Esther Perel fit one of my content chapters beautifully. The intended messaging would have flowed perfectly from her. She was the anchor speaker I was building the rest of the lineup around.

We reached out with a generous opening offer and waited.

It came back a polite no. She had family commitments already booked.

We went higher. I was willing to cut budget from second tier speakers to ensure we got her. Waited a few days. Again, no she couldn’t.

We made one final plea with a figure that would have been eye-watering to most people in her industry. The answer was the same. Family, regardless of price, took priority.

The old economics of access

A few days ago, I joined her livestream on Substack.

There were twenty-three other people on it with me and we had the ability to ask questions live. The cost of admission was a premium subscription to her channel, $8 dollars a month, or $80 for the year.

For context: our final offer would have included business class airfare, accommodation at a luxury venue, hair and makeup and access to world leaders across brand-led businesses. She turned that down three times. Then she sat on a livestream for an audience of two dozen people who’d paid less than the price of an iced matcha in LA.

I still think about how great she would have been and sitting on that livestream what hit me is how the price of value has shifted. And what gets considered valuable in the first place.

The room becomes the product

The keynote offer was structured around an old assumption: that the scarce thing was access to her. Her words, her frameworks, her thinking. The premise of the price was that you couldn’t get those things any other way. So you paid for the speaker, the room she walked into was incidental, and the audience around you was a byproduct of the transaction.

That assumption is broken.

We already have access to her thinking. She has three podcasts, a Substack, large social following where she frequently shares, books, a TED talk etc. The frameworks or frameworks are not scarce. You can build a near-complete version of Esther Perel for free, on demand, in any direction you want.

So what is actually scarce?

It’s the room. The fact that you were there.

The social proof of being in proximity to them. The shape of the audience around you. The post. The signalling “I was invited into this exclusive room because of who I am or what I do.”

This is the inversion that most event programming hasn’t caught up to. The audience used to be the byproduct of paying for the speaker. Now the speaker is the magnet that produces the audience and the audience is the product. The thing being sold is who else showed up.

Which means a livestream of twenty-three people behind an $8 paywall and a keynote in front of a hundred or so people are not the same product scaled up and down. They are entirely different transactions. One sells access to her. The other sells access to a curated, small, willing-to-pay room. The first is what brands keep trying to buy. The second is what audiences are increasingly trying to buy.

And the second is cheaper to make, more repeatable and arguably more valuable to everyone in it, including her.

What this means for brands

For anyone building brand experiences, this changes the job.

The work isn’t sourcing content anymore. The content is free, ambient, already in your audience’s feeds. The work is curating the room. Who you put on stage is a casting decision for who shows up to sit in front of it. The speaker is bait, the lineup is filtering criteria.

The metrics shift with it. Peer adjacency, the post-event group chat, the dinner that happens once the doors close, the LinkedIn post that opens with “had the most extraordinary conversation last night” that’s what your audience is paying for. Most briefs still optimise for the wrong thing: bigger names, bigger stages, bigger audiences. The interesting work is going the other direction. Smaller, tighter, more deliberate about who’s in the room and why they belong there.

It also changes what you’re actually buying when you book a speaker. You’re not buying their content. You’re buying their pull / their lore. Their ability to draw a specific kind of person into a specific kind of room. The smart strategists stopped asking “who do we want on the stage.” They’re asking “who do we want in the audience, and which speaker will make those people show up.”

The brands that figure this out stop thinking of themselves as content producers and start thinking of themselves as room builders. The speaker is the lure. The room is the asset. Plan accordingly.

The new scarcity

The most interesting question for anyone designing a stage in 2026 isn’t who you can put on it. It’s who you can put in front of it. And whether the people in those seats are willing to participate for the privilege of sitting next to each other.

Esther may not be framing her own choices this way. Her stated reason was family, not a strategic read on shifting scarcity. But the market signal is the same either way: a price that, by any conventional measure, she should have taken, lost to a livestream that, by any conventional measure, shouldn’t have been able to compete.

The keynote was the old scarcity, the livestream is the new one.

She picked the new one.

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This is the last time I’ll be able to say that for the next few months. And the last photo-booth from our Los Feliz tree-house. We’re returning to Ireland for the much-adored “Euro Summer”.

I’ve also just signed my first talent. I am now, officially, a “Talent Manager” (!) with my own LLC. I hadn’t planned this but I was approached and I said yes because I’m a believer in momentum. When you put wheels in motion, things tend to happen. Even things you didn’t plan. Translating brand-building to an individual, it turns out, is more similar than I thought.

Great brand content requires a deliberate, repeatable system.

I’m building him as a business, future-proofing long-term success by implementing the techniques of new media business. At the core, there are a few principles and fundamentals that I’m instilling.

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The new rules of relevance

The first thing: Instagram is not your audience. Instagram is where your audience currently lives. Those are very different things. Most talented people don’t grasp what it means to put their livelihood in the hands of a few trigger-happy men in Menlo Park until the algorithm shifts and the work of five years vanishes.

The old playbook was built around formats. Get a following —> Post content —> Repeat. It produced a lot of people with impressive numbers and very little leverage because the day the algorithm changed, or the platform shifted, the whole thing collapsed. The audience was never really theirs.

“Don’t build on rented land” as the saying goes.

“New Media” starts with a different question: what do you actually own? What follows are six principles I have come to believe are non-negotiable for any talent who wants to build something that lasts.

01. “Own your distribution” is table stakes

Every platform you build on has its own interests, and those interests are not yours. TikTok can deprioritise your content with a single algorithm update. Instagram can suppress reach if you don’t pay. A platform can disappear, get banned, or fall out of fashion. And when it does, the audience you spent years cultivating goes with it because it was never in a relationship with you. It was in a relationship with the platform.

Owning your distribution means building channels where you control the relationship. A newsletter subscriber is yours. A podcast listener who sought you out is yours. A community that formed around your ideas is yours. That’s why Substack has gained such traction - the email address you sign-up with is accessible to the creator.

Every piece of social content should have a pull: a reason for the right person to take one step toward a deeper, owned relationship. The direction of travel should always be: from their platform, to yours.

02. A durable audience requires three conditions

The formula for a sustainable media presence is deceptively simple.

1. You need an engaged audience.

2. That audience must hear from you consistently.

3. And they must want to hear from you because you deliver on what you have promised them, every time.

All three conditions are necessary. None of them works on its own.

The third, being wanted is the one most people underinvest in. They grow the number. They show up. But they haven’t thought carefully enough about why someone would actually want to hear from them specifically, on a recurring basis, when there are a hundred other things competing for that attention.

The answer is always the same: because you deliver on a specific promise that no one else delivers in quite the same way.

03. Habit is the asset. Reach is just the top of the funnel

Owning a habit among your audience is one of the most valuable positions available in New Media. Owning a recurring moment in their week that they would notice if it disappeared.

The newsletter they open on Tuesday morning. The podcast they save for the commute. The Instagram they check because they know something worth reading will be there.

This is not passive consumption, it’s is an active relationship. And it is worth far more (commercially and strategically) than a large but indifferent audience.

Reach gets you in front of people and habit keeps you there. And the difference between the two is almost entirely down to whether you are consistently delivering on the brand promise.

04. Think in messages. Not formats.

Most creators think in formats. What is the reel? What is the newsletter topic? What is the podcast episode? This is backwards.

The creators who endure have identified a specific idea they are uniquely positioned to advance and then figured out what formats serve that idea best at any given moment. The format changes. The algorithm changes. The message, if it is the right one, does not need to.

Format-thinking produces content. Message-thinking produces a body of work. The difference is visible five years in.

Before deciding what to post, ask what you are actually trying to say and whether what you are about to create advances that idea or distracts from it. Every off-message piece slightly blurs what you stand for.

A way to think about the content pillars you produce: Pillar = Topic + Format.

05. Volume is how you get better, not just bigger

Ship something every week and you can expect to improve 1% per piece. By the end of the year, you are approximately 65% better than when you started.

Ship something every day and improve just 0.02% per piece a fraction of the weekly rate, because the work is faster. But multiply that across five times as many days, and by the end of the year you are 165% better.

The daily creator is not improving faster per piece. They are improving faster overall because they are getting five times as many attempts to discover what works, to refine their voice, to find the idea inside the idea. Treat content as reps.

Build a publishing rhythm across multiple layers: daily social, weekly newsletter, monthly long-form, annual flagship. Each layer runs at a different frequency and a different depth. The daily layer generates the reps. The annual layer demonstrates what those reps have built.

06. Know the difference between content and IP

Content is what you post and IP is what you own. They are not the same thing.

A newsletter archive is a body of work. A podcast back catalogue is a credential. A framework that gets cited, taught, and referenced - that is intellectual property that appreciates in value the longer it exists.

I use a simple test: does this still belong to you in ten years? If the platform it lives on disappeared tomorrow, would the work survive? If yes, it is IP. If no, it is promotion. Both have their place. But they require different levels of investment, and they produce different returns.

Every quarter, ask: what have we built this quarter that will still be working in five years? If the honest answer is nothing, something needs to change. Not all output needs to be IP, but some of it does. That is what compounds.

None of this is new or revolutionary. Growing impressions up and to the right, week after week, is craft and persistence. It is showing up when the content is not flowing. It is refining the message when something does not land. It is the unglamorous, cumulative work of building something consistent.

The goal is to get so many reps in, so consistently, that the strategy becomes instinct.

Do as I say, not as I do….

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Next week: what a manager actually does in 2026 and why the functions have multiplied.

adidas hasn’t had that problem lately. Directed by Thibaut Grevet, Samuel L. Jackson fronted the next chapter of adidas Superstar. Last Thursday, Originals closed off a tunnel in Downtown LA to launch their 2026 FIFA World Cup away kits. Different outputs, operating in the same structure.

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The event was called “Three Lanes.” A nod to LA traffic, the thing that defines daily life in the city and also the physical reality of the space itself. It also referenced the three stripes - something I only fully registered after the fact.

Walking in felt like stepping onto a movie set. Cars lined the streets with DJs performing inside. There was high-production photography and videography shoots happening throughout without being intrusive. Everyone looked like they’d arrived in their own clothes and somehow collectively nailed it. That specific thing where the dressing is referencing without cosplaying. Vintage Originals worn like archive finds. Football shorts as rave-wear. The kind of crowd where you couldn’t tell who was styled and who just dressed like that. It felt like the most interesting people in LA in one space. At one point I was standing beside Barry Keoghan, an infamous Brazilian streamer (my friend informed me), and Kendall Jenner.

KAYTRANADA performed and Baby Keem closed it out in an intimate set, calibrated perfectly. It never tipped into overcrowded.

We hear a lot about brand world building but not many are able to master it at scale. This is exactly what it looks like when it’s working.

The content ecosystem

The space was designed with distribution in mind. A high-end photo booth as you entered, with lighting designed to translate cleanly on camera. None of it felt like set dressing. It felt like a set of considered decisions made by people who understood what they were building and why.

Creative direction was led by Project 3 (a company uniting Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free’s pgLang and the creative agency Frosty), with production by Mazarine. There’s a recognisable discipline to that kind of work, a clear point of view that holds all the way through.

I spoke to J.D. Ostrow, one of the Project 3 executives, to understand how the night came together from the brief.

MAEVE: “Three Lanes” felt deeply rooted in LA, with the World Cup context running through it. How did the idea come to life from the original brief?

It’s something universally understood, relatable and unavoidable, and, in the context of a World Cup summer in the U.S., highly likely on the way to a game. What we loved about it was that it acts as a leveler. No matter who you are, where you’re from, or who you support, a traffic jam puts everyone in the same place at the same time, whether they asked for it or not.

From there, the thinking became: if you’re in it, how do you make it something enjoyable? How do you turn it into something communal and memorable, something that becomes part of the journey, not just aggravation?

LA felt like the natural home for that idea. The diversity of the city, the mix of cultures, and the global football audience that lives in there and loves the game. And the weather is helpful.

MAEVE: “Was this a standalone moment, or part of a wider campaign system?”

adidas, and specifically adidas Originals, are exceptional at thinking in terms of a full ecosystem. Every idea is considered not just as a single moment, but in how it shows up across markets, channels, and communities with both specificity and connectivity.

This Away Kit reveal is one moment within a much broader brand, category, and cultural calendar, with a range of activations and expressions still to come.

As for the traffic jam concept and how it continues to evolve and show up in different ways… stay tuned.

Capitalizing on the investment

This is the model worth paying attention to. Productions at this level are expensive. But the calculation is entirely different when you’re not building for a single ad - you’re building a brand world. One that lives beyond the event. That generates a rolling library of content from a single investment. That gives creators with significant followings a reason to engage and a visual language to work within.

The event is the anchor. Everything else flows from it.

And what flows from it isn’t filler - it’s episodic content released intentionally, creators and A-list attendees recapping on social, each piece extending the narrative across channels and formats.

A surprising number of agencies are still working from an outdated playbook: isolated production, a campaign window, a media buy, then onto the next. adidas and Project 3 are operating on a completely different system.

MAEVE: “How do you approach integrating product into an experience so it carries meaning rather than feeling like placement?”

This is everything, and it starts with honesty.

If you’re there to market a specific product, be clear about it. Be confident in it. Create moments where the product is the focus and you’re effectively saying to the audience, “this is what we’re here for.”

In this case, the custom truck display was designed to showcase each kit in detail, giving the product the space and attention it deserved. That was complemented by a more expressive, on-stage moment, where individuals from the countries represented brought the kits to life in a way that felt natural and human.

You also have to recognize that when you bring together different creative communities, there’s an inherent sense of style and personal expression that you simply can’t manufacture. That becomes the most genuine interpretation of the brand and the product, and ultimately how it shows up in real life.

MAEVE: “The space felt exceptionally well curated across creators, artists, and cultural figures. How do you approach building the right audience for something like this?”

This was very much a collaborative effort.

adidas, over many years, has naturally positioned itself at the intersection of sport, music, entertainment, and creativity. When you build an event that draws from all of those worlds, it creates the conditions for a really special mix of people and energy.

I’d also like to think Project 3 played a role. Our connection to LA, and moments like Baby Keem performing, helped shape the room in a meaningful way.

At the same time, there’s an element you can’t fully control. You do everything you can to create the right environment, one where people feel comfortable, engaged, and ready to have a good time. And sometimes, it just works.

In this case, it did. And it felt special.

The takeaways

So what actually stood out?

1. The detail: From the strategic message positioning right through to the merch bags, the level of consideration was extraordinary. Nothing felt like an afterthought.

2. The vision to activation journey: The ability to translate a vision into an activation with full clarity. “Three Lanes” worked as a concept on paper and it worked as an experience in the room. That alignment - being able to visualise a brand positioning and bring it to life so that everything feels intentional, everything has a place — is the thing most activations fail at.

3. The content model: This wasn’t a production built for a singular purpose. It was infrastructure. A content ecosystem designed to generate hundreds of assets, released with intention, evolving across markets and channels. Episodic content on social. Creators and A-list attendees captured throughout the night, each recapping from their own angle, each adding a new touchpoint to the same root event. The campaign doesn’t end when the tunnel reopens. It’s just getting started.

adidas is one of the FIFA World Cup’s longest-running sponsors. Not a one-off moment, but a blueprint for how product, culture and experience compound over time.

I’ve come to the Los Feliz library, a few weeks postpartum with two hours to myself and no idea what I was going to write and found inspiration just looking around me.

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The most diverse room in LA costs nothing to enter

It’s busier than usual today. There is an “epic heatwave” in the city and people are seeking refuge. The library is air-conditioned, free and open to anyone.

The elderly mostly occupy the magazine section, armchairs by the window. The creative class huddle around a circular table accompanied by Maru coffees. Nannies and mothers and fathers in the children’s reading room. Job seekers at the computers updating CVs. And me, a few weeks postpartum trying to write something worth reading.

Five very different cohorts. And yet, it remains one of the only genuinely diverse spaces in the city.

The eroding concept of a third space

When strategists and marketers talk about third spaces, they tend to mean the pay-to-play version: luxury gyms, members clubs, brand activations. The term has been so deeply overused that it’s easy to forget what it was supposed to mean - a place that belongs to everyone, not just anyone who can afford it.

This is exactly the kind of space brands seek to recreate. The aesthetic of belonging without the infrastructure of it. The library doesn’t manufacture, it just is. And yet, over 16,000 public libraries exist across the U.S. most facing budget cuts year after year. The very infrastructure brands are borrowing from is being eroded.

What the library offers is so much more than books. A Californian library card gets you many perks: access to 200+ state parks, LACMA membership, LinkedIn Learning, an NY Times subscription. But more than that, it grants you permission to sit, to think, to exist without spending money.

The library is one of the last places in the city where you’re treated like a citizen, not a customer.

As more of our shared spaces become transactional and our social lives are occupied by brand events, that distinction is becoming more radical.

The brands getting it right and the ones that aren’t

Libraries are also increasingly becoming community hubs hosting film screenings, workshops, language classes, reading groups, career support. In Finland, the model has gone further Libraries now lend sewing machines, give access to3D printing machines, digitise old cassettes and loan art. They have become public living rooms that evolves with what the community actually needs.

You’re starting to see glimpses of this acknowledgment by brands, partly because intellectual engagement is becoming social.

Death to Stock and recently explored this shift through the lens of the ‘Thought Daughter’ a figure emerging at the intersection of identity and intellectual aspiration. Their zeit (“moodboards with a cultural pulse”) taps into how being well-read, culturally curious and ideas-driven has become a genuine marker of identity, not just taste. The risk, as they note, is when the performance replaces the pursuit.

Just last week, Uniqlo launched a partnership with The New York Public Library as part of three new stores opening. They’re doing it through exclusive themed merch designed by Japanese graphic designer Kei Saito and support for cultural programming and youth-focused initiatives including Library After Hours that are free and ope to the public throughout the year.

LEGO has run a similar playbook for years through it’s Build the Change program, partnering with public libraries worldwide to provide play-based resources. Libraries get materials and reach. LEGO gets brand association at the most formative years of a child's life.

Museums were once the obvious partner for brands seeking cultural legitimacy but they’re quickly becoming oversaturated. Libraries are next in line because they carry near-universal trust and support (90% of voters say libraries are important to their community1), anti-commercial roots and an institutional community bond.

That’s exactly what makes them worth protecting. But brands that treat them as a transactional space rather than an institution to support and protect will come across as exactly that. The run club of 2022 is a cautionary tale. Audiences in 2026 are discerning enough to tell the difference. Libraries deserve better.

What real community investment actually looks like

The branch I’m sitting in this afternoon is a reminder that not all of this is strategy or performative. It has a quirky feature most people don’t know about and that anonymity is special.

The computer room is sparse beyond a few dated PCs, the walls covered in signed film posters. It’s an odd combination until you learn that this exact spot was Leonardo DiCaprio’s childhood bedroom.

He and his family have been funding the library since the 90s. The branch director has spoken about how his foundation will periodically reach out and ask what the library needs. During the late 2000s recession, staff noticed residents coming in specifically to read the New York Times because they couldn’t afford a subscription. They asked DiCaprio’s foundation for one year’s access, just to test it.

He donated five years. No press release, just: “what do you need?”.

DiCaprio speaks about the arts being under threat, specifically the communal cinematic experience. “I’ve been most affected as an audience member when I’m in a communal experience with other people.”

He is right. And the library is proof of exactly that. It is one of the last public places where culture is experienced collectively, not curated individually.

The spaces we take for granted are the ones that disappear

I grew up going to Wicklow Library. I didn’t think much of it at the time, it was just there, the way public things are just there until they aren’t. I understand its value now in a way I didn’t then. I’m sitting on the other side of the world with that same feeling of familiarity and homeliness that a library inhabits regardless of where in the world you’re situated.

By the time my children are old enough to walk into a library alone, I hope it is still a living, breathing and vibrant public space that belongs to the collective. That’s not a given. It’s a choice we make through what we fund, protect, and refuse to let disappear.

If anyone asks what a functioning society should feel like, I’d point them to a library.

Pieces I read in support to support my thinking:

• Pew Research: How Americans Value Public Libraries in Their Communities

• Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

• New York Times: To Restore Civil Society, Start With the Library

• American Library Association: IMLS Cuts Put America’s Public Libraries at Risk

• Death to Stock and : The Thought Daughter

• Fashion United: Uniqlo x NYPL

There's something special about watching how a city turns up for its runners and equally interesting to watch how brands show up around it.

Since moving to LA, I’ve gotten to know the running space pretty well. I trialled a few clubs before finding a home in Good Vibes, an adjacent crew to my forever love, Hot Boys in London.

This weekend I saw: Satellite (USAL) collaborating with Adidas; Bandit launched a campaign ft. runners from the elite Capri team; Cadence partnering with Sweetgreen; and Nike - long-time partner of KTown Run Club and Good Vibes - releasing a limited-edition collection with Silverlake store Renegade.

Marathon weekend is peak brand season. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, but most only for the weekend.

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The problem with exploiting community

We all remember the 2022 run-club hype. Every dating app, tech company, DTC brand showed up and paid to play. It was fickle and shortsighted. I’d argue it did more damage than it benefited them. It revealed their inner workings. Growth at all costs, live and die by the quarter, illustrate "cultural relevance" to the sales team.

“Community” is a concept marketers have been grappling with for over a decade. It’s one of the most overused, misunderstood words in the industry. Brands exploit community the same way: generate awareness, capture content, gather the metrics that prove they’re “part of culture”. Then they disappear.

The temptation when a cultural moment arrives is to move fast and claim territory. Running had a moment, "women in sport"1 (whatever that actually means) wasn’t far behind. Get in, get visible, get the content.

But if we learnt anything, it’s that you can’t parachute into a community that took years to build and expect it to hand you its trust. It doesn’t work like that. The community always knows (and remembers!).

Being part of the foundation

This time last year I ran 10.5 miles of the LA marathon (before pulling out with an injury) in head-to-toe Pruzan - a female-founded, style-led, performance running brand. Their vision: “celebrating the duality of femininity through running'“ resonates deeply.

What you wear has become a significant part of the marathon experience. As Grace Cook articulated it in a widely-read FT piece: marathons have become the new fashion weeks.

I discovered Pruzan through Hot Boys, founded by the brilliant Kimi and coached by the legendary Knox. Pruzan doesn’t show up at arm’s length when it’s convenient. Jessie, the co-founder, is an actual participant and contributor.

They give us early access to new collections. They hosted us in their studio for the post-London Marathon lock-in. And most critically they take our feedback and build it into the product. Their SS26 collection was developed with three years of feedback.

What Jessie has built is what community-as-growth-strategy actually looks like when it's not a strategy at all. I sat down with her for a podcast episode to dive deeper into the ethos of the brand, unpacking their growth, product and marketing strategies and what’s in store for their future. You can listen to the episode:

What follows is what I took away.

Audience mindset over community ownership

Female-founded brands in the running space usually fall into the lifestyle end of the market. Soft colours, stretch fabrics, perfect for pilates and a coffee after. The implicit suggestion is that yes, women run, but not quite as seriously as the default (male) consumer.

Pruzan’s own words say it best: gear built for marathon and ultra distances, with the kind of lasting comfort they craved after years of running in products designed for men and adapted for women.

The brand ethos pushes back on this directly. Their customer is defined by what she does.

She is someone who uses running to see the world - signs up for a race in Dublin and builds a trip around it. Someone who cares about arts, design, and culture. Someone who wants to feel like themselves when they run, not like a walking billboard for a brand that doesn’t know them.”

That specificity is a competitive advantage that no incumbent can easily replicate. As Jessie told me:

We’re not chasing some established runners look. We’re really trying to create something that’s way more personal - pulling from all these references we really enjoy. Vintage. Sport. Fashion. Masculine references too. It’s not meant to be this only feminine perspective.

Build a wardrobe. Not a uniform.

Pruzan is one of the very few feminine performance brands in the market. Built for high-performance women who don’t see the need to trade-off between function and self-expression.

The result is a product described, consistently, as making women feel like themselves on a run. Which sounds obvious. Until you realise how rarely that’s actually true.

Product-led culture

What makes this sustainable is that the community strategy and the product strategy are the same strategy.

Ana Andjelic recently wrote that product discoverability is a design feature. In a world where everything is a thumbnail, the product has to become its own best marketing.

Pruzan is a case study in exactly that. But their version of it starts somewhere Andjelic’s framework doesn’t: inside the community itself.

Jessie’s background is in user research, and it shows. When I asked her about the design process, she described thinking through the exact sequence of a runner’s day:

Where does your phone go on an 18-mile training run? What layers work when you trek across London to train, run, grab a coffee, and get back on the tube in the cold?

Questions that can only be answered from experience. From being the person you’re designing for.

That proximity is what drives genuine product differentiation. As Jessie puts it:

“I just really didn’t feel like myself when I was running. I felt like I was putting on this fluorescent neon ill-fitting top and some bottoms that just felt really ill considered.”

That friction between how she showed up in her everyday life and how she was expected to show up on a run became the founding premise of the brand.

Aesthetics emerge from function. Style is a natural byproduct of technical designs that enhance movement. Feminine high performance. Something genuinely new.

The partnership play

Early on, Pruzan made a decision that most brands never make: they decided not to compete with running clubs but to partner with them.

“Running clubs (like any community) takes a lot of commitment to really craft correctly,” Jessie told me. “They take someone showing up day after day, week after week, cultivating the group, giving a purpose to the group. That’s not where we compete. We want to partner in that space.

So instead of building their own club, they built around the ones that already existed. What Jessie calls novelty events - experiences designed around what the runner actually needs in that moment, not what a brand wants to be seen doing.

Melting Miles, a half marathon from Brooklyn to Rockaway Beach, affogatos after a park loop in Victoria Park, a cocktail party for marathon finishers.

“For us, it’s always been about leaning into what does this experience represent? What is our community trying to do in that moment?”

The marathon is their template. Race day, in Pruzan’s world, is a celebration of months of early mornings, worn-down joints, the plans you said no to, of the body that carried you there and the people who got you there.

Anyone can throw a party for finishers. The brands that earn our loyalty (and business) were there at 6am in January when there was nothing to post about.

The blueprint

If you’re building a brand around culture, three things matter:

Define your community by mindset, not aesthetic. Pruzan’s customer isn’t a look. She’s a way of moving through the world. That gives the brand a flexibility and longevity that trend-chasing never will.

Partner, don’t compete. Jessie made an early decision to work alongside run clubs rather than try to replicate them. The result is genuine community credibility that no activation budget can buy.

Earn the moment before you show up in it. The marathon party worked because Pruzan had already been showing up in the training, with the product, contributing for months. The celebration felt genuine because it was.

Community strategy and product strategy aren’t separate workstreams. The best brands know they’re the same thing.

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Listen to the full conversation with Jessie on the podcast link below. And if you want to explore the Pruzan SS26 collection, you can find it at Pruzanrunning.com.

Now? “I sell six-figure books to people in their thirties.”

Founders. Tech people. Hedge fund managers. Crypto investors. Creatives who’ve had a big exit. The same generation that built the platforms that made everything abundant, frictionless and dematerialized, is now paying premiums for scarcity, friction, and materiality.

“They are culturally hungry,” Oli says. “They want something real. A first edition of Frankenstein or a signed Tolkien is a way of owning a piece of the cultural myth.”

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The smartest brands never stopped believing in print

Like many of you, I’m seeing “it’s the year of analog” all over my feed at the moment. It feels oddly dated. Smart brands have known this for years.

In 2019, I joined Meta to scale a print magazine. We created a quarterly edition with a brilliant editor who interviewed world leaders from culture, tech, the arts, and science, and distributed them offline and online including every British Airways executive lounge across Europe.

Naturally, the concept was questioned: why is a tech platform creating the very thing they’re supposedly working against?

One of the reasons? Print captures attention in ways digital never can. Even the largest tech platform in the world knew that.

It gave us permission to activate around experiences. We hosted speaker series, launch parties, and summits, bringing people together to build a community of like-minded individuals.

I’ve worked for three of the five largest social media platforms in the world, and each knows (and has for a very long time) the value of in-person connection and community.

Print as cultural infrastructure

When I worked for The Business of Fashion, the launch of the annual print edition was an iconic moment. There was nothing quite like the pride I felt seeing my name on the back cover page. Expensive to produce? Absolutely. But the effect it had on BoF’s cult following was immeasurable. The limited editions were treated like collectors’ items.

Now, we see more and more brands trialing old-school magazine-style print. There is a recognition that they’re not revenue driving machines, they’re marketing tactics that fuel PR, generate social content, and elevate their contributors’ and brands profiles.

Print is the most obvious analog approach because it requires authorship and a distinctive voice, which delivers trust. It can be distributed through multiple offline channels, demands sustained attention to actually read and when crafted well with cultural gravitas, becomes a keepsake that lives on for branding moments in the home or office.

There’s an interesting paradox in print too: reading rates are declining, yet book purchases are rising.

The deeper WHY

To understand what’s happening beneath the surface (not just the marketing tactics), I spoke with Oliver Bayliss, founder of Bayliss Books, a rare book dealer “for the modern collector.”

What he shared reveals helps us understand the deeper meaning behind physical ownership, identity, and the need for cultural distinction.

The new collectors (fueled by tech money)

The biggest shift Oli sees is that collecting has become emotional again.

People aren’t just buying investments. They’re buying their childhood and their identity.

“Someone inherits money and realizes they don’t want another watch.

Someone sells a company and suddenly asks what it would mean to own a first edition of The Hobbit. Someone watches Oppenheimer or a Guillermo del Toro film and goes down a rabbit hole that ends at my door.”

Many of these collectors are the thirty-something tech founders, the builders of the digital infrastructure we know today. There’s an obvious irony there.

Slow knowledge and a digital backlash

“I think we’re seeing a backlash against digital life. Everything is on a screen. Nothing feels solid. A book that survived 200 years, that someone once held in their hands—that’s a kind of anchor.”

We’re living in two extremes. On one end: the optimizers, the growth-mode people, the ones building AI to generate infinite content, the ones who believe every problem has a hack. On the other: a smaller but growing group rejecting this hyper-growth, scale-at-all-costs mode and leaning into a slower pace of life. A more refined and intentional lifestyle that’s becoming harder and harder to inhibit.

Oli’s expertise took years to build. Discovery is serendipitous rather than search-optimized. Value accrues through patience. The objects themselves resist acceleration: you have to physically handle them, smell them, examine the binding.

The pre-AI archive

There’s also another factor at play. We’re approaching a point where most text will be AI-generated, or at the very least AI-assisted, where proving human authorship becomes the exception rather than the default.

The books Oli sells represent the ultimate proof of humanity. You can trace the human chain: the author’s hand, the printer’s choices, the binder’s craft, even previous readers’ annotations. Each copy is an artifact from a specific window in history, created before the flood of synthetic content.

The life of a dealer

Oli doesn’t see himself as a dealer, but as a finder.

“We are modern-day treasure hunters. I get to travel the world seeking out rare books. I go into the world, pull these things out of attics and collections and auction rooms, and get them into the hands of people who will love them.”

MD: What drew you to the industry?

“I fell into it by accident. I left school early, had no safety net, no family money, no plan. I just loved books and objects that had lived a life.”

MD: What does a typical week look like?

There is no ‘normal week.’ If there is, you’re doing it wrong. A lot of dealers spend every day at their desk and for me, I would go mad. Get out there, meet collectors, fly to LA because you have a hunch and the business will grow in ways you never expected.”

What this means for brand strategy

You can see where this is going. Not too long ago, performance marketing was universally (falsely) touted as a tactic that could grow businesses in isolation without brand investment. We’re now seeing what actually delivers tangible brand loyalty and cult followings. It’s rooted in identity and takes years of consistency and quality to build and maintain.

The same principles that make rare books valuable (scarcity, provenance, craft, human authorship) apply to brand-building in an age of infinite content.

Recommendations for brands considering analog tactics

1. Make it part of an ecosystem

The analog play needs to feel like part of a cohesive ecosystem, not a one-off stunt. Meta’s magazine worked because it connected to events, community building, and the broader brand narrative about connection. Don’t create a print magazine in isolation build the experiences, conversations, and community around it.

2. Invest in a hero piece of content

Create a single piece of content with a strong narrative, then amplify it through communications and scale it through social and influential voices who contribute. Think of your print piece as the anchor, the physical manifestation of your brand’s point of view that can be endlessly referenced, photographed, quoted, and discussed across channels.

3. Consistency is key

Many of the print editions I’ve seen being built strategically have fallen away. They were the product of millions of dollars of investment and they no longer exist. If you’re going to invest in analog, do it with executive buy-in for the long term. One beautiful issue doesn’t build a brand. Ten years of consistent quality does.

4. Measure what can be measured (but accept what can’t)

Analog tactics are brand-building opportunities built for long-term scale. If you’re measuring against short-term actions, it will be impossible to justify. These tactics take time.

Instead, use smart signals: Track brand search volume, monitor sentiment shifts, measure PR value, observe social engagement around the physical artifact, and pay attention to who’s talking about you and in what context. Look for increases in consideration among your target audience. Track retention and lifetime value among people who engaged with the physical piece versus those who didn’t.

The closing thought

As AI floods the digital space with infinite content, the physical, the crafted, the intentional, and the human will only become more valuable.

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Huge thank you to Oliver Bayliss for his time and wonderful insight. To explore his collections and get in touch, visit his website: www.baylissbooks.co.uk

Chappell Roan just walked in, and I have two immediate observations:
1) She is impeccably dressed and much shorter than I expected. She’s wearing what I can only assume is a Chopova Lowena-style midi skirt and matching long-sleeve top, paired with black Tabis.
2) She and her friend / co-worker ordered (and paid for) their coffees separately. I found that a little odd.

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Celebrity culture in LA is different. Chappell is the product of a new kind of fame: creator-turned-superstar, built in public, shaped by the internet, and far from overnight.

Her road was long, nonlinear, and largely unglamorous. She was discovered on YouTube at 17, signed to Atlantic, and then quietly dropped after a few failed releases. The success we’re seeing today would have been almost impossible without the new media ecosystem, one that keeps mutating and fragmenting in front of us.

Which brings me to what caught my attention this week.

YouTube’s dominates

Everyone seems to have finally woken up to how much of a threat YouTube has become.

In one of Scott Galloway’s most recent No Mercy, No Malice article’s, he put it in perspective: The Kids Diana Show has 137 million subscribers, compared to Disney+ which has 128 million TOTAL.

A family making short, hyper-optimized videos (2–10 minutes, perfectly tuned for collapsing attention spans) now commands a bigger audience than one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. This blew my mind!

Other data points worth noting:

• YouTube secured exclusive streaming rights to the Oscars starting in 2029, ending a 50-year relationship with ABC

• The number of YouTube channels earning over $100,000 from connected TVs rose 45% year-over-year

• MrBeast has earned $85 million, his channel has 455 million subscribers, and one video was viewed 892 million times

• The platform sees 20 million new videos competing for attention every day1

“The Creator Economy” (we need to find a new name for this)

U.S. Creator Economy ad spend will hit $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year-over-year. That’s growing four times faster than the overall media industry’s 5.7%. A few things jumped out from the IAB Creator Economy report:

• Brands are partnering most with mid-tier creators (50K-500K followers) at 61%, followed by macro (500K-1M) and micro (10K-50K) both at 55%.

• 48% of brands now consider creator marketing a “must buy,” ranking behind only social media (74%) and paid search (60%)

• 75% of brands are using or planning to use AI for creator marketing

• Top needs from the industry: advanced attribution (28%), consistent reporting (26%), and creator discovery/vetting tools (25%)

Human-led content

Interesting countertrend: Reddit just overtook TikTok to become Britain’s fourth most visited social media site, driven by search algorithms and Gen Z users seeking out human-generated content2. UK subreddits on pregnancy and parenting have doubled in size over the last year (you can safely assume I account for at least 3% of this uplift).

“You see these accidents of AI slop and AI advice—Reddit doesn’t have that. It’s not clean. It’s messy, in that it has lots of different pieces of advice that you have to sift through. It’s not manicured down to one answer for you, but that’s kind of the point.”

@sierraxliyahbig fan of @Reddit #reddit #fyp #google

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As feeds are increasingly dominated by ads, AI-generated content and polarized politics, the move towards human-led, messy, imperfect content is exactly what’s needed.

Attention math

Two stats that sit uncomfortably next to each other:

• 43% of Americans aged 18 to 29 get their news from TikTok3

• We spend an average of 54 minutes per day on TikTok versus 35 minutes per day with friends 4

Make of that what you will.

That’s what I’m thinking about this week. Not exactly sure where it all leads, but the numbers suggest that the future belongs to the most human of voices.

P.S Canyon Coffee does a fantastic flat white and glazed doughnut. This is where I sit and write or read and drink great coffee:

They all had some version of: AI is important, authenticity matters, and Gen Z wants purpose from their career.

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“Trend reporting” has become marketing collateral dressed up as research. That’s not to say these reports are entirely useless, some contain genuinely interesting signals, but too often they recycle the obvious, obscure the methodology, and ultimately serve the publisher more than the reader.

Sometimes what’s actually helpful for me (as a marketer/ strategist) is access to clean, reasonably objective data points, clearly sourced, clearly scoped, that allow us to form our own opinions.

That’s why I’ve started building a personal repository of data points I can reference throughout the year: the stat, the source, the report, without having to trawl through “the micro-fication of X” or “the de-influencing of Y.”

Take a look and use it if it’s helpful. I’ll be building it out throughout the year as a source reference.

In the meantime, I’ve jotted down why I believe the trend reporting of everything has become so broken and what we can do to consume it more intelligently.

The business model problem

Let’s start with why these reports exist in the first place. Spoiler: it’s rarely about advancing your understanding.

The model is predictable: produce research → generate press → capture email addresses → nurture leads.

This shift away from independent research bodies toward owned insight functions has altered the quality of what we’re served. When the same company funding the research also benefits from its conclusions, the incentives are… compromised.

The most audacious sins of “Trend Reports” I’ve noticed:

Sin 1: Stating the obvious

“Consumers are more selective about spending during economic uncertainty.”

“Video content is becoming increasingly important.”

“Younger generations value authenticity.”

Waste of f*cking time. It’s just filler content to justify the report in the first place. I would much rather shorter, punchier reports that tell a story concisely.

Surely in the reporting, they’ll have uncovered that our attention span is nonexistent.

Sin 2: Missing methodology

Here’s a game: find a trend report and look for sample sizes, margin of error, or methodology details. You’ll be searching for a while.

When methodology is buried in fine print or missing entirely, you can’t assess quality. You can’t determine if the insight applies to your context. You can’t even verify if the research actually happened.

A statistic without methodology is just a number someone made up with a percentage sign attached.

Sin 3: Contradictions

The best trend reports manage to contradict themselves within the same PDF.

• Consumers are price-conscious AND willing to pay premium prices.

• They want personalization AND privacy.

• They’re optimistic about the future AND deeply anxious.

These are fundamental and usually interesting tensions that deserve exploration. But most reports don’t do that deeper work.

The honest answer is often “it depends” on category, income level, geography, or a dozen other factors. But nuance doesn’t make for compelling headlines, so we get sweeping generalizations instead.

Sin 4: Beautiful insights, zero actionability

This might be the most contentious: trend reports that are genuinely creative, beautifully designed, and completely useless.

In pains me to say it because I genuinely love the creativity, craft and content but let’s look at Pinterest’s annual trend predictions. Arguably the most creative B2B marketing in the world - stunning visual design, genuinely interesting cultural observations, search data showing emerging aesthetics. It’s the kind of content people actually want to read and share.

But, it’s not very useful.

If you’re a brand strategist, what do you do with “Poetcore”? If you’re a product developer, how does “butter boards are having a moment” inform your roadmap? Don’t get me wrong, I know they’re not intended to serve every business need but the insights are real, Pinterest has the search data to prove it, they’re missing the “so what”.

The better Trend Reports are as content marketing, the worse they often are as strategic tools. The more shareable they become, the less actionable they tend to be. You finish reading and think “that was fascinating and beautifully executed.” Then you get back to work and realize nothing has changed about your strategy, your product, or your go-to-market plan.

Future-proofing

Brands, platforms, research and media companies can learn a lot from Pinterest in how to market their insights, especially because the trend report industrial complex isn’t going away - the economic incentives are too strong. But we can change how we consume it:

1. Ask who benefits from this insight. If a travel company tells you people want to travel more, approach with healthy skepticism.

2. Demand methodology. If a statistic has no source, sample size, or methodology, it’s not insight - it’s marketing.

3. Look for tensions, not confirmations. The best insights often reveal contradictions that need exploration, not neat narratives that confirm your priors.

4. Build your own synthesis. Instead of letting publishers tell you what matters, collect raw data points and draw your own conclusions based on your specific strategic context.

Maybe the real trend for 2026 is learning to think critically again. Not outsourcing it to trend reports, not delegating it to AI, just... thinking.

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At a moment in time when consumers trust fewer brands and buy more carefully, it suggests something about Marni’s strategy.

I spoke with Chief Marketing Officer Chungaiz Khan Mumtaz about the monumental appointment, the evolution of collaboration and celebrity marketing, and what it takes to build belief.

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Meryll Rogge and the Reassertion of Female Authority

MAEVE: You’ve said Meryll’s appointment doesn’t redirect Marni, but reclaims its original axis. What do you mean by that?

From the beginning, Marni was never anchored in seduction or the male gaze. Consuelo Castiglioni built a world of silent elegance, where the focus was the inner life of the wearer — confidence, autonomy, expression. It was “for women, by women” in a way that was genuinely radical at the time. Garments stood away from the body to liberate it, not to perform for an audience.

That ethos appears clearly in the brand’s historical DNA: embodiment over display, emancipation over spectacle, authenticity over performance.

When Francesco Risso (Creative Director, 2016 until June 2025) arrived, that philosophy expanded horizontally rather than vertically — into art, craft, emotion, collectivity. It became a cultural system rather than just a silhouette. And crucially, it was never framed as activism. It was simply how the brand thought about people.

Meryll’s arrival feels timely because the real question facing luxury today is not novelty — it’s belief. At Business of Fashion VOICES, one theme came through again and again: consumers are more visually literate and more sceptical than ever. They’re tired of inflated storytelling, trend-chasing, and symbolic progress. What reads as pessimism is actually discernment. The audience hasn’t lost desire — it has lost patience.

Meryll’s language is not about disruption or attention. It’s about confidence: in material, proportion, comfort, longevity. She talks about clothes accumulating meaning “like books on a shelf.” That is a fundamentally different idea of luxury — design as an ongoing relationship, not a seasonal stunt.

MAEVE: So this is about more than representation?

Completely. Female creative leadership shouldn’t be framed as symbolic representation. It’s a shift in authority. In a landscape where women are underrepresented as creative directors but lead in criticism, consumption, and cultural interpretation, Meryll’s appointment matters because her approach embodies a mode luxury desperately needs: quiet conviction over volume, editorial intelligence over algorithmic performance.

Luxury’s problem today is overproduction and underthinking. Too much product, too little point of view. Meryll represents a return to clarity and emotional craft — clothes that don’t require explanation to carry meaning.

Collaboration Fatigue and What Comes Next

MAEVE: You’ve worked with HOKA, Madhappy, Carhartt, G-Shock, Veja. What makes a collaboration feel like a genuine extension of Marni’s world?

For me, strong collaborations balance three forces: cultural chemistry, creative friction, and community.

1. Cultural chemistry
This always matters more than aesthetic similarity. The question is: Do we share values?
The projects that work best happen between partners who aren’t chasing fashion but building belief — brands whose sincerity within their own category mirrors your own. That’s when a collaboration feels additive rather than opportunistic.

2. Creative friction
Smooth collaborations tend to disappear. The exciting ones generate something neither partner could make alone — whether that’s HOKA’s performance engineering meeting tactile colour expression, or Madhappy’s human-centred optimism intersecting with a long-standing craft ethos. The outcome shouldn’t feel like compromise. It should feel like expansion.

3. Community
Not community as a buzzword, but as a cultural role. The strongest collaborations aren’t about audience acquisition — they’re about creating space for the people who already resonate with the brand: artists, musicians, thinkers, makers. Collaboration becomes a way of honouring and convening that world, not monetising it.

MAEVE: What signals tell you a collaboration will add to culture rather than disappear into the noise?

Three things:

• A reason to exist beyond revenue — a new cultural lens, category, or way of making.

• Substance over spectacle — partners known for what they do, not for how loudly they announce it.

• Longevity of meaning — will this feel right in three years, not just this season?

MAEVE: Do you think we’re seeing collaboration fatigue?

Yes — because many collaborations have become placeholders for point of view.

A shortcut to relevance. A logo swap. And the consumer sees it instantly.

MAEVE: Will collaborations still hold cultural meaning in 2026?

Absolutely — but the format has to evolve.

The future isn’t more frequent or more viral. It’s fewer projects, deeper arcs, longer narratives, clearer authorship. Collaborations that behave less like “drops” and more like chapters.

If collaborations are to matter, the question can’t be “Who can we work with?”
It has to be: “What do we want to stand for together?”

Celebrity in the Age of Algorithmic Fame

MAEVE: From Kendall Jenner to Hunter Schafer’s iconic 2023 premiere dress, what’s your philosophy on celebrity?

There is no single model anymore, and that’s liberating. Fame is fragmented, contextual, algorithmic.

But one truth remains: celebrity is a media channel. Audiences understand how it works. They interpret celebrity dressing as the top of a brand’s expressive range — not as authenticity, but as visibility.

Because of that, different figures serve different functions.

Sometimes you need scale. A celebrity like Kim Kardashian may convert only a small percentage of her audience — but that percentage outweighs most other channels. She operates at the level of cultural reach.

Other times you need belief. This is the “real people, real style” space — even when those people are globally recognised. These are the figures whose choices feel lived, personal, emotionally intelligent. They make a brand feel human, not just visible.

The Kendall → Hunter spectrum isn’t a contradiction. You need Justin and Hailey. Beyonce and Jay.

It’s the ecosystem working properly: awareness, aspiration, depth — different talents for different jobs.

And no one dresses “total look” in the real world, so expecting celebrities to do so feels outdated and breaks the illusion. Something chosen, not costumed, always carries more cultural weight.

Hunter Schafer’s 2023 look worked because it was emotionally exact. She wasn’t performing a brand. She was expressing herself through it. That’s the ideal alignment.

In an age of algorithmic fame, I ask myself and the teams three questions:

• What role does this person play in the ecosystem?

• Are they amplifying scale or deepening meaning?

• Does their presence make the brand clearer, not louder?

Celebrity still matters — but only when used with taste, self-awareness, and intent.

Marketing & Branding in 2026

MAEVE: What cultural behaviours are you seeing at the fringes that will define the 2026 consumer?

My core belief is that fashion hasn’t hit a demand crisis — it has hit a belief crisis. People still want things. They just don’t believe most things are worth wanting.

Three behaviours stand out:

1. Radical Selectivity

Consumers are more visually fluent, harder to impress, and uninterested in volume. Scarcity doesn’t create desire — conviction does. You see this in the resurgence of pieces meant to endure: vintage Armani, Miyake, Versace. The question becomes: What’s worth keeping?

2. Private Self-Validation

People are still expressive — but less for the feed, more for themselves. Clothes are chosen for how they feel in daily life, not how they perform online. There’s a clear rejection of theatrics in favour of sincerity.

3. Trust Over Aspiration

People don’t need brands to inspire them. They need them not to waste their time. In a culture of abundance, clarity becomes the ultimate luxury.

MAEVE: What about emerging channels and technologies?

Predictions that hinge on platforms tend to miss the point. Desire isn’t generated by where a brand appears, but how it behaves.

AI will shape fashion — but primarily behind the scenes: precision, personalisation, prediction, clienteling, content intelligence. The hype lies in visible gimmicks; the value lies in invisible refinement.

Physical retail is re-emerging as a media channel, not a transaction point — spaces that offer knowledge, atmosphere, emotional exchange. In a saturated digital world, physical presence only matters if it gives something back.

MAEVE: If you had to name one cultural shift that will reshape fashion in the next 24 months?

The move from attention economics to belief economics.

Fashion has spent a decade optimising for visibility. The next decade will be defined by worthiness. Consumers aren’t disengaging — they’re demanding more: more honesty, more clarity, more intelligence, more respect.

The brands that will endure aren’t the ones shouting; they’re the ones with quiet conviction, coherent taste, and cultural purpose.

In 2026, survival belongs to the brands we actually trust.

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As the US trickles back from the Thanksgiving long weekend, I’ve been thinking about how different working culture feels here compared with the UK and Europe.

There are plenty of tired tropes in this conversation, so I won’t slip into praising one region over the other. But the energy really does shift depending on whether you’re on an entrepreneurial path or in a corporate environment.

If you’re an entrepreneur in the US, there seems to be a relentless sense of momentum, appetite and possibility. People move fast. They’re less preoccupied with critics and more focused on progress. Put one foot in front of the other long enough and eventually (almost inevitably) something takes off.

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Risk tolerance is another meaningful difference. Americans can afford to take bigger swings. The systems, institutions and mindset are set up to treat failure as a normal, even necessary, part of the journey.

Ironically, corporate life here feels far less conducive to risk. Losing your job often means losing healthcare, which becomes a massive psychological handbrake. In my experience, that leads to less boundary-pushing and more competitive, self-protective behaviours. In the UK, stronger job security tends to foster more collaboration, more psychological safety and less fear-driven decision-making.

And while these cultural differences shape how people work, they also shape how industries evolve. Which is why this year’s Business of Fashion x McKinsey report hit with particular resonance, it highlights the macro forces that will define how companies operate on both sides of the Atlantic.

I’ve outlined a few of the insights worth paying attention to:

The AI & Technology Revolution

A few data points shaping the next decade:

• By 2030, ~30% of employee time could be automated by gen AI (US & Europe).

• Up to 40% of workers will need to reskill by 2030.

• 53% of US consumers who used AI for search in Q2 2025 also used it to shop.

• Shopping-related AI searches grew 4,700% from 2024–2025.

• 41% of consumers trust AI search results more than traditional advertising.

Culture, Commerce & Consumer Trends

Accessories: the quiet boom

Jewellery:

• Unit sales expected to grow 4.1% annually through 2028 - 4x the rate of clothing.

• 42% of women and 35% of men are buying more jewellery for themselves than 2–3 years ago.

• Lab-grown diamonds projected to hit 50% of diamond jewellery sales by 2030.

Smart eyewear:

• Wearables growing 9% annually to 2028.

• Smart glasses shipments up 110% YoY in H1 2025.

• Ray-Ban Meta glasses were the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban’s EMEA stores in Q3 2024.

Consumer behaviour

• 35% of aspirational luxury customers have pulled back spending.

• 70% plan to spend less on apparel in H2 2025.

• 81% of under-35s cite design and creativity as their primary purchase driver.

Resale explosion

• Secondhand projected to grow 2–3x faster than first-hand through 2027.

• 59% of global consumers likely to shop resale in 2026 (71% in China).

• Brand-led resale programs in the US grew ~300% from 2021–2025.

Wellbeing era

• Wellness market growing 5–6% annually through 2028.

• 84% of US consumers (94% in China) say wellness is a top priority.

• 51% would maintain or increase wellness spending even if income dropped.

• 55% willing to invest $100+/month in health and wellness.

• 89% say brand community matters more than influencer activity.

In other news

• VC firm Andreessen Horowitz opens an eight-week fellowship for creators. Their criteria? “We want someone who identifies as much a founder as a creator.”

• YouTube is now the most-watched platform in the US exceeding the combined TV viewing time of Netflix + Disney+ according to Nielsen data.

• Meta opens their holiday pop-up to sell AR glasses in NY, LA and Vegas.

• Instagram now lets you “spy” on competitor insights (a gift for social strategists everywhere).

As we enter the final month of the year, it’s worth remembering what drives progress in any market: momentum matters more than perfection.

Whether you’re building in the US or Europe, in corporate or startup life, the companies (and people) that will define the next decade are the ones putting one foot in front of the other.

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Last week in Guangzhou, they launched “Cantonese Songyuan,” a pop-up soup shop where runners who complete three kilometers can redeem a free bowl of broth (limited to 50 servings daily). For the first time ever (?!) the reward isn’t merchandise, it’s an experience rooted in local culture.

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This follows their collaboration with Second Life Markets, London’s coolest second-hand fashion market, for a vintage Nike Shox showcase. The partnership checks every box: cultural cachet, Gen Z obsession, sustainability credentials. It’s Nike Refurbished meets vintage curation, wrapped in the kind of IRL experience people are pining for.

These recent activations are a clear illustration of Nike’s emphasis on community-first marketing and integration with real-life experiences. And the timing couldn’t be better:

• The secondhand fashion and luxury market is forecast to grow two to three times faster than the first-hand market through 2027. 1

• Almost 60 percent of global consumers say they’re likely to shop resale in 2026, exceeding 70 percent in China. 2

• Both marketplaces like Vinted (which grew net profit more than 330 percent from 2023 to 2024) and brand-led resale programs are exploding.3

Inside Second Life Markets

Stella Brackenridge brought Second Life Markets from Perth to London in 2019, and it quickly became what British Vogue dubbed “London’s Coolest Second Hand Market.” The formula: 100 carefully curated vintage sellers, a crowd that dresses up to show up, and the kind of third space energy that feels increasingly rare.

I caught up with Stella ahead of our upcoming podcast. In the meantime, here’s a little teaser:

MD: When did you realize there was something missing in the vintage space and that you could cater to the niche?

We felt it from the moment Second Life started, back during our first event in 2019 (which was basically just like a glorified garage sale in a basement). We had hundreds of people come and line up, rushing in to shop from all 15 of us. We didn’t fully understand what we had created yet, we just knew we had to keep doing them.

MD: Your markets feel more like scenes than shopping events. What creates that energy?

We put a lot of effort into curating our sellers. The selection of 100 stalls are all people selling high quality, interesting garments.

We have people that have been selling clothes for 5 minutes and then people that have been selling clothes for 50 years. From this, we bring in a crowd that shows up, dresses up, and is eager to hang out. I think creating a third space like this is something people are craving, that sense of belonging and acceptance.

MD: How do you decide what “belongs” at Second Life Markets?

There isn’t much more to it than whether or not it tells a story. What is that seller trying to say? I like it when someone treats their vintage business like a brand and has a unique point of view, rather than just shifting things based on what’s moving quickly in the vintage space/trending.

MD: Is there a piece or trend you keep seeing come back that tells you something about where taste is going?

I think people are just working their way down the eras. Y2K was so big during the pandemic. All I seem to be seeing now is Napoleon jackets, which makes me scared. That means indie sleaze and the Balmain Army aesthetics are around the corner.

MD: People say vintage has become Gen Z’s entry point to lux brands. Do you see that happening on the ground?

Yes, whilst we still cater our curation towards millennials in terms of style and price points, Gen Z loves the market. Even if they don’t get anything, they love to show up, throw a fit and film a Tiktok.

When I was 19, I went to a Balenciaga retailer in Perth and bought a city bag for 70% off new from the store. If you didn’t do it that way it wasn’t accessible. Now, I see 17 year olds fawning over tables of them at Second Life - I’m always shocked they even know what they are.

Fashion trends are so much more present now, and vintage is so much more exciting and less intimidating than walking into a luxury store.

MD: What are the brands that quietly fly off the racks at your markets and what does that tell you?

This is interesting - I am noticing people my age really want to be different to everyone else.

I would much rather spend £300 on a Junya Wantanabe dress than the same on a Prada nylon bag. Speaking of, I remember Paloma Esseler came to our Paris Pop-Up and the first thing she asked was where the Junya is.

Japanese brands will always be relevant because they are interesting, practical yet timeless. The last 6 months I have seen a shit tonne of Hussein Chalayan, and prior to that barely any. I don’t know what any of this means.

MD: How did the Nike Shox collaboration come about?

They reached out to us! We were very flattered. Shox are a shoe that have strong connections to fashion and lifestyle, and integrated so well with our audience. For years, Meg (co-founder) and I have been talking about collaborating with a sportswear brand, and curating a full vintage sportswear event. This felt like we manifested it haha.

MD: What’s something Nike learned from you in this process?/ or you learnt from Nike?

I have to say, collaborating with Nike was a privilege. Their team was so eager to hear our ideas and execute them. They didn’t come in and demand something or ask for anything in return.

I’ve done partnerships in the past, where there has been a whole bunch of the client’s money thrown at their cause to promote their product, and I’ve felt as if they have just slapped the Second Life logo on top of it for the clout. This was the polar opposite to that.

MD: What’s the next shift you see coming in resale or vintage culture?

Many of our sellers are small vintage businesses. A lot of them started out on Depop before the pandemic. Their businesses benefited massively from the Depop Drop method, and were being run out of their houses etc.

Since I have been in London, I have seen a big shift, where many sellers now have showrooms, sell at our markets regularly, forgetting about opening themselves up and therefore becoming geographically limited.

This is why we have built STORAGE, the first ever business to consumer resale site. Historically, resale sites have always serviced peer-to-peer transactions, helping the odd person sell the odd thing.

There has never been a marketplace where vintage businesses can thrive together. Through Second Life, we have been supporting these small businesses to make good money once/twice a month. Many of them have gone on to quit their day jobs, upgraded their vintage businesses from a side hustle to a full time job, opened shops and showrooms. Then we realised, instead of once a month, what if we could make them this kind of money every day? Through STORAGE, we can translate this online, and continue empowering them on a global scale, and create a platform where they feel supported.

People want to belong somewhere, dress up for something, and discover things that tell a story. Nike gets it. Second Life Markets has been writing the blueprint since it’s inception.

If you enjoyed reading, consider sharing with a brand, marketing or community leader in your network. Thank you!

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When you think of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman suit, the vibrant costumes of the Sanderson Sisters in Hocus Pocus, or the sleek silhouettes of the Men in Black, you’re thinking of Mary E. Vogt’s work, even if you didn’t know her name.

In full transparency: Mary is my neighbor. She lives in the most magical, quirky house on our street with her creative director husband, John. When we moved in, they kindly invited us over for lunch. I sat there, completely engrossed, as Mary, in her characteristically humble way, told stories that casually name-dropped some of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Ryan Reynolds, who insists on writing his own dialogue. Gal Gadot, who couldn’t fit into a custom dress after COVID. Bette Midler. Michelle Pfeiffer. The list went on.

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I wanted to ask a million questions, but it felt somewhat impolite in her own home over Sunday lunch. So when I got back, I immediately started researching and plotting this interview.

In this conversation, I sit down with Mary to unpack her creative process and the decades of stories that have quietly shaped pop culture. Mary’s career is a masterclass in persistence, serendipity, and trusting your creative instincts.

The art of collaboration

Mary describes filmmaking as “a pyramid.” At the top sits the director: the vision. “Your job is to get into their head and make that vision come to life. Even if you don’t like them, you have to respect that vision.”

But she’s quick to add that the actor’s personality is the soul of the costume:

“You can never design for the script alone. You have to design for the actor. The best costumes disappear — you only see the performance.”

Throughout our conversation, Mary returned to one principle: “An actor can never be bigger than their own personality.”

This is why Constance Wu in Crazy Rich Asians wore more thoughtful, restrained clothing. Her presence was introspective, and overwhelming her with big fashion would have gotten in the way. Meanwhile, Awkwafina’s personality is so enormous, Mary says you can “put her in anything. She always comes above it.”

The job isn’t designing for a character in a script. It’s designing for the character with the actor. It all works together.

This philosophy started early. Mary grew up in Long Beach, a town of ex-theater artists who were constantly putting on plays. At 10 years old, she was the default costume designer not because she wanted the job, but because no one else did.

“Designing and making the clothes, that’s easy,” Mary told me. “The most challenging part was dealing with the personalities.”

She learned this while fitting her third-grade teacher, watching someone she thought was without flaws ask how their ass looked in a pair of pants. It was, she says, perfect preparation for working in film.

“Did I agree to wear this?”

One of my favorite moments from our conversation was Mary recounting the first day Michelle Pfeiffer put on the complete Catwoman costume for Batman Returns.

After all the fittings on a body cast (Pfeiffer had been too busy to do many in-person fittings during pre-production), the actor looked in the mirror at the assemblage of pieces from jumpsuit, boots, gloves, corset, headpiece and asked: “Did I agree to wear this?”

Mary’s response? “Yeah… you liked it.”

Pfeiffer’s reply: “Yeah. Okay.”

That unforgiving latex suit, made by one of the only people in the world who could work with the material properly required 40 duplicates because Mary and world renowned director, Tim Burton were certain Pfeiffer would rip them with those sharp claws. She never ripped a single one.

The witch who refused to wear black

When Mary was designing Hocus Pocus, the studio had one non-negotiable demand: witches wear black costumes.

Mary knew this was wrong. She’d studied Bette Midler’s stage performances and understood that Midler’s personality was so big, she could wear anything and never be overwhelmed by the costume. The character needed color.

But the studio wasn’t interested in hearing it from a costume designer.

So Mary turned to director Kenny Ortega, himself a former stage performer who understood the power of costume in performance. “You have to talk them into it,” she told him. “And make sure you say it’s because it’s Bette. If it was another actor, you could do them in black costumes.”

It worked. And now those vibrant, witchy costumes are inseparable from our collective memory of the film - a movie that flopped initially but became a cult classic, with high schoolers writing Mary letters asking how to recreate the costumes for their own productions. How lucky are we?!

Color, the creative process, and paint samples

Mary thinks about color as an emotional language, a direct line to the audience. The emerald green Eleanor wears in Crazy Rich Asians? That was director Jon M. Chu’s vision. It’s a color of strength that suited both the character and the actor who played her.

But she also knows how to work with non-creative people, the studio heads and producers who came up through accounting departments but want to feel part of the creative process.

Her secret weapon once was a tray of car paint samples: little four-inch metallic squares in various reds and greens from a high-end auto factory. She’d leave them on the table during presentations with her drawings.

“Every single person, the first thing they did: ‘Ooh, I like this,’” she laughs. “They would pet the little car things. And I thought, that’s really fascinating. If you get people to like something, even if it has nothing to do with the film at all, it puts them in a good mood.”

(Barry Sonnenfeld saw through it immediately: “What the hell is this crap? This has nothing to do with the film.”)

It illustrates the importance of the sensess, and the creative ways we can bring people along the journey as we create.

Don’t let them kick you out

When I asked Mary about advice for young creatives, she didn’t hesitate: Don’t let people discourage you.

At the Fashion Institute in New York in the 1970s, instructors constantly tried to kick her out of design classes. Portfolio evaluations every few months would end with: “You’ll never be a designer. Go into fabric.”

But they couldn’t track students without computers, so Mary would simply start attending other classes. For two years, she refused to leave until finally, the department head said: “I think we should just let her stay. She seems to really want it.”

“I could have gotten discouraged,” Mary reflects. “A lot of other people who were much more talented than me—when they got kicked out, they left.”

Her insight? “Sometimes having too much talent holds you back because it makes you overly sensitive.”

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What I took away

This conversation reminded me that creativity is more than a vision and forcing your idea on any willing participant. It’s empathy, adaptability, and the quiet courage to protect an idea.

It’s appreciation for creativity in unexpected places and a respect for the audience’s artistic instincts, that makes Mary E. Vogt’s work so enduring.

She doesn’t just design for actors or directors - she designs for all of us, for the collective memory we build around the films that shape our childhoods and our culture.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Mary E. Vogt wherever you get your podcasts.

Mary shares the story behind her creative process—from building character through clothing to balancing artistry with the realities of budgets, studios, and scale. She reflects on how technology and sustainability are reshaping the craft, the misconceptions around costume design, and what it means to leave a creative legacy.

A masterclass in vision, collaboration, and storytelling from one of Hollywood’s most enduring creative forces.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I’ll admit, the format “what marketers can learn from X” isn’t my favorite. Maybe I’ve just been exposed to State of LinkedIn for too long. But in this case, it fits. The Whitney has always blurred the lines between audience and artist, between perception and participation. And in doing so, it offers something every brand builder could use a little more of: emotion, curiosity, and creative appreciation.

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Here’s what stayed with me.

Owning what you control

In the brand space, we often can’t control outcomes but we can control environments. Artists know this instinctively: they create a space for people to see differently.

At the Whitney, that philosophy shows up everywhere. Museums are traditionally synonymous with silence and reflection. But Free Friday Nights flips that notion. The museum bring in DJs, introducing sound and an energy that invites a different kind of visitor. It’s a reminder that context can transform experience.

Music moves us. It has repeatedly been found to be the gateway to emotion: people react 17% faster to sound than they do to visuals (University of Groningen), and brands who use music that is well-suited to the brand see a 13% lift in comprehension of information as well as lifts for creativity, empathy, and emotion (Nielsen, 2015).1

The atmosphere we build, both IRL and through the campaigns we create, determines how people feel, engage, and remember.

Anywhere can be an opportunity for art

When the Whitney designed its new building and opened in 2015, they wanted the first experience a visitor to encounter to be one of artist flair not functionality.

They commissioned artist Richard Artschwager, known for transforming the mundane into something marvelous, to redesign the elevators themselves. The piece, titled Six in Four, turned a purely functional space into an immersive experience. When the doors close, you’re surrounded by moving artwork.

As the museum’s director put it:

“The idea was to have something that immediately gives you a sense of place, an identity — so that this isn’t just another generic museum.”

The metaphor is that art (and brand) shouldn’t be separate from daily life. Every touchpoint can be a chance to create meaning.

When experiential marketers obsess over every consumer interaction, this is the point: even the mundane holds potential.

At Snapchat, we host an annual leadership summit, taking over the whole grounds of Soho Farmhouse and bringing together incredible speakers from all over the world. The one thing people always remember? The logo themed soy sauce dish.

Sometimes, it’s the smallest gestures that make something unforgettable.

Simple doesn’t mean easy

Change is simple, but not easy. Great work often looks effortless.

One of the most common critiques in museums is when someone looks at a piece and says, “I could have done that.” But the point is: you didn’t. What looks simple is often what takes the most mastery.

On the Whitney’s 7th floor, we saw work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-born artist known for pieces that appears deceptively minimal. His lightstring installation - two bulbs intertwined and glowing softly from a wall overlooking the Hudson river - almost look childlike. Until you learn the story: it’s a meditation on love and loss after his partner’s death from AIDS in the 1980s.

The story carries the depth of the installation.

And like most of my work, and just like myself, the work is ephemeral. It doesn’t really exist, but hopefully will light some peoples’ spaces, at least for a short time.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1995

The best ideas are clear, human, and emotionally intelligent. But that clarity takes time, patience and meaning.

Curiosity beats knowledge

Perhaps the most resonant idea: artists lead with curiosity, not certainty.

The Whitney once hosted The Letter Writing Project by Lee Mingwei, an installation inviting visitors to write letters: to loved ones, to the deceased, even to themselves. Those letters were then displayed publicly, creating a living, breathing dialogue between strangers.

The story wasn’t the museum’s, it was the audience’s.

As cliché as it sounds, the parallel with marketing is clear: stop broadcasting, start inviting. How are we deepening the conversation with our audiences, understanding their needs and allowing them to co-collaborate in the process?

Your audience doesn’t just consume stories; they can continue them.

Listening to the Whitney’s CMO reminded me that brand building, like art, is about emotion, participation, and meaning.

The best brands (like the best museums) don’t just show people something beautiful. They make them feel something real.

And maybe that’s the bigger takeaway. The role of a marketer isn’t that different from an artist, we’re both trying to shift perception, to hold attention, to make someone pause long enough to see (or feel) differently.

Maybe marketing just needs a little more museum energy.

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The issue is described as a collectible art book featuring classic Playboy imagery, sharp storytelling and exclusive interviews with top musicians, actors and more. In it, we have access to rarely seen, semi-nude images of Jane Birkin, 12 new Playmates and with Kid Cudi and Sharon Stone and others.

As you dive into the content of the issue, it’s clear the brand is entering a new era. According to Reese Lasher, Playboy’s Vice President of Brand:

“As we enter Playboy’s next chapter, we’re reconnecting with our roots — honoring where we’ve come from as we look towards our future.”

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The original IT Girl

Jane Birkin graces the cover and her inclusion feels particularly symbolic. In the summer of 1970, she was first appeared in the magazine and wrote in her diary “I did Playboy yesterday, which was something. I did get what I wanted, which was my choice of photos and more than three pages, so we did it my way,”

Reese explains why Birkin was chosen as the centerpiece of the issue:

Jane Birkin was not only a muse but a creative who challenged convention — turning vulnerability into power, eroticism into art, and style into statement.

By resurfacing these timeless images from Playboy’s archive, we reaffirm the brand’s legacy of celebrating women who embrace their sexuality and find liberation through self-expression — inspiring others to do the same.”

Birkin was always ahead of her time. By resurfacing these images, revisited through the perspective of journalist Marisa Meltzer (whose new book “It Girl” explores Birkin’s enduring influence), Playboy is nodding to a new kind of sensuality, one defined by women, for women.

I’m always intrigued by a brand’s use of celebrity; it’s a mirror for who they believe they are - or who they aspire to be. The inclusion of Jane Birkin is strategic and sets the tone of where the magazine is headed. She symolizes a women that is intellectual, artistic, and unconventional. Her approach to sexuality was intertwined with creativity and personal expression rather than existing separately from it.

The legacy editorial franchise

“The Playboy Interview,” is one of the longest standing and most prestigious interview formats in magazine history. The conversations with artists, athletes, business leaders, and political figures have been referenced by mainstream publications for decades.

The feature has been commended for it’s ability to dig deeper than a normal magazine interview with past subjects including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., David Bowie, Steve Jobs, Fidel Castro and many more.

It’s a human, and introspective and a reminder of what Playboy has always done best in this format: capturing cultural icons in their most unguarded moments.

Nailing the audience

Playboy hasn’t turned prudish. The nudity is there there, perhaps even more unapologetic than before. The Playmates still play a central role. The pin-up aesthetic is intact. But the narrative has shifted.

One of the 12 new Playmates is WNBA player Kysre Gondrezick, a clever play given the surge in popularity, record TV ratings and the highest attendance in 26 years. The level of fandom that surrounds the sport and players is remarkable - transactions on WNBAStore.com were up 756% year-over-year.1

Gondrezick already has a public identity and career outside of modeling which feels like a strategic shift from previous Playmate casting. Choosing women who are known for accomplishments in other fields rather than making Playboy itself the launching point. This aligns with the broader repositioning: instead of “we discovered/made these women famous,” it’s “these already accomplished women are choosing to express their sexuality with us.” It changes the power dynamic and the narrative.

When Reese references “redefining strength, sensuality, and success” this is what comes to mind.

The importance of touch and feel

The launch of the winter edition was hosted at kiosk-o-thèque on Sunset, directly across the street from Chateau Marmont. Founded by Arman Naféei in 2021, the space is part retail hub, part art gallery, part DJ booth, and home to the podcast Are We On Air. Coincidentally, Naféei was the last person to interview Birkin at the Kiosk prior to her passing.

Naféei described the space as “an experiential billboard,” noting that 1.1 million cars pass by each week.

“That’s an insane number as an advertising space. So, I looked at this as an experiential billboard. It’s a billboard on Sunset. And what you do with it and who you bring with it gets a lot of exposure”

With 91% of consumers craving meaningful brand experiences, Playboy’s strategy is both nostalgic and forward-thinking.2 Experiential marketing is how legacy brands build modern relevance by creating emotional connection, community, and cultural momentum.

Finding the spot

Following tonights pop-up, the brand will move onto NYC, wrapping Casa Magazines - a beloved landmark of print culture - from November 11–13.

Both the Kiosk and Casa feel like love letters to print culture and proof that “print is dead” is one of the most overused myths in marketing. When it’s paired with innovative storytelling and a clear understanding of consumer needs, it can be a powerful force multiplier for brand storytelling.

The great reset

What Playboy is doing right now is a masterclass in rebranding. They’re giving a historic name a modern, cultural reset. A brand once synonymous with the male gaze is using nostalgia, feminism, and community to reimagine what sensuality can look like today.

It’s proof that legacy brands can evolve, as long as they have the right people steering the vision, a deep understanding of what made them iconic, and the courage to bare it all again.

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P.S please excuse the occasional innuendo, I couldn’t help it.

Yesterday, I visited Beeple’s (aka Mike Winkelmann) latest installation at LACMA - Diffuse Control - the digital artist best known for Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which famously sold as an NFT for $69 million (!!) at the height of the NFT craze in ‘21.

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The exhibition examines mass collaboration between humans and AI, showing how our collective consciousness shapes creative expression between artist, curator, and viewer. He seeks for us to question who (or what) authors art in the age of intelligent machines.

Beeple continues to face questions of legitimacy in the traditional art world - does he deserve a museum exhibition?

I think so. There was an Ed Moses painting not too far from Beeple’s work titled' Abstract Painting - literally a red painted canvas - I couldn’t help but think if this deserves a space in the gallery, why wouldn’t he, or at least this form of art? Think of how many now-celebrated artists were once rejected by the establishment: Monet famously turned away by the French Salon, van Gogh selling only one painting in his lifetime. Beeple may not fit the traditional mold (well, at least his art doesn’t) but he’s expanding what art is shown in iconic institutions.

In other AI news:

• The occupations where AI will make the biggest impact

  • According to Microsoft’s Working with AI study, this visual highlights the 40 occupations most exposed to AI transformation. Customer Service Representatives top the list with an AI applicability score of 33.8%, followed by Sales Representatives (13.5%) and Market Research Analysts (9.99%). It’s a clear snapshot of where automation and augmentation are already reshaping the workforce.

    

• Terrifyingly, ChatGPT handles over a million suicide-related conversations weekly. The company says, the “heightened levels of emotional attachment to ChatGPT.” Parasocial relationships with AI bots are going to be the death of society as we know it if governments don’t get ahead of this.

• Last week, Amazon announced plans to lay off 30,000 corporate employees: Amazon’s U.S. workforce has increased 3x since 2018, to almost 1.2 million. According to the New York Times, leaked documents show the company hopes to automate away 600,000 jobs by 2033. We need to prepare government and humanity for when automation decimates labor. The concept of a ‘universal basic income’ coinciding with mass unemployment is closer than we think.

As AI takes over routine tasks, the work that remains will be more demanding on our emotional, mental, and spiritual reserves. Which brings us to an urgent question:

Are we training for this future, or just hoping to survive it?

Which brings me onto the concept of ‘The Corporate Athlete’, one that’s stuck with me since I first heard about it a couple of years ago.

To summarize, to bring mind, body, and spirit to peak condition, executives need to learn what world-class athletes already know: recovering energy is as important as expending it.

• Symptoms of stress: Anxiety, depression, injury, disengagement from work, negative and unhealthy behaviors

• Results of stress: Shortened careers, lifelong health issues, burnout, lack of productivity and innovation

• Coping strategies: Push harder, train longer, don’t allow for recovery

Executives, unlike athletes, rarely “train” - they perform nonstop, 10–14 hours a day, 50 years straight, with maybe three or four weeks of vacation. Athletes have off-seasons; we get two weeks a year. It’s no wonder we burn out. Physical fatigue affects everything else: emotional regulation, mental clarity, even your sense of purpose.

Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance.

The Corporate Athlete model was unique in looking at energy management in an integrated manner: understanding how the impact of low physical energy affected our emotional, mental and spiritual abilities.

• Emotional energy: “low physical energy compromises our ability to give our best effort emotionally” (feelings like joy, anger, fear).

• Mental energy: “low physical energy reduces our daily ability to give our best effort mentally” (cognitive skills like analyzing, thinking and making decisions).

• Spiritual energy: ‘low physical energy can erode our passion and commitment – even our very sense of purpose – toward what we are doing.”

Unsurprisingly. 68% of Americans say they’d gladly take a 4% pay cut for two extra weeks of vacation. Makes sense. Recovery is essential for performance. Time off replenishes energy, refreshes perspective, and fuels creativity. Leaders who actually rest may work longer, lead better, and innovate more.

We’re hurtling toward a future where machines can do almost everything - except care, imagine, or connect. If we can’t outthink the machines, we’ll need to out-human them and that requires investing in our spiritual, mental, emotional and physical energy.

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I’m staying in my family home for the next few days and have been routing through my old material from my University days, marketing documents that I have zero recollection of studying.

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One piece that caught my attention was a Harvard Business Review article by Kevin Lane Keller “The Brand Report Card” Written 25 years ago, it outlines ten characteristics that define the world’s strongest brands. It’s essentially a framework, a way to systematically grade your brand across the traits that separate the iconic from the forgettable. I’ve reworked it below with more culturally relevant examples because, Bic and Michelob just weren’t doing it for me.

In other news, my dad reads the weekend Financial Times, and I’ve managed to secure the How To Spend It and Style insets, which always feels like a small victory.

The 10 Characteristics of Strong Brands

Grade your brand across these ten dimensions. Map out where you’re strong, where you’re vulnerable, and where you might risk losing what already works by chasing something new.

1. They deliver what customers truly desire:

The most iconic brands sell a feeling, a ritual, a community. Erewhon has transformed grocery shopping into a wellness-driven cultural experience, turning smoothies and supplements into symbols of aspiration.

Apple sells not just hardware but an ecosystem of design, ease and identity. For brands to succeed today, they must deliver what customers emotionally and functionally want often more than they explicitly know themselves.

“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs

2. They stay relevant

“Cultural relevance” is the marketing buzzword in every meeting I’ve been in for the last few years - what “community” was a decade ago. Brands like Patagonia and Ralph Lauren have managed to stay relevant because they tap generational values, stand for something, and evolve without losing core identity. If your brand is static while culture moves fast, you risk irrelevance.

3. The pricing strategy is based on consumers’ perceptions of value.

In the lifestyle economy, value isn’t purely how much its costs - it’s meaning, prestige, experience. Look at how Rimowa reframes luggage into luxury, or how Liquid Death charges premium for water by wrapping it in irreverence and community. A brands price must match what the customer believes they’re getting, not just what they build.

4. The brand is properly positioned.

Strong brands occupy a unique space in the mind. Airbnb moved from “cheap stay” to “belong anywhere” (experience + design + culture). Jacquemus sits at the intersection of joyful minimalism and runway aspiration. A strong brand positioning has to be distinct (difference) and credible (parity) simultaneously.

5. The brand is consistent.

When every touchpoint (campaign, product, partnership) stays true to the brand essence, it builds trust. Brands like Monocle (global magazine + retail + club) show how consistency in tone, look and purpose builds identity.

It’s well known that Chief Marketing Officers have the shortest tenure of any C-suite executive1. There is high, frequent turnover. A new one joins and often change direction too quickly to prove value. But constant reinvention risks confusion and erodes equity.

6. The brand portfolio and hierarchy make sense.

Many brands span physical products, experiences, content and tech. Organisations like LVMH house multiple maisons; Lululemon is expanded into lifestyle tech via Mirror while keeping its core yoga-wear DNA. A brand architecture should feel logical, each sub-brand contributes and none cannibalises or muddies the whole.

7. The brand makes use of and coordinates a full repertoire of marketing activities to build equity.

Modern brands mix commerce, social media, collaborations, creator culture, and experiences. Red Bull has been the most consistent with this blueprint: content, experiences, sponsorships and community all aligned.

If a brand leans too heavily on one channel - just ads or just social - they’re leaving equity on the table.

8. The brand’s managers understand what the brand means to consumers.

The deepest brands reflect not just what the company thinks they stand for, but how consumers experience them.

Skims knows it’s less about shapewear and more about confidence, inclusivity and personal agency. If you don’t know why your customer buys you (beyond “it works”), you risk missteps.

9. The brand is given proper support, and that support is sustained over the long run.

Brand building is a marathon. LEGO rebooted near-crisis decades ago, but sustained investment in storytelling, licensing and design rebuilt its magic. A campaign here and there isn’t enough, true brands stay funded, defended and evolved.

10. The company monitors sources of brand equity.

Strong brands audit and measure. They track brand meaning, equity levers, consumer perceptions and marketplace changes. In an age of rapid disruption, we need to know what makes brands tick and what could make it unravel.

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Turns out, some frameworks age better than we expect, much like a good brand or, apparently, a forgotten marketing degree.

We spent the weekend at Soho Farmhouse celebrating my sister’s 30th. It always feels like a treat, especially in autumn, when it’s at its most magical, embracing log fires, muddy boots and massive roast lunches. It’s not a surprise it’s one of the most profitable houses in the Soho House portfolio.

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The group has just gone private again after four years on the NYSE and is expected to come under new ownership in the new year. There’s a lot of speculation of incoming changes and what we can expect under this new leadership.

Management will no longer be accountable to demanding stakeholders seeking short-term revenue, they’ll have the flexibility and freedom to determine what experiential hospitality to prioritize and how they want to shape members experiences and benefits.

It’s a great time to regain control. Demand for luxury tourism is forecast to grow faster than any other segment of the travel industry. This boom is being powered by a sharp rise in people with net worths between $1 million and $30 million.

Somewhat surprisingly, it’s also being fuelled by an expanding group of aspiring luxury travellers worth between $100,000 and $1 million, many of them younger and increasingly willing to allocate larger shares of their wealth to high-end experiences. In fact, 35% of the luxury-travel market now falls within this group.1

Luxury, of course, means different things at different wealth levels.

• High-net-worth individuals (HNWIs), with assets ranging between $1 million and $5 million, tend to trust boutique travel agents, seek privacy and exclusivity, and favor exotic destinations.

• Very-high-net-worth individuals (VHNWIs), with assets ranging between $5 million and $30 million, are relatively more likely to book large suites to preserve intimacy and tranquility, prefer end-to-end experiences steeped in local ambiance, and may be less focused on hotel brand names.

• Ultrahigh-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs), with more than $30 million in assets, prefer quiet luxury with personalized service targeting remote, private destinations, accessible via private airports or helipads, that feature tailored experiences available nowhere else.

What’s emerging with these rising demographics is a new layer of niche, design-led hospitality brands catering to those who are entirely price-insensitive.

Travellers with much more money than time, and an appetite for the incomparable. Think Aman, The Oetker Collection, Six Senses, and Cheval Blanc, each built around the idea that travel is less about exploring a destination or city and more about feeling.

I asked a frequent guest of the Aman properties, what makes them so special.

What makes an Aman different? It’s a different level of service, design and escapism. Other hotels make you feel the transaction; Aman hides it so well you almost forget it’s a business. If you want to see the commercial side, you’ll have to go looking for it.

Guests consistently say Aman’s hard product (architecture, materials, scenery) is top-tier. The soaring ceilings, massive suites, minimalist but highly curated design touches. But the standout element is the soft product: the service, the “we know you” feeling, and the subtleties of hospitality that don’t feel scripted. For example: one Reddit guest noted that at one Aman, “never having to sign a bill or tell anyone your name or room number” was part of the magic.

Is there an unspoken code of conduct or shared aesthetic among Aman regulars? It’s a bit of a club for people who worship good taste. The kind of guests who notice the texture of linen and the temperature of light.

As the ranks of the super wealthy swell, so does their appetite for something money can’t easily buy - originality, privacy, and a sense of belonging to a rarified world. The brands that survive will be acutely aware of what luxury really means to the demographic they’re serving, be it the HNWIs, VHNWIs or the UHNWIs!

In other news

• The top 10 stocks in the S&P 500 account for 40% of the index’s market cap: Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Broadcom and Tesla, Berkshire Hathway and J.P Morgan. Investors are worrying the markets dependence on a handful of mega stocks could leave it exposed to a prolonged downturn.

• Alex Eagle and JCrew collaborate for a fall collection. There are a few particularly good pieces I’ve got my eyes on including the ribbed long sleeve and the pleated pant.

• 34 is the average age for a mid-life crisis with 1 in ten millennials already experiencing one. Yet, 81% say they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis.2

• With $7.2 billion in annual gross revenue and just 46 employees, OnlyFans may be one of the most profitable companies on the planet.

  • The top 0.1% of creators capture 76% of revenue and earn an average of $146,881 per month. The average creator earns just $150 to $180 per month.

  • Private messages drive about 70% of revenue vs. only 4% from actual subscriptions. About 0.01% of subscribers are “whales,” who generate more than 20% of all revenue.

What’s happening in AI

• Sam Altman predicts AI will surpass human intelligence by 2030, saying ChatGPT is already more intellectually powerful than any human who’s ever lived. In a blog post, he wrote “we are climbing the long arc of exponential technological progress.”

• Teens & AI: Meta announced new parental controls for teen interactions with chatbots and AI characters.

• Adult Content on ChatGPT: Sam Altman confirmed ChatGPT will soon allow adult-themed conversations for verified adults, with new age-gating launching in December.

• OpenAI x Walmart: A new partnership will let users search and buy directly from Walmart inside ChatGPT, powered by Stripe’s checkout.

• YouTube rolled out “Made on YouTube 2025” with enhanced creator tools: AI-powered Shorts editing (animate stills, restyle footage), speech-to-song for Shorts, improved A/B/C testing of thumbnails, new live/podcast-to-Shorts conversion tools.

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Most of us assume creator income flows from brand deals and sponsorships. A fashion creator lands an athletic wear partnership. A podcaster reads ads. A TikToker gets paid for views. But the numbers tell a different story.

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More than half of the estimated $290 billion in creator economy value - roughly $145 billion - sits in direct-to-fan offerings.1 Not ads. Not sponsorships. Subscriptions, memberships, digital products, and events. Revenue that flows directly from fans to creators, without a platform or brand middleman taking a cut.

That’s where the real money is. And it’s changing how creators think about their work, their audiences, and their futures.

The math wasn’t mathing

The shift becomes obvious when you look at the numbers.

On Patreon, creators report an average annual earning of $52 per fan. For paying members specifically, that jumps to $110 annually. Compare that to TikTok, where the median income per fan is roughly 40 times lower.2

The typical creator on a subscription-based direct-to-fan platform earns dramatically more per fan than they would through ad-driven or platform-dependent revenue.

The reason is straightforward: recurring revenue is more stable than one-off sponsorships. Fans who choose to pay directly are self-selected, committed, and less likely to churn than audiences pulled in by algorithms. And creators keep more of the money, there’s no platform taking 30% or a brand demanding a discount.

But there’s something else happening beneath the financial surface.

Success looks like stability

Creators built audiences on platforms. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter. These platforms offered free distribution in exchange for content and user attention. It seemed like a fair trade.

Until it wasn’t.

Algorithms are unpredictable. Post at the wrong time, and your reach plummets. Take a week off, and visibility can suffer significantly. The pressure to feed the algorithm - to post constantly, to chase trends, to optimize for clicks - has become relentless.

78% percent of creators report that burnout affects their motivation to create and 94% are preparing for potential platform disruption.3

The “more, faster, louder” mindset has proven costly. Constant output is an emotional and operational burden. And the painful part is that creators often feel trapped by the very platforms that built their audiences. Inactivity feels like professional suicide. Stepping back feels impossible.

Now, creators want more control - over their channels, audiences, time, and technology.

The ‘1,000 True Fans’ thesis, evolved

A decade ago, Kevin Kelly’s essay “1,000 True Fans” became gospel in creator circles. The idea was elegant: you don’t need millions of followers to make a living. You need 1,000 true fans who each spend $100 per year on your work. That’s $100,000 annual revenue. Enough to sustain yourself.

It was the intellectual foundation for what’s now becoming reality.

Substack made it possible for writers to monetize directly without needing a media company. Creators in every niche - from fitness coaches to educators to adult creators - can build sustainable income from fan subscriptions. Patreon refined the multi-tier model, letting creators offer value at different price points. Ko-fi, Circle, and Discord communities give creators infrastructure to build and monetize communities on their own terms.

These platforms aren’t perfect, but they’ve made the “1,000 True Fans” concept achievable for creators who might never have had the technical skills or audience size to do it alone. They’ve democratized direct-to-fan monetization.

Direct-to-fan means owning the relationship. It means having email lists, community platforms, and subscriber lists that exist independently of any algorithm. It means if a platform changes its rules, throttles reach, or shuts down, your audience is still yours.

Creators who’ve made this shift report a noticeable change in priorities. Follower count, likes, and comments matter far less than they once did. What matters now is depth - the quality of fan relationships, financial stability, and creative autonomy.

Many creators now actively want direct communication channels with their fans, rather than relying purely on social platforms. They want to own their communities. They want to know who’s supporting them.

What direct-to-fan actually looks like

Direct-to-fan can take many forms. For some creators, it’s a Patreon tier system: $5 for early access to content, $15 for a monthly bonus episode, $50 for a one-on-one call. For others, it’s a Substack newsletter where paid subscribers get exclusive writing, or a Discord community where members pay monthly for access to a private space.

Some creators sell digital products - downloadable guides, templates, courses, or presets. Others host events - workshops, masterclasses, or retreats that generate revenue while deepening fan relationships. Many use a hybrid model: a free public presence, multiple monetization layers for engaged supporters, and occasional brand partnerships for additional income.

The specifics vary by niche and audience size. A writing-focused creator might thrive on Substack. A visual artist might find more success on Patreon or through digital product sales. A podcaster might build a membership community around exclusive episodes and behind-the-scenes access.

What they all have in common: the revenue is recurring, predictable, and entirely controlled by the creator.

The sustainability question

There’s an unspoken tension in the creator economy: most people think about scale. How many followers can you get? How viral can you go? How big can your audience become?

But direct-to-fan models reward depth over virality. A creator with 50,000 engaged fans on a membership platform might earn more and feel less burned out than a creator with 500,000 followers on TikTok.

This reframing matters. It suggests that not all audience growth is valuable. A small, committed fanbase that pays directly can be more sustainable than a massive but algorithmically dependent audience.

The shift in creator priorities reflects this understanding. Quality, fan relationships, and financial stability now rank higher than growth metrics. Creators increasingly measure success not by vanity numbers but by whether they can actually sustain themselves doing the work they love.

What’s Next

The creator economy is maturing. What’s changing is the infrastructure, the incentives, and the power dynamics.

If creators are moving toward direct relationships, platforms that make this easier, the ones who provide better discovery tools, clearer monetization options, and greater control will win. Platforms that keep pushing the “growth at all costs” model may find themselves increasingly irrelevant.

Meanwhile, creators will continue experimenting. Some will go fully in-house, like Financial Feminist. Others will maintain a hybrid approach, using platforms for reach while monetizing directly. Still others will discover new models we haven’t even imagined yet.

What’s clear is that the future of the creator economy isn’t built on ad revenue or sponsorships alone. It’s built on direct relationships between creators and their most committed fans. It’s messier, less scalable, and far more sustainable.

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