Since 2012, Bassett has served as president of Vaughan-Bassett, marking the fourth generation to lead the family company, which opened in 1919. Its brands include Vaughan-Bassett Furniture, Artisan & Post and Laurel Mercantile Co. Home by Ben & Erin Napier.

Vaughan-Bassett also bills itself as the nation’s largest manufacturer of wooden bedroom furniture for adults. The company, which employs more than 500 craftspeople, returned dining furniture to its product lines in 2023 after a three-year suspension. In April, amid tariffs on Chinese and other countries’ imports, Vaughan-Bassett announced it would not raise prices for 120 days in a letter to dealers and sales reps, and it reported in May that uncertainty around tariffs have boosted its own profits.

In 2024, Vaughan-Bassett relocated its showroom to the new Furniture First building in High Point, North Carolina, moving from the International Home Furnishings Center half a mile away. The company’s factory facilities remain in Galax.
Bassett serves on the executive committee of the High Point Market Authority’s board of directors.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.

In early 2023, Danaher, a Washington, D.C., conglomerate encompassing biotechnology, diagnostics and life sciences businesses, announced plans to spin off its environmental and applied solutions segment into a separate public company headquartered in Massachusetts and called Veralto.
A subsidiary of Danaher since 2007, Glen Allen-based ChemTreat is now part of Veralto, and Collier is now president of Veralto after previously serving as president of ChemTreat since 2021.

He was succeeded at ChemTreat by Ashour Khamis, who previously worked in Dubai for automation machinery manufacturer Emerson, and Khamis now reports to Collier. Veralto has 600 employees in Virginia, and 300 of them work at ChemTreat, which was founded in 1968 by a grandson of U.S. President John Tyler, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, who died in May at the age of 96.

An alumnus of Georgia Tech and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Collier was an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper in the Army. From 2012 to 2018, he was employed in ChemTreat’s marketing division, leaving to become president of McCrometer, a flowmeter manufacturer and a previous Danaher subsidiary that is now part of Veralto.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.

Since 2019, Moore has served as president and CEO of Philip Morris USA, the largest cigarette company in the United States with brands that include Marlboro and Virginia Slims.

Morris has worked for parent company Altria Group since 2003, serving as vice president of its heated tobacco products division and director of marketing for NuMark, Altria’s defunct e-cigarette subsidiary.

Philip Morris USA reported its domestic cigarette sales fell 10.2% in 2024 compared to the previous year. However, Altria has expanded its product line to include heated tobacco and vaping products — while hitting occasional obstacles, including thousands of lawsuits filed against Juul Labs, in which the company had a significant financial stake.

In 1998, Philip Morris and the nation’s three other largest tobacco product manufacturers entered into a master settlement agreement with multiple states, including Virginia, for costs incurred by smoking-related illnesses and deaths. Some of those settlement funds support the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, which awards grants to promote economic development in former tobacco farming communities. In June, Gov. Glenn Youngkin reappointed Moore to the Virginia State University Board of Visitors for a second term.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.

NewMarket is the parent company of subsidiaries that specialize in petroleum additives and critical performance additives used in space launch and military defense applications.

Gottwald, whose grandfather Floyd Gottwald’s Albemarle Paper Manufacturing purchased the Ethyl Gasoline Corp. in 1962, is a member of one of the nation’s wealthiest families. Ethyl, now called NewMarket, now has multiple spinoffs, including Afton Chemical and NewMarket Development, which focuses on real estate projects.

A Virginia Military Institute graduate, Teddy Gottwald joined the family company in 1984 and became president and CEO in 2004. He succeeded his father, Bruce Gottwald Sr., as board chairman in 2014.
In April, NewMarket’s board approved a $100 million capital investment by subsidiary American Pacific Corp. to expand the company’s capacity to produce components for solid rocket motors.

A member of VMI’s board of visitors, Gottwald served as interim board president earlier this year to fulfill the remaining term of John Adams, who resigned from the post. The board generated controversy in February for not renewing the contract of the school’s first Black superintendent, Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins. Gottwald is a major donor to Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.

Ledesma became the plant manager of DuPont’s Spruance site in 2021 after serving in the same role at its facility in Buffalo, New York.

Built in 1929 to manufacture rayon, DuPont’s Spruance site sits along the James River and is the largest of the company’s manufacturing facilities worldwide. Ledesma manages more than 2,000 employees, some of whom had parents and grandparents who worked at the plant. Materials produced there include Nomex, which is used in automotive hoses, electrical insulation and aircraft, and Kevlar, which is used in body armor.

In 2024, DuPont de Nemours announced it would split into three publicly traded companies, separating its electronics and water units. However, in January, the company announced it had decided to keep the water business within its portfolio.

Previously, Ledesma worked at Occidental Petroleum (Oxy), a Texas oil producer, as production manager in Michigan and Texas.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of South Florida and an MBA from DeVry University.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.

Joining the company at its subsidiary Philip Morris USA in 1994, Gifford became CEO of the Fortune 500 tobacco products manufacturer in 2020. Altria’s operating companies, in addition to Philip Morris USA, are U.S. Smokeless Tobacco, John Middleton, Helix Innovations and NJOY, as well as Horizon Innovations, its majority-owned joint venture with JT Group.

In January, the U.S. International Trade Commission finalized a ruling that NJOY Ace, a pod-based e-vapor product authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, infringes on four patents held by Juul Labs. Altria halted all domestic sales in the spring, but Gifford said in April that the company intends to appeal the decision.

Meanwhile, a potential sale of Altira’s downtown research building to Virginia Commonwealth University was indefinitely paused after the governor cut state funding for the purchase this spring.

Altria reported $24 billion in revenue for 2024, down nearly 2% from 2023. Gifford’s $26 million compensation package makes him the highest-paid public company executive in the Richmond area. He joined the Society of St. Vincent de Paul Richmond Council board at the start of this year, and he previously served as a board member of Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.

Friedrich joined Liebherr’s U.S. operations in 2021 as its managing director. In February, the Swiss equipment manufacturer announced Hirohito Imakoji has also been named a managing director of Liebherr USA and that he will work jointly with Friedrich, who is also the company’s managing director and divisional director of earthmoving and material handling technology.

Out of a worldwide workforce of nearly 55,000 employees, Liebherr employs more than 2,500 people in North America.

In Newport News, Liebherr has had a presence since 1970, when it built two production facilities and an office building there. A $60 million expansion of its Newport News facilities was completed in 2020. During the summer of 2024, Liebherr Mining Equipment announced plans to invest $72.3 million to expand a plant at the border of Newport News and Hampton, creating 175 jobs and increasing production capabilities.

Friedrich has worked for Liebherr for more than two decades, previously serving in management roles in Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Switzerland. He is a graduate of the Fontys Venlo University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

Return to the full list of this category’s recipients.