In the space of three weeks, four household names launched channels. LeBron James started a golf channel on August 15 with a ninety-minute video reuniting the 2016 Cavs for a trip to Scotland.

M. Night Shyamalan launched his on August 27 with a video titled “This is my first YouTube video,” filmed on a bench outside his production office.

Kevin Hart started a golf channel too, and spends most of it in the bunker.

And Ina Garten is making drinks in her apartment with a guest.

What is interesting is that every one of them could have taken a television deal instead.

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YouTube Is The Most Consumed Platform In The World

The scale is the part people underestimate. YouTube accounted for 13.4% of all US television viewing in April, compared with Netflix at 7.8%, meaning it pulled in more than the next four streaming services combined. That is not the biggest streamer. That is the most-watched single service on American television, ahead of every cable network and every broadcaster.

And that number only counts the television screen. YouTube is also running on every phone, tablet, and laptop, with Shorts alone passing 70 billion views a day.

There is no network, streamer, or studio that reaches people at that scale anymore… and none of them are even close.

People Who Can Get A TV Deal Are Turning Them Down

The interesting part is not that celebrities are on YouTube. It is who.

For decades, the traditional media machine was the reward. You worked your entire career for the network deal, the studio contract, the press tour, because those were the only doors to an audience, and the people holding them decided who got through. Access was the prize, and everyone competed for it on the terms the gatekeepers set.

The people who won that competition are now walking away from it.

LeBron built SpringHill with Maverick Carter and merged it with Fulwell 73 last year, so he does not need a platform; he owns one. He still ran The Shop on HBO for four seasons before moving it to YouTube for four more. Shyamalan has a film with Jake Gyllenhaal opening in October and made a video in his barn instead of a press tour. Ina Garten spent twenty years as the most bankable name on Food Network and is now filming in her own apartment.

These are not people who could not get a deal. They are the people every deal was designed for, and they are choosing the free option that’s accessible to everyone. The shift is clear that traditional media no longer holds the power.

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The Old Trade Was Access For Distribution

For a century, the bargain was straightforward. You gave a network the show, and the network gave you an audience. That trade made sense because nobody else could reach people at scale, so access was the price of distribution, and everyone accepted it.

Distribution is not scarce anymore. Anyone can reach anyone, which means the only thing you hand over in a network deal now is ownership of the relationship, and the relationship is everything. Once you see that power lies in access to the relationship, direct access to your community becomes obviously more valuable.

When Nobody Has To Approve It, The Work Changes

The reason YouTube works is that it is not network-polished.

People are sick of everything being smoothed over. They want the real, the imperfect, the authenticity. LeBron James, one of the best basketball players alive, having a show where he plays golf badly would never sell on a network. But it is what people want, and it is exactly why it is working.

Shyamalan’s second video is the same instinct. He sat in his barn and read aloud from the diary he kept while shooting Signs, which he had not opened in 25 years, and cried on camera. He told viewers he wanted permission to be not great.

This is what people crave in an overpolished TV world. No development executive greenlights a top director crying on TV in his barn, but hell, it’s going to get butts in seats for when his movie is out.

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YouTube Started Paying Like A Network

The last piece is the economics. Creators can now get paid for what they built, not for playing a part during a slotted episode.

A network deal used to be the only way to fund a real show. YouTube has closed that gap. Talent now earns through ad revenue share, brand sponsorships they sell themselves, channel memberships, and, as of May, purchases made directly through the television screen.

Every May, the television networks hold what the industry calls upfronts, where they show advertisers the shows they are making for the coming year and sell the ad space against them. It is how television has sold itself for sixty years. YouTube now runs its own version, called Brandcast, and this year it was held at Lincoln Center.

What YouTube presented there was a slate of shows, i.e., a travel series with Trevor Noah, a show where NFL and NBA stars take over a professional football team in Mexico, and four new series from Alex Cooper. Draymond Green, Dwyane Wade, and JuJu Watkins were on stage. It was YouTube’s version of an Upfront.

The part that got almost no coverage was the second announcement. YouTube launched two-click checkout on the television itself through Google Pay, and built affiliate links into the platform so creators earn a commission on whatever their audience buys while watching YouTube content.

Together, those two things change the economics. Talent earns from ad revenue share, sponsorships they sell themselves at their own rate, channel memberships, and now commissions on what their audience purchases. Four revenue streams instead of one license fee, all of them uncapped, and none of them require handing over the audience.

Queue: why 20-year TV veterans like Ina Garten are choosing YouTube over the Food Network.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Learn YouTube before you need to.

The platform is where attention, distribution, and now purchase all sit in the same place, and most brands are still treating it as somewhere to reupload their television ads. That is a misreading of what it has become.

Understand the formats that work there, because they are not the ones that work anywhere else. Build something you can sustain on a schedule rather than a campaign you can afford once. And get in early, because the brands and creators learning the platform now will own the position when everyone else arrives.

Speak soon friends,

Xx Camille

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I am using the word “creator” deliberately because celebrity, on its own, is limited now. Traditional fame does not necessarily deliver the impact a brand is looking for, and most of the celebrity names in this piece have real social followings. The decision usually comes down to two questions:

1. How many people follow them?

2. And do those people have relevant purchasing power for what you sell?

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The Cap Table Has Become a Branding Exercise

What has changed is the scale and the speed. Creators are moving from taking a fee for a campaign to taking a stake in the company, which makes sense given how many costs brands must bear to ‘make it’ in the current landscape. Marketing, influencers, technology, gifting platforms, social platforms, agencies, email marketing, it all adds up. Giving away some equity upfront for skin in the game with someone who has a platform can often make sense. Which is why Alix Earle holds equity in four brands at 25 years old. And why all of the ‘hottest’ brands these days are advertising their new celebrity/influencer or creator investor on socials and through PR announcements.

Creators taking equity in brands has become so large that talent firms like UTA, WME, and CAA have all built investment arms to capture equity upside directly, and there are syndicates that exist purely to run creator deals. Why? Because people who have an audience are valuable to brands that need platforms. Attention has become the scarcest resource, and those who have invested in building communities can build generational wealth by leveraging equity in exchange for posting power.

I already talked about Alix Earle, but she has become one of the strongest case studies of this, and why talent arms are jumping at the opportunity of getting their talent equity. On the Poppi deal, she took a stake in May 2024 as part of a partnership rather than a paid campaign, and twelve months later, PepsiCo bought the company for $1.95 billion.

What she actually walked away with is not public, but industry insiders have told me the figure was pretty insane. It’s why she is doing it again with Georgie in the drink category and why she has stakes in other companies.

So, it’s clear that taking equity when you have a platform can be lucrative, but the question is: does it make sense for your brand?

The core reasons why it can make sense are Credibility and Incentive. These aspects are important, but they determine which other tools your brand has at its disposal to leverage. Let’s break them down:

1. Credibility

A famous cap table changes how the market reads a young company.

Big names attached to something unproven make it look legitimate early. It allows the press to cover the raise, which gives the product a bump. Recently, it has allowed a bandwagon effect, as it entices ‘FOMO’: X, Y, Z has invested in the brand, so therefore I should too?! Phia is a great example of this. Phia went from an $8 million seed in September to a $185 million valuation by January, and the investor list generated more coverage than the app did. Recognizable names create noise, and early on, noise is useful but not mission critical. The issue is that it is fleeting, and once the announcement cycle ends, you are left with the product and whatever creative runway you can sustain on your own. This is where brands I work with have gotten hurt: the initial news is so exciting, but without the right deal structure, once the press cycle ends, there can be little support, and the buzz doesn’t sustain product sales.

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It is worth separating two things that get talked about as though they are the same. A creator writing a check is an investor, meaning they put money in and own a piece of the company like anyone else on the cap table. A creator taking equity in exchange for promotion is being paid in shares instead of cash, and they have bought nothing. The first is a financial signal because someone with their own money at risk did their due diligence and decided you were worth it. The second is a marketing arrangement wearing an investor’s title, and the market is getting better at distinguishing between them.

Where credibility earns its keep is in the rooms you cannot get into on your own. A name on your cap table is a warm introduction to a buyer, distributor, or retailer who would otherwise take 18 months to respond to an email. I have watched a brand get into a Target conversation years ahead of schedule because one investor made a single call, and that introduction was worth more than all the coverage the announcement generated.

2. Incentive

After the credibility question, the second reason brands consider an equity or investment arrangement is that one of the most expensive things a brand does is pay influencers to promote its content. Those costs add up, and they add up fastest for creators whose reach can greatly impact a category. Alix charges over $100K+++ per post (it’s probably insanely higher now; I’m working off of numbers from a year ago). Not only is this a fortune for brands, but paid posts often don’t work as well as organic placement and definitely don’t work well if you can only afford one post. But give them equity, and the arrangement changes.

It is why brands consider it in the first place. Paid posting is expensive and often less impactful than someone simply using the product in their daily life. It is also why the Alix Earle and Poppi deal worked so well and became an industry case study, because she already loved the product. It was natural for her to keep using and promoting it, and with equity, she had a reason to promote it even more.

Incentive is the most important measure to consider. The question you have to ask yourself is:

1. How much are you going to get for this?

2. And are they incentivized to genuinely propel the brand forward?

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But Does It Always Make Sense?

The core question is: does it make sense for your brand, or is it a nice-to-have or a necessity? The answer to the latter question is no. I have inside knowledge of some of the hot brands that recently raised with celeb cap tables and had a lot of issues with early celebrities who came on and did nothing, holding space in the brand without much impact after the headline. Attention is scarce but fleeting, and if the name doesn’t hold long-term weight or value, it’s worth thinking twice.

A famous investor was a differentiator when almost no one else had one. Now, many consumer brands at seed have a recognizable name on the cap table, which means the announcement buys a day of attention and nothing structural. The signal only works while it is scarce; once it is no longer scarce, it no longer works.

The brands still getting value from this have a specific reason for each name. One opens a retail door. One reaches a customer they cannot buy their way to. One has impactful product input, or category credibility, or a relationship with a buyer that would otherwise take three years to build. The role is defined before the equity, and each person sits on the cap table based on what they do rather than who they are.

If the name is the strategy, you just traded permanent ownership for a launch moment.

What Your Brand Should Consider

If you want a guide to deciding whether to give equity, below are three questions to help you navigate the situation.

1. What job are you buying? Sales, credibility, and product input are three different things at three different prices. Most founders pay for conversion and receive press, only to find out a year later that customer acquisition never materialized and the equity is gone.

→ Decide which one you need before you decide what it is worth.

2. Can you measure it? Equity is the most expensive currency you have, and most brands hand it over based on a follower count. Decide what number this person is responsible for moving, over what period, and how you will know. If you cannot attribute what they deliver, you cannot price what they are worth, which means you are not making an investment decision. You are buying a name and hoping.

3. Would they use your product anyway? Kim Kardashian drank Update for two years and sent the founders unsolicited notes on flavor, formulation, and packaging before there was a deal. If the relationship starts with the term sheet, the audience can tell, and that won’t work.

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I hope you enjoyed today’s article!

If you are attending AdWeek, I would love to invite you to apply to the exclusive dinner I am hosting. Send an email to hello@camille-moore.com, and we will send you more information.

Xx Camille

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Which is why it feels relevant to look at what made Dolly iconic, because most of it comes down to brand principles we have stopped applying. Icons from Dolly’s era understood pattern recognition and having visual signals that were simply and consistently reinforced.

Elvis had the jumpsuit and the pompadour. Michael Jackson had the glove and the fedora. Willie Nelson had the braids and the bandana. Cher had the long black hair with long glam gowns. All of them wore the same signal for years until it stopped being a look and became shorthand for the person.

So here is a case study, written in Dolly’s honor, on how her discipline in personal branding made her one of the most prolific female performers of all time.

…as someone who spent a significant amount of time in the performing arts with a commitment to perfecting the Art of the Brand, this one is particularly special to me.

The Wig, The Nails, The Rhinestones: Never Changing Her Brand is Why it Worked

Every decade, someone told Dolly to tone down the cheap brand and start looking more serious. Executives, journalists, and talent experts around her all believed the look was holding back the talent. She kept every bit of it at full volume.

Sixty years later, you can identify Dolly Parton from a silhouette with no face and no name attached, which is true of only a handful of people who have ever lived. The blonde wig stacked high, the tiny waist, the nails, the sparkle. She took the thing people used to dismiss her and turned it into the most valuable asset she owned, and she did it by refusing to modernize it.

What’s cool is that this look was authentic and shaped by her own image. Dolly was inspired by a woman in Sevierville, whom the town referred to as the tramp; she had peroxide-blonde hair piled high, bright red lipstick, long red nails, short skirts, and high heels with little plastic goldfish floating in the heels. Her mother called the woman trash. Dolly thought she was the prettiest thing she had ever seen and decided that was what she wanted to be when she grew up. She started bleaching her own hair at fifteen because her natural dishwater blonde was not radiant enough, and she changed it.

That is why it held. Dolly crafted her own look, and it was one that she aspired to perfect. People also resonated with the look because it was real. She said it plainly her whole life. Everyone told her less is more, and her answer was that whoever made that up was full of it, because more is more. This is where sometimes, brand is Art. What Dolly had, her conviction and understanding of taste, whether it was for you or not, is what made her unmistakably iconic.

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She Never Made Anyone Learn Her Twice

Dolly was relentlessly consistent, and over sixty years, that consistency turned a look into a set of codes. The wig, the nails, the sparkle, the voice. Recognition is built by repetition and destroyed by revision, which is what most brands get backwards.

Most companies refresh every few years, usually because a new leader arrived and needed to show movement. The problem is that recognition lives in memory, and memory is built by seeing the same thing over and over. Change the logo, the palette, and the tone, and you have not modernized the brand. You have deleted the shortcut that made people pick you without thinking.

Dolly spent six decades depositing into the same account. A woman who saw her on television in 1974 recognized her instantly in 2026, without effort, because nothing changed in between for her visuals. Brand recognition compounds like interest, and Dolly never made a withdrawal. Fifty years of the same deposits into the same account, at no cost beyond the discipline to leave it alone. It’s what made her iconic. Her icon status was consistent, so she genuinely represented the definition of the word. Regardless of trend cycles or needing to be hot in a decade, she stayed consistent. It’s a core tenet of why people loved her. She became something her fans could rely on despite their own life stages.

She Turned Down Elvis, And It Made Her A Fortune

The look is what people remember. The ownership is what made her rich.

She wrote “I Will Always Love You” in 1973 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, who had given her a national break in 1967 and did not want her to leave his show. Instead of having the argument again, she went home and wrote him a song.

Then Elvis wanted it. Colonel Tom Parker called with the condition, which was half the publishing, and it was not an unusual ask. Parker took half the publishing on virtually everything Elvis recorded. It was simply the price of having the biggest voice in music sing your song, and Dolly was 27 years old.

She said no. “I wanted to hear Elvis sing it, and it broke my heart. I cried all night. But I had to keep that copyright in my pocket.”

Whitney Houston recorded it for The Bodyguard in 1992. Fourteen weeks at number one, 11 times platinum, roughly 20 million copies sold, the best-selling single by a woman in history, and over 800 million Spotify streams since. Dolly earned around $10 million from it in the 1990s alone and owned every cent because she had refused to give away half of a song she wrote about leaving.

Her line about it afterward: she made enough money to buy Graceland.

She put the money into an office and retail complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Nashville and called it the house that Whitney built.

She wrote more than 3,000 songs across her life and kept the publishing on all of them, a catalog Forbes valued at around $120 million.

Her brand represented feminine strength and talent, which she reinforced at so many touchpoints throughout her career.

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She Told The Joke Before Anyone Else Could

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” “I’m not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb, and I also know I’m not blonde.”

For sixty years, people tried to make Dolly Parton the punchline, and every time they arrived, she had already written the line and delivered it better. Self-awareness at that level is not a personality trait, it is armor. You cannot mock someone who is holding the joke, and by owning it first, she made the most obvious attack on her completely unusable.

It is the same mechanism Kim Kardashian used in the Update campaign this summer. Take the criticism with the widest distribution, claim authorship, and the sentiment flips while attention stays.

Dollywood Sits In The County Where She Grew Up Poor

She did not license her name to a theme park, which is what almost every celebrity in her position would have done and what most of them did.

She bought a struggling park in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she was raised as one of twelve children in poverty, and rebuilt it around her own family, story, and the crafts of the region. Roughly 3 million people a year now walk into it. Her 50% stake was valued at about $165 million, and Forbes reported that the bulk of her fortune came from it.

This is World Building in its most literal form. A world is a complete point of view people can enter, and she built one you could physically drive to, buy a ticket for, and spend a day inside.

She Started The Imagination Library Because Her Father Could Not Read

Robert Lee Parton could not read or write, and his daughter spent the back half of her life making sure other people’s children could.

The Imagination Library, founded in 1995 under the Dollywood Foundation she started in 1988, has now mailed more than 332 million books to children. She donated $1 million to Vanderbilt for research, created the My People Fund after the 2016 wildfires, and paid displaced families monthly until they were back on their feet. She received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022.

By most accounts, she never became a billionaire on purpose because the money kept going out.

The songs, the park, the books, and the look all came out of the same brand, which is why she was universally loved. Dolly was never diversifying. She was telling the same story in a different format.

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What Your Brand Can Learn

What you can learn from Dolly’s personal brand is that it was constructed with the same pillars of all great brands, which are the four core pillars:

1. Product

2. Story

3. Experience

4. Consistency

Dolly held all four and perfected them over sixty years. This is what moves good brands to great brands. Time is an integral part of building something great because true mastery takes time.

Here is how each one showed up across Dolly’s career:

Product. Dolly Parton is one of the most prolific songwriters in history, writing more than 3,000 songs. On its own, the songs are fantastic, but add that Dolly taught herself how to sing and play guitar on a homemade guitar in a cabin with no electricity, with a voice nobody has managed to imitate since. She wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” in the same week before she was thirty.

Story. She was a beautiful woman with an extraordinary voice, and neither of those things is why people loved her. What they loved was the story, both the one she gave through her lyrics as well as the story of her relatable origins. Dolly wasn’t handed a career; she wrote about her struggles and never lost sight of where she came from. She wrote her childhood into her catalog and then spent sixty years in interviews being funny, warm, self-deprecating, and completely without pretense. She was a likable, relatable person with a fantastic story.

Experience. Dolly did not stop at songs, she built a world you could physically enter. Dollywood sits in the county where she grew up poor, staffed by people from the region, built around Appalachian craft and her own family history, and three million people a year walk through the gates. Add the concerts, the films, the Christmas specials, the books mailed to children in her father’s name, and what you have is a brand you could step into from a dozen different directions. Dolly was early in investing in experience, which is another reason why people love her. She gives them a reason to feel with every one of their senses.

Consistency. This is the core tenet of why Dolly’s brand is great. Her brand is 100% consistent at every touchpoint, regardless of whatever decade you entered in at.

Every decision that built this brand looked like a cost at the time. Elvis was the biggest name in music and the answer was still no. Executives spent forty years telling her the wig was holding her back and the answer was still no. Those refusals were not the price of the strategy. They were the strategy, and it’s why she will be so greatly missed.

There will not be another one like her, and there is a version of that sentence that is only sentiment. This one is not. Dolly Parton was 1:1 and a fantastic example of a great personal brand that we all can learn from.

To Dolly.

Xx Camille

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It prompted me to write a case study on why KFC returned to the bucket of chicken this summer after ditching the iconic image.

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KFC Looked At The Bucket And Saw A Dated Product

Around 2021, the company decided the bucket belonged to another era. Heavy, bone-in, family-sized, built for a sit-down dinner fewer people were having.

Meanwhile, Popeyes was winning the sandwich wars, Raising Cane’s had built a cult on tenders, and Wingstop was selling individual portions. So KFC chased the format war, launched a sandwich, leaned into boneless, and let the bucket recede into being one item on a crowded menu. In copying its competitors, KFC lost sight of what made it different from them.

Five Years Of Chasing Everyone Else’s Menu

U.S. sales fell 5.2% in 2024 and 4.6% in 2025, with six consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales. Between July 2025 and July 2026, 312 U.S. restaurants closed permanently, roughly 7.6% of the domestic footprint.

The average KFC now does $1.35 million a year against Popeyes at $1.8 million. That $450,000 gap across roughly 3,600 locations is about $1.6 billion a year, or somewhere near $8 billion over the period.

The Brand That Invented Fried Chicken Is Now Fifth In The Category

KFC has been passed by Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, Raising Cane’s, and Wingstop. Barclays looked at 76 restaurant chains and found none had lost more share in its own category than KFC, which held roughly 15% of U.S. chicken sales five years ago. Popeyes grew system sales 71% over that window. KFC managed 17%.

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The Bucket Was Never A Product

While researching the iconic bucket, I learned that the Colonel did not invent it. Pete Harman did, the man who opened the first KFC franchise in Salt Lake City in 1952. Five years after he opened the franchise, Sanders called to ask whether he wanted 500 paper buckets another franchisee had bought from a traveling salesman. Harman took them, filled each with 14 pieces of chicken, five rolls, and a pint of gravy, and then began selling them to housewives as a way to put a full family dinner on the table without spending the evening cooking. The bucket caught on, not because the food was delicious, but because by adding a salad and vegetable side, he gave women the opportunity for a night off.

That is why the bucket became the most recognizable packaging in fast food, and why the original now sits in the Smithsonian.

The Comeback Is The Bucket

The rebrand moves the bucket from packaging to the central design system, running across restaurants, communications, digital, and apparel. JKR, the marketing agency KFC hired, describes the goal as building a world customers can step into. They called the campaign “Bucketverse.”

It is an original example of world-building. The bucket carried the Colonel’s face, the red and white stripes, the occasion, and the promise of the evening off, all in a bucket sitting on a family’s table.

The Colonel is back in the advertising, and the comeback campaign is giving away free buckets to win customers back. The asset they walked away from is now the thing they are paying to put back in people’s hands.

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Brands Are Not Chosen. They Are Remembered.

The principle behind this is mental availability: the likelihood that your brand comes to mind the second someone decides to buy. It is not the same as awareness, because plenty of people are aware of brands they never think of when it counts.

Mental availability runs on distinctive assets: the shapes, colors, and characters people recognize before reading a word. Other examples include the McDonald’s arches, Tiffany’s blue box, the Coca-Cola bottle, and Louboutin’s red soles. These are shortcuts in memory built through decades of repetition, and they get you chosen before any conscious comparison happens. Lose the asset, and you lose the shortcut; a brand without a shortcut has to compete on price and features every single time against companies that are better at both.

The clearest evidence that this was a branding problem, not a chicken problem, is what happened everywhere else. In the first half of 2025, KFC’s sales outside the U.S. rose 7% while domestic sales fell 5%, with every major international market growing, including China at 5%, Europe at 7%, and Latin America at 11%. The difference between markets is that international markets never stopped selling the bucket.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Find your mental shortcut before you chase anyone else’s.

Identify the one asset that is genuinely only yours and understand what it sells. Harman’s bucket sold a woman her evening back, not chicken, and confusing the product for the promise is how a company retires the promise because the product looks dated. Once you find your mental shortcut, consistently market around it without rotating it out. Distinctive assets compound with repetition and disappear from memory without it.

Thanks for reading,

Xx Camille

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Last week, that mostly stopped. Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations had been holding at around 3.8%, which is an enormous number for one domain. By August 14, it was roughly half a percent, an 86% drop in a matter of days. Google’s AI products barely moved over the same window. This was ChatGPT specifically, and it was a cliff rather than a slope.

I learned about this while meeting with Emily, a lead AI strategist at an agency I recommend to my clients looking to get ahead. This news was relevant to me, as I have been watching this one closely because a great deal of what has been sold as an AI visibility strategy this year rests entirely on Reddit, and most of that work became worthless in a week. What makes this a case study rather than just a news item is that there are three separate stories here that are worth understanding if you want to stay up to date.

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What Changed

ChatGPT does not run one search when you ask it a question. It breaks the question into several smaller searches and assembles an answer from what comes back. On August 8, the way it builds those searches changed.

Instead of only searching the open web and seeing what surfaced, it started going directly to named websites and asking them for the answer. Domain-scoped searches went from well under 1% of its queries to nearly 17% in a single day, and the total number of searches per answer nearly doubled at the same time, which tells you these were additional searches rather than substitutions.

The consequence is structural. These searches go to whoever owns the answer, whether that is the brand, the manufacturer, the government agency, or the publisher that reported it. Reddit owns nothing, so ChatGPT stopped asking it. The largest discussion platform on the internet lost most of its citations without anyone at OpenAI making a decision about Reddit at all.

That is the honest version, and I want to be careful with it, because the version going around is that OpenAI punished Reddit for something. There is no evidence of that. What the data supports is a change in how ChatGPT retrieves information, with Reddit as collateral.

Why The Timing Is Hard To Ignore

That said, the context matters, and it is the part most of the coverage is leaving out.

For the past year, an entire industry has been building around getting brands into AI answers through Reddit. Not advertising on Reddit, which the platform sells legitimately, but seeding threads with posts and comments written for a machine rather than a person. Skincare companies, record labels, supplement brands, software firms, and a growing number of agencies are selling it as a service.

The economics explain why. Researchers at Cornell Tech found that as few as 13 words in a single Reddit comment can shift what an AI recommends. Thirteen words. Set that against the cost of a media buy, and the incentive is obvious.

So it happened at scale. Reddit now removes roughly 25,000 spam posts and comments a day and revokes close to two million inauthentic votes daily, and in early August, it expanded a moderation system built on language models across hundreds of communities, specifically to catch promotional content that keyword-based tools were missing. Moderators have been locking down entire topics. One community banned an entire product category because companies had flooded it to the point of being useless. Another now requires verification and permanently bans anonymous accounts after catching brands posting as fans.

Whether the spam caused the retrieval change or not, the outcome is identical. What made Reddit valuable to AI was that it read as authentic, and marketers spent a year eroding exactly that. When the retrieval logic shifted, there was nothing left to defend.

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Reddit Was Already Fighting On Two Fronts

The citation collapse landed on a company that was not having a good year.

Reddit’s traffic from Google search is down roughly 28%, part of the broader collapse in referral traffic that AI summaries have caused across publishing. In 2024, Reddit signed a licensing deal with Google worth a reported $60 million a year, giving Google access to its content for AI training. That deal is up for renewal, and Reddit has been publicly weighing whether it still makes sense, because the trade was content for traffic and the traffic side keeps shrinking. When that reporting surfaced in July, the stock fell 8% in a day.

At the same time, Reddit is suing Anthropic over training data, and its CEO has publicly claimed that Reddit content makes up roughly a third of OpenAI’s training set. The company is also defending against an investor class action alleging it downplayed the extent to which Google’s AI changes would hit traffic. The stock is down roughly 25% on the year.

The pattern underneath all of it is worth naming. Reddit built an extraordinarily valuable asset by being the place where real people said real things, then licensed that asset to the companies building the products that would eventually make visiting Reddit unnecessary. Every platform that depended on Reddit’s credibility is now finding ways to route around Reddit itself.

Why This Matters For Your Brand

The immediate practical point is that your own website became more important three weeks ago than it has been in years. If ChatGPT is asking named domains directly for answers, then whether your site is crawlable, indexed, and built to answer the questions people ask about your brand is no longer a technical footnote. It is retrieval infrastructure. A thin category page or an unindexed FAQ now costs you visibility in a way it did not before, and the fix is unglamorous and completely within your control.

What You Can Learn

The work is unglamorous, which is why most brands will skip it. Open your own site and read it the way a model would, looking for the answer to a specific customer question. You will likely find product pages written in your language instead of your customer’s, FAQs that don’t actually answer the questions people are asking, and content that assumes the customer already understands your category.

Focus on simplifying the language on your website in a way that problem-matches to your brand, because the person searching does not know your product names, your service tiers, or the words you use internally. They only know the problem they are trying to solve. Every page that meets them in that language becomes a page worth pulling from, whereas every page written in your own vocabulary stays invisible to the customer and the model at the same time. This is the least expensive brand work available to you right now, and it is entirely within your control.

If you want to dive deeper into this, listen to this week’s podcast episode here.

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Writing this on my way to the Philippines!

Xx Camille

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If you have not noticed them yet, you will now. The mockneck with PARKE arched across the chest has become a must-have for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, a $130 sweatshirt treated as a status marker in high school hallways and on college campuses. Collections sell out in under five minutes. At a SoHo pop-up last year, people arrived as early as 3:00 a.m. from New Jersey, Connecticut, and other surrounding cities for the chance to snag a limited-edition sweatshirt.

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The brand’s eponymous label is named after its founder, Chelsea Parke Kramer, who built a community before founding the brand. She played field hockey at Dickinson, worked in fashion wholesale and jewelry after graduating, and moved to Miami during the pandemic. She started posting on TikTok in 2020, mostly casual videos about her life, her dog, and what she was wearing.

The brand was inspired by a Miami farmers’ market. She connected with a vintage Levi’s vendor, bought a few pairs, and called her mother the following week to say they needed to move on this concept online. The first drop was 200 units of reworked men’s vintage denim resized for women, launched on TikTok in July 2022. The initial drop was a success, so she moved to launching a cozy collection in 2023 and then an original denim line in 2024. The business went from $100,000 to a reported $16 million in three and a half years without spending a dollar on ads.

What replaced the ad budget is a monthly email.

The Newsletter Is a Programming Schedule

At the start of every month, Chelsea sends a newsletter that blends personal reflection, behind-the-scenes updates, and a full calendar of what is coming: restocks, limited releases, and seasonal collections, all dated in advance. At least one cozy collection lands monthly, denim runs on a seasonal calendar, and every drop is announced before it happens.

Most brands operate on the opposite theory. They hold the launch date to preserve surprise, then flood the inbox with urgency on the day, which trains the customer to treat every email as noise. Chelsea does the opposite. Tell people the drop is Tuesday at 10:00 a.m., and they will make time for it. That is why the collections sell in five minutes.

Parke has created a wave of copycats because the drop model, paired with a community and casual insights, creates a larger feeling of connectedness. In her emails, she gives as much information as possible about the launch so that her community knows exactly what to expect. Her brand has more personality and soul, which Gen Z and Gen Alpha find increasingly refreshing. Most brands have an outdated viewpoint of their relationship with their customer, that it should be distant and mysterious. Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to buy from brands with clear values that they align with, as the brands they buy should be a reflection of who they are individually.

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She Sells the Same Thing Over and Over

The second mechanism is the product architecture, and it is almost aggressively simple. Parke is a $16 million business built on one silhouette: the mockneck with the arched logo. Each monthly drop is that product in a new colorway, a new weight, or a holiday palette. The Valentine’s collection last year, which sent the internet into a genuine frenzy, included six new mockneck colors and a matching sweatpant.

Founders tend to confuse newness with growth, launching in new categories every quarter and ending up with a catalog nobody has an emotional relationship with. Parke does the reverse, i.e., one product people already want, recontextualized on a schedule, so every drop compounds the recognition of the last one rather than starting over.

The Community Designs It First

The third mechanism is the one Target quickly mobilized on. Parke builds its collections from direct feedback about what the community feels is missing from their closets, and when Target announced the partnership in April, the retailer’s apparel SVP cited exactly that their strategy was to design with intention based on what the audience says it wants.

The Target collection ran nearly 60 pieces, priced from $5 to $55, with most under $40, in sizes XS to 4X, and included Parke’s first swimwear.

This is where most brands say they listen to their customers and mean they read the comments occasionally. Parke builds the product from what the community asks for, which means the collection is already spoken for before it exists. The people who asked for it show up to the drop invested, they recognize their own request in the product, and they tell the friends they have been talking to about it since they asked.

The Target collection results are proof the model scales beyond the brand’s own audience. Target reported that social engagement around the Parke collaboration significantly exceeded that of its prior partnerships, with some of the strongest launch-week sales it has recorded for a limited-time offering.

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The Part That Could Break It

The mechanism that built the brand is also the one generating its worst reviews. The Valentine’s drop led to site failures, items vanishing from carts, and a wave of TikTok anger from people who waited and couldn’t buy. The Target launch generated one-star reviews from customers who waited in a digital queue and watched everything sell out before they got through. Some are now openly asking whether the scarcity is engineered.

Chelsea’s answer is that she runs a small team and will not overproduce to meet a spike, which is realistically why the brand has maintained its cult-like status. The product is hard to get. Customers tolerate a constraint they believe is real and resent one they suspect is manufactured.

What Your Brand Should Take From This

Email is one of the most underused channels in consumer brands. Most brands do it, but they outsource the project to a third-party agency that pushes promotions or new launches. All consumers are sick of being sold to, and there is no shortage of brands with more money that want to break through. The way to win is to build a community and communicate with them with respect, investing in and earning their time and attention over time, and then delivering them a great product.

Parke uses email as the place where her community truly lives. A lot of top creators who have brands that are successful deeply respect and nurture their email list. Alex Hormozi constantly harps on the idea that emails are the only thing you can really own for your audience. Every other channel rents access at a price that rises every quarter and can disappear with an algorithm change, whereas the inbox is a direct line to people who chose to hear from you.

Here are the three takeaways you can learn from this case study:

1. Publish your calendar and hold the cadence without exception. Habits need a schedule, and nobody builds a habit around a surprise. Tell people what is coming and when, then be there when you said you would be.

2. Give people a reason to open it that is not a sale. If every email asks for money, the list trains itself to ignore you. Parke’s newsletters are worth reading whether or not you buy anything, which is why they get opened when there is something to buy.

3. Build the product from what the community tells you it wants, so the drop is spoken for before it exists. The customer who recognizes her own request in the collection is not being sold to. She is collecting on something she helped make, and she brings the friends she has been talking to about it.

Thank you for reading!

Speak soon,

Camille Xx

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What makes it worth writing about is who set the price. Whitesell spent thirty years on the other side of this business, representing talent and selling them into the networks. He knows how to value a media company, and he has watched them get built the same way for decades, i.e., own the distribution first, fill it with programming, and hope an audience turns up.

Cooper built hers in the exact opposite order, audience first and distribution last. Whitesell sees that what she is building is the future of media, and he priced it at half a billion dollars.

The proof that the order has flipped is in who pays whom. SiriusXM signed a reported $125 million deal with Cooper in 2024, and now pays Unwell roughly $30 million a year to handle distribution and ad sales. Legacy media used to sell brands access to audiences. Now they are paying her for access to hers.

The Race for Attention Is Changing

For a century, attention was something a company could buy. You paid for the time slot or the page, and the audience was already sitting there because there were three channels and a handful of magazines, with no real alternative for people to spend their time and attention. Advertisers were not competing for attention; they were competing for inventory, and the media companies that controlled that inventory set the price.

None of that exists anymore. Every person now has an infinite number of things they could be watching, reading, or listening to at any second, and they are choosing constantly, in real time, against everything ever made. Nobody sits through anything they did not pick. Nobody is stuck with what is on. Which means attention has stopped being something you can purchase and become something a person voluntarily gives you, and there is no budget on earth that forces that decision.

That is the hardest problem in modern business, and it is what Cooper solved early. Roughly 70 million women a month choose to spend their time with her, not because they were served an ad or handed a channel, but because they want to. That is what WTSL invested in.

Alex Has the Largest Female Audience

The size of an audience tells you very little on its own. What matters is who is in it and how tightly it holds together, and on both counts, Unwell’s is unusually rare. It is 89 percent female, with 72 percent between the ages of 18 and 35, which means it is not a broad audience that happens to skew young and female. It is the exact demographic that sets culture, drives consumer spending, and that nearly every brand in the world spends its entire marketing budget trying to reach.

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Her scale is also insane. Cooper has close to 100 million followers across the ecosystem, more than 1.7 trillion earned media impressions in 2025, and a podcast network with more than a dozen shows that reach millions of people daily.

But the number I would look at first if I were valuing this company is a much smaller one. More than 150,000 people have shown up in person at national tours, spring break programming, Las Vegas, and SXSW. Followers are cheap, and impressions are constantly overstated, whereas getting a person to leave their house, buy a ticket, travel, and stand in a room with strangers is the hardest conversion in consumer behavior. It is the difference between an audience that watches you and an audience that belongs to something, and only one of those is worth half a billion dollars.

Unwell Is Not A Podcast Company

Call Her Daddy is the front door, and treating it as the business is the most common mistake in the coverage. Behind it sits studio-level infrastructure that most companies spend years assembling.

Cooper did not build this alone. She co-founded Unwell in 2023 with Matt Kaplan, her husband and a Hollywood producer who runs ACE Entertainment, the company behind To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, one of Netflix’s most-watched original films, and the Gen Z series XO Kitty. Kaplan folded ACE’s production, financing, and distribution capability into Unwell from day one, which meant the company could make things at scale from the start rather than optioning its ideas out to people who could.

She brought the audience and the instincts. He brought the machine. They self-funded through a holding company called Trending until this week and hired operators from Disney, Meta, Microsoft, and Netflix to run it. It is worth noting how rare that pairing is, i.e., most creators who try to become media companies spend years and a lot of other people’s money assembling what Kaplan walked in with.

What that produced is a slate most independent studios would take. Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, and Amazon are all in development with the company. Disney handed over the Hannah Montana 20th anniversary special. Peacock partnered on live programming from the Paris Olympics. Let’s Marry Harry landed in Netflix’s global top 10, and Icebreaker films this fall. Alongside that sits the podcast network of more than a dozen shows, a live events business, a charitable foundation, and a creative agency.

From the outside, that looks like a company diversifying, and it is not. Every one of those lines is the same audience being served in a different format, which is a completely different exercise from a company entering unrelated categories and hoping something works. The podcast is the relationship. Everything else is another way to spend time inside it.

The subtraction proves the same point. Cooper’s first reported move after taking the investment was shutting down the hydration line she had built with Nestlé, a partnership with one of the largest food companies in the world, which closed last week. Most founders would have kept it for the optics alone. Knowing which parts of a business are actually assets and which are a distraction also speaks to the focus this team has.

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The Agency Is The Signal

The piece of this I would watch most closely is Unwell Creative Agency, which the company launched less than eight months ago.

An agency inside a media company could sound like a side business. But rather, Unwell Creative is selling the capability rather than the audience. Its first major campaign was Get Lost for Google in October 2025, which Google has said was one of its most successful advertising campaigns of that year. It followed with Moving On, a microdrama series made with Google Pixel, i.e., short-form scripted episodes built for phones rather than television. Sephora and Polymarket are also clients.

Kaplan said it plainly, i.e., brands have realized that buying paid advertising or influence is no longer enough in a media landscape this fragmented, and that it is hard to find a platform that meets Gen Z on their own terms. So the company that figured out how to earn attention is now selling that skill to the companies that cannot. It is a better product than advertising space; it carries better margins, and neither legacy agencies nor legacy media have been able to build it, because the skill was developed under conditions neither of them has ever worked in.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Start thinking media-first. Not content-first, which is what most brands mean when they say this, and which produces a calendar of posts nobody wants. Media-first means building a relationship with an audience that exists whether or not they are buying from you that week, because that relationship is the only asset that appreciates.

So what can you learn from Unwell?

1. Build it before you need it. This is the part founders get wrong most often. Attention cannot be bought anymore, and the companies that start building an audience at the moment they need one are the companies that pay the most and get the least.

2. Treat every new line of business as the same community served differently, rather than as expansion. Unwell did not diversify into film, live events, and an agency. It found four more ways to give the same people something they already wanted, which is why each one makes the others stronger instead of pulling the company apart.

Where this ends up is fairly clear. Producing things is about to cost nothing, and everyone will be producing constantly, which means the volume of content in the world is going to be enormous and nearly all of it will go unwatched. What survives is taste, i.e. knowing which idea is worth making, an instinct for what people actually stop and watch, and a community that turns up because it wants to. None of those three can be generated, bought, or hired away from someone else.

Thanks for reading,

Xx Camille

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I do not think that is what happened. Skincare and luggage are different businesses, and the gap between them is why this case study is worth examining.

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The Details

Samsonite is reportedly paying $178.5 million in cash for 85%, funded from cash on hand and its revolving credit facility, with the deal expected to close in Q4 pending regulatory approval.

Béis stays a standalone brand under CEO Adeela Hussain Johnson and the existing team.

Shay Mitchell rolled over about half her equity, kept 15%, and stays on as leading creative.

Beach House Group, the LA incubator that co-founded the brand with her in 2018 and also built Pattern with Tracee Ellis Ross and Florence by Mills with Millie Bobby Brown, sold its entire 70% stake. Its biggest exit to date.

Luggage Has a Low Second Purchase

A customer buys a suitcase every five to ten years. A Rhode customer reorders the same treatment every six to eight weeks. When an acquirer buys a repeat-purchase business, they are buying an annuity, and when they buy a one-time-purchase business, they are buying an audience that has to be replaced from scratch every year.

Same revenue, entirely different asset.

Everything else about luggage compounds the problem. The incumbents have a century of retail relationships, airport doors, and sourcing infrastructure. The product is stubbornly functional, i.e., a suitcase rolls well and survives baggage handling, or it does not, which caps how far a story can carry before the wheels have to. And most people make one meaningful decision in the category per decade, so the brand has to be famous at exactly the moment a customer starts looking, and invisible-but-remembered for the nine years in between.

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Béis Built The Brand Almost Perfectly

Which is what makes the achievement worth studying. Béis went into that category and built a $210 million business in seven years, profitably, with a $218 carry-on sitting next to Samsonite and Tumi products at $350 to $800.

Mitchell treated a functional category as a world, which almost nobody does in durable goods. The brand launched in 2018 on the idea that the customer is in motion generally, not just flying, so the range covered the gym bag, the road trip, the commute, the weekender, the diaper bag. That is a world rather than a product line, and it is what kept the brand present during the nine years between suitcase purchases.

Everything else came off that. The color drops gave a durable-goods category a fashion cadence. The pricing kept the world enterable. Mitchell is not a name on a product; she is the customer, and the two million-plus people following on TikTok and Instagram were following a person who travels rather than a company that sells luggage. The design language got identifiable enough that you can spot a Béis bag at baggage claim from across the hall, which is about as close to a moat as this category offers.

That is why the brand hit $210 million instead of $40 million. The execution was not the limit. The category was.

The Buyer Had A Problem Too

Samsonite dates to 1910 and has a relevance problem. Full-year 2025 net sales fell 2.5%. The Samsonite brand was down 10.5% in North America in the third quarter alone. Q1 2026 constant currency growth came in at 0.4%, i.e., flat, while the company pursues a US dual listing to lift its valuation. The press release says it plainly, citing Béis’s social following as aligned with strengthening digital capabilities.

Samsonite has distribution, sourcing, and scale Béis could not build in another decade. Béis has cultural presence Samsonite has not been able to manufacture at any level of spend. Each side bought what it could not build, which is the only kind of acquisition that reliably works.

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Empty Benchmarks

Here is the part that applies beyond this deal.

Most founders benchmark against whatever number was loudest that quarter. Rhode sold for a billion, so a billion becomes the target. But a multiple is not a scoreboard; it is a description of what the buyer is actually acquiring, i.e., how often the customer returns, what the margins look like, how defensible the position is, and how many credible buyers exist when you decide to sell.

That last one matters more than founders realize. Rhode had every beauty conglomerate in the world as a potential acquirer, and competitive tension is what produces a premium. The list of companies that could credibly buy a luggage brand at scale is short, i.e., Samsonite, LVMH through Rimowa, maybe Tapestry or Away. A thin buyer pool sets a price ceiling no amount of brand equity overcomes.

Chasing someone else’s multiple does real damage. It pushes founders into categories where they have no advantage, or it convinces them to hold out for a number their category will never produce until the window closes and the offer gets worse.

The benchmark that matters is internal. How far is the ceiling in the category I am actually in, how close am I to it, and what would it take to move it? Béis got remarkably close and sold to the buyer best positioned to raise it, with the founder still in the building.

Effectively, none of this means anything without the structure underneath, i.e., purchase frequency, margin, category size, defensibility, and how many credible buyers show up when you sell. A billion-dollar exit in consumables tells a luggage founder nothing, and chasing it produces real damage, i.e., launching into categories you have no advantage in, or holding out for a multiple your category will never produce until the window closes.

The benchmark that matters is internal. How far is the ceiling in the category I am actually in, how close am I, and what would move it? Béis got remarkably close and then sold to the buyer best positioned to raise it, with the founder still in the building.

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What Your Brand Can Learn

Béis built a $210 million business in seven years, profitably, and exited to the largest luggage company in the world with its founder still leading creative. That is a win by any measure, and the lesson underneath it is the question most founders never ask, i.e., how often does your customer come back?

Know whether you are in a repeat-purchase or a one-time-purchase business before you build anything. That single fact shapes your valuation, your acquisition math, your marketing budget, and your exit, and it gets decided the day you pick the category.

If the product is not repeatable, build the repeat into the brand. This is the Béis lesson and the most portable one, i.e., the accessories, the adjacent categories, the community, the reasons to be in the customer’s life between the purchases that count. A world keeps you present during the nine years the product cannot.

And know what is actually defensible. Taste that can be photographed can be copied, and Béis lookalikes were on Amazon within a season of every launch. Rhode owned formulation. Charvet owned 188 years. If the honest answer for your brand is aesthetic alone, the ceiling is lower than it looks, and the negotiating table is a bad place to find that out.

Thanks for reading,

Xx Camille

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If you’re new here, I audit every brand through four pillars:

1. Product

2. Story

3. Experience

4. Consistency

Prime had three of these working at a level most brands never reach. The one it was missing is what took the business down.

Prime was launched in January 2022 by Logan Paul and KSI, two men who had spent the previous four years as each other’s nemesis. Paul is the American YouTuber who was, for a period, one of the most disliked people on the internet after filming a body in Japan’s Aokigahara forest in 2018, and who spent the following years rebuilding himself as a boxer, a wrestler, and a businessman. KSI is his British counterpart, a YouTuber turned rapper turned fighter with an audience of comparable size. They boxed each other twice, drew the first fight and split the second, and then did the far more lucrative thing, which was to stop fighting and start selling. Between them they had somewhere north of 40 million subscribers and no need to buy a single impression.

Prime, the product, is a “hydration” drink in a brightly coloured plastic bottle priced around $2.50 at retail. What the brand sold was proximity. There was a stretch in 2022 when a bottle of Prime was the hardest thing in America for a twelve-year-old to acquire. Gas stations resold bottles for $15. Kids filmed stock hunts the way a previous generation hunted Beanie Babies. Scarcity did a lot of the work here. An empty shelf made the drink feel more desirable, a restock became a small event, and buying a bottle was less about thirst than about having found one. Owning it mattered more than drinking it, which, in hindsight, hinted at the problem to come.

The numbers followed the mania. $250 million in retail sales in the first year, second-largest hydration brand in the world within two years. The pair secured major brand deals including advertising at UFC and Arsenal games, paired with worldwide distribution across Europe and the Americas. At its peak, Prime did $1.2 billion in sales. What’s interesting is how fast it grew and how fast it crashed. Worldwide sales are down 75%. The Australian distributor went into administration owing $7.92 million, and the Canadian bottling subsidiary was placed into receivership last year.

But the question is why?

The answer is that nobody liked the drink. Prime tasted, by broad consensus, like Fun Dip mixed with water, and the less generous reviews said coolant.

Attention Isn’t the Same as Demand

The problem was product-market fit, and Prime is a rare case where you can watch a company solve for everything except that.

Product-market fit is the point at which a specific group of people wants a specific product enough to keep buying it. Prime never had one, because it never had a specific group. The drink was labeled 18-plus for its caffeine content and bought predominantly by 16- and 17-year-olds collecting bottles that looked like candy. Too sweet for the adults it was marketed to, too caffeinated for the children actually paying for it. A product built for nobody in particular, sold to everybody, once. When parents got around to reading the label, the regulators followed, starting in Australia… and the buyers went with them.

None of that is an awareness problem, which is relevant to your business. Prime reached 100% brand awareness among Gen Z and 12% of them bought it twice.

I raise this because almost every founder I speak to wants to go viral, and Prime is the strongest argument available that virality is not a strategy. It can get people to show up, but it doesn’t guarantee they’ll like the product once they get there. If the product isn’t strong enough to hold them, attention only gets you so far. Virality decides how many people show up. The product decides whether they come back. Paul and KSI understood attention better than almost any beverage company on earth, but everything that expertise bought them was trial.

But the first purchase only matters if you can bring the customer back. Going viral without something worth returning to does not build a business. It just accelerates how quickly everyone finds out.

So What Can Your Brand Learn?

The reason Prime is an interesting case study is that it proves that strong brands can only be built on having strong products. Consumers can buy a product on hype, but they won’t stay blindly loyal. Most businesses don’t struggle with a bad product; in fact, you often have a great product and story and obsess over wanting to go viral. Yet studying Prime through the four pillar framework is very helpful for focusing on where to improve your business.

Let’s go back to the four pillar framework…

1. Product. This is where Prime failed, and it failed here first. A drink that no one liked. Does the thing you sell earn a second purchase without any help? Not whether people like you, but whether they reorder. If you do not know your repeat rate, that is the number to pull this week, because it is what tells you whether you have a business or a moment.

2. Story. Do people understand why your brand exists before they know what you sell? Prime’s story was a four-year rivalry that turned into a partnership, which meant the launch arrived with a reason attached. Most brands have a founding story and never make it mean anything commercially.

3. Experience. Is buying from you an event or a transaction? Prime turned a $2.50 bottle into a small victory you could film, and that is available to you at any size, i.e., the drop, the unboxing, the packaging, the note in the box, the way you handle a return.

4. Consistency. Do you show up often enough that people know what to expect from you? Paul and KSI posted for three years without missing. Most founders post for eleven weeks and conclude that content does not work.

The order matters more than the list. Story, experience, and consistency are what build a brand. Product is what earns a second purchase; it’s the only pillar that allows brand building to matter. Prime did well on the three that get someone to try you and fell short on the one that brings them back. And the better those first three perform, the sooner a weak product gets found out. Prime’s marketing didn’t fail the brand; it just sped up how quickly people discovered the product.

And yet the lesson still hasn’t landed. Prime’s initial success led a ton of other celebrities to follow suit. The numbers were crazy, and everyone wanted in. Messi launched a drink that failed the same way, in a bottle so close to Prime’s that both sides threatened to sue over copying before both claims were dismissed.

Kylie Jenner launched Sprinter as a canned vodka soda in 2024 and pivoted this April into k2o, a collagen hydration powder, which is a smart read on where consumption is going and still a bet that her name closes the sale.

Overall, It’s the same bet Prime made, and the outcome was clear: a famous name can fill shelves, spike a launch, and get a product into millions of hands exactly once. Fame buys the first purchase. Only the product earns the second. It’s why focusing on vitality alone is not a strategy. My favorite saying tied to virality is “clowns don’t sell.” It doesn’t matter how many followers you have; you can’t cut corners on the stuff that matters.

I hope this case study helps you think about your brand and being obsessed with the core things that matter. Customers have never been smarter and more frustrated by shortcuts.

Looking forward to heading home and being back to my regular schedule. If you want to join my weekly newsletter, subscribe here!

xx Camille

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What earned Reformation the listing is a rare set of numbers, including 24 consecutive months of double-digit growth, 98 percent revenue retention on a two-year basis, and 20 percent of the customers who found the brand in 2015 still shopping a decade later. Numbers like these do not come from a hot product or a viral quarter.

They come from a model, and the model breaks down into four plays, each of which is available to a founder at any scale.

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Play One: Launch Small, Then Chase Demand

The conventional fashion model designs a year ahead and commits to inventory before a single customer votes, which means the entire business is a bet, and a wrong bet means markdowns that bleed margin and brand equity at the same time. This is the structural problem underneath most fashion failures, i.e., the industry’s default operating system requires predicting what people will want twelve months out, and almost nobody can.

Reformation removed the bet. The company launches in small quantities, reads what sells, and then produces more of the winners fast, with half its product made in 60 days or less. The misses stay small because nothing was committed to them, and the winners scale because the supply chain can chase them. The consistency investors bought, i.e., the 24 straight months of double-digit growth, is the direct output of this system. A business that responds to demand compounds steadily, whereas a business that predicts demand lurches between hit seasons and markdown seasons. The takeaway for founders is simple to state and structural to execute, i.e., stop trying to predict your customer and build the system that responds to them.

Play Two: Build A Customer Who Stays

20 percent of Reformation’s new customers last year were under 25, and 20 percent were over 50, which means moms and daughters are shopping the same brand. In fashion, this almost never happens. Most brands lock onto one generation, and when that generation ages out of the aesthetic, the brand ages out with it, i.e., growth becomes a treadmill of re-acquiring a new audience every five years at rising acquisition costs, which is precisely the treadmill that has exhausted the DTC cohort Reformation came up with.

The escape was designed at the product level. Reformation builds fits and pieces that move with the customer across life stages, fitting everything on multiple women before release, so the same woman keeps buying at 25, 35, and 45, and the 2015 cohort keeps showing up in the numbers a decade later. The 98 percent two-year revenue retention is the result, and the lesson sits in where the work happened, i.e., retention is not a loyalty program bolted on at checkout. It is a product decision, made in the design room, years before it shows up in a cohort chart.

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Play Three: Run Stores As Acquisition, Not Distribution

Reformation is a 90 percent DTC business, with e-commerce making up two-thirds of that, and it keeps opening stores, which looks like a contradiction until you see the math the company disclosed in its S-1, i.e., opening a store in a new market accelerated customer acquisition in that region up to 6x the following year. The store is not competing with the website. It is feeding it.

The reframe matters because the DTC era spent a decade treating physical retail as the enemy, and then spent the following five years discovering that renting awareness from Meta gets more expensive every quarter. Reformation’s answer is to give every channel one job, i.e., the storefront does the acquiring, functioning as the best ad unit the brand owns, a billboard you can walk into and try on, and the site does the conversion. For founders, the principle scales down cleanly, i.e., the pop-up, the market stall, and the single retail door are acquisition instruments, and judging them purely on four-wall revenue misses most of what they produce.

Play Four: Decide What You Will Never Trade

Every public fashion brand eventually faces the same pressure. A bad quarter arrives, and the fastest fixes are always available, i.e., discounts, outlet expansion, licensing deals, each of which trades brand equity for short-term revenue. That trade killed Calvin Klein, hollowed out Gap in the 2000s, and runs through most of the category’s obituaries, because the revenue shows up once, whereas the discount customer and the diluted positioning stay forever.

Reformation set the standard before the pressure existed. The company went public telling investors explicitly that brand is not an area of leverage, i.e., the brand will not be spent to make a number, in any quarter, for any shareholder. Whether that discipline survives the public markets is the real experiment here, and it is the one Skims, Quince, and Vuori are watching closely, because it tests whether a brand can compound equity in public rather than have it extracted. The principle underneath it is one I have written about through Charvet and Chick-fil-A, and it applies at every scale, i.e., the brands worth the most decided in advance what they will never trade, and made the decision before someone offered them a price for it.

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The Playbook Works At Any Scale

None of the four plays requires Reformation’s size. Launching small and chasing demand is available to a founder with one production partner. Designing for retention is a product decision, not a budget line. Running physical spaces as acquisition works for a pop-up the same way it works for a fleet of stores, and deciding what you will never trade costs nothing today and everything later if you skip it.

What the IPO adds is proof that the market now pays for exactly these behaviors. The graveyard of the last four years is full of brands that ran the opposite playbook, i.e., big inventory bets, single-generation audiences, channel wars, and equity spent to make quarters. Reformation held its price at the bell on the strength of the boring numbers, and boring numbers, it turns out, are what durable brands produce.

Xx Camille

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Understanding why the brand drifted from that model, and what happened when it did, is what makes this a case study rather than an announcement.

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The Show Was Cancelled Because Nobody Was Watching.

In 2019, Victoria’s Secret cut the fashion show after ratings fell 66 percent in five years, from 9.7 million viewers in 2013 to under 3.3 million in 2018. The CFO’s stated reason was that the show had no immediate impact on sales, and on the numbers available to him, he was right. The show had become an expensive television production whose connection to the business had gone slack, and the audience decline told the deeper story, i.e., the brand had lost sight of its brand. A company founded on sexy spent years trying to become everything for everyone, and the customer, who can always tell, stopped showing up for a show that no longer knew what it was. By the time the cancellation came, the business was in a genuinely dire position, and the show was the most visible symptom of it.

The diagnosis matters because it separates the format from the failure. The fashion show did not stop working because runway entertainment stopped working. It stopped working because the brand underneath it had gone incoherent, and no production budget fixes that.

The revival worked because the brand went back while staying modern. The new show stayed true to what Victoria’s Secret was founded on, i.e., sexy, but no longer only one type of sexy, and it put on a show rather than a statement, because people want to be entertained rather than lectured.

The numbers followed. The revived show is credited with a 60 percent surge in web traffic and a 15 percent lift in new customer sales. Q1 net sales rose 15 percent, the stock spiked 40 percent in a single day, shares roughly doubled to an all-time high near $80, and the company has posted four straight quarters of positive comps. CEO Hillary Super and creative lead Adam Selman rebuilt the show on the understanding that the halo was always real, i.e., the 2019 problem was never that the show produced no value; it was that the value could not be measured or converted inside the moment it was created. Which is exactly the gap the new format is built to close.

The Trend Is Much Bigger Than Victoria’s Secret.

Media and shopping are collapsing into one surface, and the data has moved past the point of debate. US livestream commerce sales grew nearly 50 percent last year, with buyers up more than 20 percent year over year. Conversion rates for shoppable live formats run 9 to 30 percent against the 2 to 3 percent of standard e-commerce, i.e., as much as ten times higher, and clothing is the top American livestream purchase category at 43 percent. TikTok Shop doubled to $66 billion in gross merchandise value; TikTok is now the fastest-growing beauty retailer in the US, with sales rising roughly 260 percent annually since 2023; livestreaming alone accounts for about 22 percent of its US sales per McKinsey’s latest State of Beauty report, and YouTube is rolling out in-app checkout. China shows where the curve goes, i.e., livestream commerce is roughly 60 percent of Chinese ecommerce against about 5 percent in the US, which means the American market is not near saturation; it is near the beginning.

Read against that backdrop, the VS announcement is not a brand experimenting with a trend. It is a brand with the most valuable shoppable-media heritage in retail moving back into its own category as the category becomes the future of the industry.

Philip made the mechanical point on our show this week, which you can listen to here. In the episode, he shared the idea of imagining every model walking in a look available in limited quantities where scarcity is tied to the event itself. The technology to do this exists today, the audience behavior is already proven, and the format answers the 2019 objection permanently, because immediate impact on sales stops being the missing metric and becomes the defining feature.

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People Don’t Want To Be Sold To. They Want To Be Entertained.

This is where the trend connects to world building, because shoppable media only works if people choose to watch it, and nobody chooses to watch a store. The brands doing this correctly are building entertainment people enter, i.e., a world with a point of view, personalities, and moments worth showing up for, where the shopping happens because the audience is already inside. The ones doing it wrong are bolting checkout buttons onto advertising and wondering why nobody converts.

Victoria’s Secret understands the difference, and the location choice says so. Moving the show to Los Angeles is not a venue decision; it is a statement about what the show now is, i.e., the brand is maximizing the entertainment value by going to the home of entertainment. The original LA shows in 2006 and 2007 were the brand at its cultural height, and returning there stacks nostalgia on top of the new format. That combination matters more now than it would have five years ago, because AI has commoditized spectacle, i.e., the crazy stunt video is now cheap to produce and everywhere, whereas the feeling attached to a brand’s own history cannot be generated. Nostalgia creates the pull, and the shoppable format converts it in the same moment, which is the full stack every brand running this playbook is assembling.

What Your Brand Can Learn.

Treat your media as a storefront rather than an awareness play. The demand your content creates decays on the trip to the store, and every step between the moment and the transaction leaks conversion, which is why the format shift matters at every scale, i.e., the livestream, the drop tied to the launch video, the product linked inside the content rather than in the bio.

Entertain first, because the audience enters for the show and stays for the world. The transaction follows attention, and attention follows entertainment, whereas content built to sell reads as advertising and gets skipped. The brands winning shoppable media are producing things people would watch even if nothing were for sale.

And stay true to what your brand is, because the entire VS arc turns on it. The show died when the brand tried to be everything for everyone, and it came back when the brand remembered what it was and modernized the expression rather than the identity. The format is the multiplier, but the brand is the base, and no amount of commerce infrastructure converts an audience that no longer knows what you stand for.

Thanks for reading,

Xx Camille

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Elf is one of the biggest beauty companies in the world, with 27 consecutive quarters of net sales growth and the budget to buy attention anywhere it wants. What is worth studying is where it chooses to spend instead. Elf has spent the last five years showing up in places no beauty brand had entered, i.e., Twitch, the Indy 500, NASCAR, and the through-line is not a taste for stunts. It is a thesis about community. Elf understands that behemoth brands are built on people who feel connected to them, and that the cheapest loyalty in the market belongs to communities that want connection and are not being served. While competitors bid against each other for the same audiences on the same platforms, Elf hunts for underpriced community, and the two case studies below are the playbook.

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Case Study One: Twitch

No beauty brand was on Twitch, and there was no playbook for one. What Elf found was a reason to write it, i.e., 77 percent of women on the platform reported being bullied, and many were gaming under aliases to hide that they were women, because they could play as well as the boys and were being harassed to the point where their confidence and their play deteriorated. The community existed; it was engaged daily, and nobody was serving it.

Elf’s response was not an ad campaign. They built a channel, ‘elfyeah’, as a protected space to game and talk, with trained hosts and moderators who actively manage the environment; i.e., negativity gets pulled aside into side conversations, and anyone unwilling to change their tone is removed. They entered with service and infrastructure, and five years later, Elf sits in the top 1 percent of brands on the platform, in the company of Red Bull.

The more revealing part is what happened when Elf asked the community what it wanted from them. The top two answers were career advice and financial advice. Not makeup tutorials, which the community felt it already had, but access to the things missing from their lives and from the platform, i.e., financial literacy and professional guidance. So the CMO went live with career advice, then brought on the CFO, and 111,000 people showed up to watch a beauty brand’s chief financial officer talk about money. That number is a signal about what community connection looks like in action, i.e., the relationship transcended the product. Elf had become, in the CMO’s framing, the bestie helping you through your life– a loyalty that’s invaluable to the brand.

Case Study Two: The Indy 500

The Indy 500 is the largest single-day sporting event in the world, and roughly half its audience is women, i.e., women at the race supporting their fathers, husbands, and brothers, and women who simply love the sport, with almost nothing at the venue built for them. Women receive just 1 percent of all sports sponsorships and account for only 4 percent of drivers on track. In the race’s 108-year history, nine women have qualified. Then Katherine Legge emerged as the only female driver in the field, and Elf read the context correctly, i.e., an enormous, passionate, completely unserved community with a history maker to rally around.

Elf became the first beauty brand ever to serve as a primary sponsor of a driver at the race, putting Legge in a branded fire suit and a wrapped number 51 car, and backing her season after season since; i.e., Legge became the fastest woman ever to qualify for the Indy 500 with Elf by her side, and the partnership has since expanded into NASCAR. The Lip Oil Change activation, celebrating the nine women who have competed across the race’s history, is where the grandfathers cried. That is what serving an ignored community produces, i.e., loyalty with an emotional depth no media budget can buy, in a venue no competitor thought to enter.

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The System Behind It

The playbook underneath both case studies is operational, not creative, and it starts with where Elf looks. Women on Twitch and women at the Indy 500 were never hidden, i.e., the bullying data and the audience composition were available to every brand in the category, and nobody else acted on them. Elf treats overlooked communities as a sourcing discipline, which means the first step of the playbook is research most brands never bother to do, because the communities in question look too small or too far from the category to justify the effort.

The second step is identifying what the community is actually missing, which is almost never the product. Women on Twitch did not need another makeup tutorial; they needed a place to game without being harassed, and later, when Elf asked them directly, they wanted financial literacy and career guidance. Women at the Indy 500 did not need a beauty booth; they needed a reason to feel like the race was also for them. The unmet need is the entry point, and finding it requires asking the community rather than assuming, which is why Elf constantly polls its audiences about what they want to hear and learn.

The third step is where the investment gets real, and it is the part most brands skip. Before Elf ran a single piece of advertising on Twitch, they built the infrastructure of a functioning community, i.e., trained hosts who were prepared before going live, because streaming is a genuinely difficult format, and moderators in the comments whose entire job is protecting the environment. When negativity or hate shows up, the moderators move it aside and have direct side conversations, telling people they are welcome to stay, but the tone has to change, and removing anyone who refuses. That level of operational commitment is what made elfyeah a safe space rather than a branded channel with a mission statement, and it is the same commitment that showed up at the Indy 500, i.e., a driver sponsorship held across multiple seasons rather than a one-race stunt, and an on-site activation built for the community rather than the press release.

The fourth step is access, and it is the one that separates Elf from every brand that talks about community and means a comment section. The CFO streams on Twitch. The CMO takes the CEO onto TikTok lives so the community can tell him directly what they want from the brand. Elf calls this zero distance, i.e., zero distance between insight and action, and zero distance between the community and the C-suite, and the practical result is that something the company hears at night is in the feeds the next morning. The community is not being managed by a social media coordinator three layers removed from decisions. It is talking to the people who make them, and both sides have a personally vested interest in each other, which is what connection at scale actually requires.

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The Two Trends Underneath

Community and price point are the whole formula, and the two compound each other in a way that is easy to miss if you look at either one alone. Elf finds communities where loyalty is underpriced, i.e., audiences that are large, passionate, and completely unserved, and then serves them with products almost anyone can afford. The community work creates the connection, and the price point removes the barrier to acting on it. A teenager who watched the CFO’s financial advice stream can walk into Target the next day and buy the brand that showed up for her, whereas the luxury version of the same emotional connection dead-ends at the price tag. The connection converts because nothing stands between the feeling and the purchase.

The capital efficiency is the part that should interest anyone running a P&L. A Twitch channel and a driver sponsorship cost a fraction of a single Super Bowl spot, and they built market positions no competitor can buy their way into, because the position is not a media placement; it is a relationship with a community that remembers emotionally who connected with them in an authentic way.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Start with where you are looking, because every category has communities being ignored in plain sight, and the data on them is usually public. The incumbents look past these audiences because underserved reads as small to a brand optimizing for reach. Underserved means underpriced to a brand optimizing for loyalty, and the reframe is the entire opportunity, i.e., the communities nobody is bidding on are the only ones where attention is still cheap.

Then serve what the community is missing before selling what you make. This is the step that requires actual patience, because the unmet need is almost never in your category, i.e., Elf’s Twitch community wanted financial literacy, not lip oil. The brands that enter a community with service earn the right to sell later, whereas the brands that enter selling get read instantly for what they are, and the community closes to them.

And give people real access, because connection to people builds loyalty that connection to campaigns never will. That does not require a CFO with streaming range. It requires the founder and the leadership being reachable by the community in some genuine, recurring way, i.e., the version of zero distance your company can actually sustain.

Remember, world building is about providing consistent datapoints that compound, allowing your customers to turn into fans. One way Elf is world building is by focusing on underpriced attention. I hope you find this case study inspiring!

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Till next time,

Xx Camille

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Fast forward to July 14th, and Gap drops 2 styles in collaboration with Hailey Bieber. A smart reactionary campaign to the demand Hailey created with jeans. What’s interesting is that the virality was never really about Gap; it was about how good Hailey looked in the jeans, which is why the collaboration was so successful and is a case study in world-building.

The Gap drop was a limited capsule of one 90s low-rise and one extra baggy fit, branded to 1996, her birth year and Gap’s most iconic denim era; she thoughtfully stitched her signature inside the pocket. And the campaign was launched with a 90 second-scored film campaign focused on 90’s nostalgia. Gap capsules like Victoria Beckham’s have typically run a full style range, whereas this was a two-piece edit, and it sold out in minutes. Old Navy lookalikes and resale flips appeared within days.

The speed of the sellout is not the story. The story is that this collab is a clean example of world-building in practice, and since world-building is the question I get asked about more than any other, the Hailey Jean is worth breaking down.

What Hailey Does Best

Hailey’s particular genius is creating a world at an accessible price point. This is the Rhode playbook, i.e., the lip gloss and the phone case built to carry it, under $100 together, so that anyone can selfie like Hailey. The phone case turned the gloss into a visible accessory. It stopped living in a makeup bag and started living on the back of millions of phones, in every mirror photo and every selfie, where it worked as both product and signal.

The structure underneath it is what founders should study. The products are attainable, whereas everything around them is engineered to feel restricted, i.e., the drops are limited, the edits are tight, and the aesthetic is so controlled that owning any single piece feels like access. Most brands manufacture scarcity through price, where the product is exclusive because most people cannot afford it. Hailey manufactures it through the edit, where anyone can afford the product and almost nobody feels like they have all of it, which is a more durable form of desire because it invites the entire market in while still giving them something to want.

Rhode did $212 million in three years on that math, sold to Elf for a billion dollars, and is on pace for a billion in revenue this year. The multiple only makes sense if you understand that Elf was not buying a lip gloss company. They were buying a world with millions of people already inside it.

The Hailey Jean runs the same equation inside someone else’s brand. Gap prices, two styles only, and sold out in minutes. Most celebrity collabs try to manufacture scarcity through price, i.e., the product is exclusive because most people cannot afford it, whereas Hailey manufactures it through the edit. Anyone can afford the jeans. Almost nobody got them. That combination, accessible yet restricted, is what keeps the world aspirational without gating it behind wealth, and it is the part of her playbook most brands have never studied closely enough to copy.

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Why This Is World-Building

World-building is such a buzz term, so here is why this qualifies. World-building is creating compounding moments with visual creative cues that allow people to enter your world. Social media runs on desire, and you create desire through the mental image people want to enter and signal they are a part of. Whenever Hailey does something, it is done so creatively well that participating makes you feel like you can be a little more like Hailey, and that is the mechanism working exactly as designed.

The formula underneath it is what she does best, i.e., making things really cool at an accessible price point. Gap jeans are something almost anyone can afford, the same way Rhode sits under $100, whereas the creative around both is executed at a level most luxury houses do not reach. That combination is rare. Most brands with accessible price points produce accessible-looking creative, and most brands with elevated creative price accordingly. Hailey holds the two apart, i.e., the product stays attainable while the visual world stays aspirational, which is why women who cannot justify a Chanel bag can still buy their way into her world for the price of a lip gloss or a pair of Gap jeans.

And every move compounds toward the same world. The collaboration was not a departure from what she built at Rhode; it was an extension of it, i.e., highly visual, aesthetic, and creative. Each detail is congruent with the world she has been constructing for years, which is why the campaign reads as an extension of her coolness rather than a celebrity plugged into a template. This is the same discipline you see in the females who understand visuals and creative at this level, i.e., Pia Mance at Heaven Mayhem, where the entire brand is a mental image executed consistently enough that the audience wants in. The compounding is the point. One congruent move adds to the world, and the world is what sold out the jeans in minutes.

World-building is creating compounding moments with visual and creative cues that allow people to enter your world. Social media runs on desire, and desire is a mental image you want to enter and signal you belong to, which means the mechanism only works if every cue comes from the same image.

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Every single aspect of what Hailey does is drawn from the same world. The 90s references, the pared-down edits, the effortless styling, the 1996 story doing double duty across her birth year and Gap’s best denim era, connecting to her viral jean shot months earlier. These details aren’t a decoration but a cue that builds toward a larger brand world. That is the difference between a collab and a world, i.e., a collab is a transaction between two brands, whereas a world is something the customer enters.

Because buying the Hailey Jean is not really buying jeans. It is buying entry into her world. The capsule sold out in minutes because the demand for the world started years earlier. Gap did not have to build desire for the drop. Hailey had already done it. Gap simply supplied the entry point.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Build the world before you build the product. Desire is a mental image people want to enter, which means the world does the selling before the product does, and a brand that launches products without a world is asking each product to generate its own demand from zero. Define the aesthetic codes only your brand can claim, and be able to name them, because if you cannot articulate your world’s cues, neither can your customer.

Express those codes across every touchpoint so each one compounds the others. The reason Hailey’s collab worked and most celebrity collabs read as licensing deals is that hers is congruent, i.e., she genuinely loves Gap, lives in denim, and the campaign is an extension of her rather than a celebrity plugged into a template. The consumer is done with celebrity-attached names, and the test is simple, i.e., a Walmart jeans collab would not have worked by the same measure, because the partner’s identity has to already contain your brand.

The Best Brand Collabs Are…

In studying the leading collabs, including Gap and American Eagle, among other notable campaigns of recent past, the formula rings clear: nostalgia + a familiar face + a shoppable viral moment. Katseye danced to Kelis’ “Milkshake” in low-rise Gap denim and pulled 8 billion media impressions. Sydney Sweeney echoed the 1980 Brooke Shields campaign for American Eagle. Hailey tied her drop to 1996 and resolved a viral moment into a product people could buy.

Which brings this back to world-building. The formula gets a campaign attention, whereas the world is what converts it, and Hailey’s is the proof. Her connection to Gap was real; the creative is consistent with the Hailey universe, and the price point was accessible for her mass fans.

The best brands do not sell products. They hand out passports, and Hailey has been printing them for years... The Gap collab was simply the latest stamp.

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I hope everyone enjoyed the Muppets & FIFA show as much as we did. Would love to hear your thoughts on the halftime performance.

Xx Camille

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What makes this a case study rather than a feel-good sports story is why it worked. Football fandom is one of the most closed cultures in the world. You inherit your club, you earn your credibility over decades, and the whole ecosystem runs on gatekeeping, i.e., the badge, the chants, the unwritten rules about who is a real fan. Norway did the opposite. They took a thousand years of cultural heritage, played it straight, and built an entry point anyone could walk through. You did not need to know football to follow Haaland’s Snapchat, and you did not need to be Norwegian to learn the Row. Norway gave people who had never felt welcomed into football a way in, and millions of them took it.

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That is world-building in its truest form. A brand sells a product. A good brand sells a story. A great brand builds a world, i.e., a complete point of view people can enter, and the entering is the part most brands forget to design.

World-building is the question I get asked about most, and the examples people reach for are usually brands like Rhode or Summer Fridays, i.e., brands with real budgets, full creative teams, and the resources to art-direct every surface a customer touches. That is what makes Norway the more useful case study. Nobody would call a national football federation a sophisticated brand operation, and yet they out-built nearly every consumer brand this year, because world-building was never about the budget. It is about creating isolated touchpoints, i.e., a photoshoot, a chant, a Snapchat account, a haircut, a raccoon, that all draw from the same point of view, so that each one compounds the others instead of standing alone. One touchpoint is a piece of content. Five touchpoints from five different directions is a marketing calendar. Five touchpoints from one source is a world, and the difference between those last two is the discipline.

Every Touchpoint Came From The Same Source

The world was established before a ball was kicked. The Norwegian Football Federation marked the team’s departure with a photograph of the squad in Viking battle gear, standing in front of a wooden longship in a fjord, which told everyone exactly what world they were about to be invited into. The Row extended it into the stadium. The chant was created by a supporter named Ole Frøystad, who wanted something that felt unmistakably Norwegian and simple enough for an entire stadium to perform together, and the simplicity was the strategy, because a ritual only spreads if anyone can do it.

Haaland ran his own channels on the same frequency. His Snapchat, where he is most active, is a stream of deadpan selfies with captions like “well well well,” and during the tournament his Instagram grew from 40 million followers to 60 million, more than ten times the population of the country he plays for. He ended all seven of his goals with the same meditation pose, documented the run on YouTube, let a remix of a rap song he recorded as a teenager go to number one on Spotify Norway, and flew home carrying a taxidermied raccoon captioned “It followed me home.” The ponytail became something fans wore to matches.

Nothing was borrowed from another culture or invented for the algorithm. Everything was already theirs, and that is why every touchpoint compounded instead of competing. This is the part most brands get wrong about world-building. They treat it as a production exercise, i.e., more content, more campaigns, more surfaces, whereas the discipline is editorial. Norway created one point of view and expressed it everywhere, and that is the compounding effect at work, i.e., every new touchpoint made the previous ones more valuable, which is the signature of a world rather than a campaign.

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The World Pulled Other Brands In

The clearest evidence that Norway had built something with gravity is that other brands started marketing themselves by entering it. Before the England quarterfinal, Norwegian Air challenged British Airways to a public bet, i.e., the losing airline would replace its Instagram logo with the rival’s for 24 hours. British Airways’ lawyers approved it, a Norwegian Air intern flew to London to hand over the logo files on a USB stick, and the exchange was filmed at BA headquarters under a screen reading “Miami is a long way to row home.” American Airlines jumped into the comments, SAS promoted remaining seats on an aircraft named after a Norse figure, and Norse Atlantic added a Dreamliner to the Oslo-Miami route after the Brazil win. When England won, Norwegian followed through, swapped its logo, congratulated British Airways, and ran a flash sale captioned “Well played, England. Fancy a trip to Norway?”

None of this was Norway’s spend. The airlines wrote themselves into the story because the story had gravity, which is what a functioning world produces, i.e., other parties investing their own budgets to be part of it. Most brands pay to borrow attention. Norway built something other companies paid to associate with, and the difference between those two positions is the entire economics of brand building.

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Almost None Of This Cost Money

A photoshoot, a chant, a drum, a Snapchat account, a haircut. Haaland’s commercial machine existed around the edges, i.e., the Nike tournament spot with LeBron James and Kim Kardashian, but the world itself was built from creative decisions rather than production spend. What made it work was a point of view held consistently across every touchpoint, which is the thing most brands with a hundred times the budget never achieve, because consistency requires saying no to everything that is not from the world, and most marketing teams are structurally incapable of that refusal.

The returns did not stay inside football either. Norway’s Viking museums reported a surge in visitor interest during the tournament, and Innovation Norway’s tourism director publicly credited the Row with bringing attention to the country. A world built for a football team started selling the nation itself, which is what happens when the world is real, i.e., it generates value in places the original strategy never planned for.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Define the world first, i.e., the point of view and the codes only your brand can claim. Norways were sitting in plain sight in a thousand years of cultural heritage, and most brands have an equivalent they have never mined because they are too busy watching what competitors are doing.

Pull every touchpoint from that world, so the whole brand compounds toward one idea. The longship photoshoot, the gjallarhorn, the Row, and the Snapchat reinforced each other because they came from one source, and this is what separates a world from a content calendar, i.e., a brand whose touchpoints come from one source gets stronger with every piece of content, whereas a brand chasing trends starts over every week.

Make it participatory, because people do not share what they watch; they share what they belong to. The Row traveled because anyone could do it, and the moment your customer can perform the brand rather than just purchase it, the distribution problem solves itself.

Norway went home in the quarterfinal, and the Row did not. That is what a world does, i.e., it outlasts the campaign, the season, and even the result, because the people inside it have a reason to stay. Most brands are still buying reach. The ones worth studying are handing out passports.

Xx Camille

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A brand sells a product. A good brand sells a story. A great brand builds a world.

After studying hundreds of case studies across every category, I have found that the brands that climb those levels all share the same four core pillars:

1. A good product

2. A good story

3. A good experience, and

4. Consistency (the focus of today’s case study)

Most businesses overlook these four pillars entirely, which is why they never move past “a brand.” The energy goes into follower counts and viral moments rather than the foundations, and the pillar that gets dismissed most often is the one that ultimately decides everything, which is consistency.

My favorite example for illustrating the power of consistency is Chick-fil-A, and the reason starts with a number most founders cannot get their head around.

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The Chic-Fil-A Story

Every Sunday, all 3,000-plus Chick-fil-A locations in America close. Including ones inside airports, malls, food courts, sports stadiums, etc. Which is arguably the single best foot-traffic day. The policy dates to 1946, when founder S. Truett Cathy, who had spent years working seven-day weeks at a 24-hour diner, decided his own restaurant would close one day a week so that he and his employees could rest, and his children have vowed to keep it that way long after the family is gone.

The widely cited estimate of what this costs was $1.2 billion a year, calculated back when systemwide sales sat around $10 billion. Sales reached roughly $21.6 billion by 2023, which puts the realistic forgone Sunday revenue somewhere between $2 and $3 billion annually. Most companies would treat a number like that as a problem to be solved. Chick-fil-A treats it as the strategy, and the results suggest they are right to. The chain averages more than $8 million in annual revenue per restaurant, whereas McDonald’s averages roughly $3.7 million, and McDonald’s is open every day. Chick-fil-A laps the industry on a per-unit basis while operating 14% fewer days a year.

The Sunday closure is the most visible refusal in the business, but it is not an isolated quirk. The entire company is built out of refusals, and studying how they stack is useful to founders looking to build with longevity.

The Refusal Proof

Any brand can print values on a wall, and most do. What separates Chick-fil-A is that the company pays over $2 billion a year, every year, to prove theirs, and the customer can feel the difference between a stated value and a purchased one. The closure signals that the company means what it says. Employees get a guaranteed day of rest, which shows up in retention and in the tone of service the other six days. Cathy wrote in his 2002 book that the family was not so committed to financial success that they were willing to abandon their principles.

This is the mechanism founders tend to miss about values-driven positioning. The value only builds equity when it costs something. A refusal that is free is a preference, whereas a refusal with a nine-figure price tag is proof, and customers have become extremely good at telling the two apart.

The Menu That Barely Changes

Chick-fil-A sells roughly a quarter of the menu items of competing chains, and the core menu has remained essentially unchanged for decades. The operational math compounds quietly, i.e., fewer items means fewer mistakes, faster service, less waste, and margins that run 20 to 30 percent while competitors chase limited-time offerings to manufacture news. The customer math compounds louder. A person who orders the same sandwich for fifteen years and receives the identical product every time stops evaluating the purchase at all. The brand becomes a default, and defaults are the most valuable position in consumer behavior, because the customer has stopped comparison shopping.

This is the pillar in action. A good product gets a customer to try you, a good story gets them to remember you, and a good experience gets them to come back, whereas consistency is what turns the return visit into a habit.

Consistency gets treated as the boring pillar of brand building, the one that comes after the exciting three. In practice, it is the one that compounds, because reliability is what converts a customer into a default, and defaults are what produce a drive-through line that wraps the building at 11:45 on a Tuesday.

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A Franchise Harder To Get Than Harvard

Chick-fil-A receives roughly 60,000 franchise applications a year and accepts fewer than 1 percent of them, which makes becoming an operator statistically harder than getting into Harvard. The economics invert the industry model. The fee is about $10,000, versus the $2 million-plus required to open a McDonald’s, and in exchange the operator runs one store, forever, and owns none of it. The company retains the real estate, the equipment, and the right to select exactly who represents the brand.

Conventional franchise logic says this should repel talent. It does the opposite, because Chick-fil-A is not selling locations to whoever has capital; it is selecting operators the way elite institutions select people, and every store ends up run by someone who beat 99% of the field to be there. The one-store rule completes the design. Every other system rewards its best operators with more locations, whereas at Chick-fil-A the operator’s only path to more income is running their single store better. The result is the most obsessive operator base in the industry and a level of service consistency that no multi-unit portfolio model can match, because the store is not one line item in someone’s holdings. It is the operator’s entire livelihood and reputation.

Seventy-Six Years Without A Down Year

Cathy started selling chicken sandwiches at 25 and played the same game his whole life. The company has never taken on debt, has never had a down year in 76 years, and grew by reinvesting profits into new locations rather than borrowing to expand. The contrast cases are instructive. Boston Market expanded rapidly on borrowed money and collapsed. Krispy Kreme scaled into every grocery store in America and diluted the very scarcity that made the brand desirable. Chick-fil-A grew only as fast as its standards could travel, which is why the brand experience in location 3,000 matches the one in location 30.

There is a straight line from this discipline to the Pop Mart collapse I wrote about a few weeks ago (which you can read here). Pop Mart scaled production 100x into demand and destroyed the psychology that made Labubu valuable, whereas Chick-fil-A has spent seven decades refusing to grow faster than its consistency could hold. One company optimized for volume and lost time. The other optimized for time and the volume followed. The discipline is the moat, and the moat only exists because the company kept choosing it in the years when choosing it was expensive.

What Your Brand Should Take From This

The lesson is not to close on Sundays, and it is not that every founder should run a chicken chain. The lesson is that every refusal Chick-fil-A made looked expensive. The Sundays, the small menu, the 59,400 rejected applicants a year, the operators capped at one store. Each one cost real money in the quarter it happened, and each one compounded into the most profitable per-store operation in fast food, because refusals are how a brand proves what it is, and consistency is only a moat if you hold it when it costs you.

The practical question worth sitting with is being obsessed towards perfecting the four core pillars that make brands great. Most founders can point to the product, some can point to the story, fewer can point to the experience, and almost none can point to consistency, because consistency is the pillar that only shows up over time and only compounds if you protect it when it is inconvenient.

Chick-fil-A built an empire by focusing on core values and being the best one-stop shop for a chicken sandwich. The riches are in the niches. I hope you enjoyed this case study!

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By every conventional M&A metric, there is nothing here. A sub-scale business with a single door, an owner-operator team in their 70s, and a buyer who has publicly committed to not growing it. Chanel bought it anyway, and the reason they did is worth studying closely.

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What Chanel Actually Bought

Charvet has spent 188 years as the brand people with taste reference to signal they have it. Proust wore it, Churchill wore it, and so did JFK, Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld, and Coco Chanel herself, who was introduced to the house by Arthur “Boy” Capel and famously borrowed his Charvet shirts, an influence that helped shape the menswear codes she built her own house on. The company never advertised, never expanded past its single address, and never chased a customer in nearly two centuries of operating, and that refusal is precisely what made it the insider signal. Owning Charvet says you know, and knowing cannot be purchased off the rack.

Taste is the visible layer of what Chanel acquired, but taste alone is an aesthetic judgment, and aesthetic judgments can be imitated. What makes Charvet’s taste worth paying for is what sits underneath it, i.e., an unbroken heritage of craft that proves the taste is real, and a multi-generational community of clients who validate it every time they reorder, some of whom have been buying from the same counter their fathers and grandfathers did. The three assets stack. Heritage is the proof, taste is the signal, and community is the moat, and while a brand can fake one of the three, it cannot fake all three, because two of them only accumulate through time.

The Market Test That Preceded The Deal

The acquisition did not come out of nowhere. It came out of an unusually expensive product test conducted in public. For his debut Chanel collection last October, Matthieu Blazy entered a “conversation” with Charvet on a series of co-branded shirts, priced from $3,900 to $7,130, and they sold. The pieces caught the internet’s attention, sold through, and demonstrated the thing an acquirer most needs to know before writing a check, which is that Charvet’s credibility transfers. Put the name next to Chanel and the Chanel product becomes more desirable by association.

This is the sequence worth studying, because it is available to companies at every scale. Collaborate first, watch the customer vote with their wallet, then acquire with proof in hand. The collaboration was due diligence conducted in public, and by the time the deal was signed, the only question left was price.

This Is A Forty-Year-Old Playbook

The Charvet acquisition reads as news, but the strategy behind it is four decades old. Chanel began buying specialized ateliers in 1985, starting with the jewelry maker Desrues, and continued methodically through Lemarié for feather work, Lesage for embroidery, Michel for hats, and Massaro for shoes. Today that portfolio sits inside 19M, a purpose-built campus on the edge of Paris housing the Métiers d’art ateliers, and Chanel puts their work at the center of a dedicated show every year. The ateliers serve Chanel while continuing to serve other houses, because the point was never exclusivity. The point was making sure the crafts survive at all.

The scale of the commitment is easy to underestimate. Chanel spent more than $700 million on artisanal suppliers and workshops in 2025 alone, and its acquisition history runs from the Scottish cashmere house Barrie to the glovemaker Causse to a minority stake in The Row. Charvet is not a departure. It is the latest chapter of a forty-year strategy of buying the assets that cannot be rebuilt once they disappear, at prices that only make sense if you understand what is actually being acquired.

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Why These Assets Have To Be Bought

Taste is built through refusal, which is why it cannot be manufactured. Charvet’s credibility comes from 188 years of saying no, i.e., no to expansion, no to advertising, no to wholesale sprawl, and no to the wrong customer. Every no compounded the asset, and every no was expensive in the moment it was made, which is exactly why so few brands sustain the discipline. A conglomerate can build reach, product quality, and celebrity association overnight, whereas taste, heritage, and community only accumulate over decades, which is why the fastest way to acquire them is to buy them.

The timing of the sale matters too. Charvet did not sell because it was struggling. The brother-and-sister team that runs it, Jean-Claude and Anne-Marie Colban, are in their 70s with no next generation of operators lined up, the same force behind the Loro Piana sale and behind Armani preparing his own succession. The most protected independent brands in the world are changing hands because of biology rather than market pressure, and the acquirers winning these deals are the ones the founders trust as custodians. The succession gap has become a meaningful M&A driver in luxury, and it is releasing a generation of time-based assets onto the market at once.

The Pattern Beyond Chanel

Chanel is not alone in this logic. LVMH-backed L Catterton is currently in exclusive talks to acquire Hyrox, the German fitness race series, at a valuation of up to €1 billion. Hyrox has no brick-and-mortar, no flagship product, and no paid marketing, and the asset is the community, i.e., hundreds of thousands of athletes who structure their training, travel, and identity around the format. Different surface assets, same underlying logic. Charvet is taste backed by heritage and community, whereas Hyrox is community backed by format and ritual. In both cases, the money is moving away from revenue and toward the things it historically could not buy, which is credibility, community, and cultural position.

The reason this shift is happening now, rather than a decade ago, is relevant to the ai boom.

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The AI Context That Makes This Urgent

AI is collapsing the cost of producing nearly everything a brand used to compete on. Content, design, campaigns, photography, copy, and even product development are all compressing toward zero, which means the traditional inputs of brand building are becoming commodities available to anyone with a subscription. When everyone can produce everything, production stops being a differentiator, and the market starts repricing the assets that cannot be compressed.

You cannot generate 188 years of heritage. You cannot prompt a loyal community into existence. You cannot train a model on refusal. Time-based assets are becoming the only defensible ones, and the acquisition market has started to price that in, which is what the Charvet deal actually signals. Chanel looked at a €15 million shirtmaker and valued it highly enough to buy the building too, because what Charvet holds is the one category of asset that the next decade of technology cannot replicate.

This is the positive story inside the AI anxiety, and it belongs to founders with discipline. If your brand has been saying no, protecting its standards, refusing the shortcuts, and building slowly while competitors scaled fast and cheap, the market is moving in your direction. The brands that chased every trend, every channel, and every customer are watching their playbook get commoditized, whereas the brands that accumulated taste, heritage, and community are holding assets that are genuinely scarce, and the buyers have started arriving.

What Your Brand Should Take From This

The lesson is not that every founder should build a 188-year-old shirtmaker. The lesson is that taste equity is now demonstrably acquirable, and it is built the same way at every scale. What your brand says no to is what builds the asset. The distribution you refuse, the collaborations you decline, the discount you never run, and the customers you do not chase all compound into credibility that cannot be copied, whereas every yes to the wrong thing spends the asset down.

The practical question worth asking is which of the three layers your brand is actually building. Heritage takes decades, but it starts with consistency, i.e., doing the same thing the same way long enough that the track record becomes the proof. Taste is a curation discipline, built through the visible quality of your choices and the visible absence of the choices you refused. Community is the moat, and it forms around brands that give people something to belong to rather than something to buy. Most brands have none of the three, because all three require patience that quarterly thinking does not reward, and the brands compounding all of them are building the most acquirable equity of the next decade.

Charvet said no to everything for 188 years, and the result was a company doing €15 million a year that one of the most disciplined brand owners in luxury valued enough to buy the building too. Taste is now an acquirable asset, and Chanel just set the market price.

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Today my weekly deep dive newsletter went out, where I broke down the core book I go back to yearly to keep winning. If you are a business owner that wants to get ahead, I recommend subscribing to my weekly newsletter here.

Xx Camille

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The scale underneath it is genuine. TikTok Shop generated $15.1 billion in US sales in 2025, up 68 percent from the year before, with beauty and personal care leading every category on the app. It did $4.9 billion in US sales in the first quarter of this year alone, nearly double the same period last year, and eMarketer now projects $23.41 billion for the full year, which would give a short-form video app a larger US online business than Target, Costco, Best Buy, or Kroger. Whatever else you want to say about TikTok Shop, it has earned the title of the fastest-growing sales channel in US retail history.

Then the rest of the results came in.

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Half The Stores Sold Nothing

There are 803,500 registered stores on TikTok Shop in the US, and more than half of them recorded zero sales last year, i.e., not low sales, none. Roughly 2,000 stores cleared $1 million, which means the success story you keep seeing on your feed represents about a quarter of one percent of the platform, a group small enough to fit in a hotel ballroom.

The creator side is even more lopsided. Around 851,000 creators actively sell on TikTok Shop, and of those, 291 exceeded $1 million in sales while most generated under $10,000 for the year. That record-breaking Canvas Beauty session sits in even rarer air, because only four livestreams out of roughly four million have ever crossed $1 million. The case studies are outliers presented as a playbook, and the platform has no incentive to correct the impression, because the jackpot is what sells the tickets.

The Winning Was Purchased

I recently sat down with Leslie, a good friend who runs Iced Media, an agency that held one of the first TikTok Shop licenses in the US, the kind of operator who pays for the full platform data and can see down to the penny what every brand and every creator sells in a given month. Her read on the channel was blunt: for most brands it runs as a loss leader, and the expectations walking through her door usually have no relationship to the economics.

Here is what she means. A brand watches Canvas Beauty break records on a live and assumes the channel produced that result, whereas the result was produced by aggressive discounting, paid media layered on top, and commission rates that reward the creator before the brand. The winners at the top of TikTok Shop are paying full price for their position. They simply arrived with the margin, the capital, and the existing demand to afford it. The revenue is public. The margin never is.

The Platform Gets Paid Before You Do

The math is available to anyone willing to run it, and almost nobody runs it. TikTok takes a 6 percent referral fee on every order. Creator commissions in beauty, the platform’s biggest and most competitive category, run 15 to 30 percent, the highest rates on the app. And as of this spring, sellers are required to use TikTok’s own fulfillment, which starts at $3.58 per unit.

Stack it up and roughly 30 percent of the selling price is gone before product cost, discounting, or ad spend enters the picture. On a $30 serum, that is about $9 to the platform and the creator before you have paid to make the thing. Now add the discount, because full price rarely survives the feed, and the media dollars that most winning brands quietly layer on top of their organic and affiliate activity. This is how a channel does $15 billion in sales while most of the brands on it lose money, and it is why the people with the clearest view of the data treat it as a loss leader rather than a growth engine.

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The Hail Mary Problem

The deeper issue is who is showing up and why. A meaningful share of the brands rushing onto TikTok Shop right now are beauty brands getting squeezed at retail, i.e., brands losing shelf position at Sephora or watching their sell-through flatten, and they are looking at the platform as a replacement for the retailer that is failing them. They are treating TikTok Shop as a Hail Mary, and the mechanism runs in the opposite direction.

TikTok Shop amplifies demand that already exists. The brands performing on the platform tend to arrive with retail heat, cultural momentum, or a product already moving somewhere else, because the algorithm rewards velocity and velocity has to start somewhere. A brand arriving with existing demand uses TikTok Shop as a multiplier, whereas a brand arriving with a demand problem is asking a checkout button to solve it. A checkout button converts the demand you bring to it, and it charges you 30 points for the privilege.

The Category Law

Every platform in history has sold itself on its outliers, i.e., the lottery advertises the jackpot, never the ticket holders. TikTok Shop’s economics reward brands that arrive with demand, capital, and margin to burn, whereas brands that arrive needing the platform to save them are the ones funding it. A channel’s winners tell you nothing about your odds in it. The only numbers that predict your outcome are your own, which is precisely why so few founders look at them before signing up.

Run The Net Math Before You Touch The Channel

Model the full cost stack against your margin at the discount level the platform expects, not at full price. Price the creator commissions at beauty rates if you are a beauty brand, not at the platform averages quoted in the pitch decks. Then decide what the channel is for before you launch, i.e., profit, volume, or visibility, because on TikTok Shop you will rarely get all three at once, and a channel that runs unprofitably can still be worth operating if you chose that outcome on purpose rather than discovered it on your P&L.

GMV is a platform metric. Margin is a brand metric. TikTok Shop reports what it sold, and it will never report what you kept. Any channel decision that starts with the platform’s numbers instead of your own is a decision the platform made for you.

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The Bigger Picture

TikTok Shop is an amazing platform, and it is not going anywhere. It is rewriting how discovery works, it is pulling billions of dollars into the feed, and for the right brand with the right math, it is one of the most exciting channels in retail. It is also a double-edged sword, and the edge you land on is determined before you ever post, by your margin structure, your existing demand, and whether you entered with a strategy or a prayer. Hope is not a strategy, and on a platform that gets paid whether you profit or not, hope is expensive.

The founders who win the next phase of TikTok Shop will be the ones who treated it like a business decision instead of a lifeline. If you are considering TikTok Shop, you have to understand the economics, and for most brands, the economics only start working when the platform has something to amplify, which in beauty still means distribution in stores.

Look at who is winning. Color Wow sits in Sephora, Ulta, and Amazon, and that shelf presence is exactly why its Dream Coat can move more than 137,000 units on TikTok Shop, because the platform multiplies demand the shelves already validated. Tarte, the number one beauty brand on TikTok Shop at $4.9 million in a single month, sells its hero product at the same $30 it commands at Sephora and Ulta and sweetens the offer with a free brush instead of a discount, which is only possible when retail has already established what the product is worth. Even the retailers have read the mechanism correctly while the struggling brands read it backwards, i.e., Ulta and Sally Beauty are opening their own TikTok Shop storefronts to amplify their retail businesses at the very moment independent brands are fleeing retail for the platform.

The creator system enforces the same law. TikTok Shop ranks its creators in levels based on how much they sell, and the top-level creators, the small group who drive the majority of creator sales, choose what they promote. Their level depends on conversion, so they pick products with proven velocity, recognizable names, and offers their audience already trusts. A brand nobody has heard of cannot book the creators who actually sell, which leaves it paying commissions to the creators who cannot. Distribution is what breaks that loop, because the shelf gives the creator proof, and the creator gives the algorithm the velocity that produces the numbers everyone screenshots.

So run the math, and then ask the harder question, which is whether you have given the platform anything to amplify. TikTok Shop is not a replacement for distribution. It is a reward for it.

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In case you missed it, I am hosting an exclusive Zoom tomorrow giving live brand audits and answering questions for your brands and socials. If you want to join, all you have to do is purchase my Social Media and Brand planner here. We have literally 20 left. If you already have one and didn’t receive our emails, respond to this email, and I’ll get you in!

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Some context on how this started. FIFA requires host stadiums to remove all non-sponsor branding for the duration of the World Cup, a policy it calls the clean stadium rule. Fifteen of the sixteen host venues were renamed this summer. Gillette Stadium taped over 64,146 individual seat logos. Heinz bottles in stadium concessions had their labels covered by hand, Beats logos were covered on players’ headphones, and a venue worker was made to duct-tape over the Nike swoosh on her own shoes because Adidas holds the official partnership. Levi’s Stadium, which the brand pays for under a $170 million naming rights extension signed in 2024, became the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium, with white tarps over the batwing logo inside and out.

Levi’s is not a FIFA sponsor, so it had no official way to advertise during the tournament. What it did instead was change its Instagram profile picture to a photo of the covered logo and post a video of the tarped stadium set to the “Nobody’s Gonna Know” TikTok audio, captioned “Welcoming the world to the beautiful [redacted] stadium!” A second post read, “At least we got to choose how to cover it.” The first post generated 2.4 million likes, 354,000 shares, and 26,000 comments, and the TikTok version pulled 9 million views. Within 72 hours, Levi’s had extended the bit to its own storefronts, covering its logos in Paris, London, Milan, Berlin, Hong Kong, Brazil, and Mexico with the same white sheets.

Fast Company called it one of the biggest brand moments of the World Cup, which is notable for a brand that was technically banned from participating.

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Why It Worked

The clean stadium rule makes commercial sense from FIFA’s side. Sponsors pay significant fees for category exclusivity, and the rule protects what they paid for. The problem is how it reads from the outside. Taping over ketchup labels and renaming stadiums comes across as institutional overreach, and audiences reliably side with whoever is being suppressed. Levi’s benefited from a dynamic that has been well documented since Barbra Streisand sued to remove an aerial photo of her Malibu home from the internet in 2003 and drove downloads from 6 to over 420,000 in a month. Suppression draws attention to the thing being suppressed.

What Levi’s understood is that FIFA had handed it an underdog position it could not have bought. A Fortune 500 company is not an underdog on paper, but a 152-year-old American brand getting its name stripped off its own stadium by an international federation reads as one, and the audience responded accordingly. The other thing worth noting is that Levi’s never broke a rule. The stadium logo was covered, the name was changed, and every requirement of the policy was met. There is no regulation against changing your own profile picture or covering your own storefronts, which means FIFA had no mechanism to respond. The compliance itself became the campaign.

The Nike Comparison

Nike faced the same restrictions. The clip of the venue worker taping over her swoosh pulled 5.2 million views on DailyLoud within 24 hours and became one of the most-shared kit moments of the tournament. Nike did not respond to it, and Adidas is now beating Nike 4 to 1 on kit share of voice for the World Cup, per Pulsar’s tracking. Nike’s most viral moment of the tournament is a video about the brand being censored, with no participation from the brand itself.

The comparison is instructive because both companies had the same opening and the same audience goodwill available to them. The difference was response speed, or possibly the internal permission structures required to move at all. Whatever the reason, one brand converted the moment, and the other watched it pass.

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What To Take From It

Reactionary marketing has become a real capability, and it is worth understanding what it actually requires, because it is not a social media team with a memes budget.

It requires a short approval chain. Most brands lose reactive windows because campaigns route through legal, brand, and executive review, and the moment closes before the work ships. The teams that move fast have standing authority to make live calls without a committee.

It requires knowing your position in advance. Levi’s did not develop the underdog framing in a war room after the tarps went up. The brand has spent 152 years accumulating the cultural equity that made the framing available, and the team simply claimed ground it already owned. A brand that has to workshop its point of view during the moment has already missed it.

It requires extending the moment past the first post. The Instagram post was good. The storefront extension across seven international markets is what turned it into a campaign, and it is the part most brands would not have done. A reactive moment can run through every channel a brand owns if the team moves quickly enough, and most teams stop at one.

And it requires treating silence as a choice with a cost. Nike’s non-response was read by the audience as a response, and the share-of-voice numbers reflect it.

FIFA will enforce the same rule at the next World Cup, and the next one, which means more brands will find themselves in the position Levi’s was in this summer. The playbook now exists. The question for any brand watching is whether they have the internal speed to run it.

In case you missed it, I have a weekly deep dive where I go deeper. I’ve received a bunch of positive feedback on the last two…so If you want to join, click here!

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The demand was so intense that secondary market prices ran 2,000 percent above retail, robbers in California staged a $30,000 heist to steal inventory, and in-store fights in the UK got severe enough that Pop Mart pulled all in-person plush sales and moved distribution exclusively online. Every signal in the market was pointing in the same direction, and it was almost impossible to imagine how a company sitting on this level of cultural velocity could fail to convert it into a Disney-scale IP franchise.

But then it did. Nine months later, Pop Mart has lost $33 billion in market value, and the collapse was entirely self-inflicted.

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The Empire That Almost Was

Pop Mart licensed Labubu from Hong Kong-Dutch artist Kasing Lung in 2019, spent five years quietly building the character through blind box collectibles, and hit escape velocity in 2024 when Lisa of BLACKPINK posted a Labubu keychain on her Instagram in April of that year, triggering a 30 percent jump in Pop Mart’s Southeast Asia sales inside a single week. Revenue for the character grew more than 700 percent year over year in 2024 to roughly $430 million, and the following year turned the company into the most valuable consumer IP story of 2025.

Full-year 2025 revenue grew 185 percent year over year to $5.4 billion. Net income quadrupled to $1.9 billion. US sales alone jumped 1,200 percent year over year. Labubu accounted for 38% of total revenue, up from 23% the year before, and the company hit its $44.43 billion peak valuation in June, more than the combined market caps of the three largest legacy toy brands in the world. A life-size mint-green Labubu sold at the Yongle International Auction in Beijing for over $170,000. Secret blind box editions traded at 2,000 percent above retail on Chinese resale platforms.

The Product Was Never The Toy

The most important thing to understand about the LaBubu business model is that the physical product was almost irrelevant to the commercial mechanism. Pop Mart was not selling plush toys. They were selling access to something engineered to be hard to get.

The blind box format meant customers did not know which figure they were getting until they opened the box. Limited editions meant they might not get one at all. Queuing culture meant they had to show up in person, and the resale market served as public proof that others wanted what they had. Every element of the go-to-market strategy compounded the difficulty rather than reducing it, and that difficulty created the cultural momentum. Customers were paying for the chase, and the chase was the product.

This is the operating principle that every scarcity-driven brand runs on, whether it is Hermès, Ferrari, Rolex, or Pop Mart. The friction is not a bug to be optimized away, it is the commercial mechanism. The moment you remove the friction, you have not made the product more accessible; you have removed the reason anyone wanted it.

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The Decision That Broke The Machine

By late 2025, the pressure to scale had become impossible to ignore. Waiting lists compounded across every major market, and resale prices went vertical on the secondary market. Counterfeits, known as Lafufus, flooded distribution channels. Scalpers dominated the resale infrastructure, priced everyday customers out of the ecosystem, and generated a cycle of negative brand stories about heists, in-store fights, and safety recalls that were becoming reputational liabilities.

Pop Mart’s response was to scale production dramatically to chase the demand. Monthly production moved from approximately 300,000 units in early 2024 to 30 million units by late 2025, a 100x increase in under two years. The strategic bet was that meeting demand would extend the cultural moment, lock in market share before competitors and counterfeits could catch up, and restore access to real fans who had been priced out by the resale market. The financial math and market-share math supported the move. Even the brand reputation math arguably supported the move.

The logic held together on paper. If Labubu was a $5 billion revenue engine and demand was still growing, scaling production was the responsible decision. This is the same call almost any CFO in any consumer category would have made, and it would have been correct for almost any consumer category.

It was not correct for Pop Mart.

What Happened

The scarcity engine collapsed in weeks. Resale prices fell by more than 50% almost immediately, and some SKUs dropped below their original retail prices as scalpers panicked and sold their inventory into a falling market. Google search interest for Labubu dropped roughly 90% between August 2025 and March 2026, one of the steepest declines in cultural interest for any consumer product in recent memory. Pop Mart stock fell 44% from its August peak, wiping out $33 billion in market value in nine months.

The reason this happened, and the reason it happened this fast, is that scaling production against a scarcity-driven demand curve is functionally equivalent to destroying demand. Pop Mart did not oversupply the market in the traditional sense, meaning they did not make more product than customers wanted. They made more products than the brand’s psychology could support. The moment the object stopped being difficult to obtain, it stopped being culturally valuable, because the difficulty was the culture.

Analysts drew immediate parallels to the Beanie Babies collapse of the 1990s, the last time an engineered-scarcity category ended as supply caught up with demand. The comparison mattered because it signalled to institutional investors that Pop Mart was not building a Disney-style IP franchise; they were riding a collectibles bubble, and the bubble had just been popped by the company itself.

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The Real Question Was Not Volume, It Was Time

This is the strategic misread every founder should sit with, because it is the actual business lesson underneath the case study.

The real question in a hype cycle is not how to capture more of the current demand. It is about extending the product’s cultural life, so that the demand curve stretches over a longer monetization period rather than compressing into a shorter one at higher volume. Pop Mart optimized for the first question and lost the second. Every unit added to monthly production shortened the brand’s runway instead of lengthening it, and the two- to three-year cultural window most hype brands get was compressed into eighteen months.

The CFO’s math showed the company was leaving revenue on the table by failing to meet demand. The correct math was that leaving demand unmet was the mechanism keeping the cultural moment alive. Scaling production converted what should have been a multi-year revenue arc into an eighteen-month revenue spike, at a valuation priced by the market on the assumption that Pop Mart understood the difference. The $33 billion in lost market value is the price of that assumption being wrong.

The Category Law

The most valuable brands in the world protect scarcity as a permanent operating principle rather than a launch phase. Hermès prints Birkin bags at a fraction of demonstrated demand and forces customers to build a purchase history before they qualify for one. Ferrari caps annual production at approximately 13,000 to 15,000 units despite demand that would support ten times that, and Rolex lets retail waiting lists compound for years on specific references and refuses to scale allocations.

All of these companies leave enormous revenue on the table every year because their leadership understands something that Pop Mart’s leadership either did not understand or did not have the discipline to protect. The friction to access the product is the brand. The moment you remove it, you are no longer operating in the same category, and every commercial metric that used to work for you will collapse within weeks.

This is not a marketing observation but a category law. Scarcity brands cannot be run on volume math, and the moment they are, they stop being scarcity brands. The valuation multiples that made them extraordinary evaporate along with the psychology that generated the multiples in the first place.

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What Every Hype Brand Should Do Instead

If you are building anything right now that has a resale market, a waiting list, a drop culture, or engineered difficulty inside the customer experience, the Pop Mart case is an important cautionary tale.

The first move is to decide what business you are in before you scale. Scarcity brands and volume brands are two different companies with two different commercial physics, and you cannot switch from one to the other in real time without dismantling the mechanism that made you valuable in the first place. If you are Hermès, you commit to the model permanently and hold the line every year that the finance team argues for more allocations. If you are Nike, you scale into demand aggressively and optimize for volume. There is no middle ground that works, and the brands that try to occupy the middle usually end up with neither the pricing power of scarcity nor the market share of volume.

The second move is to plan the second wave while the first is still peaking. If your model is drop-driven, treat drops as capsule cycles rather than sustained production runs, and plan the next character, collection, or universe before the current one collapses. Pop Mart is attempting this pivot now with Crybaby, Skullpanda, and Hacipupu, but they are doing it in the middle of a cultural collapse rather than ahead of one. The founders who execute this well plan the second wave while the first wave is still at its cultural peak, because the pivot lands cleanly when the customer is still emotionally invested rather than actively watching the brand fade.

The third move is to protect the brand’s psychology from the finance team. Every scarcity brand will hit a moment where the CFO math argues for scaling into demand, and that is the exact moment the founder has to hold the line. The math is not wrong in a mechanical sense; it is describing the correct decision for a different category than the one you are actually operating in. This is why Hermès and Ferrari have stayed at the top of their categories for decades. Their leadership understands that leaving revenue on the table is the moat, not a bug in the business model, and they have the discipline to protect it in every board meeting where someone will argue otherwise.

The fourth move is to remember that the customer is not paying for the product; they are paying for the story around it. The story only holds if the product is scarce. The moment the product is available, the story dies, and the customer is left with what the object always physically was, which in Labubu’s case was a plush toy on a keychain.

The Bigger Picture

Pop Mart is not going out of business. They generated $5.4 billion in revenue and $1.9 billion in net income in 2025; they operate over 1,000 stores across 18 countries, and they have a portfolio of emerging IPs that give them a second act. This is not a going-concern story, and CEO Wang Ning has been clear in his last three months of earnings calls that the company sees itself as a multi-franchise operator rather than a single-character brand. Sony Pictures acquired Labubu feature film rights in March with filmmaker Paul King attached, aiming for a theatrical release in three to five years, and COO Si De has talked openly about applying the Disney playbook of continuous investment to extend the character’s cultural life the way Mickey Mouse has been extended for nearly a century.

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The strategic pivot is directionally correct, but the pivot is being executed while the market watches the original cultural moment fade in real time, and a feature film release three to five years from now cannot replace the cultural momentum that Pop Mart is currently losing every quarter. The company will be smaller than the $100 billion peak valuation the market briefly assigned it, and that is because of a decision by leadership rather than anything the market did to them.

Pop Mart built the most valuable consumer IP moment of the year on scarcity, then broke the scarcity because the finance math argued for it. The math never saw the psychology. Every founder currently sitting on a hot product with a resale market or a waiting list should be studying this decision, because the same decision will arrive at your company, and you need a clear vision for the brand’s future you are aiming to build.

Till next time,

Xx Camille

P.S. If you are a creator, the Clio Creator Awards are open for entries through August 22nd, and you can submit your work here: https://clios.com/creators/

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The Victoria’s Secret comeback is almost unbelievable, but very few people are talking about why the brand and its sub-brands are working so well. What Victoria’s Secret did was rebuild its empire across three platforms and three generations. They built a Roblox presence to capture Gen Alpha, leaned into product perfect for YouTube hauls that convert across Gen Alpha and Gen Z, and properly revived the VS runway show to recapture millennials.

What is smart about this model is that a customer who enters the universe at age 15 can now stay for decades, which is the structural advantage that few DTC brands have been able to replicate. Most brands are still optimizing for a single platform and a single generation, while the next chapter of brand building requires building across both. This strategy matters especially for mall brands with strong brick-and-mortar footprints. You have to create demand and cast a wider net to fill the entire pipeline.

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The Pipeline Underneath The Comeback

Victoria’s Secret operates across three discovery channels that map onto three age cohorts.

Pink captures the bulk of the customer journey, from tweens through young adults. The brand sits atop a massive organic YouTube haul economy, where thousands of creators film try-on, shopping, and sale hauls that collectively pull in millions of views without the brand paying for any of it. The Tween Row flagship adds the physical layer in the neighbourhood where Gen Alpha and Gen Z already shop. This is the world-building piece, allowing people to discover the brand online and build anticipation to experience it in real life.

The Roblox layer pulls Gen Alpha in before they are even shopping. The platform is the dominant discovery channel for Gen Alpha and a meaningful one for young Gen Z, and brands that show up inside the game world become part of the cultural universe she associates with her friends.

Victoria’s Secret captures 25 and up. The revived runway show pulls Millennials back through nostalgia, brings Gen Z in through Sabrina Carpenter and the new Angels, and generates billions of media impressions across every platform in a single night.

A customer who encounters the brand on Roblox at age 9, ages into Pink through YouTube hauls and the Soho flagship by 13, and is buying Victoria’s Secret by 25. That is over 15 years of customer acquisition executed across three platforms, which is the architecture every DTC founder should be studying.

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Roblox Is The Channel Founders Are Missing

Roblox has over 130 million daily active users, with 73 percent of verified users under the age of 18. The platform is the dominant discovery channel for Gen Alpha and a meaningful one for young Gen Z, with the 18+ segment growing fastest. Brands operating there with real infrastructure include Gucci, Nike, Walmart, American Eagle, and Forever 21. Almost no DTC brand has built anything on the platform.

The format rewards a completely different kind of content than what brands run on Instagram and TikTok. Gamification, virtual brand worlds, obstacle courses, earnable rewards, and shoppable experiences inside game environments. The customer is not scrolling; she is playing, and the brands that appear in her game world become part of the world she associates with her friends and childhood.

The brands that wait until Gen Alpha is twelve to start marketing to them are showing up too late, because the brand decision was made when she was nine.

YouTube Hauls Are The Trust Layer For Three Generations

The part most founders misunderstand about YouTube hauls is who actually watches them. The format does not convert only Gen Alpha. It resonates with Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X because the value proposition is the same across generations. The viewer wants to see how a product looks on a body that resembles her own before she buys it.

This is the structural advantage of YouTube that Instagram and TikTok cannot match. A teenage girl, a thirty-year-old, and a forty-five-year-old all watch hauls for the same reason. The long-form, conversational, detailed format lets them make a real purchase decision instead of an impulse one. The video sits on YouTube for years, continues to generate views, and continues to drive customer acquisition long after it was posted. Search Pink haul on YouTube and find thousands of organic videos pulling millions of views collectively across creators.

Loungewear, sleepwear, accessories, fragrance, and seasonal capsules dominate the haul format because they are visually interesting enough to film for fifteen minutes and show variety across pieces. This is a product strategy decision more than a marketing one, and it is the single most important thing founders need to understand about building for the YouTube layer. If your product is not designed to be filmed, talked about, and tried on, you are not in the YouTube conversation, and the YouTube conversation is where purchase decisions are being made across three of the four generations currently in the consumer market.

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The Show Is The Cultural Anchor That Holds The Whole Thing Together

The third layer of Victoria’s Secret’s platform strategy is the revived runway show, which gets undervalued because it looks like nostalgia marketing. It is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure. The show generates billions of media impressions in a single night, pulls Millennials and Gen X back through the original Angels, brings Gen Z in through Sabrina Carpenter and the new ambassador roster, and creates the content layer that feeds every other platform for the following twelve months. Clips end up on YouTube, the brand world feeds back into Roblox, and the cultural moment becomes the proof point that justifies everything else the brand is doing.

Most DTC brands do not have a cultural anchor moment because they were built on performance marketing and never invested in the kind of brand work that creates one. NikeSkims is the closest DTC equivalent, and it sold out within hours of launch, which suggests the appetite for cultural anchor moments is real. The brands just have to commit to building them.

The Lesson For Every Brand

Pink is winning because Pink is the only brand in its category operating across all three layers simultaneously. The brands that will be worth a billion dollars in 2036 are the ones whose customers entered the universe a decade earlier, and the infrastructure to build that pipeline is being put in place right now by brands paying attention.

Roblox is underleveraged, YouTube hauls are misunderstood, and cultural anchor moments are undervalued. I would highly encourage you to learn more about these platforms.

Thanks for reading today,

Xx Camille

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