Design-led companies win: in the Design Management Institute's 2015 Design Value Index, 16 publicly traded design-led companies delivered ten-year returns 2.11 times those of the S&P 500 over 2005 to 2015, which DMI reports as a 211% outperformance [1].
The names are familiar: Apple, Nike, Intuit, SAP, Starbucks, IBM, Target and Walt Disney among them.
It wasn't a one-year fluke.
DMI calls 2015 “the third year in a row” that the index beat the S&P 500 by more than 200% [1].
If you run a SaaS company, the useful question isn't whether Apple is good at design. It's whether design deserves a steady line in your budget.
So look at what these companies actually do with it. They don't share a product category, a price point or even an industry: coffee, sneakers, tax software and enterprise resource planning all sit on the same list. What they share is a way of running design, and most of that way of working scales down to a small team like yours.
Every figure here comes from the published DMI results and an interview with the index's author, which we read in full on 24.09.2026. You'll find more sourced numbers on the Cluma reports page.
What is the Design Value Index?
The Design Value Index (DVI) is a stock index built by the Design Management Institute with the consultancy Motiv Strategies. Microsoft funded the work, according to DMI [3]. It takes companies that meet a strict set of design management criteria, weights them by market capitalisation and tracks them against the S&P 500 over the previous ten years [5] [6].
Three editions were published. Each one put design-led companies far ahead.
| Edition | Ten-year window | Companies | Result vs S&P 500 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 [5] | 2003 to 2013 | 15 | 228% |
| 2014 [4] | 2004 to 2014 | 16 | 219% |
| 2015 [1] [2] | 2005 to 2015 | 16 | 211% |
So when you see 228%, 219% or 211% quoted for the same idea, they're all real, just from different editions. Quote 211% with 2015 and you're using the latest one.
The first edition shows what that looks like in money. A hypothetical $10,000 in the index grew to $39,922.89, while the same $10,000 in the S&P 500 grew to $17,522.15 [5]. That's where 228% comes from: 39,922.89 divided by 17,522.15 is 2.28.
Which companies are design-led?
Sixteen companies appear on the 2015 index chart [1] [2]: Apple, Coca-Cola, Ford, Herman Miller, IBM, Intuit, Nike, Procter & Gamble, SAP, Starbucks, Starwood, Stanley Black & Decker, Steelcase, Target, Walt Disney and Whirlpool.
Getting in wasn't easy.
A company had to show that design operates at scale across the business, has a place at the leadership table, is run by experienced design executives, gets growing investment and has backing from the very top [1]. It also had to be listed in the US for ten years, which DMI says was there to select companies with “a consistent, long-term focus on design” [3].
Two of them are software companies at heart, Intuit and SAP. That matters if you sell software, because their story is the closest to yours.
What do design-led companies have in common?
Read the criteria and case notes side by side and four habits come up again and again. None of them is about a signature look.
Leadership backs design from the top
In every index company, design has a seat at the table. The index looks for an executive-level head of design who can work directly with senior leadership, and for a CEO who shows the importance of design “in their day-to-day work” [3]. Jeneanne Rae, who built the index, put it simply: the CEOs of all the DVI companies “already understand the power of design and do their best to enable it” [6]. Apple is the clearest case. Its decade of success, in the words of DMI, was earned in large part through products designed under its head of design. DMI calls Apple “an example of what good design combined with good business strategy can achieve” [4].
Design sits inside product decisions
Design isn't called in at the end to make things pretty. The criteria require that it's “clearly built into the structure and processes of the organization” [3], with an operating model that works hand in hand with marketing, R&D and operations [4]. SAP shows how that plays out in software. Its co-founder Hasso Plattner became convinced that human-centred design would make its software “more intuitive and easier to use”, and the company then went to work “integrating design into its product development processes” [1]. By the 2015 edition its design function had grown to over 500 people [1].
