For a few minutes this week, millions of people did something that feels increasingly rare: they looked at the same thing at the same time. Not a TikTok. Not a Superbowl release. Not something served them because an algorithm had decided it matched their interests.

The ACTUAL BLOODY sky.

There’s something almost embarrassingly moving about the collective watching of an eclipse. People rearrange plans. They travel. They find a rooftop. They drag their kids outside. They text the group chat. Strangers stand next to each other and stare upwards.

And after a long, aggressively hot summer across London and Europe, there is something even more powerful about a moment that gets people out of their houses and into the same physical space. It’s a useful reminder that, despite everything we hear about the fragmentation of culture, people still really, really want reasons to come together.

We want to be able to say: did you see that?

Brands should probably pay more attention to that. Because somewhere along the way, social media became remarkably antisocial.

We started treating culture like a publishing schedule.

Monday: product post.
Wednesday: creator asset.
Friday: meme because apparently it is important the brand has a personality.

Then repeat until Christmas.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a content calendar. You need consistency and you need a plan. Nobody wants a social team waking up every morning with absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

But the idea that you can map out everything a culturally relevant brand should say six months in advance feels increasingly ridiculous.

Culture does not operate on your content calendar.

The weather changes, a celebrity says something bizarre, a footballer becomes the main character, a Tube sign goes viral, everyone suddenly cares about a pistachio chocolate bar.

There’s an eclipse!!!

Suddenly the most interesting thing your brand could possibly do wasn’t in the planning meeting three months ago. Some of the most enjoyable brand moments happen because somebody had the confidence to respond to what people were already talking about:

• IKEA constantly finding wonderfully simple ways into news and culture by turning whatever everyone is talking about into something recognisably IKEA.

• Specsavers building an entire brand voice around reacting to public mistakes with “Should’ve gone to Specsavers.”

• Or Ryanair turning things happening around the airline, football, celebrities and the internet into relentless fuel for its own strange little social universe.

The common denominator isn’t that these brands are brilliant at posting. It’s that they understand attention is already happening somewhere else.

Their job is to find an intelligent way into it - very different!

There’s an industry obsession with creating conversation but most brands aren’t going to create the conversation and frankly, they don’t need to. Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do is notice the conversation everyone is already having and add something genuinely entertaining, useful or surprising to it.

Don’t manufacture the moment. Join it well. The eclipse is a perfect example.

Imagine the creative brief that was written yesterday. Millions of people are looking up, people are figuring out where to watch it, they’re buying glasses. They’re photographing it badly, they’re standing on rooftops with their mates, there are hundreds of possible brand ideas sitting inside that behaviour, like a pizza brand showing you how the pizza box can be used ;)

Some of those ideas would be stupid. Some would be brilliant, but the point is: you couldn’t have put most of them in January’s content calendar.

You needed someone paying attention - creative work always needs a slightly different field of vision.

We should be watching the football and the fashion show and the terrible reality programme and the weird Reddit thread and what teenagers are suddenly saying and the thing happening outside the pub.

Then asking: Is there something here for you?

Not because brands need to comment on everything. PLEASE DON’T!!

The cultural calendar beats the content calendar

We tend to flip the planning calendar to get the best results + stories. Instead of: Here is everything we’re going to post.

It becomes: Here are the things we know we need to say and here is the space we’re deliberately leaving open for the things we don’t know yet. Because the unknown bit is where a lot of the fun lives.

The thing everyone at work starts talking about at 9:07am, these moments create something brands spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture:

Shared attention. Powerful because it gives you a shortcut…You don’t have to explain why anyone should care. Your only job is not to ruin it.

We’re still looking for reasons to look up

For all the talk of niches, algorithms and personalised feeds, the eclipse is a lovely reminder that mass culture hasn’t disappeared. It just looks different.

Millions of people will still walk outside and stare at the sun together - if humans like collective experiences, brands should build for more of them.

So yes, make the content calendar, but leave some bloody space. The best thing your brand does this summer might not exist yet.

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Welcome back to Community Kitchen: Axe + Saw’s table for the culture-makers, community-builders and creative independents feeding the future.

This time we hear from Dean George, Founder and Creative Director of GAUCHOWORLD, an independent cultural platform and print magazine documenting the intersections of music, fashion, sport and youth culture across the world.

If your brand/organisation had nothing to sell, what would it stand for?

Community, documentation and cultural ownership. GAUCHOWORLD has always been about giving real space to the worlds that shape us, especially across music, fashion, sport and everyday youth culture. Even without products, events or magazines to sell, the mission would still be the same: to archive what is happening around us, champion the people moving culture forward and build infrastructure for independent creativity.

What’s the hardest truth about your work no one wants to say out loud?

That culture work takes far more than good taste. It takes money, patience, admin, resilience and the ability to keep showing up when things are moving slower than people can see. A lot of the work that sustains creativity is not glamorous, but it is what allows the special moments to exist.

What’s something you’ve built that was too early, but still right?

GAUCHOWORLD itself. When I first started it, it was just an independent magazine made from my bedroom in Hackney. At the time, it probably seemed niche or too ambitious to build a serious cultural platform from that position. But looking at where it is now, with print, digital, events, a football club, music programming and a physical space, it feels like the instinct was right. The timing just needed patience.

What’s a failure that still stings (but shaped everything)?

There have been moments where I have underestimated the operational side of building ideas. I have always been strong on vision, storytelling and bringing people together, but running a business forces you to learn the less romantic parts too. Budgets, contracts, timelines, systems and protecting your time. Some mistakes in those areas have definitely stung, but they have made me a much stronger founder.

What inspired you to do what you’re doing today? Is there an early memory that links to what you are doing today?

I grew up in Hackney surrounded by culture, but I did not always see the people, places and communities around me documented with the care they deserved. GAUCHOWORLD started from that feeling. I wanted to create something that could hold those stories properly. An early memory would be making notes on my phone at 18, thinking through ideas for a magazine before I had any real experience or industry access. That instinct to document, connect and build around culture is still the foundation of everything I do now.

Talk to us about the importance of community. In what ways does this come through in what you’re doing now and working towards in the future?

Community is everything. For me, it is not just an audience or a marketing word. It is the reason the work exists. GAUCHOWORLD was built through people, spaces, conversations, parties, football, music, print and shared belief. With GAUCHOWORLD SPACE in Hackney, we now have a physical home for that. It is a creative hub, but more importantly it is a place where people can meet, build and feel part of something. The future is about expanding that feeling globally while still keeping the same local spirit.

What is the most underestimated skill or lesson in your opinion to learn early on as possible?

Learning how to communicate clearly. A strong idea can fall apart if people do not understand it, believe in it or know what they need to do next. Whether you are leading a team, pitching to a brand, working with artists or building a community, clarity is everything.

What does the future hold for the industry you work in - what are the challenges and what are the opportunities?

I think the future belongs to people and platforms who have real proximity to culture. The challenge is that everything is moving faster, becoming more algorithmic and often more transactional. But the opportunity is that audiences are becoming more aware of what feels real. Independent platforms, creative studios and community led spaces have a chance to lead because they are not just observing culture from the outside. They are part of it.

In a world where we have just 8 seconds to capture someone’s attention, what do you think it takes to cut through + be remembered?

Truth. You can grab attention with noise, but you are only remembered when there is something real underneath it. The work has to have a point of view, a feeling and a reason to exist. People remember things that make them feel seen.

What are you currently obsessing over that might be considered niche or mundane or just a bit random? Why is it interesting to you right now?

I have been really interested in the small rituals that make community feel real. Things like Sunday run clubs, amateur football group chats, music nights, local chess clubs and the way people gather around simple routines. They might seem mundane, but I think those spaces say a lot about where culture is actually being built.

There’s no point working to build a community when you can invest in the ones that already exist and Dean has achieved just that with GAUCHOWORLD, which is Hackney to its core. We hugely appreciate Dean for taking the time to answer our questions and give us insight into his creative process.

You can keep up with Dean on his Instagram and with GAUCHOWORLD, GAUCHOWORLD SPACE, as well as the website.

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There’s a version that opens with “AI is coming for PR.” We’re not writing that one. Everyone’s writing that one, and it’s already boring.

“Humans have short memories. AI does not - it pulls historic links from every little crisis and conversation that someone has reported on.”

“AI is now a stakeholder and treat it like an audience not a channel - you don’t influence a channel”

“Community is the antithesis to over-AI-fication.”

“Our craft isn’t words. Our craft is thought.”

Five lines that hit in a room of journalists, brand leaders, community builders and communicators together for the first Source Materials conversation.

Not because everyone agreed. They didn’t.

Some saw AI as the most exciting opportunity PR has had in years. (We like to say ‘earned’ vs straight PR).

Others saw a cheap, synthetic product flooding the market with formulaic work. Some argued that community is the answer. Others questioned whether brands have overused the word so much that it has stopped meaning anything.

But one thing became very clear:

The brands that treat AI as another production tool are missing the much bigger shift.

The comms landscape is moving faster than most brands can understand it, respond to it, or capitalise on it.

Culture, communities, algorithms, journalists, creators and AI are all moving at once and most sign-off chains were built for a world that moved once a quarter. Legacy agencies answer with more process. More decks. More stage-gates. That’s not a strategy. It’s a delay tactic dressed up as rigour.

Which is strange, because this is arguably the biggest opportunity earned media has had in a generation. The brands that work this out early get to own the sharper, more culturally literate version of the conversation - not “how do we manage this,” but “how do we build trust, relevance and growth now that the old playbook doesn’t hold.”

In the words of Jessie - VP of Corporate Affairs at Vinted: “Our craft isn’t just our words - it’s our thought and the output of that was words + language”

We think the old playbook was built for control and to be honest we’ve never subscribed to it. The new one is built from something else entirely: culture, community, data, journalism, and trust. That’s the source material now. Legacy agencies tend to answer that complexity with more process.

The question is no longer:

How do we manage this?
It is:
How do we build trust, relevance and growth now that the old playbook no longer holds?

We have never been particularly interested in old communications models. The new one is made from something else entirely: original thought, credible sources, communities, interconnected signals and human judgement.

So we thought we’d name the four things it’s actually made of. The source material:

Trust is built through original thought

“If everyone is producing AI content, how are we going to get original ideas?”

Point of view isn’t a nice-to-have anymore, it’s the whole game and what’s a huge shame is huge corporations working depending on you being a cog in a machine, to say yes and push the paper along to the next person. Now trust gets built through taste and rigour, not volume - which is exactly the muscle a good journalist has and most brand content doesn’t.

‘Journalists might have sown the seeds of their own destruction by producing so much slop content - e.g. listicles which are prime to LLM’s were never really journalism at the sharpest end’ - Fin Wright, Head of Community, The News Movement‘

Strip out editorial instinct and what’s left is content, and content without a point of view is slop. Work that doesn’t make you feel anything is also in our opinion slop. The uncomfortable truth here is that: if every brand sounds equally confident and equally careful, audiences stop trusting any of them. Sounding like everyone else is now the risky choice, not the safe one.

Spread: the community ‘problem’

“Community is the antithesis to over-AI-fication.” - Finn Wright, Head of Community,

Stories don’t move through media channels anymore, not primarily. They move through communities - group chats, Reddit threads, comment sections, fan accounts, the people who talk about your brand when you’re not in the room.

Fin’s argument was simple: brands are more credible when they support communities that already exist rather than trying to manufacture an entirely new one around themselves.

If you don’t understand how a community actually makes sense together, you lose control of your own narrative before you’ve even walked into the room.

That is where the distinction between an influencer and a tastemaker matters.

A tastemaker has earned authority through genuine immersion, knowledge and passion. They were part of the space before it became a line on a marketing plan. Their endorsement has value because it cannot simply be bought and reproduced at scale.

Brands do not need constant “community activity.”

They may need one genuinely meaningful contribution each quarter. More intentional + better people in the room.

AI is an audience, not just a tool

Here’s the less fashionable take: AI isn’t the threat, it’s the amplifier. Used properly, it’s how a brand reads an overwhelming volume of conversation and turns it into something a strategist can actually act on - faster, and at a scale no team of humans reading everything by hand could manage. This isn’t a hot take but it is how we’re seeing AI used for huge swaths of businesses on the plight to stay ahead.

“Humans have short memories. AI does not.” - Amy Dowling Head of Comms TUI

This was probably the most important shift of the conversation. Most brands still talk about AI as software their teams might use to write, research, summarise or automate tasks.

But AI is also increasingly sitting between brands and their customers.

“You need AI to want to choose you.”Amy Dowling Head of Comms TUI

People are asking systems which car is safest, which hotel is best for families, which financial provider they can trust and which product suits their needs. The answer an AI gives is partly shaped by the information diet it has consumed about each brand: journalism, owned content, reviews, expert commentary, historical coverage and the consistency of the brand’s wider footprint.

That makes AI another audience in the communications ecosystem. Visibility is not enough because a brand can appear frequently and still fail to be chosen.

The task is to become the most credible, differentiated and useful answer.

That is why earned media sits at the heart of this. AI systems need trusted source material. They look for interconnected signals of authority across credible publications, specialist outlets, reviews, owned information and consistent expertise.

Interestingly, that does not only mean the biggest media titles. Smaller and more specialist publications can appear disproportionately in AI-generated results because they hold deep authority within a particular niche.

The implication is significant: “Your communications strategy is no longer only shaping what people think of you today. It is helping train the systems that may describe and recommend you tomorrow.”

And while a person might forget an outdated article, an old controversy or a long-abandoned brand message, an AI system may continue resurfacing it.

A conventional coverage report will not answer those questions.

Proof a case for the boardroom

None of the above matters commercially unless it’s legible to the people holding the budget. This is the layer most agencies are worst at: translating earned media into something a CFO would recognise as value, not vibes.

Comms is still often most legible to a boardroom when something has gone wrong.

Reputational risk remains one of its clearest and most established functions. But treating crisis avoidance as the primary commercial value of communications dramatically undersells the work.

“The opportunity presented by AI is not only faster content creation or sentiment analysis.It is the ability to connect more variables” - Jessie de la Merced, VP of Corporate Affairs, Vinted

Media coverage, search behaviour, customer perception, community conversation, brand preference, recommendation, consideration, revenue.

Used intelligently, AI can help communications teams analyse an overwhelming volume of information and find patterns no human team could realistically identify by reading everything manually.

Jessie from Vinted described this as bringing more causation into strategy: getting closer to understanding not just what happened, but what may have contributed to it.

That does not mean outsourcing judgement to a model. It means using the model to make human judgement faster, broader and better informed.

The industry has spent years reporting impressions, reach and sentiment scores that very few people outside communications genuinely trust. It is evidence that translates earned influence into the language of the organisation: customer demand, differentiation, commercial preference, resilience and growth.

The uncomfortable bit

Put those four things together and there’s a real tension in the room, not a tidy one:

Every brand should be asking:

• What do AI systems currently say about us?

• Which sources are shaping those answers?

• Who are we being compared with?

• Are our distinctive strengths actually coming through?

• What outdated or fragmented information is still influencing our reputation?

Control vs. culture moving without you. False precision vs. measurement that’s actually honest. Bland POVs vs. journalism-grade sharpness. AI sameness vs. human judgement, amplified. Owning the narrative vs. letting the community own it with you.

So I leave you with this question: What is a brand genuinely willing to change, relinquish or invest in to become trusted, relevant and commercially provable at the same time?

The Source Check

We have built a four-week diagnostic for brands that want to understand how they currently show up across earned media, communities and AI-generated answers.

It includes three conversations, a review of the previous 12 months of coverage and sentiment, and a clear assessment showing where your story is breaking, what is shaping your reputation and where the opportunity sits.

It is genuinely useful whether or not you ever work with us again.

Get in touch if you want in.

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This year’s hosts wanted to leave their mark on the World Cup. And in true US style: bells, whistles, budget, glitz… A Super Bowl-style half-time show, dropped into the middle of football’s biggest night. Something, we’re pretty sure, nobody actually asked for.

But that’s not really the story. The story is what it revealed.

It was a masterclass in not reading the room albeit clearly built for the global stage, not the football fan actually in the game who has continued to support no matter the weather, country or performance. And the internet agreed. Justin Bieber’s ballad, mid-game, became the moment everyone was talking about from a Gen Z audience perspective but as for the rest. It wasn’t popping up in our what’s app group chats for the reason anyone hoped.

“It was crap,” said Wayne Rooney, and somehow that three-word review did more work than the entire production budget. Thousands took to TikTok, Instagram, X, asking what they’d just watched. Honestly? We’d have been more surprised if it landed.

So why did it fall so flat?

Madonna. Bieber. Shakira. Some of the biggest names on the planet, on football’s biggest stage. A line-up built to dominate conversation - a moment engineered for reach.

But nobody remembers your reach. They remember how it made them feel.

Football is the people’s game. Its power was never manufactured. It was built slowly, over decades, through community, ritual, tension, identity, belonging. Through songs passed down generations, shirts worn until they fall apart, players who become symbols of entire eras and postcodes. The stakes were already intimate. Already enormous. Spectacle didn’t add to that - it sat on top of it, unasked for.

This is the feeling brands spend millions trying to manufacture. And it’s not just a FIFA problem.

The industry is chasing its own tail

Authenticity, community, fandom…

Every deck says it, every pitch leads with it. And yet strategy is still being built on follower counts, impressions, engagement rate. We say we want people to feel something, then optimise for the easiest number to screenshot into a slide.

A few months back, Adam Mosseri addressed Instagram’s “Great Purge” of fake and inactive accounts, and the follower-count-is-dead conversation did its predictable lap of the industry again. We’d be a little concerned if that’s still landing as news for anyone reading this.

Followers have been losing value since the day we left chronological feeds for the algorithm. The blue tick, once a marker of status, now just verifies you pay £8 a month. Likes, once a signal of real approval, got bought by the thousand. Comments, the last place we went looking for proof of real community, got filled with bot fire emojis and “love this 🔥🔥.” Every signal we’ve trusted has had a shelf life of about eighteen months before the market learned to fake it.

Here’s the actual question worth sitting with: have we gotten so reliant on the metric that we forgot what it was ever standing in for?

Trace the path properly:

Followers were the first signal…big number, big audience, big influence. Simple, until the feed stopped being chronological and reach stopped being guaranteed.

So we moved to likes… until likes became a line item you could buy.

So we went digging in the comments for something unfakeable…until the bots got there too.

Every time, the metric lost its value about as fast as it gained it. Because none of them were ever the actual thing. They were placeholders, proxies for trust, for community, for do people actually believe this. And that question is hard to answer and impossible to put in a slide. So we kept reaching for the nearest number that gestured vaguely in its direction.

So where does real influence live now?

It’s migrated - again! Away from anything that can be bought in bulk, and further down: into the group chat. The Reddit thread three replies deep. The “honestly, just try it” from a mate. The voice note. The recommendation across a dinner table with no tracking link attached.

Because what we’re actually chasing was never on a dashboard. It’s trust. It’s a feeling. It’s the sense that something is worth telling someone else about.

And somewhere in the chase, plenty of brands forgot that. Reach became the brief. Events got built for shareability. Partnerships got sized by follower count. Community and fandom got flattened into an engagement report. Budget followed the number, not the feeling.

We’re not in the business of accumulating metrics. We’re in the business of leaving something behind.

It should always be about the feeling, or the shift in perception - we should build experiences that become a shared memory that earned the right to be talked about.

Metrics are evidence, not the verdict

This isn’t an argument against measurement, but a reminder to look beyond the metrics.

They’re brilliant servants and terrible masters. The moment the number becomes the entire definition of the work, we start optimising for the measurable and quietly losing the memorable.

The numbers tell you what happened, but they were never going to tell you the whole story of what it meant.

If you want your work to stand the test of time, shape it around the impact you’re trying to make, not the number used to prove it happened. What that actually looks and feels like in practice for the people you’re speaking to.

Culture won’t ever live on a dashboard

The industry will keep building better dashboards. The channels will keep shifting. Whatever we’re measuring today gets gamed by next year, and we’ll go looking for the signal somewhere else. That’s just the nature of it and that’s fine.

What’s never changed is the actual goal: legacy, community, trust. Built through work that gets under people’s skin - work that makes them see something differently, gives language to something they already felt, or earns a real place in their lives.

Football didn’t need a half-time show to make anyone feel something. The songs were already in the stands. The stories were already being passed down. The stakes were already there.

That’s the whole lesson.

Don’t add spectacle because it inflates the number of people you can claim to have reached. Build something worth remembering.

Nobody remembers your reach. They remember how you made them feel.

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If you told us a year ago we’d be allowed to be in a pub at 3am on a Monday, we wouldn’t have believed you. Except when the words “World Cup” are mentioned - that’s when rules seem to disappear…

The Night the Pubs Didn’t Close

When England’s match against Mexico got pushed into the early hours, pubs across the country applied for Temporary Event Notices to stay open. The numbers that came back the next day had little to do with the England win. Total sales were up 67% year-on-year at Heineken’s managed pubs, food sales up over 80%, and Stonegate group alone were pouring 796,000 drinks - 355,000 more than a typical Sunday night. Roughly a third of UK pubs stayed open for it and about half the usual number of fans stuck around to watch.

Why Did It Take a Football Tournament?

London has spent a decade having the same conversation about its nightlife - venues shutting early, last orders creeping earlier, everyone complaining that the city that should never sleep actually goes home at 11:30. And then a football tournament turns up and quietly does what years of closure petitions never managed.

It’s not that the appetite wasn’t there before. It clearly was. It just needed a reason nobody could argue against. While the World Cup brings an untouchable joy and community experience to the UK, it’s a shame that a huge corporation gets more backing by council laws than the venues and pubs that are the community. We won’t be complaining when Jude brings it home and we get next Monday off but this should only be the start of our nightlife plight.

Where We’ve Been Watching

If you’re looking for somewhere to bring in England’s semi-final and the final match properly, here’s where we’ve been doing our match analysis…

Pub on the Park, London Fields - A huge screen, and the option to skip pub prices altogether and watch from a picnic in the park (though we do encourage you to spare some change for at least a pint). Surrounded by some of the best food in East London, so there’s somewhere to go at halftime. This is the one to build a whole day around with your mates, not just a match.

Hackney Bridge, Hackney Wick - Our old office stomping ground, and still one of the best outdoor spaces in the city for it. Huge open-air setup, and if the timing lines up, you get a proper sunset behind the screen right as Saka wins it in the final minute. A hub for creatives, Hackney Bridge feels different than the other spots on this list with its basis of community typically being music and fashion.

Clissold Park Tavern, Stoke Newington - Despite being an Arsenal pub (depends what side you’re on), here World Cup rules apply: everyone’s on the same side for this one. Expect a queue out the door, but the pub garden is worth the wait.

The host cities have of course fostered an atmosphere of community to welcome the mass amount of visitors they’ve had; the people of Boston completely fell for the Scottish fans’ charm! Here’s a couple of recommendations of where to watch the Final in NYC if you weren’t lucky enough to get a ticket.

Habana Outpost, Brooklyn - The perfect spot to get that neighbourhood watch party vibe, this bar was home to some great Knicks watchparties and now it’s become the place to be for the World Cup too. With Spike Lee’s store round the corner, there’s a possibility you could see some famous faces too. If you only go to one nightlife spot in NYC, this is the one that encapsulates what the city’s nightlife is about - street style food that’s actually good and a community atmosphere that feels like home to anyone.

The Swan, Bed-Stuy - Definitely one for the regulars, if you’re a serious sports fan this is the spot for you. Bonus points for being in the heart of a fab neighbourhood, this is the sport community third space we need more of.

When England faced Mexico, for one night, the city remembered what late actually looks like. Whether you’re a diehard Kane fan or just making the most of late licences, we’re just pleased that this year’s world cup is bringing everyone together in unexpected ways.

What have been your favourite spots to watch the World Cup? Let us know in the comments.

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Welcome back to Community Kitchen: Axe + Saw’s table for the culture-makers, community-builders and creative independents feeding the future.

This week, we speak to , a freelance writer, editor and the author of How To Be Curious. Formerly the Associate Editor of Stylist magazine, these days she writes about the people and ideas shaping our cultural moment for titles including Service95, Glamour, EE72, British Vogue and Who What Wear.

If your personal brand had nothing to sell, what would it stand for?

Curiosity and compassion. After a decade working in newsrooms and running features desks, I’m an editor who’s always looking under the rug of our cultural moment – asking why we think and feel the way we do, and what connects us in an increasingly divided world.

What’s the hardest truth about your work no one wants to say out loud?

That it’s categorically impossible to survive, particularly in a city like London, on a writer’s wage alone. Diversifying is a necessity at this point; be that adding content creation, consultancy, chairing or a myriad of other creative strings to your bow. But I’m hopeful that the resurgence of smaller zines, new media platforms and independent newsletters is the start of a new dawn of appreciation for the power of brilliant writing.

What’s something you’ve built that was too early, but still right?

When I was at university, instead of racing through the four books and three essays I should’ve been working on for my Literature degree every week, I was running a fashion and lifestyle blog that absolutely no one read. I took it as seriously as a job, writing articles and asking my friends to do photo shoots in our local park. I didn’t have the skills or the network to scale it into something lots of people would read at that point, but I am so glad I did it – it totally ignited my creativity and gave me the drive to pursue a career in magazines.

What’s a failure that still stings (but shaped everything)?

I spent a full week on an application to intern at a magazine called Stylist, which I absolutely adored as a 21-year-old who had just moved to London – it was smart, cool and sophisticated in a way I could only dream of being back then. I mocked up my CV in the style of their magazine covers and posted it (yes, I’m that old) but I never even got a reply. I was heartbroken.

That failure led to me working night shifts on a news desk for a few years, and I learned so much about the quality and diligence that goes into respected journalism. Eventually, I did get a job at Stylist as a sub-editor, and by the age of 30 I’d worked my way up the masthead to be Associate Editor of the print magazine.

What inspired you to do what you’re doing today? Is there an early memory that links to what you are doing today?

I was a child that asked ‘why?’ constantly and had a vivid private world inside my head. It felt inevitable that I was going to end up telling stories in some way. But I’d be lying if I said that early 2000s films and TV shows about young writers didn’t make me yearn for a glossy, creative life. Sex And The City, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, The Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia were on repeat in my teenage bedroom.

Talk to us about the importance of community. In what ways does this come through in what you’re doing now and working towards in the future?

There is so much mutual support, coffee meet-ups and kindness in the freelance writing world, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it. I’ve had jobs come to me because another writer has mentioned my name, and I’ve paid that forward many times. I would love to play a part in formalising that support in the future – perhaps creating some dedicated events or co-working sessions for freelancers to spend IRL time together.

What is the most underestimated skill or lesson in your opinion to learn early on as possible?

Listening! It sounds basic, but I truly think it’s a dying art. Really hearing what people are telling you, and also being able to hear what they’re not saying, will take you far. What do they want? What are they worried about? How can you help with that? What do you have in common? It’s the key to genuine connection.

What does the future hold for the industry you work in - what are the challenges and what are the opportunities?

The media landscape is shapeshifting every single day, but it’s never in the way we think. People have been saying print is dead for years; new magazines with incredibly creative covers are cropping up every month. Big media conglomerates are being bought up by technocrats; great journalistic minds are jumping ship to start their own ventures. The AI revolution marches on, but stories that really make us feel something keep rising to the top, and they are always made by humans. Maybe I’m delulu, but I choose to see it as an exciting time in media. It’s a bit like being on a fairground ride; sometimes you feel a bit sick, but mostly you feel the thrill of forward motion.

In a world where we have just 8 seconds to capture someone’s attention, what do you think it takes to cut through + be remembered?

Thoughtful honesty. The work that moves me the most, in any discipline, is when someone communicates an experience that lots of us have had, but few of us are talking about.

What are you currently obsessing over that might be considered niche or mundane or just a bit random? Why is it interesting to you right now?

Grenadian soca music. It’s been a few years since I’ve been to Grenada, where half of my family is from, but blasting soca through my headphones on a walk or in the gym makes me feel like I’m warming up for a real island carnival. Hopefully next year…

PRs and journalists work so closely intertwined, but it’s rare we get this much insight into a journo’s process. A massive thanks to Meena for taking the time to answer our questions, she’s one who really gets the importance of culture and community and why we work to push that as our north star.

You can keep up with Meena’s latest ventures in journalism on her Instagram and website.

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Grand Theft Auto has a fake drinks brand called Sprunk, a fake fast food chain called Cluckin’ Bell, and radio ads for big pharma that are indistinguishable from the real ones. It’s 25 years of sustained brand satire, built by people who understood advertising well enough to tear it apart.

In November, it becomes the biggest cultural event of the year.

GTA’s success has always been built on the stuff brand safety teams have palpitations about: violence, sex, weapons, greed, crime. Most brands end up doing one of two things: saying nothing at all, or reaching for the most literal reference they can find - recoloring their logo or crime pun - and getting dragged across socials.

The vices make it feel untouchable, but that’s not actually the problem.

We’ve seen this before

When Squid Game dropped, a show built entirely on a critique of corporate capitalism, brands queued up to use its imagery. Domino’s ran ads suggesting an emergency pizza order would save a contestant mid-game, essentially arguing capitalism saves you, in a show built on the premise that capitalism destroys you. Hyundai made a car meme, despite the show’s main character losing his job at a car factory being the entire catalyst for the plot.

They not only missed the tone, they became the thing the show was satirising.

Compare that to how Airbnb and Xbox handled Barbie. Of 165(!) brand partnerships that mostly just painted products pink, they nailed it because they understood the culture, not just the colour. Airbnb converted a Malibu mansion into a real, bookable Dreamhouse, extending the film’s own world into the actual world. Xbox dropped Barbie cars into Forza, understanding that a film about breaking into male-dominated spaces made a gaming partnership actually on-theme vs just on-brand.

The problem around GTA is that most brands don’t understand what they’re trying to newsjack.

The real subject of the game has always been the same: American excess, corporate greed, and the absurdity of the advertising that holds all of it up. Rockstar put Sprunk and Cluckin’ Bell in the game because the gap between what brands promise and what they actually do is one of the richest comedic seams in modern culture.

Here’s what most brands miss

Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked why GTA has never taken real brand money for product placement, and his answer was definitive:

“It’s a fictional world and everything in it is fictional. All the brands are made up. And I think that keeps us pure.”

They turned down millions in guaranteed advertising revenue to protect their ability to mock you. They’ve been making that joke since 1997. Which means every brand that tries to newsjack GTA VI is trying to piggyback a cultural moment built specifically to mock the piggybackers.

That’s not a reason to stay away, it’s an open invite to go all in.

Think of it like a heist, the brands that get caught are the ones who go in loud and grab the most obvious thing they can find. The ones who get away clean knew and embraced the mess they were walking into.

Reference the satire, not the storyline.

You can’t reach into a subculture built on chaos and ask it to look professional, so go for the satire instead of the storyline.

Three places to start:

• Let the game mock you before it does. The most ambitious move is a brand with enough cultural confidence to turn the lens on itself. Produce something in the voice of your own GTA parody - mocking your own corporate language, your own advertising conventions, your own category. Not as a subtle nod, but as proof you fully understood the joke, which requires genuine self-awareness.

• The radio stations, not the soundtrack. GTA’s in-world radio is iconic because it’s a character, not a playlist. The ads between the tracks mock tech bros, wellness gurus, big pharma companies and financial services with more precision than most industry commentary. Any brand in those categories has a real opportunity to get there first. A “GTA vibes playlist” never was and will never be it.

• The Ammu-Nation model. Ammu-Nation is GTA’s gun shop, but what makes it funny is that it operates with the exact customer warmth of any modern consumer brand - loyalty programs, cheerful staff, friendly language wrapped around something that has no business being friendly. GTA uses it to show how consumer culture sanitizes everything by dressing it in the language of choice and empowerment. The culturally fluent move is to be the brand honest enough to drop the corporate armour and mock the absurdity of your own customer-service speak. Acknowledge you’re already part of the joke.

We think about this kind of thing every day, so go ahead, take these ideas and apologize to your legal teams at the same time.

The brands who kill it in November won’t be the ones with the biggest paid media budgets, they’ll be the ones who lean into the parody with serious conviction.

GTA’s been making fun of brands for 25 years. Know the joke or become it.

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Photo credit: @jordy.png

Someone said that living in New York City right now feels like that Lebron James meme where he’s being earnest in the pool.

“Smiling through it all! Can’t believe this is my life.”

It’s spot on. The sun is out, Mamdani is mayor, our beloved Knicks in 5, the World Cup is under way, and we just celebrated Pride. It’s an almost implausible convergence of cultural moments all hitting at the same time, and it has people out on the streets.

You’ve Seen It On Your Feed

Even if you aren’t in the city, we’re sure you’ve been following along on your phone. It’s almost impossible to scroll without seeing some viral video taken at the championship parade. You know which one we’re talking about. Or maybe you saw the one of the Norwegian soccer fans rowing in the Subway train.

Even through screens, the energy is palpable.

A Party on Every Block

On any given day, the streets turn into a patchwork of jerseys with people repping their favourite soccer teams. In Astoria, fans cruise down the streets to celebrate Egypt’s first ever World Cup match win, while in Bushwick, a sea of green Mexico jerseys turns into a serious dance party.

The best part? There’s nothing manufactured about it. The gatherings and celebrations we’re seeing are happening organically in public places where everyone is invited. Why wait hours in line for an exclusive pop-up, when you could watch a game over pints with the mayor at the neighborhood gay bar?

Photo credit:

From the Inside

As marketing and communications professionals, we’re responsible for how our clients show up in the real world. Some will spend millions on self-serving stunts and activations that might capture attention for a moment, but ultimately fall short of impacting people in any meaningful way.

The reason they fall short is the same reason we wrote about in our latest piece on discovery: you can’t manufacture a moment people actually want to be part of. A stunt asks people to stop and look at a brand. A genuine moment invites them into something that was already happening. One is a transaction. The other is memory. The brands we’ll remember this summer are the ones who understood the difference - the ones who helped create moments from the inside.

Take Nuuly and Perfectly Imperfect’s Kit Check activation at The Ground last month, which promised an evening of soccer, good food, and live music. All you had to do was show up wearing your favourite jersey. Rather than simply slapping a logo on something, they built an entire evening around football, fashion, and community – tapping into the culture that’s already living in the city right now.

Summer Is Just Getting Started

There’s so much more to look forward to. The brands and people who show up to genuinely participate will be the ones who stay top of mind. You don’t need a massive budget or a celebrity cameo. You just need to actually be here, in the mix, with everyone else. Right now, that’s the easiest sell in the world. The summer’s wide open - the only question is whether you show up for it.

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I’ve just come back from my first Cannes Lions. And I need to debrief, not in the polished, lessons-learned, three-takeaways-in-a-carousel way - in fact if you know me you’d know I struggle to do that in life. This is what I saw, what landed, and what left me with more questions than I arrived with.

I said yes before I thought about it too hard.

I was invited to speak on the Financial Times × People Like Us panel, a programme built for and by underrepresented voices in the industry - and the honest version of what happened next is: I spent most of my time in Cannes focused on one thing. Delivering that talk well, scrapping it and starting again the day before because I didn’t really know what to expect. I was not interested in the yacht parties (though yes, more on that). Not the networking. Not performing presence at the right moments. Just the panel.

Which meant I arrived slightly underprepared for everything else. And somehow that was the best thing that could have happened, because it stripped away any possibility of performing. I was just there. Actually there.

And then, the people. This is the bit nobody tells you about Cannes. Friends I haven’t seen in years, scattered across the world all in one place. People who left London for Amsterdam, New York, LA, Lagos - suddenly all within a square mile of each other. New ones made in the most unlikely spots: the queue, the bathroom, on bloody standby or during flight cancellations, a sliver of shade we were all desperately clinging to like it owed us something.

I needed to write that part down first. Because the industry talk matters, but so does remembering that the industry is people.

So onto the juice…🧃

The most important thing I heard at Cannes 2026 was said in passing, and definitely not the key takeaway anyone attempted to land, but on a panel on a yacht.

An AI company hosted it, which is the kind of detail that will either make you roll your eyes or confirm what you already suspected, that the money has genuinely moved, and it has moved into tech.

The speaker, almost as an aside, said that one of her brand clients was outperforming everyone in the current AI landscape. The reason wasn’t a complex strategy. They had doubled down on original content before AI arrived, posted it on their own platform, and that archive is now what the models are feeding from.

That is the AI harvesting problem in one sentence. And it should be keeping every brand and agency strategist up at night.

Because here is what is actually happening right now: brands brief with AI, expecting answers faster than real original takes. The work gets drafted with AI. Then it’s marked with AI. The creative loop no longer requires a single original thought to enter it. And the output is exactly what you would expect - work that feels like everything and nothing, that could have come from anywhere, that belongs to no one.

The counter to that is original material. Earned stories. The work that actually happened, told by people with genuine proximity to it.

To be clear that means the large language models do not care about paid, or sponsored content, or branded posts. Earned. The implication is significant: if LLMs are trained predominantly on earned media, then brands that have invested in original, earned storytelling are compounding an asset that paid spend cannot replicate.

This is the entire founding argument of Axe + Saw. We started five years ago with one principle: people move culture, and culture moves brands. You cannot shortcut that with spend. You have to earn it first. The brands we have built campaigns for - across music, sport, fashion, and financial services - have all had the same insight at the core: the earned story has to exist before the paid amplification has anything real to amplify.

My unasked follow-up in that room - the question you are not really allowed to ask when everyone around you needs to justify their media plans is this:

Nobody was keen to answer that. The panel moved on. I stayed with the question.

The content creation conversation needs a hard reset.

There was more discussion about content creation at Cannes Lions 2026 than almost anything else, especially from the brand POV. More, arguably, than AI itself. Which would be fine, if everyone in the room agreed on what they were talking about.

They don’t. And that confusion is costing the industry clarity it cannot afford to lose.

Someone referenced a creator who had built an entire campaign for a makeup brand - a full photoshoot, a specific aesthetic, natural light, the whole thing. Shot it, edited it, art directed it, delivered it. Something that could have run in a magazine. That for me is craft disguised as casual, hours of real skill compressed into something that looks effortless is content creation.

But what is a B2B marketer talking to camera about demand generation trends. Or a founder posting their morning routine with a product placed in frame. Both have value. Neither is the same discipline. There are at least three distinct categories being collapsed into one word - creator - and the industry is acting surprised when budgets do not match briefs and work does not perform.

The distinction matters because the skill sets are different, the audience relationships are different, and the results are different. Conflating them produces briefs that no one can actually deliver against or that people will end up losing trust in quickly.

The money has moved. And tech has not yet understood what creativity actually costs.

The larger feeling I left Cannes with is this: the budget has migrated into tech, and tech by its nature, optimises before it imagines. The cheapest high-volume output wins the budget line. Right now that is content. Lots of it. Fast. Scroll-filling. Presence performing as storytelling.

The generation in that room pushing hardest against it, imperfectly, inconsistently, but pushing is millennials. Not out of nostalgia. But because we remember, just about, when the idea was the product and not just the container. When you had to earn the attention before you were permitted to spend against it.

The creative industry does not have a talent problem or a platform problem. It has a prioritisation problem. The thinking that produces original, earned, compounding work is being systematically defunded in favour of output that is cheaper to produce and easier to report on and the AI harvesting problem means that defunding now has a compounding cost that will be felt in five years, when the models have nothing original left to cite.

Axe + Saw was built as the counter-argument to that. An earned-first, culture-led agency that starts with the story before it considers the channel. Five years in, that founding position has never felt more relevant or more urgent to defend.

I don’t think Cannes is broken. I think it needs different voices at the front of the room. Ones who have had to make something work without paying for it. Ones who know what it actually costs - in thinking, in time, in genuine cultural proximity - to build a story that travels.

We’ll keep making that case. Loudly, and in public, for as long as it needs making.

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Boiler Plate is the weekly dispatch from Axe + Saw, earned-first thinking, cultural commentary, and brand expertise without the jargon. Subscribe below. If someone sent this to you, welcome.

Rachel Allison is the Founder and Creative Director of Axe + Saw, a creative communications agency based in Shoreditch, London.

The Discovery page has a secret: the only thing it’s actually discovering is you.

Your habits, your hesitations, the 0.3 seconds longer you lingered on that reel before scrolling. It knows. And it’s been quietly building a world around those signals ever since, serving it back to you under the flattering guise of curation.

And that’s not always a bad thing. The feed is good. It’s genuinely entertaining, it’s introduced you to things you love, and none of us are pretending we’re logging off any time soon.

But it’s worth asking: when was the last time you truly discovered something unexpected online that the feed didn’t hand to you?

Not from your FYP. Not a recommendation. Not from a Discovery page that already knew what you were going to like before you got there.

Imagine you’re driving down a road. Beautiful scenery either side, you’re taking it all in, enjoying every minute. You keep driving. The road is good. The road is curated. The road is, honestly, a great road.

But what if you pulled over, got out of the car, and walked into that scenery?

You might find a ditch. You might find a hidden oasis. You might find something that becomes a story - one that took a specific, unrepeatable journey to reach. That’s a discovery. The algorithm is the road. Smooth, optimised, endlessly entertaining. It’s just that it’s always gently leading you somewhere.

The thing worth holding onto here isn’t time or attention. It’s the instinct itself. There was a time when humans looked into the abyss, at the stars, at the horizon - something weirdly out of place, and thought: what if?

Call it frictionmaxxing, call it deep curiosity. But we’re losing the instinct for it. Curiosity used to be the engine, but now it’s a passenger.

And the ripple effects go even deeper than you’d think. Community has technically never been more accessible, yet we’re in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. That’s a discovery problem.

Real community tends to come from the accidental, unrepeatable experience of finding something, or someone, you weren’t looking for. You can build a beautiful Pinterest board of culture you love. But belonging is one thing you can’t shortcut your way into. We wrote a whole Substack on that alone… you can read it here.

Now what?

So this isn’t the part where we tell you to delete the apps and touch some grass..

We all know we’re going straight back to normal after 48 hours. The feed isn’t the enemy. The point is just to keep one foot off the road.

So here’s the actual prompt: how do you feed your curiosity beyond the algorithm?

Because algorithms and AI are built entirely on what’s already been discovered. They just remix the past and hand it back to us as new. Which means the genuinely new stuff, the things that haven’t been fed to anyone yet, only come from the human side. So a few ways to go looking:

• Break the routine. A different route to work, dinner for breakfast, whatever it is. Autopilot is your brain switching off - disrupt it and it starts noticing things again. New inputs, new surroundings = new ideas

• Walk without an aim. Step outside and just go. If your brain starts steering you toward a destination, do the opposite. If something catches your eye, follow it and see where it goes.

• Put your phone down and talk to strangers. The barista, the person next to you in the queue, whoever. Small, pointless, lovely conversations you’d never have had with your head down. Everyone you pass has a backstory as complicated as yours — care enough to catch a glimpse of one.

The friction. The detours. The chance encounter that takes you somewhere you didn’t plan to go. For everyone in this industry especially, that’s the difference between a finger on the pulse and an echo chamber that just sounds like one.

So we’d love to hear from you. When did you last discover something by chance? Not fed, not served, not surfaced. Just found.

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Summer’s here, the round-ups are back, and the whole team is heading out to things you can’t stream, pause or watch from the sofa. Call it research. Here’s where we’ll be, and why each one’s more than just a good night out.

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Fête de la Musique, where DJs and musicians take over the streets of Paris for one day of chaotic unfiltered culture

Access to music and culture feels more ticketed every year. Fête de la Musique is one of the rare moments that brings music back to what it’s really about.For one day, Paris becomes a city-sized global stage for cultural exchange, shaped by the diversity it’s built on.

Launched in 1982 by France’s Ministry of Culture with the idea of “music everywhere, concert halls nowhere,” it’s built on a simple premise: remove the barriers and see what happens.

And that’s exactly why it’s best experienced without a plan. A brass band in one street, a techno set in the next, a jazz trio tucked into a square you didn’t know was there.

Berlioz presents Deep In It in Finsbury Park this August… open-air, jazz-soaked house all day long. If Matisse made house music, he’d be Berlioz

Dance music has quietly become something to curate, not just sweat through. The crate-diggers and the genre-blenders are the ones people actually follow now, and Berlioz sits right at that meeting point of jazz, soul and house.Two stages, open air, a line-up handpicked for the day. The line between the gallery and the dancefloor has never been thinner, and that’s the point.

Photo: Lindsey Byrnes

My Chemical Romance, Wembley. A celebration of the 20th anniversary of their (ICONIC) album The Black Parade

The eyeliner kids of 2006 are the alt kids’ older siblings now, and a new generation has picked the baton straight back up.

The Black Parade sits at the centre of it all, a record so visually and emotionally complete it still defines what the whole thing looks and feels like twenty years on.

Cats in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. An immersion in nature while watching this wacky, eccentric show.

Half the magic here is the setting. Watching something this gloriously absurd unfold under open sky, surrounded by trees as the light fades, hits completely differently to a dark room off Shaftesbury Avenue.

And besides, cats are always dying to get out into the wild. What better way to watch them than in their natural habitat?

Houghton. Four days, hundreds of DJs, stages hidden deep in the woods around a massive lake in Norfolk. Pure escapism

Houghton isn’t a line-up in a field, it’s a whole world you disappear into. Stages sit unnamed deep in the forest, a lake at the centre of it all, sculpture and light installations tucked into corners you stumble across by accident.

The whole weekend is curated to build slowly, rolling and simmering rather than chasing the instant peak, which is rare in an era where everything’s engineered for the immediate hit.

That patience leaves room for real breadth. Hundreds of DJs across the weekend, from underground legends to the names defining the scene right now, moving through deep house, dub, techno and everything in between. Something for the old heads and the newcomers alike.

Photo: Houghton Festival

Bonobo’s Distance In Static launch party. Global grooves, heard first.

For 25 years Bonobo has been quietly perfecting his own lane: lush, downtempo electronica that pulls in jazz, soul and samples from all over the world, equal parts headphone record and dancefloor. Distance In Static stretches that even further, a multilingual affair with vocals moving between English, Urdu and Japanese, and featuring Joy Crookes to Arooj Aftab to Nilüfer Yanya.

Scan that tracklist closely and you might spot a rather familiar name on this one. We won’t say which. But we’re very, very proud.

All Points East. 6 days, 2 weekends and a sound for everyone.

All Points East has become a proper London staple, and the diversity of the line-up is the whole point. Few festivals capture the city quite like it: every genre, every scene, every corner of London’s music culture sharing the same few days in Victoria Park.

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Axe + Saw is an award-winning, earned and social storytelling agency based in London and New York, turning cultural insight into ideas that travel.

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There’s a pattern in brand strategy that almost nobody talks about. Brands grow, get serious, hire more talent or agencies, and somewhere in that process they replace the thing that made them specific with something that sounds more impressive. A vision. A mission. A set of values that could belong to absolutely anyone. The rough edges come off. The origin gets quietly retired. What’s left is clean, professional, and completely forgettable.

Meanwhile the communities who were there at the start - the ones who built meaning around the brand before it had a marketing budget - never forgot. They’re still carrying the original story. Waiting for the brand to catch up.

Kiss just caught up.

Kiss started in 1990 as a pirate station, “Illegal” broadcasts from a tower block in East London. Music for people who generally weren’t being served anywhere else, delivered by similar people willing to actually risk something to reach them. Then it got a licence, went mainstream, and like most brands that grow up, quietly set that chapter aside.

The rebrand they just did didn’t invent a new identity. It found the pirate chapter, and said: actually, this is who we are. The sense that the rules are somewhat optional - it all flows from that original energy.

And that matters because the people who were there at the start never forgot. Before Kiss went legit, UK pirate radio was its own world - stations like Horizon, Jazz FM, and Gordon Mac’s Kiss FM broadcasting soul, reggae and funk and playing cat and mouse with DTI agents who were trying to shut them down.

By the early 90s it had exploded into something rawer and more grassroots: Kool FM, Weekend Rush, Rinse FM launching with an aerial taped to a broom handle. The MCs it made — Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Boy Better Know. The sounds that fed directly into grime, dubstep and garage, eventually forcing the BBC to launch 1Xtra just to keep up. Those communities carried the story for 35 years while the brand looked the other way. All Kiss had to do was start being proud of it.

This is the thing brands consistently get wrong. The story was never really theirs to own — it belongs to the people who built meaning around it before there was a marketing budget. The best brand stories are found in archives, in the memories of people who were there at the start.

Some brands never forgot that.

Levi’s has been telling the same story since the 1850s. Jeans stitched together for gold rush miners because the trousers kept falling apart. Tough, functional, built for people who actually do things. 170 years later it still works because it’s true - it happened, it was specific, and the people who wore them in every era after that kept adding to it.

Dr. Martens started as orthopaedic footwear. Designed by a German soldier to help his injured foot. Then British factory workers bought them. Then skinheads, punks. Then Pete Townshend wore them on stage and something shifted permanently. The brand barely had to do anything - subcultures did the work. Each community that adopted that boot added a chapter the brand couldn’t have written for itself.

That’s the pattern. The most durable brand stories aren’t managed, they’re accumulated. Real people, in real subcultures, finding something that means something to them and making it their own.

So why do brands stop telling their origin stories?

Usually because the story feels too “small”. The origin is a market stall, a spare bedroom, a single product that barely worked. It feels like a disservice compared to the size the brand has grown to. So it gets replaced with something that sounds more impressive - a vision, a mission, a set of values that could belong to absolutely anyone.

Sometimes the story feels too risky. Kiss was technically breaking the law. Some founding stories involve failure, or weird pivots. So the edges come off. What’s left is safe.

And sometimes - the story just gets lost. The founders leave. The early employees move on. Nobody wrote anything down. The brand drifts towards generic not because anyone decided that, but because nobody in the room remembers where specifically it came from.

The test we use

When we are looking at a brand’s story, we ask one question: could you swap the name out and have it still work?

“We believe in quality.” Swap the name. If it still works, not a story.
“We were founded by a soldier looking for a solution.” Swap the name. Doesn’t work at all. That’s a story.

Specificity is everything. Real stories have a place, a person, a reason, a moment. And usually, somewhere in the people who were there at the start - the ones who took a risk on you before you were worth the risk — is the story that actually makes people feel something.

Most brands have something like that. Sitting in a box, waiting.

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There’s a new phrase doing the rounds. Women in SPAM - Social, PR, Advertising, Marketing. It’s meant to be a rallying cry. A reclamation. A finally, we see you for the women who built entire industries while somehow remaining invisible in the conversation about them.

And look - the intention is right. We rate the people behind it. We rate the energy. The instinct to name what we do, to give it visibility, to say we are here and we matter - that is not wrong.

But then you see the visuals that are snowballing with the trend. The moodboard. The aesthetic it’s been assigned. Heels. Pencil skirts. Cosmos in hand. All gloss, no grit.

We love Sex and the City. We genuinely do. It’s a show about female friendship, about women holding each other up through chaos and heartbreak and truly terrible decisions. The entertainment is earned. But Sex and the City was never about being taken seriously in a boardroom, and that, unfortunately, is exactly what we still need to fight for. When Women in SPAM reaches for that aesthetic, it glamourises the role at precisely the moment we need to be talking about what it costs us. We don’t want to become entertainment. We want to be heard.

Dear Internet: we don’t want to be called Women in SPAM.

Here’s the thing about reclamation trends. In other industries, they make sense for a different reason. When women in tech or finance push back and demand visibility, it’s because those industries have historically been built by men, for men, and women are still fighting to be in the room at all.

That is not our story.

PR and social media are majority female industries. Two-thirds of people in public relations below director level are women. We are not the minority here. We are the workforce.

So why are we still borrowing the language of industries where women are the exception?

Because the problem is not that we’re missing at the bottom. The problem is that we disappear the moment we try to rise.

The CIPR published research recently that put a number to it for the first time. There are 3,910 women missing from senior PR roles in England and Wales - people who either left mid-career or never made it to leadership. That’s a structural failure.

Women make up 66% of professional-level PR roles. At director level, that flips: 54% of those seats belong to men. A 20 percentage point drop, right at the moment careers should be paying off. And it doesn’t happen by accident. The research identified three interconnected barriers: a persistent boys’ club mentality in leadership, structural issues around maternity support and flexible working, and the disproportionate weight of caregiving that still falls on women outside the office.

The numbers behind the experience are just as telling. More than half of respondents reported experiencing gender-based discrimination. Over half felt they didn’t have equal opportunities for advancement compared to their male colleagues. Burnout was the top career challenge cited. Only one in five rated gender equality in their workplace as excellent.

This is not a vibe problem. This is not fixed by a moodboard.

We have all been in that meeting. You say something. It lands nowhere. Five minutes later, a man says the same thing - slightly rephrased, same idea - and suddenly it makes sense to everyone in the room. We are not imagining it. It is documented, it is systemic, and it is exhausting.

The women who do make it to senior roles in our industry largely get there despite the structure, not because of it. They’ve found workarounds - switching between agency and in-house roles, going freelance, starting their own businesses, quietly accepting demotions in exchange for flexibility. Resilience dressed up as career strategy but it’s not a success story - it’s a coping mechanism.

Which is why Women in SPAM, in its current form, doesn’t land the way it should. Not because recognition is wrong, it isn’t. But because the aesthetic it’s wrapped in does the work of the problem, not the solution.

We already have to fight against the perception that our work is fluffy. That social media is just vibes. That PR is just schmoozing. When the visual language of a movement meant to celebrate women in our industry reaches for sequins and cosmos and pencil skirts, it doesn’t dismantle that perception. It leans into it, and worse, asks us to find it empowering.

The same goes for the phrase “marketing girlie.” We know the community around it is warm and genuinely supportive. But language shapes perception, and perception shapes how you’re treated in a pitch meeting, a salary negotiation, the moment you ask for what you’re worth. We are not girlies. We are strategists, writers, researchers, cultural analysts, account leads, creative directors, business owners. That is not a girlie job. That is just a job. A serious one.

What would actually help? Less aesthetic. More audit.

More companies publishing their gender pay gap data without being asked. More agencies promoting women into leadership before they burn out and leave. More industry events where the women on stage are there to talk about the work - not to inspire other women to dream of one day being in the room.

We want the recognition. We want visibility. We just don’t want it wrapped in something that makes it easier to dismiss us.

We say this as a majority female storytelling studio. We have watched the women in our industry do extraordinary work - build brands, shape culture, write the campaigns people quote back to you years later - and we have watched them do it while being underpaid, overlooked, and occasionally described as a personality hire.

The Women in SPAM trend had the right instinct. The intention was good. It just reached for the wrong image. The industry is mostly us. The power still isn’t. That’s the conversation worth having, and it doesn’t need a filter.

Source: The Missing Women Study, CIPR / Socially Mobile, 2025

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We’ve seen it, the trailer of a new reboot is announced and the comment section shares the same sentiments: Have we run out of original thoughts?

For the past 5 years, we have been living in a loop of endless resurrections, sequels, and rebrands and that’s honestly because bringing something new into the cultural zeitgeist is terrifying. Silence is expensive; a reboot mitigates that because it guarantees an immediate reaction. Instead of folks wondering what the brand is and what they represent, they are already familiar and discussing said reboot in their personal lives.

The real game, however, is not what you reboot. It’s how you reenter the room. Audiences can smell corporate desperation from a mile away.

How brands position themselves in that exact moment determines whether they survive culturally.

We are just the caretakers

This is the brand’s humble approach. They pretend that the reboot doesn’t belong to them but to the cult following they’ve fostered for years. They hire the original team, use nostalgic fonts, and practically beg for fan validation despite this somewhat lazy approach. Sure it lowers the initial reservations people might have when buying into the reboot, but it’s too safe, and (oooh are we at liberty to say this?) somewhat boring. Essentially the result is a stagnant product that fails to hit with a younger generation because it’s suffocated by its own heritage.

The Cynic

The self aware brands understand how people read reboots. They know you think it’s a cash grab, they know it’s a cash grab, so why not laugh about it together? Look at how Warner Brothers dealt with Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Instead of pretending they were making an updated high quality film, the entire marketing rollout leaned heavily into the joke that this film was mostly for a nostalgic payday. Even the script is self aware, Winona Ryder’s character, Lydia has grown up to be a sell-out TV psychic faux act managed by her boyfriend who is a spoof of the man-bun wearer who only speaks in toxic corporate therapy speak.

The modern overcorrection

The worst way to play it. This happens when a brand swoops in to update its classic for modern audiences, subtly hinting that the original was problematic. This is the ultimate PR trainwreck as the press rollout is based on contemporary social commentary which as we know is constantly evolving.

Let’s explore this Stateside by looking at the 2025 Cracker Barrel rebrand. Since the 1960’s Cracker Barrel built its entire brand identity with very traditional Southern American aesthetics: rocking chairs, southern comfort food, and a rustic logo featuring their brand mascot, Uncle Herschel. However as sales declined, they assumed that their nostalgic image was too old fashioned and disconnected from the younger generations.

The result? Immediate disaster. By aggressively taking away the Southern aesthetic (right, wrong, or indifferent) Cracker Barrel took away the ambiance that attracted its consumer base in the first place.

At Axe + Saw, the mindset we hold most dear and tell our clients all the time is that one of the most important aspects of communicating with the public is having a North Star. It’s the the idea that no matter what, brands stick true to their authentic identity. In a world full of noise and shifting trends, that unwavering consistency is what builds unbreakable trust with an audience.

The Trojan Horse

Saving the best for last, because it’s the absolute gold standard (and gives us the chance to talk about The Devil Wears Prada 2). This is when a brand manages to weaponise nostalgia not just for a financial safety net, but as a Trojan horse to talk about something happening with culture right now.

Look at The Devil Wears Prada 2. They could have easily given us a shallow, copy-paste rehash of Miranda Priestly demanding 15 skirts from Calvin Klein while Andy fumbles around life (to be fair she is still doing that). Instead, the sequel leverages our collective obsession with these characters to focus on the relevant conversation around the fragile state of journalism. The studio didn’t just market a movie, they marketed cultural commentary. They tapped into the genuine anxiety of today’s media landscape. The pivots to video, mass layoffs, and the slow death of legacy media. By using a 20-year-old movie to mirror the exact industry crises the journalists writing about the movie are currently facing, the PR campaign practically wrote itself. It moved the needle from nostalgic cash grab to essential cultural commentary.

The Takeaway

Consumers are too media-literate now. They don’t just look at the product; they judge the intent.

If the reboot looks like a desperate cash grab: You. Are. Cooked. But if you can use the safety net of your previous work to speak on something new, you pull off the ultimate brand miracle: moving a legacy forward without ruining it.

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Just because you call it community doesn’t mean it is.

Community is the most claimed and least earned word in marketing. We say that at Axe + Saw often, and we mean it as an accusation - not an observation.

It’s the assumption that putting people in a shared space automatically creates shared meaning. The tell is the verb here. ‘Launch’ a community?! Que? Anyone worth their weight should know that you cannot “launch” a community by naming it into existence on a platform.

You don’t launch a community any more than you launch a friendship, you launch a product, a campaign, a Discord with a welcome bot and a founding-members email. This is all marketing infrastructure cosplaying as community building. The mistake, always, is misconstruing infrastructure with intimacy.

You can see it in the behaviour. A brand staffs a community before it has one. A campaign books a room of creators on Tuesday and files it as a “community activation” by Friday. The work optimises for reach, engagement and conversion - the measurable things - and quietly skips reciprocity, identity and belonging, which are the only things a community is actually made of. None of this is fraud. It’s building for visibility and calling it connection, and the gap between those two is where unfortunately, most brand communities die.

You can only earn the right to convene one - usually over years you haven’t spent yet. For an agency to tell a client that the thing they want, fast, is not for sale is an uncomfortable thing to say out loud. We say it anyway. The discomfort is the proof.

Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler, recently spoke about how brands are slowly draining meaning from the word “community.” Over the past few years, it’s become shorthand for almost anything involving people online: You can’t fake it till you make it.

Our job is translation, not just amplification

This is the actual line between us and most of the industry, so we will put it first rather than bury it two-thirds down.

Amplification assumes the story is yours and the work is making it louder. Translation assumes the story already exists - inside a culture, carried by specific people - and the work is recognising it before it is obvious, then earning the right to carry it further. You cannot amplify your way into a community. You can only be fluent enough to be let into one.

That fluency isn’t a tactic bolted onto the work. It is the model.

Community is a discipline before it is a moment

We are always looking at ways to build on a duality, and community sits squarely inside it.

Craft, consistency, longevity - the unglamorous discipline of showing up when there is no campaign, no launch and no reason anyone outside would notice. That is what a community is physically made of: people who keep showing up, for something worth showing up for.

It takes time + effort to know which rooms are worth showing up to in the first place - the instinct to read a culture before it is legible to everyone else. Get the first bit wrong and you show up faithfully, for years, to the wrong place. Get the second part wrong and you arrive once, brilliantly, and never again. A real community needs both, in that order. Most brands attempt it with neither.

Which brands prove the rule?

Corteiz, heard of him? Again anyone in the culture space references the way he’s done something that caught people’s attention and didn’t launch a community; it earned one by being legibly against something. Scarcity, refusal, a deliberate rejection of the brand playbook - an oppositional stance Gen Z reads as honesty, and honesty is what they will actually show up for. The insider alignment isn’t a marketing layer applied on top. It is the product of a position held consistently enough to be believed.

Manors Golf is the same principle moved into sport. Instead of golf through the country-club lens it inherited, Manors reshapes the game around how young people already live - creativity, identity, participation. The proof isn’t the apparel; it’s the community rounds and the rooms where people actually play together. Golf becomes the entry point. Showing up becomes the habit. The culture is tangible because people can physically invest in it, not just watch it scroll past.

Neither brand built community from a distance. You can’t. You have to be in it.

WHICH IS WHY WE OPERATE THE WAY WE DO

We work a four-day week. The fifth day is not time off and it is not overtime, it is reserved for being in the culture we are paid to understand, as it happens, rather than reporting on it after the fact. Proximity isn’t a value we put on a deck. It’s a line in the calendar.

Brands are starting to understand they can’t fake that anymore. The ones that last are the ones built with time, care and genuine understanding - the ones people actively want to see win, because being part of them feels like something.

Invest in something meaningful, and community follows. Don’t, and people will find something else to ride for.

Because community isn’t an output. It’s a byproduct - of shared references, shared instincts, and the discipline of showing up.

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Listening culture has always sat at the heart of British life. From grassroots sound systems at Notting Hill Carnival to underground raves across the country, we’ve long understood music as something physical; something you move to, build community around, and pass between generations. Where there’s a sound system, there’s a conversation: about culture, origins, roots - and most importantly, the music itself.

Music connects Britain in a way few things do

Across regions, across genres… there’s always a track that cuts through.

But when it comes to listening - real listening - something has shifted.

Not passive streaming or background noise. But slow, intentional, almost ritualistic listening (and not in a “wellness” sense). The kind that asks you to sit still and pay attention. To feel.

Somewhere along the way, we lost that.

Maybe it’s abundance. Endless access has dulled our appetite. When everything is available, nothing feels essential. We consume more, but experience less.

At the same time, the spaces that once held this kind of attention are disappearing. Third spaces are in decline - and with them, the environments designed for collective listening. There are fewer places where music is the main event, rather than the backdrop.

What’s replaced them is… complicated

Hi-fi listening bars are on the rise, and there’s an undeniable appeal. But strip away the small plates and the saved recco’s in your Tiktok (that you’ll probably never go to but vicariously visit), and you’re left with a question: who are these spaces really for? There’s a risk we’re aestheticising sound systems that were once rooted in rebellion, community, and sonic precision - turning culture into concept.

Because the truth is, many of the real music lovers aren’t there. They’re still underground… in spaces where the speakers matter more than the setting.

And yet, something new is emerging.

It feels ironic that the solution might come from the very platforms that fueled the ‘abundance’ problem, but brands are beginning to build the spaces that cities no longer can - or won’t.

Not pop-ups, not fleeting moments, but permanent, purpose-built environments.

Inside Spotify’s London HQ, the new Listening Lounge is one of them. Designed in collaboration with Friendly Pressure and Cake Architecture, it’s a space engineered entirely around sound. A custom-built system. Acoustics treated with intent. Music, heard as it was meant to be; lossless, uncompromised.

We curated a very intimate invite only event, to launch the space with a different kind of experience. Not a party, but a listening session. Where guests were asked to swap their shoes for slippers. A panel with artists including NAO and Joy Crookes, hosted by Yazmin Lacey - all women who exist in the grey spaces of genre. They didn’t just play tracks; they unpacked them. shared stories, and slowed the room down, with not a second of a track skipped.

We included a sensory food and drink pairing by Sessions Arts Club’s very own Nil Mutluer (a.k.a. Heal Goblin). Even the menu was a tool for attention, using ingredients like Pine Buds and Lapsang to sharpen the senses, ensuring we weren’t just hearing, but perceiving.

On the surface, it’s a beautiful room. But beneath that is a deeper idea: how you listen shapes what you hear.

And maybe that’s where this is all heading.

The future of music culture isn’t louder, faster, or more visible

It’s becoming more considered, more sensory, and more human, with brands increasingly recognising that meaning is built through physical experience and real-world community, not just digital presence.

Hearing D’Angelo, Frank Ocean, Sunday Service Choir - even Jamie xx - through that system stirred something familiar. Not polished, not performative. Just that feeling you usually only find at 4am, somewhere deep on a Saturday night.

Maybe we haven’t lost our ability to listen.

Maybe we’ve just forgotten how to do it.

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Nostalgia has become such a force and tapping into it has become a slight cheat code. The embrace of bygone eras acts as a refuge for listeners seeking solace in the familiar, and for corporations chasing a formula that guarantees commercial success.

However, when that nostalgia is borrowed from across the Atlantic, something more complicated happens. It’s not that British artists lack identity - it’s that the system around them keeps pointing them outward, while an equally rich sonic heritage at home sits largely untapped beneath their feet.

And honestly if there were any remaining doubt about the weight and legitimacy of the British sound, the recent V&A exhibition, The Music is Black, makes the argument better than words ever could.

“What happens so often is that British music is presented as important but marginal,” says The V&A East’s artistic director, Gus Casely-Hayford. “What we have tried to do here is say this is our story, and it’s one of our major contributions to the world.” That repositioning matters. It is one thing to say the British sound deserves more faith - it is another to stand in a room and feel the weight of what this country has produced.

Black music has driven 80% of the UK industry’s revenue over the past three decades, Britain’s contribution to Black music is nothing short of extraordinary.

The sound systems of the Windrush generation planted the seeds of a distinctly British relationship with rhythm and bass. So why, then, does so much of the contemporary British music conversation feel like it is looking elsewhere for its reference points?

The issue is not nostalgia itself

Paying homage to musical legacies is a celebration of the art form’s timeless nature, and every generation of artists stands on the shoulders of those who came before. The issue is the direction in which artists are being encouraged to look. If the industry had complete faith in the British sound, in its history, its distinctiveness, its global potential, the conversation around “crossing over” would look entirely different.

Right now, crossing over is too often understood as sounding more American, more palatable to a transatlantic market. The appetite here however exists. What remains inconsistent is the institutional faith required to back it.

For the first time in decades, the UK has not birthed a dominant successor genre - a striking silence from a country that has handed the world jungle, garage, grime and afroswing, each one a cultural era in its own right. The question of why we have reached this creative plateau is complex, shaped by technology, cost of living and more - but perhaps the more uncomfortable truth is that this plateau is a domino effect of the pandering that is so evident in the industry.

An Industry with at times… a lack of faith

This is where the responsibility of industry stakeholders becomes critical. The over-reliance on nostalgia is in many ways an algorithmic decision, informed by data that tells them audiences respond to the familiar.

Wireless Festival was built by and for Black British music culture - yet last year they headlined Drake, and this year Kanye West was… the goal, with critics also calling out the lack of British press at the event. Big names draw big crowds, that logic is not lost. But there is something telling about a festival so deeply rooted in this culture consistently looking across the Atlantic for its marquee moment rather than betting on one of our own to dominate that stage.

Brands crave that raw UK sound

Brands have made “authenticity” their favourite buzzword, plastering it across briefs and campaign decks as though the word alone is a substitute for genuine cultural understanding.

The reality is that briefs are more intentional than ever, and brands are increasingly sophisticated in how they identify talent, mapping cultural relevance and assessing whether an artist’s identity aligns with the narrative they are trying to sell.

There is definitely a growing awareness, albeit gradual, that metrics alone do not capture cultural weight. Some brands are starting to recognise that an artist with fifty thousand deeply engaged listeners from within a specific community carries a different kind of value than one with five million passive streams, and that distinction is slowly becoming part of the conversation.

The artists most genuinely rooted in British musical heritage are increasingly finding their way onto campaigns as the centrepiece. The challenge now is ensuring that progression becomes the standard rather than the exception. If the industry and brands continue to move in this direction, backing the British sound not because it is a trend but because they understand its cultural legitimacy, then the artists will finally be seen as the asset they have always been.

There are artists navigating the balance. From PinkPantheress’ frequent genres of choice, Garage and Drum and Bass, whose international success we’re seeing triple daily as of late despite her sound being distinctly British, to Jim Legxacy’s very British visual branding and style.

Britain has the sounds and history to produce music that draws British born sounds whilst pushing into territories that have not yet been charted. What it needs now is an industry willing to match that ambition. The faith placed in American templates needs to be redirected inward, towards a British sound that has already proven, time and again, that it does not need to borrow an identity from elsewhere.

It has always had one of its own.

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Welcome back to Community Kitchen: Axe + Saw’s table for the culture-makers, community-builders and creative independents feeding the future.

This week we hear from Ann-Marie Kinlock, Founder of KindHaus, a London‑based coworking and childcare space designed for modern parents - where you can work productively while your young children are cared for on‑site.

If KindHaus had nothing to sell, what would it stand for?

The redefinition of Motherhood, on mothers terms.

What’s the hardest truth about your work no one wants to say out loud?

You have to have a wacky mind to look at the facts in front of you yet still believe that the vision in your heart is the real truth.

What’s something you’ve built that was too early, but still right?

I love thinking about the future and coming up with ideas of what life will be like. While working for an agency I created their very first proprietary NFT artwork. It felt huge at the time like we were living on the brink of a major technological and cultural shift. The shift wasn’t as big as we thought but the courage to act and foresight to imagine a future scenario are the skills you take away. The lessons learned immersing ourselves in that moment still inform my thinking today.

What’s a failure that still stings (but shaped everything)?

Bringing on a member of staff who just didn’t realise how unkind they were being. The small choices made on a daily basis rolled into an avalanche and I was reduced to tears. This experience changed everything. Genuine kindness is now a key criteria for joining KindHaus. If you don’t feel a genuine sense of joy in making people smile - colleagues and customers - it won’t be a fit. This experience also taught me about myself.

What inspired you to do what you’re doing today? Is there an early memory that links to what you are doing today?

I remember the time clearly. It was about 2am and I was in bed crying and reading. I discovered for the first time that the number one cause of death for women during pregnancy and post-partum in the UK is suicide. It still blows my mind that things have gotten so bad that some women can’t see a way out. It’s a complex issue but I knew from that moment I had to do something, no matter how small. I suppose I’ve always been what’s called an “empath” . The human experience moves me to tears. I was told that I was too sensitive but now as a grown woman I realise it’s a gift and an endless source of power to create change

Talk to us about the importance of community. In what ways does this come through in what you’re doing now and working towards in the future?

Community is everything. I didn’t realise how impostor was to me until a recent round of therapy. I’m the third child in a family of five. I was born into a community. It’s my default state but modern life has eroded this over the last decade. To the point where I was feeling this sadness, mourning, almost longing to be part of a community again. My grandmother introduced my sister and I to the black Pentecostal community at a young age and wow. They know how to do community in reality - no one goes without, everyone is your aunty or uncle, when they cook they cook expecting 10 people. It’s one of the most underrated forces of good that I know. I still long for that at times.

What is the most underestimated skill or lesson in your opinion to learn early on as possible?

The ability to truly listen to yourself. To filter out the noise and then the courage to act on that.

What does the future hold for the industry you work in - what are the challenges and what are the opportunities?

I work in the childcare industry and I am genuinely concerned about the future of this sector. Childcare is infrastructure but it’s treated as a commodity. The practitioners are subject matter experts but they are not treated as professionals. They are literally helping to build the brains of the nation’s children but they are undervalued, underpaid and overworked. Childcare has become a key political issue now and there’s a huge opportunity to reinvent the system so that it works for all the stakeholders, parents included. We really need a national think-tank that sits above political agenda and builds a system that works for all. I see a future where quality childcare is more accessible to all. where parents can access quality care no matter their income and create schedules of care that work around their schedules.

In a world where we have just 8 seconds to capture someone’s attention, what do you think it takes to cut through + be remembered?

Radical honesty that speaks to our hidden emotions. It’s also genuinely kind.

What are you currently obsessing over that might be considered niche or mundane or just a bit random? Why is it interesting to you right now?

Right now I am obsessed with ice cream. It would be a total dream to have a soft serve machine dishing out shots of ice cream at KindHaus. I’m secretly working the budget to see if I can squeeze one in. It’s an easy shot of joy that can lift your mood. My son and I sneak into our local Odonos Ice cream parlour for the freshly made gelato. I’ve been watching Nara Smith on TikTok pour brown butter on a scoop with a spindle of salt. Just know I am trying that tonight when the little one goes to bed.

We massively appreciate Ann-Marie for taking the time to answer our questions.

Check out Ann-Marie for the latest on Kindhaus, to hear more about what it’s like being a woman in business, and for her activism work in the motherhood space.

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Something has quietly happened in fashion last month. In the space of one week, Zara announced two major designer partnerships: a two-year creative residency with John Galliano, and a capsule with Willy Chavarria. One of the world’s most celebrated living couturiers and one of New York’s most politically charged designers, both signing onto one of the most prolific fast fashion brands on the planet.

Our take? This isn’t really a fashion news story. It’s exposing something important about who actually holds power in the fashion industry right now.

The Backstory

Fashion house X fast fashion collabs are not new to us or even true to us, H&M have owned this market whether that be partnering with Balmain, Karl Lagerfeld or Roberto Cavalli, it has been a repeated strategy for them - but they haven’t had a long lasting impact, which is what makes Zara’s move feel different. This isn’t a one-off capsule. Galliano will dissect past Zara designs and reconstruct them, injecting his signature sense of drama, proportion play, and layered storytelling into garments originally made for mass appeal. It’s a two-year residency. Are we going to be wearing archival Molly Mae leather jackets this A/W? We hope not.

The part nobody’s saying out loud

Is the luxury industry in genuine trouble? The luxury consumer base declined by 50 million over two years. Even the news cycle has been relentless - departures and new appointments at Dior, Gucci, Fendi, Versace, Celine. Galliano himself left Margiela.

But here’s what really doesn’t get discussed: does fashion pay its own people?. The 1 Granary Substack ran an anonymous salary survey of senior designers at houses including Balenciaga, Prada and McQueen. One designer described being offered 28k per year at a major Parisian luxury house: “I earn more working at the pub.” but then again at the very top, creative directors at the most successful luxury brands can earn $1 to $2 million a year. However, maintaining that lifestyle once you leave a house can be very difficult.

A Zara deal - guaranteed fee, defined timeline, genuine global reach - is a different kind of offer. For a designer between chapters, it might be the most creatively free arrangement available.

What Zara is actually buying

Zara doesn’t need legitimacy - it already dominates, what it actually needs is a point of view. Zara is trying to redefine what fast fashion can look like when it starts taking design a little more seriously.

The Willy Chavarria partnership operates on a different register entirely. His VATÍSIMO collection - rooted in 1980s Mexico City, telenovela drama, and Chicano community pride - is a cultural statement, not a product launch. Chavarria said it plainly: “I want the Latino community to feel seen.” Zara gains meaning that no trend algorithm can manufacture.

The bigger question this raises

Are fast fashion brands becoming the new key holders of the fashion industry? If the talent is migrating, and the cultural moments are following, luxury houses need to understand who is still buying what they’re selling.

In ten years, will the most ambitious designers be choosing Zara over Saint Laurent - not as a compromise, but as a career move? Financial security and global reach versus prestige and a Paris postcode. In a cost of living crisis, that’s not an obvious answer anymore.

What’s certain is the asymmetry. For fast fashion brands, this is a clean win - named legitimacy and wider audiences. For luxury, the result is unclear. Culture has always been their currency. The question is who’s holding it now.

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In an age of infinite content, we ask you: when did we stop caring about making people feel?

These days, all the content we consume is designed to be saved, shared, screenshot - algorithmically engineered for maximum virality.

We’ve become so good at optimising for shareability that we’ve forgotten the original point: to make someone feel something they can’t quite put into words.

And people are starting to notice.

The Disconnect Is Obvious

Here’s what brands don’t seem to understand: consumers aren’t naive anymore. Over the last decade they’ve learnt how to spot the manufactured authenticity + marketing tactics. The ‘so called’ community and culture campaigns that are ultimately measured in numbers, wrapped in hashtags.

You can’t shout ‘community’ and then roll out an experience that feels fresh off a KPI spreadsheet + optimised for Instagram grids.

Consumers see through it instantly. And worse, they talk about it… not just in your owned (and curated) comments section, but in WhatsApp groups, Reddit threads, and Discord servers where brands can’t control the narrative.

This new reality means consumers play a bigger role than ever in the news cycle. And if the experience doesn’t land emotionally or culturally… well no amount of polished content, shares or views will save you.

Take the Broadway Market store opening we worked on for our client Ace & Tate - we didn’t want to interrupt an already established, close-knit community, so we worked with local businesses and creatives on each touchpoint to elevate the event. The result? It became something the neighbourhood actually wanted to be part of.

Trust Has Left the Feed

Another shift happening quietly beneath the surface? We’re seeing less content from friends because algorithms dictate everything. The feed isn’t a place you trust anymore; it’s a place you scroll past… Hence influence has shifted to comment sections and conversation.

Think about how you discover something… Is it the #ad tagged brands? Or spotted in the comments section? It’s the spaces that feel too honest to be a marketing tactic.

The truth is, the algorithm optimised itself into irrelevance, and real influence found a new home in the margins.

Emotional resonance is what’s ultimately going to get people talking. Something that hits them in a way they need to share with someone who’ll get it.

People Are Logging Off

We’ve spent years being oversold to, algorithmically manipulated, and reminded daily that every platform profits from our insecurities. And now? We’re lonelier than ever. More connected than any generation in history, and yet somehow more isolated.

Digital fatigue is real and we’re craving good old-fashioned human connection - the kind that doesn’t come with a branded hashtag attached.

Brands have become villains in the cultural narrative - treated like evil overlords that constantly exploit our fears and desires. Trust in brands is at an all time low, and are you surprised?

For every genuine attempt at connection, there are ten more that feel like psychological warfare disguised as self-care content.

The result is people are logging off. Not dramatically. Not with manifestos. Just quietly seeking spaces that feel real. Dinners with friends. Book clubs. Craft nights. Anything that doesn’t require performing for an audience of strangers who might screenshot your vulnerability for engagement.

What Actually Lands

So where does that leave us?

If you’re a brand in 2026 - It’s not just a better social strategy or a TikTok trend. It’s simpler and simultaneously infinitely harder: make people feel something real.

That means experiences that aren’t designed to be photographed. Moments that prioritise the person in the room over the person who might see it online.

In a world optimised for shareability, the most radical thing you can do is create something that doesn’t need to be shared to matter. Something that exists for the people experiencing it, not the people watching it happen.

Stop chasing reach and start chasing resonance.

The brands that will matter moving forward aren’t the ones with the best social presence. They’re the ones that make people feel something worth remembering. The ones that understand influence don’t live in feeds anymore - it lives in conversations between people who trust each other.

Because maybe the most share worthy thing we can create in 2026 is something that doesn’t need to be shared at all.

Something that just is - honest, human, and worth showing up for.