Best of Fort Worth: How Voting Works & How to Win

One ballot, two lists, and only one of them takes a public vote

Hair and Co. won Best Beauty Salon in 2025. Cowtown Brewing Co. took Best Brewery the same year. Both came from Fort Worth Magazine's public readers vote, the half of Best of Fort Worth that anyone can actually cast a ballot in.

The other half doesn't take votes at all. Editor Picks is a list the magazine's own staff compiles on its own judgment, published separately, with no ballot step for readers to touch. A business can land in one, the other, both, or neither in a given year, and outreach to customers only ever moves the needle on the readers-vote side.

That split is worth sitting with for a second. Plenty of metro-area readers-choice programs run one ballot and call it a day. Fort Worth Magazine runs two parallel tracks under one shared brand name, which means the very first question a business owner needs answered isn't "how do I win," it's "which list am I actually chasing." See the Texas contest hub for how this compares to the state's other business ballots.

Category groups span the whole metro, not just downtown

Shopping. Food and drink. Beauty. Wellness. Home and garden. Nightlife. People. Culture. Those eight groups break down further into subcategories on the live ballot, and the geography behind them stretches well past the Fort Worth city line.

Southlake and downtown Fort Worth can share a subcategory

A med spa in Southlake and a salon in downtown Fort Worth both sell beauty services, so they're just as likely to land in the same narrow subcategory as two businesses that are actually neighbors. The magazine's coverage area runs across the metro, not a single zip code, which changes who a business is really up against.

For the broader mechanics of running any readers-choice push, see award-style vote campaigns, and for food and drink nominees specifically, restaurant vote campaign planning covers ground Cowtown Brewing Co.'s category sits inside. The people and culture groups sit closer to annual business-recognition campaigns, since a "People" nominee here is usually a founder or executive, not a storefront.

What the magazine doesn't publish, and why the year matters

No running archive of every past Best of Fort Worth category winner sits in one place on fwtx.com going back multiple cycles. That's not a hole in this guide; it's a fact about how the magazine reports results. Old screenshots and reseller pages claiming a win for a year or category not on the current listing shouldn't be trusted without checking the source.

Checking a competitor's claim? Record the exact year, the exact category, and which track produced it, readers vote or Editor Picks, since only one of those has a public ballot behind it at all. Promoting your own win? "Best of Fort Worth 2025, Best Beauty Salon" survives scrutiny; it's the readers-vote title Hair and Co. actually received. Calling the same business "Fort Worth's favorite salon" collapses two different mechanisms into one vague boast, and a sharp customer might ask which one actually happened.

Before results post, "nominated" and "vote for us on fwtx.com" are the only honest phrases. See legitimate promotion versus vote manipulation and how online contest votes work for the mechanics behind any campaign built around a program like this one.

Running a campaign without confusing the two tracks

Category name. Business name. fwtx.com/best-top/best-of/. A customer reminder that drops any one of those three pieces makes someone do work they won't finish on a phone between errands.

One message when the ballot opens, one mid-window nudge, and a tighter push as the close date nears beats a single loud announcement, especially across a metro this spread out. A Weatherford nursery and a downtown Fort Worth bar aren't fighting for the same customers, but they're both fighting the same clock.

And the Editor Picks side needs a different message entirely, if any at all. Telling customers to "vote" for something the magazine's staff decides on its own does more harm than good; it sets an expectation the ballot structure can't deliver on. Businesses running both a metro-wide push here and a statewide one can compare notes with Houston Chronicle Best of the Best, which runs a similar readers-choice format for a different Texas metro, and Best in Central Texas, a smaller regional program a couple hours down I-35 that skips the editor-picks split entirely.