The 21st Singapore Prestige Brand Awards (SPBA) celebrated local businesses whose branding has helped them stand out in the competitive business landscape. Construction firm Craftwork and co-living operator Coliwoo were among the winners at the ceremony, held on Wednesday night (October 25).
The award categories include Best of the Best for SMEs, Most Promising Brands and Brand of the Year. In the Best of the Best, a panel of judges from across different industries assessed brands on their creativity, innovation and value-add. Other criteria included business sustainability and the brand’s unique positioning in the market.
Besides the main category awards, there were also ten special prizes ranging from best reimagined spaces to best use of emerging trends in design. The judges for the special prize categories were from the retail, media, technology and hospitality sectors. The winner in each of the 10 categories received a trophy and S$25,000, while the runners-up won S$10,000 and S$5,000 respectively.
NUS Asia Research Institute distinguished fellow Kishore Mahbubani mooted the idea for the prize in a Straits Times column last year. He said: “A famous American social scientist once observed that nations are ‘imagined communities,’ and a shared imagination of the past is critical to holding them together today. “That is why the prize is aimed at encouraging and supporting historical writings that deepen public understanding of our nation.”
Miksic’s work was shortlisted alongside Nature’s Colony: Empire, Nation and Environment in the Singapore Botanic Gardens, by Timothy P Barnard; and Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore, by Loh Kah Seng. In announcing the prize, NUS Press managing director Peter Colcanis and the jury said that the work had “an outstanding contribution to the understanding of Singapore’s history and its relationship to the natural environment”.
In 2023, the prize was awarded for the first time to architects and designers who created buildings in the city that exemplify “the Singapore spirit”. The winning projects were a post-earthquake reconstruction in Indonesia by Budi Prajot and Tito Supriatna; a stacked apartment building in China by OMA and Ole Scheeren; and a public park in Shanghai by Approach Design Studio and Zhejiang University Engineering Design Group.
Five winners – including a lithium-ion battery recycler and a programme to end illegal fishing – will share the US$1.1 million prize money at an event in Singapore next month. The winners will receive support to scale their solutions and accelerate the impact of their innovations on the world’s environmental crisis, which has reached unprecedented levels this year as Earth swelters in record heat.