to cut costs or focus too much on short-term financial results.
For Gen Z, I do not think the main takeaway should be that one type of ownership is automatically good and another is bad. It is probably more important to actually understand how these different ownership structures work and how they can affect the companies we buy from and eventually work for. Once you understand that, you can form a more informed opinion rather than just assuming one side is better.
The next time you walk into your favorite store, order your favorite Corner Juice whey strawberry smoothie, or get a cute new UVA sweatshirt from Mincer’s, it might be worth asking one more question:
Who actually owns this?
Because before Gen Z becomes the generation running the business world, we should probably understand who is running it now.