On 22nd of February 2005, Jeff Staple put a Nike Dunk with a pigeon stitched on the heel in the window of his shop on the Lower East Side. People set up tents four days before it went on sale, in a very cold New York, for a shoe most of them had never seen before. By the morning of the release the thin line had turned into a huge crowd. The police came and left with bats, knives and a machete. Buyers were walked out the back of the store and put into cabs so they wouldn’t be robbed on the way home. The shoe cost two hundred dollars. By that same afternoon the resell price went up to over a thousand.

That cold New York morning has been marked as the birth of sneaker culture, the day the resale market became a thing. But more than that, what it created was a totally new concept at the time: the drop, which taught culture that you can turn an ordinary product into a huge brand event.

Twenty years later, that concept is now a regular strategy and a permanent part of the business plan behind any big brand. They call it “pinnacle strategy”. The coolest brands on earth were built on some version of what Staple created: a limited drop that was always smaller than the demand. Brands understood that the easiest way to be wanted was to be hard to get, and they built their strategies accordingly.

So did Nike, Supreme, and every other brand under the sun.

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Not broke as in “cute Instagram origin story” broke. Actually on the brink of ruin — a band committed to something too theatrical, too maximal, too much for the rooms they were playing, with almost no money coming in and almost no one listening. They could have made themselves smaller. Easier to book, easier to sell, easier to explain. They didn’t. They kept building the one thing that was unmistakably theirs, years before there was any evidence it would work.

Then, one day, it broke through. And it never stopped.

I open my upcoming book with a song they made after those first years, called ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’ When I first heard it I was nine, in a neighbour’s living room, in a post-communist Romania where I was born and where I grew up with little Western music and no concept of a brand. I didn’t know who Queen were. I didn’t know who Freddie Mercury was. I did not speak English yet. But it didn’t matter. Before I understood a single word, something in me already knew how I felt when I listened to that song. I felt free, it felt like a mirror of who and what I wanted to become.

Hold this… we’ll come back to this story.

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A few days ago I wrote a piece about the power of creative invisibility — about Rick Rubin, who can’t play an instrument and is arguably the most trusted producer alive, and about The Row, which has never run an advertisement and sold a minority stake at a billion-dollar valuation. It travelled further than anything I’ve ever published and I was surprised to see how many of us feel exactly the same about being chronically online. And many of you wrote back with the same three words.

Okay — but how?

If the play is to stop performing and become your industry’s best-kept secret, then how do you actually build something that lasts, without simply going quiet and vanishing? And how do you do it when you have no resources? Fair question. So here goes the answer.

Here’s what I didn’t say the first time. Invisibility is never the strategy. It’s a pre-requisite. Rubin and The Row don’t endure because they went quiet(er) — they endure because they’ve already built the thing that endures, and the thing that endures doesn’t need to be performed. Copy the invisibility as a startegy on its own and you get exactly what it looks like: silence with nothing underneath it. That’s missing the point entirely.

Alex Hormozi tells you to win and be visible but his origin story is not that at all. He was completely broke for a long time, and developed his business and craft in total obscurity before he made his millions and went big.

Gary Vee shouts at us to post 15 pieces of content on LinkedIn every day, but before he became who he is today, he worked for his parents’ wine shop and created content on YouTube for a long time in total obscurity before he broke through.

Just like Queen. Do you get it now? Obscurity is the price you pay for greatness. For becoming good at what you do.

Because social media shows us only the end result, we came to believe it is easy. It is not. Great brands need time to get built. Time to develop a good product, a good positioning, a good story, a good marketing strategy. Gary Vee, Alex Hormozi, Queen, you me… we all need more time to macerate our essence and make it really great. To remive the mediocrity.

The actual engine is far less glamorous and very hard to fake. It’s becoming unmatched, and staying unmatched long enough that it compounds. Coherence, held over time. That’s it. Everything else — the quiet, the mystique, the restraint — is downstream from figuring out who you really are.

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I talk about this at lenght in my book, what coherence actually is, because the word usually gets used to mean “consistent branding,” and that’s not it at all. Watch Rubin. He does the same thing in every room, on every genre, across four decades — he strips a piece of music down until only the true essence is left; the approach never wavers. That’s his methodology if you will. What he promises is what he delivers: no signature to sell you, no house sound, just the artist made more themselves. It runs all the way through — the way he works, the walls with no gold records, the refusal to explain, the book, the podcast, all pointing at one center. And he is the same barefoot man lying on the floor whether the cameras are running or not; there is no version of him that switches on for an audience. That is coherence.

The Row uses the same architecture. Every touchpoint says the identical thing — no logo, no advertising, no phones at the show, no founders posting — and none of it is decoration. It’s what the brand promises, made structural. Take the labels off and you’d still know exactly who that brand is. Coherence is when the thing could only have come from you, and every piece of what you put out is in alignment.

However — and this is the distinction almost everyone building a brand right now gets wrong — coherence is not the same as consistency.

Consistency is a fixed surface, held in place by force. The same logo, the same palette, the same tone, policed across every channel by a guideline nobody is allowed to break. It photographs as discipline. It is usually rigidity, the maintenance of a look that may no longer correspond to anything that feels true or relevant.

Coherence is the reverse of that. It rarely looks the same twice on the surface, because it isn’t a surface. It's one true thing expressed differently every time, the way no two Queen songs sound alike, yet not one of them could be mistaken for any other brand. Consistency asks whether the parts match. Coherence asks whether they come from the same place.

You can be flawlessly consistent and mean nothing. You can look completely different every time you show up and still, underneath, be the same thing.

Which is why the most popular brand on social media I can think of right now is running the exact same play too. Skims looks like the opposite of The Row — built on the most famous woman alive, living inside pop culture on purpose. But its co-founder, Jens Grede, doesn’t describe the work as marketing. He describes stepping into a world no one else owned — so distinctive you could take the logo off and still know what brand it was. He says the product had to be good enough to arrive at the same place with or without marketing; marketing, in his word, is “lipstick,” accentuating something already there, never inventing it (please watch the interview I linked here, it is a good one). And from day one he and Kim Kardashian built it not to be about her — a platform, not a person, meant to outlast its founder the way the Jordan brand outlasted Jordan’s playing career. Loud and coherent. Quiet and coherent. The volume is never the variable. Coherence is.

Which brings us to the part nobody wants to hear anymore. Coherence only becomes a moat through time. There is no fast version.

Freddie needed years of being broke and unmistakably himself before it compounded. The Row was quiet for seventeen years before the phrase “quiet luxury” existed. Rubin’s judgment is trusted because it has been proven right across four decades and every genre, and you cannot generate that in a year. And this is precisely the input our entire industry has chosen to deny. The quarter demands growth now. The campaign resets every season, and never compounds. No growth deck can model a decade of staying the same true thing while faster, louder competitors move faster than you. So almost no one does it anymore.

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This is what Charlie Rocket has to say about scarcity:

Which is the whole reason meaning works in the first place. A moat any budget could copy is not a moat anymore. Coherence held over time is uncopyable for one boring reason: it costs the single thing that can’t be bought, borrowed, rushed, or faked — years of not changing your mind about who you are. A competitor can copy your look. They cannot copy fifteen years of you having done your thing coherently.

So here’s the blueprint.

In my upcoming book, I break the architecture of meaning into eight parts. Not eight tactics, but eight structural elements that every brand that lasts is built from, whether it’s a billion-dollar house or a business of one. They only hold when they point at the same centre. That convergence is the coherence this whole piece is about; and these are the parts that produce it.

Meaning comes first, everything after it is decoration or “lipstick” as Jens Grede says. It’s the one true thing at your core that people recognise themselves in — not your aesthetic, not your tagline. People don’t choose a brand for the product; they choose who they become when they have it.

Attention is next — and here I want to emphasis something the last piece may have overlooked on purpose. Attention is not the enemy. You need it; great meaning no one ever finds may as well not exist. But attention is a distribution mechanism, not the product — it’s how meaning travels, not what it is. What matters is the right kind, at the right time, pointed at something already true, not noise manufactured to feed an algorithm. Grede’s Skims is a masterclass in exactly this: attention aimed with precision, at the cultural moment, in service of a world already built. Attention peaks; meaning compounds. Use the first to carry the second, never the other way around.

Mediums change and will keep changing — cave walls, vinyl, feed, whatever’s next. None of them is the point. The medium is a vessel; what survives is what it carries. Build the thing the platform is only borrowing for a short time.

Memory is the asset most brands throw away. An archive isn’t nostalgia; it’s accumulated meaning that compounds — the one thing a competitor with a bigger budget still can’t buy or copy.

Identity is more than a logo. When someone brings your product into their home, they aren’t making a purchase; they’re making a declaration about who they are. Identity is what stays true across every version of you.

Ownership is the real moat. There is value that can be taken from you and value that can’t. Rent nothing that matters. Meaning is owned, not borrowed, so build the thing you can fully own.

Coherence is where the other seven converge or fall apart, the load-bearing wall of the whole structure. It answers one question asked of everything you do: could this only have come from me? Everyone chases authenticity, but authenticity without coherence is just a more convincing performance. Coherence is what makes you trusted, and only coherence compounds.

Legacy is the why, and the finish line. Not what you build today, but what stays when the hype is gone. Great work built coherently, and given enugh time, keeps finding new people across decades without anyone pushing it.

That’s the architecture of meaning, and it’s the same whether you’re building a global brand or a business of one.

I know what the CMOs and founders reading this are thinking, because you always ask it, and you are right to: if I can’t put it on a dashboard, how do I measure it?

So here is the honest measurement, and it is not reach and it is not impressions — those tell you how loud you were, not whether any of it meant anything to anyone. You measure coherence by asking whether a given thing could only have come from you, then running your last ten real decisions through that question and counting how many pass through. You measure it by alignment — whether the people inside the company describe what you stand for the same way your customers do, because the gap between those two is exactly where meaning leaks out. You measure it by resistance — when a rival copies your surface or the market turns, does the thing you built hold or dissolve, because what is coherent becomes more itself under pressure and what is merely consistent collapses. And you measure it by the only question that finally counts: would any of this still be standing if you stopped posting content tomorrow?

Now … back to the question the last piece left open. What is all that visible output actually building?

Mostly, nothing you can own. It is rent. It buys attention that resets to zero the moment you stop paying, and it leaves behind nothing a competitor couldn’t reproduce by next quarter. What lasts is the coherent, owned world you build in silence, built true and held long enough that it keeps finding the right people without you standing in front of it. That’s Rubin’s taste. That’s The Row’s clothing. That’s a Queen song reaching a nine-year-old in a country Freddie never visited, decades after he was gone, still completely intact.

That’s what I’m building now, in semi silence, through my work at unmtchd. , this Substack and my upcoming book “The Architecture of Meaning”. I don’t have huge budgets to push awareness on anything I do. All I have is my vision of the future I want to help build, and my judgement and taste to make it come alive through my work.

Invisibility is not the strategy.

The real strategy is to build only what YOU can build, at your own pace, in semi-obscurity if you need to, working a job that supports your dream while you give your dream time to fully develop, and believing in yourself and your vision so fully, that being in semi-obscurity doesn’t heart your ego, but allows your creative act to fully unfold.

Giving yourself time to become as great as you can ever be.

He is, by most measures anyone would accept, one of the most consequential record producer alive. He built Def Jam out of a university dorm room. He worked with more than a hundred and twenty artists across hip-hop, metal, country, rock and pop — the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Johnny Cash, Slayer, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, Adele. Nine Grammys. The man who says he knows nothing about music has shaped forty years of it.

How does this even make any sense?

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What Rubin does in a studio is almost nothing you could put a label on. He listens. He lies on the floor, barefoot, eyes closed, and listens. Anthony Kiedis calls him “the end all of listeners”. And then, mostly, he removes stuff he does not like. He is the rare producer with no signature sound — because a signature is a fingerprint, and the fingerprint is the one thing he refuses to leave behind. “Under the Bridge” by Red Hot Cilli Peppers reached star level because he drew out a confession of singer Anthony Kiedis who was too self-conscious to share an intimate poem he wrote with his bandmates. Late-career Johnny Cash exists because Rubin took one of the most iconic voices in American music and stripped everything else away until only the voice remained. The value he brings to music is never addition. It is subtraction.

Everything around him rewards the opposite instinct to what we’re being told to do today. Post daily. Show the process. Narrate the work while doing the work. Be visible, be constant, be legible to the algorithm before you are anything to anyone. Somewhere along the way, visibility stopped being a by-product of good work and became the work itself. A creator, now, is someone who creates content — which is not the same as someone who creates.

Rubin opted out of almost all of it. Not out of the world — he runs a podcast that has published close to two hundred long-form conversations, he wrote a number-one bestseller, he does interviews. He is present. What he withholds is the performance act of creating. No process videos, no hot takes, no daily proof of life. His artefacts are few, deliberate and slow: a book years in the making, an hour-long conversation, black text on a white square. He told Cooper that when it comes to the work, “the audience comes last”. In an attention economy, that sentence is close to heresy. It is also the entire argument of my upcoming book, The Architecture of Meaning.

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However — and this is the distinction almost everyone building a brand right now is getting wrong — being everywhere and becoming a loved brand look identical from the outside, and behave like opposites underneath.

Constant visibility and durable authority kind of look the same way in a feed. Both fill the frame. But one is rented and one is owned. Attention paid out daily has to be re-earned daily; the moment the posting stops, the balance runs back to zero. Judgment does not work like that. Taste, shown once and then trusted, compounds. It is why an artist at the peak of a career flies to Malibu to lie on the floor with a man who cannot play a note. They are not buying his output. They are buying his verdict — and a verdict only carries weight when the person delivering it has not spent every waking hour performing it.

Watch the same strategy unfold at brand level. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have run The Row since 2006 without a single advertisement, without personal social accounts, and without letting phones inside their runway shows — guests are handed paper and a pen. Almost nothing leaks. And in 2024 they sold a minority stake, to the families behind Chanel and L’Oréal among others, at a valuation near a billion dollars. A house built on refusing to be seen became one of the most valuable independent labels in fashion. The reason is structural, not stylistic. Most celebrity brands rise and fall with the founder’s relevance, because the founder’s face is the product. The Row was never built on the founders’ visibility, so it cannot be devalued when that visibility fades.

Now set Rhode beside it. Hailey Bieber launched the skincare line in 2022 and sold it to e.l.f. Beauty in 2025 in a deal worth up to a billion dollars — the same headline number as The Row, reached by the opposing type of strategy. Rhode became the number-one skincare brand by earned media largely through Hailey Bieber’s own visibility: her face, her routine, her reach as the growth engine. That is a real achievement, and in the near term it is an enormous advantage. It is also the question the brand now has to answer to maintain its longevity. A brand fused this tightly to a living, posting, ever-present founder inherits the founder’s dependency — it has to keep her visible to keep itself relevant. The most telling detail is that analysts already describe the task ahead as de-centring the founder, which is only a task if the centre was a person to begin with. The Row never has to de-centre anyone. There is no face to outgrow.

This is the part the visible economy keeps mislearning. Output is no longer the scarce thing. In a year when almost anything can be generated on demand — an image, a track, a thousand words in any style you can name — the one input that cannot be synthesised is judgment: the taste that decides what is worth making, and what to cut. And judgment has a strange property. It only reads as authority when it is not buried under performance. The more taste is performed, the more it looks like content and the less it looks like conviction.

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The Row did not win because quiet luxury trended; it was quiet for seventeen years before the phrase existed. Rubin did not win because he is mysterious. He won because he removed everything that would compete with his judgment — the gear, the ego, the signature, himself — until the judgment was all that was left. His silence is not modesty and it is not a tactic. It is the condition that lets the real creation take place.

So the uncomfortable question, for anyone measuring a career or a brand by how much of it is visible (including myself right now, by the way), is not how to be seen more. Especially in today’s extraordinarily crowded, nosiy social media landscape. If the only thing that cannot be copied is judgment, and judgment registers only when it is not performed — what, exactly, is all that visible output building? And when the feed scrolls past it, the way it always does, what remains that anyone actually owns?

Maybe, just maybe, it is time for the real builders to take a step back and focus on the building more. On developing the kind of taste that gets you clients without chasing, that gets you awareness without performing, and that gets you recognition without fightig for it. Maybe, the best strategy right now, is to be your industry’s best kept secret.

So the question every operator is asking, underneath the growth targets and the content calendars, is simpler and more brutal than they want to admit. How do you stand out when standing out has been commoditized? And also, how do scale someting that lasts longer than the latest TikTok trend?

The answer is simple but not easy to execute on: it is meaning. A brand that means something specific to a specific person cannot be undercut on price or out-published by a competitor with a bigger content budget.

But meaning is expensive in the one currency you cannot buy. Time. Mickey Mouse took a hundred years. Harley Davidson took decades. The brands with the deepest meaning earned it in slow accumulation, one specific choice at a time, and that is exactly why it cannot be copied and why it lasts.

Which leaves most brands with a problem. They need meaning now. They do not have thirty years to wait for it to accumulate.

There is a way to compress the timeline. I watched a football club do it in six years, and I have since used the same move with a few of my clients, who didn’t have huge budgets, or a powerful IP to build on.

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She is not an AI skeptic. She calls it the most powerful technology she has ever seen. Her argument is though, that most of what gets marketed as AI transformation is what she names “AI wishing”: treating the tool as magic, assuming it can leap over the hard, unglamorous work underneath the real problems company face. She also names the cousin version, “AI washing”, where a company under pressure to show progress claims more from AI than it has actually built. The worst form of that, though, is the “AI layoff”. A company says it needs fewer people because AI made it efficient, when the efficiency often does not exist yet. The cut is really about freeing up cash, sometimes to spend on more AI.

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She has watched multitude of AI demos break the moment they meet a real business problem, its data scattered across systems that contradict each other, thick with years of exceptions and manual fixes. A report she cites found that ninety-five percent of enterprise AI pilots never delivered real results.

Her worry is the cost of pretending otherwise. Companies cut roles before redesigning the work, then quietly rehire the capability they claimed AI had replaced. They lose the people who understood the reasons behind the numbers, the context no model could see. And every inflated claim teaches employees to trust the technology a little less. So she argues for the unfashionable thing: honesty. AI is powerful, it still needs people, and getting real value from it is patient, human work.

It resonated because I have watched the same pattern from a different angle. I spent two decades inside global brands. The kind with heritage worth more than most of the balance sheet. The pattern at play here is jumping on the trend before mapping what the company actually owns and what holds real value. AI is only the newest trend to jump on. The announcement comes first. The market claps. Then it quietly stops clapping. Averill saw it from the technology chair. I saw it from the brand side. Same mistake, faster, and worse. Everyone reaching for the outcome and skipping the order of operations.

There is an order. Three things come before efficiency. Get them wrong and efficiency only carries you to the wrong place at a lower cost. Whatever that means…

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1. Ownership

An internal AI system is worth exactly what you feed it. And that is YOUR data. Your archive. Your heritage. The decades of decisions that made the brand mean something to anyone.

The question nobody asks right now is who owns the inputs, and who owns what the system learns from them. If the answer is a vendor (whoever owns the AI platform), you are renting your own identity back to yourself. Heritage is an asset. It does not belong inside a model you cannot control, on terms you did not write.

Own your data. Own the heritage. Automate against it, not away from it.

2. Accuracy

A tool that is fast and wrong is not a tool worth paying for. It is a liability.

AI doesn't know your strategy. AI doesn't know your heritage.

A confident wrong answer, produced at scale, does more damage than a slow human who checks their work and delivery quality. In brand work this is not a technical footnote. Accuracy is trust, made operational. The moment your own people stop believing the system, they route around it, and you have bought a machine that produces work nobody really uses. I have seen this too many times, even before AI was a thing.

Accuracy first. Speed is worthless without it.

3. Meaning before efficiency

This is probably the biggest thing in any company, but especially in heritage and product / consumer led brands. Most deployments optimise the process and forget the real thing to optimize for: the consumer, what they need and want from us.

Efficiency is a multiplier. It amplifies whatever you aim it at. Aim it at a meaningful, well-owned, accurate operation and it compounds value. Aim it at a hollow one and it mangifies the hollowness.

Meaning comes first. Then protected IP. Then accurate data. Efficiency is the last question, not the first.

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AI doesn’t know what makes sense to the brand

Back in June I atended VivaTech, the biggest AI & tech conference in Europe and during one of the multiple events available, LVMH walked us through LucIA, their internal Gen AI tool for design.

As a market innovator, and the biggest heritage conglomerate in the world, LVMH is leading the way in using AI to bring ideas to market more efficiently.

The stats they shared:
→ 25 window designers using it, generating 6,000 images
→ 500 creatives trained across the rest of the company
→ Built to do three things: speed up the ability to visualize an idea, make communication and collaboration between teams more efficient, and obey human rules while being used creatively

But what is more important is the way they use it: Gen AI creates options. Designers create meaning. The human leads the creative process.

And you don't have to use AI all the time, when you don't need it, you think about sustainability instead.

So here's where any heritage brand should start: map your meaning before you automate it.

You can't point AI at your heritage if you've never defined what your heritage actually owns, so mapping the brands codes, the history, the products, innovations, and context for each product in the pipeline is key.

The mess underneath

None of this is simple, because the ground you are automating on is always a mess.

Global companies run on red tape. Processes that made sense in one decade and never got retired or updated. Departments that do not speak to each other, sometimes inside the same silo. Marketing and brand, one floor apart, working from different definitions of the same deck.

AI looks like the way out of all of it. It is not. Automate a disconnected process and you get a faster disconnected process. The dysfunction does not disappear. It only scales.

So before the tooling, do the unglamorous work. Find the seams. Name the places where the organisation contradicts itself. You do not have to fix everything first. But you have to see it, because whatever you build on top of it will inherit it.

The order

Own it. Make it accurate. Keep it meaningful. Then, and only then, make it efficient.

Most of the companies blaming AI for their cuts have skipped to the last step. They will get speed. Whether they get anything worth speeding up is another question.

That arrangement is ending, and Balenciaga is leading the way.

In June, Balenciaga became the first fashion house to join Substack’s native sponsorship program, announced on stage at Cannes Lions. It had opened its account a year earlier, livestreamed a runway show on the platform, and put its people on a panel next to working writers. Connecting all these dots, they are not scattered pieces of news. They are a clear signal of how the house is moving its editorial operation in-house, onto a platform where it speaks directly to consumers and keeps the digital record of it.

This piece is about what that actually means for luxury brands, why it works, and how to build it on purpose instead of stumbling into a newsletter nobody reads.

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Enrico Piaggio built the Vespa out of necessity. He owned an aircraft company with no more aircraft to build, in a country that had to be completely rebuilt after the war. Piaggio, decided to keep his workers employed, looked at the rubble, saw the crucial need for mobility and decided to give Italians something agile, cheap and easy to move around in amongs the rubble. A two wheels.

He handed the problem to Corradino D’Ascanio, who was an aeronautical engineer and a helicopter pioneer, a man whose life’s love was flight, and who deeply disliked motorcycles. He found them bulky, dirty, awkward to fix by the side of a road. Every time I think about this, I giggle … the most important consumer product of postwar Italy was handed to someone with no affection for the category it belonged to.

It was the right choice, but for a reason that has almost nothing to do with engineering.

D’Ascanio did not start with the machine. He started with the person.

The first thing he designed was the rider, and how they would sit. What they would be wearing. He designed for someone in ordinary clothes. For a woman in a skirt. For anyone who had never ridden anything and was a little frightened of the idea. Before he drew a single mechanical part, he decided how a human body should experience on this new object — upright, comfortable, feet together, dignified — and then built a machine that would sustain the body that way.

Everything people admire about the Vespa is downstream of that one decision.

The step-through frame exists so a person can walk onto it and go, instead of throwing a leg over. The shield exists so they arrive with clean clothes. The engine sits by the rear wheel, chain gone, so nothing dirty ever touches them. He borrowed from aircraft where aircraft helped — a stressed shell instead of a tube frame, a front support arm modeled on landing gear so a wheel could be changed as easily as a plane’s. But the aircraft thinking served the human decision. It did not lead it. Every clever part traces back to a body he had already pictured, sitting a particular way.

That is where real innovation comes from. Deep skills earned in one industry, used to elevate a real human experience. Not to fit in a market. Not to jump on a trend. But using innovation to support people, observed closely enough and designing for them.

Today, most brands make the product first and look for the consumer after.

They design the machine, the tech, the shoe, then commission the research to find out who might want to use it. The order is reversed which is what makes performance marketing so important – it must push the value onto the consumer, even if the product is not what they actually need.

The intuition people credit to great design is rarely intuition. It is observation. D’Ascanio’s gift was not that he guessed well. It was that he watched a woman in a skirt, a nervous beginner, a country that needed to move again, and let what he saw dictate the object. The genius was in the observation of reality, not in guesswork.

But even well designed products need some help to get people excited about it. This is where marketing comes into play.

For the Vespa, that brilliant marketing move was being featured in a movie. In Roman Holiday, Audrey Hepburn sits behind Gregory Peck and they ride a Vespa through Rome. You watch two people fall a little in love with a city, and the Vespa is simply there, in the middle of it. They are young, happy, chic and everybody wanted that exact feeling. An ad can tell you a product is freedom, but this scene lets you feel the love, the freedom.

In one of the most impactful organic product placements to come about, it’s said Hepburn’s scooter ride encouraged over 100,000 Vespas to be sold in the aftermath of the film’s release. The company went from modest sales to surpassing one million units sold by 1956. Now with an enduring dream it could sell, the Vespa’s place in the public imagination was cemented.

The product itself did not change, the amplifier did.

However, in typical adversiting fashion, the film gets too much credit for the success of the product. Hollywood did not make the Vespa mean something to Italians, nor did it design a great product. It only amplified a meaning that was already there, a product that had solved a real problem for a real person, before any camera got to capture that feeling. You can only amplify what already exists. Point the same movie at a product built the other way round — product first, person second — and you get a fashionable moment with no feeling of freedom attached to it.

Piaggio no longer calls the Vespa a mobility brand; in its own words, in 2024, it is “not only a mobility brand but a lifestyle one”. There is a clothing line now. Pop-up shops that travel from Paris to Jakarta. Dior laid its Oblique motif across the saddle of a limited edition — the two houses, it turns out, were both born in 1946. Decades on, a film about Enrico Piaggio himself reaches people who have never sat on a Vespa; more than five million watched it the night it first aired in Italy. I myself saw this movie on Netflix over the weekend and was inspired to write this article, because it speaks so well about the thing I always preach: consumer first, meaning first.

The heritage of this brand is not sitting in an old, dusty, museum somewhere in Italy. It keeps earning today, and it keeps building the future.

That is what heritage actually is. Not the past preserved. The past still paying out. And it pays out only because the first decisions were always rooted in meaning. You cannot compound from a weak base.

Now look at most of what is launching this year. Built to be noticed, very little is built to be kept. It lands loudly in your feed and leaves as quick as it appeared. People scroll past the new because the new has nothing underneath it — no real problem solved, no life changed, no meaningful story to be told. We mistake attention for meaning, but they are not the same. Attention is rented. Meaning is earned slowly, over time.

You can manufacture reach. You can buy an audience. You cannot buy the decades that turn an object into a symbol, and you cannot retrofit the starting point. If you began with the consumer in mind, that consumer will pay you back in loyalty and advocacy.

The Vespa still means something to people in 2026. It has had seventy years to build that meaning, and it all started with a man who decided to draw the rider before he drew the machine.

But the question I keep going back to is not whether the product is good. Plenty of forgotten things were good. The question is always whether in building those products the consumer is at the center or not.

Mirwan Suwarso has been sharing this blueprint for two years now, and the blueprint is starting to become very profitable. The Hartono family bought Como in 2019 for a figure he puts at €850,000 plus €150,000 of debt. They have since put in, by his own account, north of a hundred million. They have rejected bids in the high hundreds of millions, and he now talks about the group moving closer towards a billion.

He calls Como a “multi-club servicing model”. The boutique version for a fanatic, he adds. And the comparison he keeps returning to is Disney.

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For olive oil from a remote village in Crete.

Global brands pay agencies millions to manufacture what George has by default: a story that happens to be true and completely human, which due to its relness, is now scaling globally.

And what people are actually buying from him is not just good olive oil. It is the story, the face that stands behind the can, which is what make his olive oil, unmatched.

Everyone is busy debating what AI will destroy. As someone who lives of unlocking and scaling meaning for brands, I am deeply inspired by what George is teaching us all: that meaning is the one true thing left to scale.

And it is the reason I refuse to be scared of what is coming.

Instead, I advocate for what I call the “meaning economy”, a model where abundance is equally distributed among all players, with no competition and where everyone can build, create and scale a business and a brand.

And there are 3 phases to it.

The first phase: one person becomes ten

The cost of starting anything is collapsing. What took a team, a budget, and a corporate approval chain now takes one person with judgment and the right tools.

I spent twenty years inside global brands and I know exactly how much time and how many people it takes to launch a campaign, build a licensing program or ship a product. Not the most efficient process in the world.

That complex structure is dissolving, because the individual is rising. One marketer can now do what an entire department did. A one-person advisory can compete with a 100 people agency.

The doom version of this story says jobs disappear. The version based on the meaning economy says jobs move.

They move from institutions to individuals. From employment to ownership.

And this shift requires a mindset shift too, asking a different question alltogether: not “who will hire me”, but “what can I build, and what can I own.”

The second phase: essentials get cheap, meaning gets expensive

The pessimists highly underestimate human potential and creativity right now.

I grew up in communist Romania in the 80’s. I know what an economy of scarcity does to people. But I also learned something there that took me decades to reconnect with and fully embody: value doesn't disappear when things run out, it simply moves. It moves to whatever the shortage can't touch. That's meaning. And it's exactly what's about to happen again, but in reverse.

We are heading into the largest abundance of content, products, and intelligence in human history. Which means we are also heading into the largest scarcity of meaning.

I say this all the time: attention is rented, meaning is owned. This is true for brands. It is about to be true for the entire economy.

Schostal was founded in Rome in 1870 by two Viennese brothers, once certified supplier to the royal household, carried by one family through two world wars and five generations. Schostal sells shirts, socks and pajamas the way it always has, and its revival, Schostal Originals, is turning a 156-year archive into a modern brand without inventing a single new thing.

An olive farmer and a pyjama heritage house have more in common with each other than either has with the mass market between them. Both sell the same asset: a history no one can copy, and a name that stands behind the work.

And the middle? The middle is where the rift opens wide. Consumers are polarizing, trading down to the cheapest or up to the most meaningful, and slowly abandoning everything that is neither.

In the UK, the mid-market’s share of fashion has fallen from 20.5 percent in 2019 to 18.4 percent, while the mass market gained. Department stores bleed in both directions at once. “Good enough, priced right” was a strategy for a world that is ending. In the one that is beginning, the middle is not a position. It is a gap.

Meaning-led brands aren't competing with each other. They're both feeding on the same thing: the collapsing middle.

The third phase: the meaning economy

In the best case scenario, work does not disappear. It simply moves up.

From making things to imagining things. From generating to curating. From output to ownership. Someone still has to know what is good. Someone still has to vouch for it. Someone still has to be the name behind the work.

That someone is a person. With a history, a reputation, a point of view built on things that actually happened to them and nobody else.

Your archive becomes your asset. Your lived experience becomes your moat. The twenty years you spent in meeting rooms (like I did), on factory floors, in negotiations, in failures, that is the one dataset no model was trained on… just yet.

My sons will not compete with machines on speed or volume. Nobody wins that race. They will compete on being someone with purpose and meaning driving them forward. They will compete on judgment, on taste and on trust. And I would rather prepare them for that world than protect them from it.

What this asks of you and of us all

The best case scenario is not something that just happens to us by accident. It is something we build, choice by choice.

It asks of us to ask different questions alltgether and to take full ownership of who we are and what we stand for. As brands and as individuals. To treat your story, way of seeing and skills as intellectual property. To build the thing that carries your name, even if it starts small, even if it starts scared.

To be perfectly honest, every day I make a deliberate choice to not be scared.

Scared of the doom AI predictions, scared of being an entrepreneur fully on my own, scared of what my kids’ future might look like.

As someone who deeply believes in meaning as economic engine, I want to model a more positive case scenario, one that everyone, people like you and me, can benefit from.

So here is a scenario I am inviting you to imagine on this beautiful Monday morning (beautiful for me because Spain just won the 2026 World Cup): you wake up tomorrow and decide you want to lead your own life and start preparing for a world where WHO YOU ARE is priceless.

Not your job title. Not your output. You.

The economy that is rising rewards exactly that. Not scale for scale’s sake, but scaling meaning driven by real values and real people.

So no, I am not scared, because fear defends you of a world that is ending, and meaning prepares you for the one that is beginning.

The marketing industry will file this under another celebrity collaboration. But it is something way deeper and specific: the first major campaign to understand what 2026 actually means for people. A generational border crossing.

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Everyone born in 1996 turns 30 this year. And 1996 is not just any birth year. In 2018, Pew Research Center fixed it as the final millennial birth year, a line since borrowed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Gallup, the Federal Reserve and the Library of Congress. Anyone born from 1997 onward is Gen Z (note: we do know the cut off is not always so exact for everyone). Which means 2026 is the year the millennial generation completes itself and the cohort that was marketed to as “young” for two straight decades is now — officially, and entirely — not.

At the same time, many artists, brands and franchises celebrate a 30 year anniversary in 2026, alongside these people.

I recently wrote a piece on how Roc Nation is running “’96 & Forever,” a yearlong program marking three decades of Reasonable Doubt — for the June anniversary it turned the decommissioned Bowery subway station into a multimedia archive of Jay-Z’s early career, wrapped the J and Z subway lines with Spotify, and issued commemorative library cards through the Brooklyn Public Library.

The Pokémon Company opened its 30th year — Red and Green launched in Japan in February 1996 — with a Super Bowl LX spot and the first-ever LEGO Pokémon sets. Bandai is marking Tamagotchi’s 30th with an anniversary device, a Times Square retail activation, and partnerships from CASETiFY to Kura Sushi. The Spice Girls are reissuing “Wannabe” — released July 1996 — on a four-inch collectible vinyl. Even Jones Soda, founded in 1996, is running a “Dirty 30” with Crayola.

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And although this is, structurally, a happy timing coincidence, it is also a coordinated bet on one cohort.

Why this cohort. Why this birthday.

Turning 30 is not just a birthday. It is a huge rite of passage into adulthood. It is the first milestone where people celebrate while having a career, savings, relationships, maybe even the first kid. And it is precisely when moving forward feels heaviest that people reach backward, hard, for the things that made them who they are. Brands have always known milestone birthdays are purchasing events. What they are only now cashing in is that this particular class of 30-year-olds is unlike any that came before it.

The 1996 cohort is the hinge generation. Their childhood was analogue — a Tamagotchi clipped to the backpack, trading Pokémon cards in the playground, saving pocket money to buy a single CD meant a lot. Their adolescence was digital. They are the last people alive whose earliest memories contain more physical than digital things. Old enough to remember the world before social media. Young enough to have spent their entire adulthood inside it.

@officialsundialwhat am i 😀

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And this is the actual research rationale behind Pew’s report. When Pew drew the generational line at 1996, its reasoning was technological: the iPhone arrived in 2007, when the oldest members of the next generation were ten. Millennials adapted to social media and constant connectivity as they came of age; for everyone born after 1996, Pew wrote, those conditions are “largely assumed.” Adapted versus assumed. And the 1996 cohort stands on the very last inch of the old side of that line.

That is why their nostalgia runs hotter than the standard cycle. The 1990s this cohort misses is not merely their childhood, it is the last version of the world that had meaning. 1996 was pre-Google, pre-social, mostly IRL versus digital. Nothing made in 1996 was performing for an audience of followers, because the audience did not exist yet. Hailey Bieber’s own word for the era is “effortless.” The demand-side data agrees: young consumers assembling “analogue bags,” declaring 2026 the year of analogue, describing the ‘90s as free of the pressure of perfection that comes with the feed. For most of them it is an aesthetic they inherited. For the 1996 cohort, it is a memory they still own.

The mechanic underneath the Gap campaign

Strip the Bieber capsule to its engineering and you find a play any brand with an archive asset can study: pair a face born in the specific year with an asset born in that era. The human milestone and the brand milestone land in the same twelve months and amplify each other — Hailey turns 30 in the same year Gap’s ‘90s denim codes turn ripe for reissue. The story writes itself once again, building a new cultural moment to build the future on, not just a simple nostalgia play.

Roc Nation runs the same logic, inverted. There, the album is the 30-year-old asset and the audience turning 30 alongside it is the market. The people who were born the June week Reasonable Doubt dropped in 1996 are exactly the people now old enough to take their own children to the subway station exhibited as an archive.

The machinery behind both is the same one that surfaced in 2016, when Nintendo’s NES Classic Mini proved that generational memory could be productized into a sell-out event. The nostalgia industry has run on a roughly 30-year gear ever since.

And this is nothing new, by the way. Disney codified it as early as 1957, in Walt's famous synergy map — films feeding parks feeding merchandise feeding films — and then ran it on a generational clock: Snow White re-released every seven years for a new audience of children, animated classics remade in live action a quarter-century later, when the original audience had children of their own. One brand ecosystem, built from smaller franchise ecosystems, each engineered to be inherited and passed on generation after generation.

Two ways to sell someone their childhood

However… not every brand courting this cohort is doing it right, and the 30-year-olds in question are precisely the wrong audience to be messing with. This is the generation that grew up being A/B-tested. They can smell BS from a mile away.

Some of the 1996 plays are simple throwbacks: borrowing the cohort’s warm memories to rent attention for a new product with no claim to them. Attach the aesthetic, harvest the engagement, move on. Rented meaning, priced at media value, worth exactly as much as the next campaign budget allows.

The strongest plays are archive plays. Roc Nation is not referencing this cohort’s youth, instead it is exhibiting its own catalogue the way a cultural institution would, and calling it, in its own press language, a “cultural archive”. Gap is not just borrowing ‘90s codes — it is re-issuing its own iconic assets: the studio minimalism, the white tee, the Sorrenti lens that photographed the era the first time around. All while creating new product icons like the “Hailey Jean” to build the future on (i.e. I can clearly picture the “Hailey Jean” being the “Birkin Bag” of GAP 20 years from now).

I know the difference sounds subtle. But to a 30-year-old with a fully developed BS detector for fake, it is not.

The machine rolls forward

Next year, the 1997 babies turn 30 — the first Gen Z cohort, by the same line that makes this year’s class the last of the millennials. Then 1998. Then 1999. Milestone marketing is no longer a tactic; it is becoming infrastructure.

So the question is no longer whether your brand should mark an anniversary. It is this: when your consumer's milestone year arrives — and it is already on the calendar — will you be in their personal archive, or just in their feed?

Every legacy artist eventually gets a milestone anniversary. Most of them treat it like a farewell lap with a greatest-hits tour, a reissue, a documentary that plays like a eulogy for a career still technically alive. Jay-Z just used his to do something more instructive: he showed exactly how a body of work gets built into a legacy, in real time, in public, building the future not the past.

This is important to understand, whether you’re twelve months into building something or thirty years in. Most artists treat the archive as past history — old work, filed away, revisited once in a while only for a nostalgic re-issue. Most heritage brands treat theirs as an asset sitting in a basement that legal has to clear before anyone can touch it. Jay-Z spent six weeks this summer treating his as the single most valuable asset he owns, and building something new, publicly, in front of everyone.

After years of silence, he didn’t release a new album. Instead, he moved through nearly every piece of heritage he owns — his music catalog, his personal archive, his family, retail footprint, a television deal — and pressure-tested each one in public. Three sold-out nights at Yankee Stadium, with the first two breaking the venue’s attendance record for a concert twice in 24 hours, as reported by multiple outlets citing box-office figures. Two more stadium shows already booked for Paris and London before the year is out, a third in Los Angeles. An eight-part HBO documentary directed by Rick Rubin. A haircare brand’s (Cecred, owned by Beyonce) short film that quietly became one of the most-discussed pieces of content he’s been part of in a decade. And a retail partnership that created exactly the kind of controversy he seems to have anticipated, and used in his favor.

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None of this reads as nostalgia if you look at it as legacy-building in progress. It reads as an owner walking his own archive, folder by folder, in public, and co-creating new meaning with it.

An Archive Is Not Content. It’s Shared Meaning.

On June 25, the exact date Reasonable Doubt was released in 1996, Roc Nation opened two pop-ups: one inside a decommissioned Bowery subway station in Manhattan, one at Smack Mellon in Dumbo, the former boiler house that appears in the “Dead Presidents” video. Both ran for free. Neither sold new music. What they sold was belonging and history: a $1,500 crate of vinyl spanning Jay-’s entire catalog, Yankees jerseys built with Mitchell & Ness running up to $1,200, a leather varsity jacket at $1,000, the 1993 Lexus from the “Dead Presidents” video parked outside as a prop that doubled as a museum object. Apple Music co-produced the Brooklyn activation. Assouline built a coffee-table book, The Book of HOV, and bundled it with a hotel stay and Yankee Stadium tickets.

This is something I call the “archive-as-asset” strategy that most brands don’t understand the value of. It’s treating thirty years of legacy material NOT just as memorabilia to be licensed out, but as brand inventory to be re-packaged, re-priced, and re-sold at a margin that reflects what the culture now knows the work is worth.

A T-shirt is not a T-shirt when it belongs to 1996.

It’s a claim on a piece of history, and Jay-Z understood the assignment really well. Which is why everyone talks about it these days and it’s creating a totally new cultural moment, building for the future, not just from past.

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The shoe was scheduled to release on July 11 — 7-Eleven Day, the chain’s Free Slurpee promotion — in a colorway Nike called Sport Green and Safety Orange. The insole carried a graphic of convenience-store shelving. The product copy referenced strolling down to the corner store. Nowhere on the shoe does the word “7-Eleven” appear. Resellers had already started calling it the “7-Eleven shoe” before either company said a word about it publicly, and 7-Eleven’s lawyers put that exact detail in the complaint as evidence.

This is textbook collab strategy, but for some reason, it ended up being a dupe. A dupe created by Nike, using 7 Eleven meaning. This is, indeed, a weird world we’re living in.

Nobody dupes logos anymore

In June 2025, Lululemon sued Costco. The complaint runs forty-nine pages and covers three product lines — the Scuba hoodie, the Define jacket, the ABC pant — but its real subject is construction: crotch gussets, curved pockets, decorative rivets, rear paneling. Costco was selling near-identical silhouettes under Kirkland Signature, Danskin, Jockey, Spyder and Hi-Tec, priced at roughly a sixth of Lululemon’s own tag. A $128 Define jacket next to a $22 version of the same shape. Lululemon does assert trademark claims over words like “Scuba” and color names like “Tidewater Teal,” but the bulk of the filing is about the pattern pieces themselves.

In October 2025, Smucker’s sued Trader Joe’s, but not over the word “Uncrustables.” Over a circle. Trader Joe’s had launched its own frozen, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a round, crimped at the edges, photographed on the box mid-bite, and in a shade of blue Smucker’s argues belongs to it. Smucker’s says the shape itself, apart from any name on the packaging, has become synonymous with the brand over the last twenty-five years in the market.

Three months before either of those, in May 2025, Mondelez sued Aldi over Oreo, Chips Ahoy, Wheat Thins, Nutter Butter and Ritz — not the names, which Aldi never used, but the blue box, the gold box, the layout and the type treatment. The same year, a UK appeals court ruled against Aldi over lookalike cider packaging, and an Australian court had already found Aldi liable over a snack-puff brand called Baby Bellies.

Meaning is the new entrypoint

For most of the last century, brand protection meant defending the name, the wordmark, the logo. Most brands still believe that the entrypoint for consumers is the logo, or the wordmark and that is the main asset they decide to protect. Four different companies, in one year, are arguing the entry point isn’t the name (anymore). It’s everything a shopper’s eye processes before they get there — round, crimped, blue, a specific stripe order — and that pre-verbal recognition is now being defended in federal court, with or without a wordmark attached.

And I guess we have to thank the dupe economy for finally laying this out for all brands to see. Because the entire private-label playbook — Costco’s, Trader Joe’s, Aldi’s — has run for years on the working assumption that to replicate the look, and skipping the logo, would protect them from being taken to court. Four lawsuits in twelve months are showing us this assumption is completely wrong, and that meaning plays a much bigger role than anyone expected.

Meaning, they’re arguing, was never separable from the name in the first place, it was always living in the shape all along, and the trademark was just the legal formality formality.

Not everyone will win though

These four cases are not equally strong, and they will surely get different outcomes.

Most of these lawsuits rest on something called “trade dress” — a legal claim that protects a product’s overall look, not its name. Trade dress covers shape, color, packaging, the whole visual package a shopper would still recognize with the label removed. To win a trade dress case, a company has to clear two hurdles: prove shoppers actually connect that look to them specifically, and prove the look isn’t just functional, in other words, a shape can’t be owned if it only exists to do a job, like a bottle cap being round because round twists open easily.

Lululemon’s best claims aren’t trade dress at all, though. They’re design patents which is a different, and clearer, legal tool. A design patent doesn’t require Lululemon to prove any customer was actually confused. It only has to show that an ordinary shopper would see the two products as basically the same design. That’s a much lower bar to clear, which is likely why Costco keeps settling instead of going to trial.

Smucker’s case is the weakest of the four, and it runs straight into that functionality hurdle. A crimped, sealed circle is a hard sell as “non-functional” because the crimping exists to keep the filling in, not to identify a brand. Legal scholars who’ve looked at the filing are openly skeptical Smucker’s can win on shape alone.

7-Eleven’s case might be the strongest of the four, because it clears that same hurdle easily. There’s no functional reason a shoe needs to be orange, green, and red in that order, which means the color choice does nothing except signal a specific brand. That makes it close to a textbook example of what trademark law calls an “arbitrary mark”: a look or word with no practical purpose at all, which is exactly why it’s the easiest kind of mark to protect. There’s no other explanation for why it looks that way except to say “this is our brand.”

One of the most popular examples is Apple. They were able to trademark their name for computers because apples have nothing to do with computing; nothing about the word does the product’s job, which is exactly why the law lets a company own it. So the courts built this logic for names already, the novelty is that now it’s being stretched to cover a stripe pattern, a crimped edge, a stitch. A shape has to prove it isn’t just doing its job before a court will call it ownable, which is a much easier case for a sneaker than for a sandwich.

As you can see, these four lawsuits are landing very differently and not all of them will be successful. But the biggest takeaway for brands who want to own their IP moving forward is this: strip away function, and whatever’s left is what the brand actually owns.

Mondelez probably falls in the middle. Packaging color and layout are easier to defend as non-functional than a sandwich’s shape, but grocery private-label has a long, messy legal history where courts have sided both ways on whether a shopper reads a store-brand box as confusing or just as a wink at the original.

The dupe economy just admitted meaning is IP

Dupe culture was sold on a specific promise: get the look, skip the brand tax. Its rise over the past several years depended on a legal bet nobody tested aggressively until now — that a look could be cleanly separated from a brand, as long as the name stayed off the label. Four lawsuits in twelve months are the branded side’s answer to that bet, and the answer, so far, is no. Meaning doesn’t live only in a registered wordmark. It lives in the accumulated, repeated, specific decisions a brand makes about how it looks — like the shape, the crimp, the stripe order — and courts are now being asked, case by case, to confirm that those decisions can be owned.

This is unlikely to stop with sneakers and sandwiches. The same argument is about to collide with an even less regulated space: creators, whose entire commercial value already rests on personality and story, not registered trademarks. A creator’s aesthetic (a specific gradient, a way of framing a shot, a font repeated in a certain way) is exactly the kind of asset these rulings are testing, except almost none of it is patented, and most of it isn’t even trademarked.

Part of why this is accelerating now is structural. The internet trained us to encounter brands as a whole, not in small pieces. A generation ago, a brand reached you fragmented — a print ad here, a jingle there, a logo on a packaging— and you assembled the picture yourself, slowly, over years. Now a brand arrives as a single scroll: color, pacing, tone, all at once, compressed into a feed you take in within seconds. You don’t decode a brand anymore. You recognize it, the way you recognize a face before you could describe it in words.

That’s the biggest shift sitting underneath all four lawsuits. Consumers no longer relate to brands as a set of features to evaluate. They relate to them as something closer to a feeling to register, meaning made together, as a co-creation, done through buying and scrolling, not handed down from brand to consumer.

Which leaves one question standing at the end of a piece about sneakers and sandwiches: what is a brand, if not the meaning two people agree it holds — one who built it, one who felt it, with or without a name attached?

The traditional sports brand positioning has always been performance.

Faster. Stronger. A better time than last season. Every major sports brand for the last fifty years has built its product, its athlete rosters, and its marketing around some version of this single promise: we will make you better at the thing you do. It’s not a shallow positioning either. It’s the deepest, most durable one the category has ever had, and it’s earned every bit of the ground it holds.

But a positioning being durable in the past is not the same as it being the only one available going forward. And there’s a real case that for the next generation of sports brands, performance may not be the strongest place to build from, because this promise has become crowded, technical, and, for a growing number of people, exhausting to be inside of.

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The Global Wellness Summit named its top trend for 2026 the “Over-Optimization Backlash”, a decisive pivot away from a decade of dashboards, scores, and readiness percentages, toward what it’s calling “softcare.”

I flagged this collective briefly at the end of a recent article I wrote, without giving it the space it deserves. It’s one of the most underserved audiences in sport right now, and almost nobody is building for it … yet.

This piece is about who they are, why traditional performance positioning structurally can’t reach them, and what a new brand built on a different promise would actually look like.

Who the de-optimiser actually is

Not anti-fitness. Not anti-technology, even. Anti-scorecard.

In Lululemon’s own 2024 global wellbeing research, 45% of people say they feel burned out by wellness itself, and 61% say they feel pressure to appear well.

The de-optimiser still runs, still lifts, still shows up, but what they’ve stopped tolerating is a wrist gadget that gives them a verdict every morning, or a shoe or an app that turn a Sunday fun activity into a readiness percentage.

Roughly three in ten wearable owners abandon the device entirely, citing exactly this fatigue, because the tracking stops feeling useful and starts feeling like surveillance of the self.

And they simply want peace.

The de-optimiser, then, is not defined by what sport they do. They’re defined by a decision that their relationship to movement doesn’t need to be legible to an algorithm, or measured against a personal best, to be real.

Why this is an opportunity, and not just a trend.

Three things make this collective unusually valuable to sports brands:

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Chanel posted $19.3 billion in revenue for 2025. Up 2 percent on a soft prior year. $4.7 billion in operating profit, up 5 percent. Free cash flow up 44 percent. Forty new boutiques opened. Roughly $2.3 billion put back into the house itself, not distributed, not extracted.

No public shareholders. No quarterly call to survive. No activist investor asking why capital expenditure stayed elevated two years running while the house built a new fragrance facility in France and a new headquarters in London.

The Wertheimer family took direct operational control of Chanel in 1974, and have stewarded its codes ever since — Coco Chanel had no children, and the Wertheimers were her financial partners before they were her successors. They answer to no one but themselves.

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That, is by far, the main ingredient to Chanel’s financial strenght.

Chanel is the fashion house that has most successfully protected its founder’s original ethos and have coherently evolved the brand for decades. Four creative directors in a century. An empire built out from fragrance into watches, jewellery, dozens of ateliers. The IP and the meaning have endured over time. That takes a discipline most houses lose the moment they go public and start answering to people who have never built a brand themselves.

On July 2nd, Chanel acquired Charvet: the world’s oldest specialist shirtmaker, founded in 1838, a single store on the Place Vendôme, a single atelier outside Paris, roughly 100 employees, an estimated $11 to $17 million in annual revenue. Its client list across 188 years: Churchill, Baudelaire, Proust, Cocteau, JFK, Karl Lagerfeld, David Beckham.

The deal followed a collaboration. Chanel’s new artistic director, Matthieu Blazy, put three Charvet shirts on the runway for his October 2025 debut — one of them, a long-sleeved white shirt with a Chanel chain at the hem, retailing above $4,000, worn front row by Nicole Kidman and later by Jacob Elordi. It became one of the most talked-about pieces of the season.

That collaboration was the visible layer. Here is what sat underneath it.

Memory

In the early 1900s a young Gabrielle Chanel was in love with a British polo player and shipping merchant named Arthur “Boy” Capel. Capel had his shirts made at Charvet. She started borrowing them. The precision of that tailoring — the collar, the cuff, the deliberate menswear austerity — became one of the seeds of what she later did translating men’s tailoring codes into women’s clothing.

So what Chanel bought, is not a simple shirtmaker. It’s an intimate, shared history, compounding for 188 years, which made the union not just smart, but also extremely coherent with the story of Chanel. Chanel didn’t acquire a technique of shirt making. It acquired a shared legacy and memory.

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Ownership

At the time of their purchase by Chanel, Charvet was still run by siblings Anne-Marie and Jean-Claude Colban, 69 and 71, whose father bought the house in the 1960s. There were no children in the business and no internal successor.

Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, explained the operation like this: “The acquisition is "to support, over the long term, the passing down of unique savoir-faire and the continued existence of an iconic French heritage house, while fully respecting its creative independence."

The Colbans are not an isolated case. Private-equity-backed consolidation of independent luxury houses reached an estimated $48.6 billion in 2025, projected to grow at over 27 percent a year through 2034, driven largely by first-generation founders retiring with no succession plan. Most of those houses go to firms whose business model is extraction: strip the margin, scale fast, license out what’s left. A handful go to buyers who already share the codes and have no need to strip anything for parts.

In Charvet’s case, they luckily remain a specialised atelier under huge fashion house with shared history and legacy, making it an unmatched brand union. Even the names align in the best way possible: Cha-nel. Cha-rvet.

Identity

Pavlovsky explained the logic behind the operation in simple terms to the NY Times: “Now we have a name, Chanel, for women, and a name for men, Charvet.” Which, reportedly, it does not make Charvet the menswear arm of Chanel, but rather a contributor to a mix of gender neutral items that anyone can wear, as they like.

Notice what Chanel didn’t do. It didn’t launch a menswear line. It has never had one, and by its own account has no plan to build one now. A house this specifically coded, this precisely feminine in its accumulated meaning, cannot invent a men’s identity from a studio brief, which would be the kind of stretch that would dilute a brand like Chanel, instead of extending it.

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Instead, it acquired an identity that was already connected to the house for years. And this is a huge and important lesson for legacy brands: you can’t manufacture an identity. You can only evolve what you have and bring in partners that complement you, by not diluting your own brand.

Coherence

None of this reads as an isolated decision once you look at what came before it.

In 1997, Chanel established the Paraffection division (a French term roughly translating to "by affection" or "for love"). This strategic subsidiary was created to acquire, preserve, and promote the threatened ancestral savoir-faire and heritage of specialized Parisian artisanal workshops. It built a dedicated campus, Le19M, to house them, opened in 2021 — eleven maisons d’art under one roof, part of a wider network estimated at 40 to 60 workshops across France, Italy, Spain and Scotland.

So the acquisition of Charvet is not a new strategy. It is forty years of the same instinct, applied to a name people actually recognize. And it highlights the difference between a brand performing coherence for a quarter because the market rewards it, and a brand whose architecture hasn’t changed since before most of its customers were born. Which is what true luxury stands for, unaltered by hype or virality.

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Legacy

What usually happens to a moment like Blazy’s debut, once the show ends and the press cycle moves on? It fades. The next season replaces it with something else entirely.

Chanel had no intention of letting Charvet become a footnote in one collection. It secured the house itself — atelier, archive, the atelier’s 188-year story — as part of its own history now, not a supplier relationship renewed each season.

And here is the takeaway for any heritage brand reading this: legacy building is a structural decision, not a marketing one. It protects the meaning at the root of a brand long enough for that meaning to compound — and compounded meaning is what lets a brand charge a premium no competitor can compete with.

Chanel didn’t need Charvet’s revenue. It needed the thread Charvet had built for more than a century, an unbroken line back to the moment its own founder decided to wear someone else’s shirt and fold its codes into her own collections.

Most acquisitions add a name to a portfolio.

This one closed a loop that started before Chanel was even Chanel as we know it.

Until next time, let’s build what lasts,

Oana

My upcoming book, The Architecture of Meaning - What Makes Great Brands Last and Impossible to Copy, is dropping this September. Get on the waitlist here.

He described the rise of what he called a “Movement Class” — a group for whom longevity, energy and vitality now matter more than the old status signals. In this world, he wrote, sportswear is no longer utility. It has become identity. A second skin.

He is right. And he is not alone in seeing it.

Within weeks of that post, the news broke that L Catterton — the private equity firm backed by LVMH and the Arnault family — was in exclusive talks to take a large stake in Hyrox, the standardised fitness race that has gone from roughly 650 participants in 2017 to hundreds of thousands of athletes across more than thirty countries. Industry estimates put the valuation somewhere between €700 million and €1 billion.

Read that again. The house that built its empire on handbags is circling a business whose entire product is eight kilometres of running and a sled pushed across a conference-centre floor.

Then On itself launched a multi-year partnership with Erewhon, the Los Angeles grocer that turned a twenty-dollar smoothie into a cultural password. And no, it is NOT just a logo swap. A run collection, a co-branded recovery juice, and a Wellness Club — recurring running, training and recovery events across LA.

And underneath all of it, Whoop — the screenless strap that sells discipline as a subscription — raised $575 million in March at a $10.1 billion valuation, with Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and Abu Dhabi on the cap table.

There is even a clean line straight back to the conglomerate: LVMH’s own Loewe has already collaborated with On — luxury and performancewear, fully intertwined, before a single euro changed hands over a fitness race.

What is actually happening is more specific, and more useful to anyone building a brand right now.

Status used to be a possession. You bought it, wore it, parked it in the driveway, wore it on the wrist. What luxury capital has understood — earlier than most brand teams — is that status has migrated from the thing you own to the thing you do. A Hyrox experience cannot be bought. The entry fee is months of training, and training is time, the one resource no amount of money can buy. It is also, more importantly, a community and a shared identity.

This is why the finish line now looks as valuable to a luxury house as the front row of a fashion house. But discipline is harder to fake than a handbag. And a brand that attaches itself to a discipline attaches itself to identity at a depth that lasts longer than any fashion trend.

That is the prize the “Movement Class” makes available again. Not exposure. Belonging. The difference between a consumer who wears your product and a consumer who organises their identity around it.

However… something that is not talked about enough is this:

Buying access to discipline is not the same as owning meaning inside it.

On x Erewhon works not because it is a collaboration but because it is an ecosystem — product, ritual, and a recurring community that brings the same people back, week after week, into physical space the brand will never fully control. The juice and the shoes are not the point here. The Wellness Club is. One is product that sells once. The other compounds over time, at the same rate as the identity behind it.

The brands that will lose money in this gold rush are the ones treating the Movement Class as a media buy — bolting a run club onto a deck, sponsoring a finish line, generating the impressions, and wondering three campaigns in why nothing accumulated. Showing up where the consumer runs and sweats is not the same as meaning something to them outside that space.

Most importantly, there is a second story unfolding at exactly the same time, in exactly the opposite direction.

While capital pours into optimisation, the Global Wellness Summit named the defining wellness trend of 2026 the “Over-Optimisation Backlash.” A growing population — exhausted by the dashboards, the sleep scores, the cortisol-managed mornings — is doing the most countercultural thing available to them. They are taking the watch off. I am one of those people.

There is now a clinical term, “orthosomnia”, for the insomnia people develop from anxiously tracking their sleep. The strap meant to optimise rest is, for a measurable number of people, destroying it. The nervous system has replaced the six-pack as the thing the most knowing consumers signal. Presence has become the new performance.

This looks like a contradiction. It is not.

Both consumers are responding to the same condition: a quantified, saturated, exhausting world that has made being a person feel like a job with KPIs. One responds by mastering the system — training harder, tracking tighter, wearing the discipline like a watch. The other responds by exiting it — choosing the analog, the unmeasured, the deliberately un-optimised.

The Optimiser signals control. The De-Optimiser signals the freedom not to need it.

And both are now markets. Both are identity declarations. Both will be courted, monetised, and chased with the same generic wellness language that means nothing to either.

Because that is the real lesson underneath the “Movement Class”, and it is the same one the attention economy keeps teaching brands the hard way: the trend is never the asset.

On does not win because running is having a moment. It wins because it has spent fifteen years building a specific conviction about movement, and the right moment arrived to meet it. Erewhon does not win because wellness is hot. It wins because it is so completely, unapologetically itself that other brands now borrow its meaning to become visible. Whoop does not win because everyone tracks now. It wins because it owns one idea — discipline, made visible — more completely than anyone else.

Performance exhausts. It always has.

That exhaustion is precisely what created the counterculture. Meaning is the only thing that carries a brand through a consumer’s swing from one pole to the other — because meaning does not ask the consumer to optimise or to opt out. It asks them to recognise themselves in the brand proposition, and the experience offered to them.

So the question for anyone watching luxury capital chase the finish line is not which side to bet on. Both sides are real. Both will be gigantic opportunities.

The question is the one underneath every trend that has ever moved this fast:

When the “Movement Class” moves on — and it will, the way every class eventually does — what will come next? And which side do I position myself on?

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My upcoming book, The Architecture of Meaning - What Makes Great Brands Last and Impossible to Copy, is dropping this September. Get on the waitlist here.

A boy in a Jalen Brunson jersey, number 11, the one every kid in the five boroughs is wearing this week, pushes out a door and starts to run. The camera doesn’t glide; it lurches after him, handheld, breathless, the city smearing past on either side. This is unmistakably a Josh Safdie frame. The man who made Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme grew up on these blocks, sat in those seats at the Garden through decades of heartbreak, and he shoots New York the way it actually feels from inside: too fast, too loud, too much, and somehow exactly right. Billy Joel song in the background. The boy runs and runs, chasing something we can’t figure out yet, until he turns a corner toward Madison Square Garden and finds he isn’t alone. The crowd is already there, already pouring into the street, and one boy’s sprint becomes a city celebration.

The caption Nike posted was: Sleep well, NY. The ad closes on: Never slept. Always dreamed.

Iconic, old Nike ad signed by Wieden + Kennedy.

The Knicks had just beaten the Spurs 94–90 to close the Finals 4–1, their first title since 1973, the end of a fifty-three-year wait. Brunson dropped 45. And within hours, before the confetti was swept off the floor in Texas, this ad existed. No product in the frame. No logo doing push-ups. No call to action, no “shop the collection,” no merch, despite the fact that championship merch is one of the sharpest buying spikes in all of sport, and Nike knows it. The brand had every reason to sell. It chose not to. It just handed the city its own feeling back, beautifully, and got out of the way.

Fans called it the best ad Nike has ever made. Some just said “welcome back Nike”.

The other ad

Two weeks earlier, the same brand, and, notably, the same agency, Wieden+Kennedy, released something that could not have been more different.

Rip the Script is a six-minute short film set on a Hollywood backlot. It is a parade. Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Cristiano Ronaldo, Vinícius Júnior and Ronaldinho share the frame with Kim Kardashian, LeBron James, Travis Scott, Channing Tatum, Serena Williams, and Jason Sudeikis in character as Ted Lasso. It is expensive, it is well-made, and it announced itself as a Hollywood moment. Sixteen million views in twenty-four hours.

But the reaction, from the people who actually live inside football, the fans, was different. The most common verdict was that the celebrities nearly outnumbered the footballers, that the whole thing read as, in the words that kept recurring, a flex on money and on who Nike happens to sponsor. The quiet consensus was that Adidas, with a simpler film about players using absurd methods to train for the tournament, had made the better ad by staying inside football’s own world.

Coming back to Nike, both ads are objectively good in their craft. Both came from the same agency. One landed as a gift and one landed as a flex. That difference is not an accident - it is structural, and it tells you everything about how meaning works in sport.

The before and after

The simplest way to read the gap is to look at when each ad lives.

The World Cup ad is a pre-event ad. The tournament hasn’t started. Nothing has happened yet. No hero has emerged, no story has written itself, no country is celebrating. When there is no story to tell, a brand cannot author meaning, there is no meaning yet to author. So it reaches for the only assets it can control in advance: wattage, scale, fame, spectacle. The thirty famous faces are, in effect, a hedge against narrative uncertainty. You don’t know who the tournament will crown, so you buy everyone and hope to be standing near whoever it turns out to be. And because the pre-event window is also the commercial window (where kits, boots, national-team gear are on the shelf) the campaign has to carry the weight of selling, too.

The Knicks ad is a post-event ad. The outcome is known and emotionally maxed out. The story has already written itself in the most cinematic way imaginable. Now the brand can do the opposite of hedge: it can go narrow, deep, single-protagonist, no stars at all, because the moment is so loaded that one nameless kid is enough. There is nothing left to sell in that instant; the game is won. So the ad’s only job is to bank feeling.

Different moments carry different intent and different visibility needs. Before the whistle, you are fighting for share of attention in the noisiest media environment on earth, and you need to be seen. After the final buzzer, the attention already exists, the whole world is looking at the same thing, and your job is simply to attach yourself to it gracefully.

But notice what the two ads are really made of. The Knicks ad is built from earned emotion. The World Cup ad is built from borrowed fame. And audiences can tell the difference emotionally even if they can’t really explain it in words. That is why the celebrity flex created such different opinions and the kid brought everyone together. It isn’t that one was sales and the other was brand. They are both brand. It’s that one owned its meaning and the other rented it, and rented attention always reads as slightly hollow standing next to the owned kind, no matter how large the budget.

Which brings us to the real question underneath all of this.

The architecture of meaning in sport

Sport is a stack. Meaning lives at different floors, and different parties own different floors, and almost nobody is honest about which floor they actually stand on.

The ground floor is the act. The labor, the risk, the years, the 45 points on the road in a closeout game. This belongs to the athletes. They make the raw material out of their own bodies. Without them there is nothing to mean anything about.

The floor above it is the meaning itself, and this one belongs to the fans. This is the part brands consistently misunderstand. The fifty-three years did not belong to the Knicks organization or to Nike. They belonged to the people who inherited the loyalty from a parent, who sat through the failed decades, who taught it to their own children before there was anything to celebrate. The win is an event. The meaning of the win is something the fans built, privately, over half a century, and were carrying into the street that night. The athletes own the act. The fans own what it means.

Above that is the institution — the league, the team, the Garden, the trophy — which owns the show as intellectual property: the marks, the broadcast rights, the apparatus that turns the act into a product.

And then there is the brand, on the top floor, which owns none of it. This is the uncomfortable truth a sponsor must come to terms every single time they make a product or an ad. In the meaning economy, Nike is structurally a guest. It owns factories and a logo and a great deal of money. What it does not own is a single ounce of the emotion it builds its campaigns around. Everything it has in the meaning layer is leased - proximity to the athletes (sponsorship), proximity to the moment (the ad), proximity to fame (the celebrities).

A brand in sport is always, by its nature, renting.

So who benefits, and who pays?

When the renting is done with respect (like the Knicks ad) the transaction is a positive-sum. The fans were the true owners of that fifty-three-year feeling, and Nike handed it back to them, rendered more beautifully than they could have rendered it themselves. The fans felt seen. The brand was credited with articulating something true. Equity transferred willingly, the way it does when someone gives you a gift instead of a pitch. Nike still rented the moment, but it paid the rent in craft and restraint, and the fans were glad to be its landlord.

When the renting is done with extraction (like the World Cup flex) the same fans feel the cost. The celebrity stack reads as a brand spending at them rather than for them, importing borrowed status into a space whose meaning the fans themselves already own. Nothing is given back. Attention is harvested and spectacle is returned in its place, and spectacle is not the same as meaning.

This is where the fans actually stand: as the rightful owners of the most valuable floor in the building, and simultaneously as the people whose emotion is being monetized on every other floor. They are both the source and the target. The entire game, every ad, every activation, comes down to a single question they answer instinctively and almost instantly: is this brand treating me as a co-author of this meaning, or as an audience to be monetized? The Knicks fans were treated as co-creators. The global football audience was treated as a market to be impressed.

And they knew. They always know.

The only way to stop renting

None of this is an argument against sponsorship, or against the show, or even against celebrity use in ads. Pre-event noise has its place; a brand fighting for share of voice before a World Cup is doing a legitimate job, and there are moments when scale is exactly the right instrument. The Knicks ad is not “good” and the World Cup ad “bad.” They are a calibrated engine and an over-hyped one, run at two different moments in time.

The constructive point is this. A brand can never own sport’s meaning outright; it will always be a guest on that floor. But it can convert rented proximity into something that behaves like ownership - slowly, and only through coherence. A single great ad rents you a moment of goodwill. What turns that goodwill into durable equity is whether everything else you do is coherent with it. The Knicks film is a beautiful promise. It becomes a lie the instant Nike’s next gesture toward that same fanbase is extractive.

Meaning is owned only when the whole system tells the same story: the ad, the product, the price, the way you show up the morning after the celebrations and the year after that.

That is the real test, and it is the hard one, because it cannot be bought with a bigger budget. Anyone can buy thirty celebrities to show up. No one can fake a decade of treating a fanbase as a co-author of a shared meaning. Trust is the mechanism that converts rented attention into owned meaning, and trust only compounds when it is coherent across every touchpoint, not performed in a single film and contradicted everywhere else.

The kid in the Brunson jersey will grow up. Whether he stays loyal to the swoosh on his chest won’t be decided by that ad, however perfect it was. It will be decided by whether the brand behind it keeps telling him the truth long after the city has gone back to sleep.

Sleep well, New York. The brand that earns the right to say that, and means it on the two hundredth day as much as the first, is the one that finally stops renting meaning and starts owning it.

My upcoming book, The Architecture of Meaning - What Makes Great Brands Last and Impossible to Copy, is dropping this September. Get on the waitlist here.

The comment section didn’t ask whether it was AI. Nobody really cared. Nobody asked about the budget. Nobody wanted to know whether the nuns were actors or renders or something else entirely. They just got it.

Asher Hyde didn’t invent anything. He read culture and he executed with precision, at the right moment, in the right register. The AI didn’t do the creative work. A human did. The AI was the pencil.

And I believe that what this moment exposes, is something that I talk about at lenght in my upcoming book, The Architecture of Meaning - What Makes Great Brands Last and Impossible to Copy.

[Join the waitlist →]

The backlash against AI in creative work is not really been about AI. It is exposing the absence of a point of view, and AI making that absence impossible to hide. When something is generated without a genuine reading of culture, without a human who actually creates something true and real, people feel it.

Stop him? Just pray lands. Because Asher connected the right dots, at the right time, and executed with the right tools available to him.

That is what meaning does when it is working. It doesn’t require explanation. It doesn’t require context. It is not reliant on tools. It simply lands.

I have spent twenty years working inside the machines that are supposed to produce this kind of cultural relevance. Brands operating at a scale where a single creative decision moves markets, and campaigns are created one season and become forgotten the next. I have watched enormous budgets allocated to initiatives that amounted to nothing because the goal was completely wrong.

But I also watched specific things endure. Regardless of platform. Regardless of market cycles. Regardless of every disruption the industry kept insisting would change everything.

The difference was almost never creativity. Almost never budget. Almost never talent.

It was meaning. And it was ownership.

The brands that last are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated playbooks. They are the ones where someone had a genuine point of view and the courage to build from it completely. Not performing a version of what the market seemed to want. Being something specific and refusing to apologise for the specificity.

That specificity is what Asher Hyde identified. It is the specific Nike POV when it was building campaigns that made people feel something. That specificity is what separates the things that accumulate meaning over time from the things that generate reach and disappear.

And it is what is becoming the scarcest resource in the entire attention economy — not because of AI, but because we spent a decade building infrastructure that rewarded volume over conviction, visibility over truth, the optimised creation over the real one.

The Architecture of Meaning is the book I have been building toward for the last twenty years.

It is not a framework. It is not a guide to the current platform or the current algorithm or the current conversation about what AI can and cannot do. Those conversations will be different by the time you finish reading.

It is eight ideas — Meaning, Attention, Mediums, Memory, Identity, Ownership, Coherence, Legacy — that make the case for something the industry keeps trying to optimise its way around.

That the brands, creators, and founders who last are not the ones who captured the most attention. They are the ones who built something so specifically, so genuinely, so completely their own that the comparison category dissolved around them.

Not winning the competition.

Exiting it.

The waitlist is now open.

If you have spent any time in the last few years feeling the distance between what you are building and what you want it to mean, this book might be for you.

Join the waitlist

A recent NBC News poll found that 47 percent of adults between 18 and 29 would choose to live in the past if given the option. The study specifically cites a discomfort with technology, but underneath, the reasons are obviously more complex - they are political, economic, existential, with 80% of Gen Z saying the Us is on the wrong track, and 62% expecting their lives to be worse than their parents’.

Pick your crisis. There is no shortage of reasons for this, and it is a reflection of a general feeling across the globe, not just in the US, and not just for Gen Z.

But inside that broader exhaustion sits something the brand world has contributed to and rarely acknowledges. This is the most marketed-to generation in history. They have never known a world without targeting, personalization, content optimized to reach them at precisely the right moment. And the cumulative effect of all of it — every campaign, every activation, every purpose-washed brand moment — is its own kind of weight.

Wasn’t every generation nostalgic though? I don’t think so… prior generations had Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and The Beatles, heroes to look up to on and off screen, and leaders who would stand for ideals that young generations would want to fight for.

Not only that. They had brands like Nike and Apple talking to them about greatness in ads that would travel across time, and invent products that would inspire the youth to create and to build something new.

The issue with nostalgia is that it is passive. Exhaustion, on the other hand, is a much clearer verdict. Part of what this generation is exhausted by is not just the multitude of problems in the world (humanity has always dealt with big challenges throughout our history).

It’s the absence of anything worth believing in that is the real issue.

In 1975, Queen’s label at the time, told them Bohemian Rhapsody was too long. The rule was three minutes - that was the standard, the template of the time, the thing that got you played on radio and moved by the machinery that controlled the market. At six minutes, the song was commercial suicide. EMI said no. Their own manager said no.

Queen had a strong vision for it and insisted on making it the single of the album “A Night at the Opera”.

Freddie Mercury started writing Bohemian Rhapsody as a student at Ealing Art College in the late 1960s, having fragments scribbled on scraps of paper, a song that had no name for a long time. Brian May, the guitarist of the band, recalls Freddie playing them an early version in the early 70s, a song he had apparently been calling "The Cowboy Song", probably after the line "Mama, just killed a man."

To record it, they used six studios and layered 160 vocal overdubs. Critics called it self-important. A DJ named Kenny Everett played it fourteen times over one weekend. By Christmas it had been number one for nine consecutive weeks.

What Queen did at the time was just to take a huge creative risk. Risk implies you might be wrong. What they did was being courageous and sticking to their vision - they knew they were right and kept going in spite of everyone’s opinions. That willingness to stand your ground at the cost of the safest option, is what has almost completely disappeared from culture today.

In 2018, Nike put Colin Kaepernick’s face on a campaign. “We wanted to make sure ‘Just Do It’ reflected the priorities of a new generation. That’s when the conversation with Colin Kaepernick began,” Nike spokespeople said at the time. “Here was an athlete reframing what ‘Just Do It’ means and doing it in a way that could potentially move the world forward.”

Nike believed in this athlete. And the athlete believed in Nike, and together they believed in the power of standing up for your values.

And what do yu think happened next? The company experienced an initial, intense backlash, including consumer protests and product burnings, followed by a significant surge in online sales (up 31% within days) and record-high stock prices.

Go figure …

Anyone can publish a brave campaign. Almost nobody can resist the pressure that comes with that level of public scrutiny.

Since then, brands stopped having beliefs, and they started optimising briefs.

You see, great marketing does not age. It accumulates equity. The difference between the brands that last and the ones that disappear is not the production value, platform, or budget. It is whether there was something real at the center that only that brand, at that moment, could have meant.

Culture takes care of the rest.

The real challenge now is that we are not short of content. We are short of things worth believing in.

The 47% who would rather live in the past are not, at their core, really asking to go back. They are asking for what the past occasionally produced - brands, artists, moments that carried genuine conviction and made people feel less alone in theirs.

I don’t see this as nostalgia per se. I see it as a desperate need for meaning.

And meaning is not a creative deliverable. It is what accumulates when a brand has the courage to stand for something long enough, at enough cost, that people begin to trust it.

The industry has spent a decade perfecting the performance of meaning. Purpose statements. Impact reports. Values frameworks. Created campaigns that run for exactly one news cycle and are never mentioned again. None of it is meaning. All of it is the shape of meaning, but completely hollowed out.

The consumer knows the difference. They have always known the difference. They just stopped expecting brands to close that gap.

Here is what I have watched happen, over and over, inside every major brand machine I have ever been part of.

What does not disappear is the brand that stood by an athlete in sign of support. The song the label said would fail and it din’t. The commercial built on a question so human it outlasted every limitation of the technology that made it.

None of it happened because someone chose the safe option. But rather, because someone had a belief so deep they were willing to risk it all for it.

Today, 47% of young people would rather live somewhere else, and they are not just asking for better marketing.

They need new heroes and ideals. And they are asking for something to believe in.

As a marketer, that used to be our job. It might be time we go back to it again.

What the research is actually telling us right now is something harder for many leaders to acknowledge and execute on.

The consumer of tomorrow is not a person. They are a set of expectations that the market has not yet figured out how to meet. And the gap between those expectations and what most brands are currently offering is widening, not closing.

The clearest way to understand that gap is not through demographics. It is through behaviour — specifically, through the way preferences now shift across channels and contexts so quickly that static personas stop being useful almost as soon as they’re built. McKinsey has been tracking this: market research is moving beyond fixed segmentation models precisely because consumers can no longer be reliably predicted by age, income, or location alone. What shapes behaviour now is mindset. And mindset is fluid. ^[CleverX]

That fluidity creates a specific problem for brands built around campaigns and product features. It creates a specific opportunity for brands built around owned meaning.

——

What is actually changing

Two things are happening at once, and most brands are only tracking one of them.

The first is the compression of the consumer journey. Deloitte’s research confirms what anyone inside a brand already feels: Gen Z and millennials are having their discovery, trust-building, and purchase decisions collapse into the same few touchpoints — primarily social platforms and creator ecosystems. The ad, the review, the moment of wanting, and the moment of buying are happening in the same scroll. Which means the old sequential model — awareness, then consideration, then conversion — is no longer describing the actual experience most consumers are having.

This is the visible shift. The one that has generated an enormous amount of strategic response: social commerce, creator partnerships, short-form video, frictionless checkout. Brands have correctly identified that the journey is compressing and have tried to show up at the moment of compression.

The second shift is less visible, and more consequential.

The most influential consumers of tomorrow are often the ones currently most underserved. McKinsey is specific about two cohorts that tend to get missed. First: younger consumers in emerging markets, who by 2030 will represent 75% of the 15-to-34-year-old population globally, and who are more willing to trade up to premium products than their peers in advanced economies. Second: older consumers — particularly higher-income boomers — who still spend meaningfully in discretionary categories like travel, home improvement, and premium experiences, and who are frequently absent from the brand conversations that obsess over what Gen Z wants next.

The split market that results from this is not being served by a single strategy. Younger consumers shape trend and social influence. Older consumers shape revenue in premium and experience-driven categories. The brands that over-rotate toward one cohort risk losing the real centre of gravity — and the ones that understand both can build something that compounds across time rather than just spiking with each cultural moment.

The consumer of tomorrow is not one person. And the brands that treat the market as if it is will keep designing for the loudest part of it while missing the most durable part of it.

——

This is where IP becomes the real conversation

Every time I use the word IP in a brand context, there is a version of the conversation that stays inside the legal register — trademarks, copyrights, licensed characters, protected assets. That version of the conversation matters. It is necessary. But it is not what I mean.

What the research is now demonstrating — with increasing precision — is that IP in its deepest form is a growth engine. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology looking specifically at IP marketing found that IP content, value, emotional trust, spiritual consumption, and fan interaction all positively influence consumer psychology and behaviour. What that means in plain language is this: the consumer of tomorrow is not only buying products. They are buying identity, belonging, and narrative. And the brands that own those things — that have built recognisable worlds rather than recognisable products — have an advantage that cannot be replicated by a competitor with a larger media budget.

IP, understood this way, has three distinct forms of power in the current market.

The first is differentiation. In a market where most consumers can already feel the sameness — where aesthetic convergence, campaign language, and purpose statements have blurred to the point of meaninglessness — the brand that has a distinctive world is immediately legible in a way that a distinctive product is not. A product can be copied. A world, built over time from a specific centre, cannot.

The second is personalisation at scale. Proprietary platforms, owned data, and AI-assisted experiences can tailor interactions without losing brand coherence — but only if there is a coherent brand underneath the personalisation. Hyper-personalisation applied to a brand without a centre produces something that feels invasive rather than relevant. The consumer who receives a perfectly targeted offer from a brand they don’t have a relationship with does not feel understood. They feel watched. The personalisation that works is the personalisation that happens inside a world they already want to be in.

The third is lifetime value extension. The fan-consumer — the person in a genuine relationship with a brand world — does not return for the next transaction. They return for the next chapter. The emotional attachment to owned IP, to characters, to creators, to brand narratives that have accumulated meaning over time, converts customers into communities. And communities are the one thing the attention economy cannot manufacture on demand.

IP is not what protects you legally. It is what makes you worth choosing in the first place — and worth returning to after the campaign ends.

——

Five consumer types, and what IP must do for each of them

The most useful frame for the consumer of tomorrow is not generational. It is orientational — defined by mindset rather than birth year, because most individuals will move between these modes depending on the category, the moment, and the cultural context they’re navigating.

What this table reveals is something that the campaign model consistently misses: the fan-consumer — the most loyal, most emotionally attached, most commercially durable consumer type — is not a segment you target. It is a destination you earn. You get there by being credible to the convenience seeker’s expectations, trustworthy to the values buyer, genuinely experiential for the experience buyer, and coherent enough that personalisation feels like service rather than surveillance.

The fan-consumer is the compound return on everything else done right. And you cannot shortcut to them.

——

What this asks of brands

The research across McKinsey, Deloitte, and the IP-specific academic literature converges on the same structural answer, which is also the hardest one to implement inside organisations built for quarterly reporting.

Build around adaptive IP, not around campaigns.

What that means in practice: create a recognisable world — a specific centre that only you occupy, built from something genuinely, irreducibly yours — and then use data and real-time personalisation to calibrate how different consumers enter, explore, and participate in it. The world stays coherent. The experience adapts. The relationship deepens over time rather than resetting with each campaign cycle.

It also means treating market research as a continuous sensing system rather than an annual planning input. Consumer behaviour is evolving too quickly for a once-a-year audit to be useful. The brands that will maintain relevance across the split market — younger trend-shapers and older high-value spenders simultaneously — will be the ones that are genuinely tracking both, with enough flexibility in their brand architecture to serve different orientations without losing coherence.

The strongest brands of the next decade will combine five things: distinctive IP that is immediately recognisable; real-time personalisation that feels helpful rather than extractive; social proof and creator-led discovery that builds trust before purchase; values and transparency that justify the relationship; and enough range in product and experience to serve both the young consumer who shapes culture and the older consumer who shapes revenue.

None of those five things can be bought. All five require being built — slowly, consistently, from a centre that is genuinely yours.

That is what the consumer of tomorrow is asking for. Not more content. Not better targeting. Not a more sophisticated algorithm or a more comprehensive segmentation model.

Something real. Something specific. Something that could only have come from you.

——

Oana Leonte is a brand strategist and the founder of unmtchd. She publishes The Architecture of Meaning on Substack — exploring what lasts, and why.

Not on a strategy. Not on a product range. But on the specific way a specific human being sees the world — the particular quality of their thinking, their taste, their conviction, the things they care about enough to keep building toward even when the commercial logic would suggest otherwise. That specificity is what makes the brand mean something rather than just exist.

The question that almost no one asks while the founder is alive is what happens after.

Not to the company. Companies have succession plans. Boards. Operating structures. The company continues. The question is what happens to the meaning — the thing that made people choose the brand over every other brand in the same category, the thing that built genuine loyalty rather than mere preference, the thing that could not be generated by any competitor with a larger budget and a better distribution system.

Because here is what I have learned, across twenty years inside the largest brand machines in the world: a brand’s meaning is not held by its legal entity. It is held by its people. And when the person who was the source of that meaning is no longer there, the legal entity can retain everything — the trademarks, the archives, the registered designs, the licensing agreements — and still lose the only thing that mattered.

Off-White is the most complete demonstration of this that I have seen in fashion. And what is happening with it right now is something every founder, every brand leader, and every investor in a founder-led business needs to understand.

What Off-White Actually Was

Virgil Abloh founded Off-White in Milan in 2013. He was a trained architect, a former DJ, a man who had served as Kanye West’s creative director for a decade and arrived at fashion not through the conventional path but through a completely different relationship with objects, references, and culture.

His design philosophy was codified in a lecture at Harvard in 2017 — ten principles he called his personal design language, including the 3% rule: the idea that you only need to change something by three percent to make it genuinely new. He cited Marcel Duchamp as his “lawyer.” He described creativity as “like DJing: you take existing sounds and recontextualise them.” He used quotation marks not as a logo but as an architect’s annotation — a gesture of ironic detachment from the object, pointing at it rather than simply being it.

These were not branding decisions. They were the architecture of a specific mind, applied to fashion. Every mark Off-White made was an extension of the way one human being thought about the world.

By the end of 2018, Off-White was ranked the hottest label in the world, surpassing Gucci. In 2021, LVMH took a 60% stake in the brand. Five months later, Virgil died at 41 of a rare cardiac cancer he had kept private for two years.

And then the question that no one had asked while he was alive became the only question that mattered.

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Three Kinds of IP — and Only One Can Be Sold

When we talk about a brand’s IP, we almost always mean the legal assets: trademarks, registered designs, copyrights. The things you can file, protect, transfer, and sell. These are real and they matter. But any brand built around a specific human being carries two additional layers of IP that never appear in an acquisition document — because they cannot be acquired.

The first is Human IP. The person themselves: their credibility, their relationships, their specific way of seeing the world, the quality of thinking that made everything they touched feel like it came from somewhere real. Human IP is the source from which everything else flows. It is not transferable, not licensable, not inheritable by a legal entity. It either lives in the brand or it doesn’t.

The second is Product IP. Not just the aesthetic codes — the marks, the shapes, the visual language — but the meaning underneath those codes. The reason they say what they say. Product IP carries weight only insofar as it is legible as an expression of something real underneath it. Divorced from its source, it becomes decoration: recognizable, reproducible, and hollow.

The third is Narrative IP. The story of who the brand was and why it existed. The cultural context that made its arrival matter. The community it built, the bridges it crossed, the particular moment in time it embodied. Narrative IP is the most durable of the three — and the most dangerous to borrow, because the people who were part of it know when it is being invoked rather than lived.

For Off-White, all three of these were Virgil. Entirely, uniquely, completely.

And when he died, and when LVMH sold the trademark to Bluestar Alliance in September 2024 — on what would have been his 44th birthday — these three layers went to entirely different places.

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Human IP: Where the Codes Now Live

Virgil’s Human IP did not disappear. It went somewhere specific.

It went into the Virgil Abloh Archive — a collection of over 20,000 objects from his creative practice, assembled and now stewarded by his wife Shannon Abloh through Virgil Abloh Securities. It went into The Codes, the major retrospective of his work curated by Chloe and Mahfuz Sultan at the Grand Palais in Paris in autumn 2025 — the first European exhibition dedicated entirely to his thinking. It went into his Free Game platform, his published lectures, the studio he co-founded, the designers he mentored who have gone on to build their own practices.

The Human IP is alive. It is being actively stewarded, documented, and made accessible — exactly as Virgil intended, for the 17-year-olds he always said he was building for. It is just not in Off-White. The people who hold it have no institutional connection to the brand anymore.

Bluestar Alliance, which also owns Bebe, Hurley, and Scotch & Soda, acquired the legal entity. The people who were actually inside Virgil’s thinking went in a different direction. That gap — between the legal owner of the trademark and the actual custodians of the Human IP — is not a transition problem. It is a structural severance.

Product IP: The Marks Without the Logic

Off-White the brand now holds the quotation marks, the diagonal stripes, the zip tie, the annotated labels. These are registered, protected, legally owned. They are also, separated from the mind that gave them their logic, increasingly difficult to animate.

The 10x10 collection — ten creators each reimagining a signature archive piece, launched in early 2026 — is the brand’s most explicit attempt to solve this problem. And it is worth taking seriously, because the collaborators are not cynical. When Guillermo Andrade of 424 says he wants to understand Virgil’s “layering, the workwear, the repetition” — not to repeat what he did but to honor the architecture he built — that is a designer engaging genuinely with a genuine inheritance. When Yuta Hosokawa rebuilds the hoodie’s proportions to allow the original identity to remain while transforming it, that is serious work.

But here is what the 10x10 collection actually reveals: the collaborators are lending their understanding of Virgil’s codes to a brand that no longer has any institutional connection to those codes. They are the bridge. The brand is not.

Virgil’s 3% rule worked because it came from somewhere. The quotation marks worked because they were an architect annotating a blueprint, not a designer choosing a font. The zip tie worked because of the ironic detachment behind it — Duchamp applied to streetwear by someone who had studied both. Every mark had a logic. And the logic was personal. It was the specific and irreducible output of one mind.

What the 10x10 collection demonstrates is that the product IP still has cultural gravity — enough that serious creators want to engage with it. What it cannot demonstrate is whether the brand itself understands why those marks meant what they meant. Whether it has an internal answer to that question. Whether there is conviction at the center, or only borrowed credibility at the edges.

Narrative IP: The Statement That Ends the Discussion

The Off-White story is one of the most powerful brand narratives of the last decade. A Ghanaian-American architect from Rockford, Illinois, who arrived at fashion through DJing and Kanye West and a Fendi internship. The first Black artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. A man who built his creative philosophy into public lectures and open-source mentorship platforms, who kept his cancer diagnosis private for two years while continuing to build, to show up, to mentor the next generation.

That story does not belong to Off-White the legal entity. It belongs to his family, to the archive they steward, to the community he built around his Free Game philosophy.

And the person who co-curated the 20,000-object retrospective of his work — who understands his actual codes, who built alongside him, who stewarded the most complete documentation of what he was — has said this publicly, in response to the 10x10 collection:

“Off-White has nothing to do with Virgil or his family anymore. But they continue to try to profit off him nonetheless.” — Chloe Sultan, co-director, Virgil Abloh Archive

That is not a casual criticism. That is the verdict from inside the actual custodianship of his legacy. It is the person who held his codes drawing a visible, public line between those codes and the brand that commercially carries them.

When Narrative IP is invoked by a brand that no longer has the relationship to tell the story — when the brand points at the founder’s legacy while the founder’s family points back and says “not ours anymore” — the narrative doesn’t hold. It turns. What was a story of meaning becomes a story about the absence of it. The invocation of the archive becomes the evidence of the distance from it.

This is the moment Off-White is in. And it is not a crisis of execution. It is a crisis of structure.

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What Bluestar Bought and What It Didn’t

Bluestar Alliance owns the carrier. The trademark. The licensing agreements. The right to put quotation marks on a garment and call it Off-White.

What it cannot own — what was never in the acquisition document because it cannot be acquired — is the reason those quotation marks meant something in the first place. The Human IP is with the family. The real archive is with the family. The narrative is with the community Virgil built — the same community that is now, explicitly and publicly, distinguishing his legacy from the brand that carries his name.

The trademark and the owned meaning are now two different things, living in two different places. That is not a criticism. It is a definition.

The Question Every Founder-Led Brand Needs to Ask Now

Off-White is an extreme case — a founder who died young, a brand sold twice in three years, a family and archive community that has drawn the line in public. Most founder-led brands will not face this specific combination of circumstances.

But the structural question it surfaces is universal.

What happens to your brand’s meaning if the founder is no longer available to carry it? Not the visual identity, not the product range, not the legal assets — those will survive. What happens to the Human IP, the Product IP, the Narrative IP that make those legal assets worth anything?

Have you built meaning that lives in the brand’s culture, in its relationships, in the genuine conviction of the people inside it — or does it live entirely in one person? Is the root the brand, or is the root the founder, with the brand as a set of expressions that only make sense when traced back to them?

Brands that last are the ones where the meaning has migrated. Where the founder’s specific way of seeing the world has become the institution’s way of seeing the world — absorbed, internalized, genuinely alive in the people and decisions and products that continue after them. Where the Human IP has, over time, become cultural IP. Shared. Owned collectively. Survivable.

The brands that don’t last are the ones where the meaning never migrated — where it remained so entirely one person’s that when the person left, there was nothing underneath the marks except the marks.

Off-White did not fail. Virgil built something real, something dense with genuine human truth, something that still has enough gravity that serious creators want to engage with it four years after his death. The 10x10 collection exists because the legacy is real.

What Off-White is now discovering — publicly, structurally, in a way the whole industry can observe — is that a real legacy and an owned meaning are not automatically the same thing.

The legacy belongs to whoever carries the truth of it.

Right now, that is not the brand.

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