Once I started noticing ice cream brand moments, I couldn’t stop from luxury fashion houses to homeware and hydration brands, everyone is serving scoops. In my notes app I started a list including the Loewe pistachio ice cream bar offering deliciously decadent scoops paired with crisp wines at The Dreamery to celebrate their fragrance launch.

Hydration brand, waterdrop is taking over beloved Bondi ice cream institution Luca + Luca for the city2surf race this weekend (8-9 August), promising custom gelato created from their bestselling hydration flavours. And you must have seen Lore launch their new fragrance, Lil Softie with a partnership with their Happier Grocer popsicle created to taste how it feels “soft, milky and cocooned like cozy cereal milk dreams under the TV.” Obsessed

And just last week, Bottega Veneta opened a BEAUTIFUL ice cream pop-up in Selfridges with flavours using the ingredients found in their fragrance; even the cups are completely exquisite - zoom in to look at the weaving detail. This follows Our Place’s ice cream pop-up to celebrate the launch of their Vanilla Bean collection and Merit’s ice cream van in collaboration with cult, queue-worthy gelato brand Messina (one of my favourites in Sydney) and I noted that With Nothing Underneath also gave out ice creams this summer at their store over a particularly hot weekend.

Which got me thinking: why ice cream?

Part of it is so simple: ice cream makes us happy; it's unapologetically joyful. I believe it’s actually impossible to be unhappy with a Mr Whippy in your hand (unless they forgot the flake!) Ice cream reminds us of childhood holidays, sticky fingers, melting cones and proudly wearing an ice cream moustache. It's wrapped up in some of our happiest memories, which is exactly why brands are drawn to it. Better still, it's one of the few things that feels just as cheerful at 5 as it does at 50 or beyond.

Plus ice cream activations are also a great way to generate coveted, harder-to-get earned media moments. They turn what could have been a typical product launch into a story, giving editors an additional and more urgent/timely reason to write about your brand. In our AI era, where trusted third-party sources are increasingly shaping how brands are discovered, press becomes more than awareness; it becomes part of your discoverability strategy.

Even the melting, chasing the ice cream down the cone before it disappears, is a neat metaphor for why these activations work. Pop-ups thrive on scarcity. They're temporary, giving people a reason to turn up now rather than later. Combined with the natural shareability of ice cream, the impact quickly extends beyond the people standing in the queue and becomes far greater than the number of cones you serve. (While looking for a photo to go with this piece, I searched "ice cream" in my photos - there are 127 of them- which proves my point)

Ice cream is also itself a brilliant storytelling medium. Flavours, colours and packaging all become part of the experience, allowing brands to build a world rather than simply launch a product. From the cup to the cone, the sprinkles, toppings, the van and signage, every touchpoint reinforces the idea. Few marketing mediums engage sight, taste and even sound quite so naturally its the perfect sensory experience.

And for luxury, they’ve found a surprisingly sweet spot. Luxury brands have traditionally struggled with approachability; an ice cream (or insert coffee, cookie, magazine) offers an elegant way to invite more people into their world without diminishing its desirability. You might not be in the market for a Bottega bag, but spending 10 mins at a Bottega ice cream pop-up means that perhaps, when you are, you might think back to that experience. It allows you to experience the brand without the pressure of purchase, and at a time when we're bombarded with advertising on our screens, billboards, with creators, YouTube, experiences that engage the senses tend to stay with us for much longer.

Plus no coincidence that almost none of these brands are opening their own ice cream shops too. They’re partnering with places people already love. For Loewe, The Dreamery was the perfect partner It positioned them as being in the know. It’s a tiny little spot, but that actually made it cooler they didn’t need to do it with a mass partner because this felt much more chic, design led and aligned with their brand. They’re borrowing cultural capital, brand affection, familiarity and relevance that would take much longer to build themselves. The same goes for Merit with Messina and waterdrop with Luca + Luca.

And if you want to come down to Luca + Luca with waterdrop this weekend and quote HIHOLLYSUBSTACK you can get a free gelato on either day - enjoy!

If this season is anything to go by, the trend isn’t really ice cream at all. It’s brands recognising that experiences leave a deeper impression than ads ever could, and ice cream just happens to be one of the most charming ways to bring that idea to life. The cherry on top, if you’ll indulge me that last pun.

Cool ways to approach an ice cream activation

• Start with the story. Why ice cream? Is it tied to your product, a colour, a flavour, the season or a feeling? It should feel like a natural extension of the brand, not a random stunt.

• Lean into nostalgia. Ice cream already comes loaded with happy memories - how can your activation tap into them?

• Design for sharing. The cup, toppings, uniforms, van, signage, sound and location all matter. The production and execution matter - it’s your brand world.

• Find the right partner. Bigger isn’t always better (except when it comes to scoop size). Borrowing the cultural capital of a beloved but small local institution is often be more powerful than building something from scratch or going mass. It shows a cultural awareness from bigger brands too.

• Create urgency. Limited-time experiences are what make pop-ups work.

• Market the activation. You’ve got to make sure that you maximise the effort - so get creative with how you deliver press, communities, content, storytelling, getting people to the ice cream pop up.

Other things I’ve consumed this week:

• I went along to see the Odyssey last weekend and whilst it seems fashionable to be critical of everything at the moment I’m here to say I loved it. I was completely immersed in the story - I left longing for another trip to Greece (we went island hopping on our honeymoon)

• I’m currently telling anyone who’ll listen about how good the Our Place Titanium collection is, I already have the Always Pot which I love too - it’s made cooking for our family so much easier and I’m now convinced I need to get the Wonder Oven too - it’s both a toaster and an air fryer and most important non-toxic and made without PFAS

• PSA to anyone who loved Sorrow and Bliss, I just picked up Meg Mason’s latest book - Sophie Standing There after finishing Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, which I really enjoyed.

• Any readers who have recently had a baby and like me are dealing with wild frizzy regrowth - this gel from Crown Affair is for you!

• I landed my dream client and so as a celebration from me to me I bought these Chloe Charlton earrings - I have worn them so much already!

• These stripes are on my list - Matteau Breton Stripe I was also chatting to my friend and fashion stylist about our mutual hatred of sneakers in Winter and I have determined it’s why why I find dressing in Winter so difficult - suggested these Rothy’s clogs. I’ll let you know how I get on.

• This was a great read about Reddit

• I was lucky enough to meet a couple of weeks ago and adore everything she’s writing on her substack about taking time out from social and connecting with ourselves more. One to to subscribe to.

• I’ve been enjoying ’s observations she’s paying attention to in the world of creator, social here

P.S. I'm building out the next round of my Meet My Friend interview series. If there's a brand marketer, founder or creative you think I should chat to, I'd love to hear your recommendations (or even better - an introduction!)

I’ve loved the brand for years, so this was a conversation I’d been looking forward to for a long time.

Lexy Martin started her career at Vogue before joining Matches during one of the most influential periods in modern luxury retail. Today, she’s Marketing Director at WNU, the British womenswear brand known for its classic pieces, timeless silhouettes and thoughtful storytelling.

We talked about the “magic and logic” idea that shaped her early career, building brand belonging, expanding into new markets without losing your identity, and why some of the best marketing ideas aren’t always the biggest ones.

We could have talked for hours. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

Holly: You started your career at Vogue before moving into Matches, and now you’re at With Nothing Underneath. Looking back, what do you think those experiences taught you that still shape how you market today?

Lexy: It was a really interesting time to be at Vogue because they were looking at how to translate the Vogue brand, which at the time was predominantly a print magazine, into different revenue streams, with customers and physical experiences at the heart of that strategy. We launched the Vogue Festival and Fashion’s Night Out after Covid to bring everyone back in store.

Vogue also taught me how to get dressed because I was in an office for eight years with some very stylish women who now have huge Instagram followings, but back then they were just walking around the office!

Matches was such a formative experience. I really loved it, and I was very lucky to be there with the founders and the original team, who were just so innovative and visionary. When I joined, brands were shifting advertising budgets into experiential retail. This was years before anyone had started speaking about world building as a concept, but they were already testing and understanding that having physical interaction with customers was super valuable to building a brand.

We launched the Matches Fashion Townhouse, which combined retail, private shopping, a café with rotating guest chefs, and spaces for brand installations and events. That was really instrumental in teaching me the importance of building community when you’re building and marketing a brand. It also taught me that there were no rules. You should just be brave and do seemingly bonkers things.

We worked on so many incredible activations. We launched the Townhouse with Prada, who took over the entire house, including a branded Prada vending machine with dedicated merchandise.

Then there was Vetements. Do you remember when Vetements was like the hottest brand in the world? We held a garage sale in an abandoned industrial warehouse outside Seoul, only revealing the address 24 hours before opening. People camped overnight for 17 hours just to get the exclusive merchandise.

My boss at the time, (Chief Brand Officer) Jess Christie, always talked about the balance of magic and logic in everything we did. She had such a clear vision of the Matches brand, so even though we partnered with all these different brands, everything was viewed through the Matches lens.

Holly: For smaller brands borrowing from luxury fashion can feel unattainable but it’s not only about budget.

Lexy: I think that’s always the challenge - how do you cut through? There’s so much content now, everyone sees everything. How do you do something that feels very authentic to the brand?

I always think you just want to do something that’s a bit silly and a bit unexpected. We did our pub quiz in New York and spent ages thinking, what’s our prize? We have to have a prize. It’s got to be something British. We came up with Marmite with a silver lid on top.

Holly: WNU started with shirts, but today the brand spans multiple categories. How do you think about expanding the product range without losing what the brand stands for? And how do you bring new and existing customers on that journey?

Lexy: The brand is 10 years old next year, but for the first seven years it was just women’s shirting. We just focused on perfecting it.

The category evolution really came from the customers. Pip, the WNU founder, used to be a stylist at Vogue and still styles all of our campaigns. She’d always style with vintage menswear, coats and blazers, and we’d get so much feedback from customers saying, “What’s this blazer? Are you selling the coat? When’s it landing?” So it felt like a really natural progression for us.

I think the reason we’ve managed to bring our original customers on that journey is that they saw the really considered way we went into product. The first extension was tailored trousers, based on a pair of tailored menswear trousers. We launched them in one fabrication, in black and navy. Then we tested, listened to feedback and iterated. The next season you could buy them in different fabrications and colourways and it’s still a bestselling style today.

I think that’s the beauty of WNU. When you find a product you know and love, you know there are going to be different iterations season after season. One of the core tenets of the brand is to keep the design simple and trendless. We know they’re going to be the building blocks of your wardrobe. We make getting dressed effortless.

Shirts still account for 54% of our overall brand mix, but what’s so exciting is seeing the appetite for new categories. Knitwear is up almost 300%, and dresses launched last year and are now up over 800% this year.

We’re seeing customers come to us for full wardrobing. She’s not just buying one piece, she’s buying the full look. For us, that’s the biggest proof point that we’re expanding into different categories in a really considered and consistent way.

Holly: World building has become one of the biggest buzzwords in marketing. Is it a term that you kind of identify with, and what does it mean to you at WNU?

Lexy: It’s definitely something that we talk about. We’re very conscious of every marketing channel and every customer touchpoint, making sure they have that balance of storytelling and commerciality, back to that ‘Magic and Logic’ from Matches.

To me, it’s about shaping a brand that lives beyond the product itself and creating a place your customer wants to be part of.

Looking at that J.Crew summer camp this summer—who didn’t want to go to that? I’ve never been to summer camp, let alone in the US, yet that campaign made me nostalgic for something I’d never even experienced. It just made me want to shop. It was such a perfect example of how to build a world and make people want to be part of it.

From our side, it’s a discipline that we really challenge ourselves on. Whether it’s the retail styling book we have in store, how we’re going to scent a pop-up, or what our pub quiz prize is going to be, we always put it through the same taste filter. We want everything to feel like one cohesive world rather than a collection of separate marketing ideas.

Pip still writes handwritten thank you notes to our collaborators after projects, and that’s such a great example of the WNU world. People rarely write letters these days. Nostalgia is a big part of the brand world. Her background as a stylist gave her this visual language that we still lean on to inform product, partnerships and imagery.

Some of our best-performing content on Instagram isn’t actually product at all. It’s inspiration and mood board imagery. I feel like we’ve had a really clear WNU world long before that phrase was coined.

Holly: I think people often imagine world building has to mean huge experiential moments, but the handwritten notes are a great example that it’s often the small details that matter. I also loved your recent tastemaker series in the US with Harling Ross and Melanie Marasin. Even the way it’s shot has that buttery Richard Curtis rom-com feel.

Lexy: There’s a lot of Richard Curtis chat in the office, so that’s great feedback. Thank you!

Holly: You’ve gone from being a digital-first brand to having multiple stores. How important has physical retail been to your growth? I’ve always admired how your store openings feel really connected to the neighbourhood they’re in.

Lexy: I’m so happy you said that because that was exactly the strategy.

Stores are a really important part of our ecosystem because we get to meet our customers, understand who they are, see their pain points and learn how we can serve them.

We currently have four stores in the UK, and each has a slightly different customer, so each needs a different retail strategy.

Notting Hill is a great example. It’s a very community-based store, so when we opened we threw a big party with friends of the brand and worked with a local pizza truck to host a street party.

Marylebone was completely different. It’s an area with incredible foot traffic but lots of tourists, so we assumed many people wouldn’t know the brand. We gave our first customers WNU boat bags filled with produce from neighbours including Daunt Books, Diptyque and La Fromagerie.

We also had a flower cart outside with seasonal posies wrapped in WNU newspaper, which we gave to people walking past. Suddenly there were all these people walking down Marylebone High Street carrying WNU flowers, which created buzz and drove footfall into the store.

We definitely take a different approach with every store. Alongside that, we have a small number of strategic wholesale partners including Harrods, Liberty and Moda Operandi in the US.

Holly: You’ve expanded into the US, where nobody knows your brand. What have been your biggest learnings building trust in a new market? And have you noticed any meaningful differences between the UK and the US?

Lexy: Firstly, we work with an amazing PR team on the ground, Futong and Friends, who have been integral in helping us understand the landscape and those cultural nuances.

The biggest learning is that you have no brand equity to lean on. Everything you do has to work harder to earn trust. Press validation has been really important for us, alongside credible talent partnerships and word of mouth from real customers. You really need that validation and proof.

It’s also really important for us to be on the ground. Our London team travels out four times a year, and we always combine brand, community and retail moments whenever we’re there with ShopMy and Meta campaigns around these moments. We’ve tested retail through pop-ups and trunk shows in New York and Palm Beach, but the community piece has been particularly interesting. It’s small and unscalable, but we’ve seen an incredible halo effect from relatively small activations.

In February we hosted a vision boarding event with 40 women. We gifted everyone a shirt, then invited them to spend the evening vision boarding over wine and cheese.

It wasn’t about sales. It was about introducing people to the brand and giving them an experience that they’d genuinely enjoy and remember. Since that event, we’ve seen a real halo effect through consistent coverage on Substack and ShopMy from attendees.

Our US customers respond to the same things our UK customers do: British heritage and the modern simplicity that’s at the core of the brand. The US is up 250% year on year, and we’re up 100% year on year in the UK, which signals that we’re building trust, but there’s still so much more to do.

ShopMy has become a really important part of our growth strategy because it helps us tap into different regions and networks. We’ve got a big activation in Nashville in November, and we’re already using it to identify and build relationships with local creators before we arrive.

Holly: What’s something you’ve been reminded about in marketing over the past few years?

Lexy: The power of a catalogue.

For years, a catalogue felt very outdated, but now we see it as one of our most valuable acquisition channels. Customers who come through our catalogue have a higher lifetime value and a higher first-order value than our online customers.

People love having something tangible they can read at home in their own time. We also love it because it gives us a longer-form format to communicate the brand and address one of our biggest customer pain points—how to get dressed, particularly for different occasions.

WNU is so well positioned for this because you can wear your shirt and tailored trousers for the school run, walking the dog or dinner in the evening. Our catalogue gives us the space to break that down into really digestible formats.

Holly: There’s often a perceived tension between brand and performance marketing. Do you think there is?

Lexy: No, I actually think the opposite. Brand marketing creates demand, and performance marketing amplifies and captures that. I don’t think one can exist without the other if you want to scale a business.

We have very different KPIs, but we work incredibly closely together. Our Digital Director is probably the person I speak to and work with the most. It’s not a one-way conversation. Performance marketing generates so many insights. We’re constantly looking at imagery and understanding what styling, product and messaging gets the most engagement or clicks, and then we use that to inform our campaigns.

Holly: Outside of work, where do you find inspiration?

Lexy: I definitely think getting off your phone - at the weekend I really try not to look at Instagram, and sometimes I’ll even delete the app because I think a lot of good ideas come when you’re not looking at a screen. I’m most inspired on a long walk or swimming. I find swimming so meditative.

When I’ve got a big piece of work, I sit down with a pen and paper and write everything out. I think the best ideas come when everything settles and you can think clearly. It’s like four days into a holiday - you can finally think clearly because you’ve taken a bit of time away.

Films are another huge source of inspiration. I love Luca Guadagnino films - have you seen After the Hunt? Everyone is beautifully dressed, every set is beautiful.

And then there’s people watching. There is nothing better than watching how people style things. I think the best-dressed people are the people who look relaxed. You look at them and think, “Why do they look so cool? They’re just wearing a crumpled shirt and a pair of jeans.” It’s because it’s not overly done.

Holly: It’s effortless. Just like WNU style. What are you most excited about that’s coming up next for With Nothing Underneath?

Lexy: We have a very exciting new category launch in August that I can’t talk about yet, but it’s going to be huge. We saw a lot of success with our Lucy Williams collaboration this year and we’re working on another partnership for next year. Lots of exciting things are on the roadmap!

Quick Fire

A brand you’re loving right now?
Matteau, Phoebe Philo accessories, Bottega—I love all the tailoring.

A book everyone should read?
Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn and To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara.

A Substack you never miss?
hi holly, of course. Then The Wardrobe Edit by Anna Newton, Remotely by Lucy Williams, Nightshade by Melanie Marasin and not a Substack but Lauren Sherman’s Puck - essential reading.

A magazine you always pick up?
How To Spend It - I love what Jo Ellison has done there - and House & Garden.

Your favourite creator who wears WNU?

Melanie Masarin, Harling Ross, Tatiana Hambro, Lucy Williams, we have too many to name!

Your dream collaboration?
I think it’s got to be J.Crew. They’ve built such an iconic brand. I love Olympia’s vision, the art direction - everything.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

We’re talking 17-tabs-open kind of madness. I asked ChatGPT, which confidently produced a shortlist in about four seconds and somehow managed to make every possible option sound like the right one. I discussed every choice with my husband, disappeared down Reddit rabbit holes, wasted an entire evening watching TikTok reviews, canvassed my mum friends’ WhatsApp group, and, at one particularly low point, found myself zooming in on photographs of strangers’ playrooms to see what was sitting in the corner.

I wanted something beautiful, something open-ended, something that wouldn’t become another forgotten piece of plastic by the end of the month.

Somewhere between the browser tabs and my latest attempt to compare two almost identical wooden toys, I realised I wasn’t really trying to answer the question, which one should I buy? But instead - does this feel like the sort of choice a mum like me would make?

I don’t remember asking myself questions like that 10 years ago. Whether it’s social media pressures, tighter budgets or the strange performance of modern life, I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is that somewhere along the way, ordinary products seem to have stopped being just products.

Of course, brands have always traded on identity. What's changed is the breadth of categories. Somewhere along the way, even the most ordinary purchases became shorthand for our taste, our values and the lives we imagine for ourselves.

Sometimes I miss when buying olive oil was just buying olive oil. When choosing trainers didn’t feel like an exam in cultural literacy. When bed linen was simply bed linen.

Now olive oil comes with a philosophy about cooking and connection. Trainers are signals I’m not cool enough to decode. Children’s products arrive with entire ideas about the kind of childhood we’re hoping to create. Somewhere along the way, it seems, even the most ordinary objects acquired points of view.

Brands like CHOPIT are turning chopping boards into sculptural objects worthy of permanent display (cool campaign vid here). PlayLinen sells more than bedding; it evokes a childhood of sun-faded afternoons, colour and outdoor play. The Awa water bottle describes itself as elevated hydration. I’m obsessed with the benjie band aid brand. Even Fishwife has transformed a humble tin of fish into the coolest item in the cupboard. Somewhere along the way, everyday objects stopped being purely functional. They became part of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, or who we'd like to become.

This isn’t a criticism at all. I’m exactly the customer these brands are speaking to. I love beautiful packaging, thoughtful branding and discovering companies that seem to see the world in the same way I do. The very best brands have always sold more than products. Sometimes they sell aspiration. Sometimes belonging. Sometimes reassurance that we’re already becoming the sort of person we’d hoped we’d be.

As I closed ChatGPT, still no closer to finding the perfect gift, it struck me that AI had solved the wrong problem. It had made discovery effortless. What it couldn’t do was tell me which choice felt right for me.

Perhaps that’s the challenge for brands. AI is making products easier to discover than ever before. The real opportunity isn’t simply being found. It’s becoming the brand people choose when they’re faced with an abundance of beautifully considered alternatives.

That starts with a clear point of view. Your Instagram isn’t simply somewhere to post content; it’s one of the clearest expressions of your brand’s taste. Founder stories aren’t personal branding; they’re context. Editorial, partnerships, events and product design aren’t separate marketing channels but different ways of answering the same questions before a consumer reaches the checkout: Who are we? And perhaps more importantly, why us?

The competition isn’t another chopping board, another tube of toothpaste or another tin of fish. It’s every other beautifully branded object competing for the same discretionary spend - for a place in someone’s home, their routines and ultimately, the story they tell themselves about who they are.

In a world where every category is full of excellent products, the brands that endure won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest campaigns—or even the best product. They’ll be the ones with the clearest point of view, expressed so consistently that people don’t simply recognise the brand. They recognise themselves in it.

And for the first birthday? Well, the gift I’d spent too long researching turned out to be on pre-order and wasn’t going to arrive in time. So, the afternoon before his birthday, I walked into a Nature Baby store and admitted defeat.

The lovely sales assistant picked up something I’d never heard of in a catagory I had initially dismissed and before I’d had time to overthink it, my eldest son spotted it ran over, climbed straight on and refused to get off.

So, readers, I bought it.

For a week I’d been asking what the gift said about me. Whether it reflected the sort of parent I wanted to be. Standing there, watching him whizz around the shop, I realised I’d forgotten the simpler question.

Would Jesse actually love it?

Luckily, every so often, a boisterous 3 year old reminds you that, however much meaning we attach to the things we buy, they’re still meant to be lived with, played with and loved.

PS This is the gift we ended up with here for Jesse’s first birthday - if anyone else is looking.

Other things I’ve consumed this week

• Watched: The Bear season 5: just a beautiful ending to the series.

• Visited: Adelaide’s Kitchen just opened near me in Paddington (Sydney - sorry London friends) and it’s a gorgeous spot.

  • Plus LA friends I spotted a new FroYo space opening called Meadow which looks gorgeous -on my list when I’m next in the city.

• Cooked: Alison Roman’s cheesecake recipe for my son’s first birthday gathering at the weekend - always a hit and so easy!

• Read: ‘s take on the evolution of the brand trip (this was from last year but feels very relevant still) and Substack I’ve been enjoying.

  • Also book recommendations here

• Shopping: I’m obsessed with this With Nothing Else shirt* thank you so much to the brand who sent it.

• And also shopping: Jewellery brand of the moment, Tilly Sveas is offering a free postcard print with purchases by Ciao Chiara - I love this little detail and their chunky T Bar necklace*

*these products have an affiliate link: it means that if you purchase I get a small commission but does not influence my recommendations.

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I opened my notes app, nestled somewhere between shopping lists, reminders and passwords (yes, yes, I know) I wrote one question: is everyone a founder now, or does everyone just want to be one?

That note sat there for weeks but over the last few days I’ve been pulling at the thread. According to LinkedIn, founder titles are up 300% since 2022 and almost 70% this year. Nearly 4 in 10 professionals say they want to go out on their own. Founders, seemingly, are everywhere. The question for me isn’t why. It’s why now? What changed?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

THE SYSTEM STOPPED MAKING SENSE

In the UK, redundancies rose over 18% between 2024 and 2025, with 2026 forecast to be another record year. Globally, three in ten companies plan to replace employees with AI by 2026, and just last month 80,000 Meta employees were laid off, described as “AI casualties.” All of this sits on top of a decade of stagnant wages, restructures presented as strategy, and career ladders that seemed to move just as we reached for the next rung.

Then, for some, add motherhood.

Image: One Fine Day - a mum juggling it all!

The pay gap doesn’t just persist; it accelerates the moment a woman has a baby. Men’s earnings increase after becoming fathers, while women’s stall or fall — economists call it the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus in the same breath. Women returning from maternity leave can find themselves sidelined, passed over, managed out. For a lot of women in my life, that’s the moment the calculation finally tips. It’s rarely dramatic; more often, it comes from a clear-eyed look at what the system is offering and deciding there has to be a better way (from personal experience, raising kids without a village is really, really hard).

When the safety net looks this precarious, building something of your own stops being a romantic rebellion and starts looking like the more rational bet. And here’s what the risk conversation consistently gets wrong: for a generation facing redundancy waves, a pay gap that compounds over decades, and a motherhood penalty that can derail a career mid-stride, staying in the system is actually the riskier option.

Entrepreneurship isn’t the leap of faith it used to be. Continuing on the old path is.

FOR WOMEN, THE MATHS DOES NOT MATH

Women still earn 84 to 85 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gap that compounds across a career. Women look up at the senior roles ahead and increasingly question whether the trade-offs are worth it. Always-on availability, office politics, the scrutiny of being one of very few. It doesn’t necessarily look like a reward.

And yet the narrative we keep perpetuating is this ambition gap. Women opting out, stepping back but we’re missing what they’re stepping into.

In 2024, women launched nearly half of all new businesses in the United States, up from 29% in 2019. Female-founded companies generate 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested compared to 31 cents for male-founded companies, according to BCG, and still only receive around 2% of venture capital. Make it make sense.

It’s not a lack of ambition. It’s the corporate path offering less, and the founder path offering ownership, upside and the chance to set your own price.

For me, the vision I have for my life and my family isn’t going to happen by selling my time. The things my parents’ generation built, the house, the security, the sense that hard work pays off, feel increasingly out of reach on a simple salary. Building something, owning equity. For my generation, it might be the only route left to the life we were told was possibl.

Emma Grede. Hot Smart Rich and Maggie Reum Sellers’ discourse around “f**k you money” surfacing in group chats. This isn’t hustle culture rebranded. It’s wealth-building as a feminist act.

FOUNDER BECAME SHORTHAND FOR A NEW KIND OF AMBITION

For a long time, “founder” mapped onto two archetypes. At one end: venture capital, product-market fit, a cap table and an exit on the horizon. At the other: the kitchen table creative, the Etsy shop, ambition that was never supposed to stretch much further than paying the bills. Both legitimate. Neither left much room in between.

What’s emerged is everything that didn’t fit either box. The newsletter that becomes a consultancy. The podcast that becomes a media business. The community platform that starts as a shared spreadsheet and becomes a company with real revenue and real influence. Like Shameless Media, Sheerluxe. Or brands like Sult, Chopit or , launching with one or two SKUs and growing deliberately from there. Serious, scalable businesses built around expertise, audience and taste.

20 years ago, building a business happened largely behind closed doors. Founders felt exceptional, almost mythical. The internet changed that. Social media made these business models visible in real time, the logistics, the pivots, the unglamorous middle. Proof of concept. It shifted the question from “is this possible?” to “why not me?”

“The most powerful thing social media did for founders wasn’t reach. It was making new kinds of businesses imaginable.”

Founder has become the word we reach for when we mean: I’m building something that’s mine, on terms I set. The ambition has always been there but now we have permission to name it properly.

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THE PORTFOLIO CAREER: A CHOICE, NOT A CONSOLATION

And the most interesting change right now is people actively choosing to build across multiple things simultaneously. Fractional work, consulting, advisory roles, a newsletter, a product. Not because the traditional path wasn’t available, but because this model works for them better. The rise of the portfolio careerist ( the go-to for this!) coincides with businesses increasingly seeking deep expertise on demand over full-time long-term hires. The person running 3 fractional engagements alongside a platform they’ve spent years building has more leverage, more resilience and more upside than the one waiting for a promotion that may never come.

The founder title is expanding to contain all of it. The deliberate builders, the women who did the maths and decided to do their own thing, the person building a lifestyle business on the side. Launching an agency a media arm. They don’t all look the same. Their businesses don’t look the same. But we now have the imagination to contain them all under the founder umbrella.

WHAT THIS ACTUALLY MEANS

The founder boom is not a trend that will reverse when the economy stabilises. The structural forces driving it, AI, redundancy, the pay gap, the collapse of the traditional loyalty contract, are not temporary.

What we’re seeing is a reorientation of ambition. Away from climbing someone else’s ladder toward building something with your name on it. Away from waiting for the system to make good on its promises toward deciding you’ve waited long enough. And as much as we hear how tough it is - I think it’s one of the most creative expressions. It’s a different ambition to the one we might have expected but it might be a better one. Here’s to the founders.

OTHER THINGS I’VE BEEN CONSUMING THIS WEEK:

• Let’s Go Baby app, a New York mother curating the city’s best baby-friendly restaurants.

• The Things We Never Say: I just started this my first Elizabeth Strout book

• I’ve been listening to Italo Disco playlist while I work.

• I met with the brains behind this week and was reminded of this post by on The Expert Influencer which I think its still super relevant today.

• The Loewe x David Shrigley collab: very cool

• piece on new media theory here

• on why VC's hire creators - an interesting move to treating media, distribution and audience ownership as part of a VCs competitive moat.

• ++ thank you to for the shoutout on her latest newsletter here

Me writing this between client calls - hi!

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been struck down by Knicks fever, just like the rest of New York and what feels like everyone on the internet. I’ve watched more game highlights in the last month than I have in the previous 10 years combined, alongside a steady stream of cultural commentary surrounding it all: the memes, the fans, the brands, the politics and the courtside celebrity gossip. I’ve consumed it all.

I learnt that Alana from Haim enjoys making screen-printed T-shirts in her spare time. My TikTok algorithm directed me to the best place to buy vintage 90s Knicks merch (Mr Throwback in the East Village for those looking) and I’ve had my heart warmed watching New Yorkers gather around a projector in the West Village to watch and celebrate together. It felt like we were watching a city collectively will its team to win.

Beyond the cultural narrative, the economy surrounding Knicks fandom has gone bananas. Official merchandise partner New York or Nowhere had people queueing for hours outside its SoHo store. Official sponsor Saie leaned heavily into its well-timed partnership, from makeup classes for the Knicks City Dancers to courtside activations and even a wrapped Saie bus. (watch more here). Meanwhile, New York institutions and New York-coded brands like Kith have been pushing partnerships and sneaker collaborations, often winning more share of voice than national sponsors simply because they’re more connected to the identity of the city.

And whilst I usually find brands jumping into cultural moments a little cringe, I have to admit I’ve loved seeing the likes of Glossier, Van Leeuwen and Away lean into the moment through organic social. Perhaps because they didn’t feel like outsiders attempting to borrow relevance or make a quick sale but instead felt like joyful participants.

Aside from the business of the Knicks, it got me thinking about some bigger brand questions. How are sports teams so good at creating belonging while brands spend millions trying to manufacture it? And more importantly, what can we learn from them?

Give people a reason to gather

Watching the reaction to the Knicks this season, one thing became clear: the strongest communities are often built around something much simpler than we think: a reason to gather.

Over the past decade, brands have become increasingly interested in community. Membership programmes, ambassador networks, events and private WhatsApp groups have become standard features of the marketing playbook. Yet building community around a brand requires far more effort than simply hosting another in-store event.

At a basketball game, the game itself is only part of the appeal. The atmosphere, anticipation, rituals, traditions and sense of participation matter just as much, whether you’re sitting courtside or watching from a crowded sports bar. The game provides the focal point and everything surrounding it creates the belonging.

The same principle applies to brands - communities emerge around shared experiences, shared identities and shared interests and it’s perhaps why some of the most interesting brands like Bandit Running, Bobbie and Soho House are investing in experiences, programming and partnerships with existing communities rather than only trying to build something themselves.

Something I keep coming back to it that we often talk about community as though it’s the starting point and something that can be built or engineered through the right strategy, platform or channel but increasingly, I’m not sure that’s true. Community is an outcome. The by-product of creating something people want to return to, participate in and tell other people about.

Space for Anticipation

An enormous part of what has made the Knicks story so compelling is that it feels rare. This isn’t a team that’s been consistently winning for decades and so much of the excitement comes from years of waiting, hoping and believing. The anticipation had time to build and there’s most importantly a break between seasons.

Brand marketing rarely allows for that kind of patience - we’re conditioned to be always on with full ambitious roadmaps, launches, announcements, collaborations and campaigns that roll into one another and we’re often required to feed more and more content to the unsatiated and ever hungry algorithm.

But let’s remember that the best moments come from anticipation, letting the moment have space by doing fewer - bigger better. Give consumers time to be excited for the next moment - I think brands doing this well are in the beauty space: FFern, Rare Beauty, Rhode, Refy. They really launch the world around the collection and then don’t immediately rush to the next message - they take a pause.

Actual Authentic Endorsements

The Knicks have a deep roster of celebrity fans which of course heightens the buzz. I became so invested in Timothée Chalamet’s courtside looks, Jordyn Woods’ lucky orange handbag, Hailey Bieber, Jay-Z, Larry David, Tracy Morgan and long-time fans Spike Lee and Ben Stiller and, of course, the Taylor Swift and Haim moment.

What makes all of it so compelling is that none of it feels overly orchestrated. Upon researching I learned that the Knicks have a strong approval process for who gets seated courtside which goes by Knicks owner James Dolan with celebrities needing to pass a loyalty test (this was an interesting read here)

It made me think that there’s probably a lesson in that for brands (even if you’re not directly working with celebrities) that the most effective advocates are often the people who were already customers, already fans or already participating with your brand before a partnership existed.

Wear the Team

One thing sports teams understand exceptionally well is the role identity plays in belonging. The Knicks aren’t only watched, they’re worn. Caps, jerseys and vintage T-shirts become visible expressions of fandom.

My sons, almost 3 and 1, both proudly wear their Sydney Swans caps to the AFL. It makes my heart burst that they already have a local team to root for despite having only the vaguest understanding of what’s happening on the field.

The same dynamic exists in brands too.

A few years ago at Papier, if you’d bought a notebook there was no logo on the front, only on the back. We eventually changed that because we realised people wanted to carry the brand more visibly. It helped us stand out, but it also gave customers a way to signal their connection to the brand. Owning a Papier notebook said something about you in the same way carrying a New Yorker tote or wearing a university sweatshirt does.

Look, not every brand needs merchandise. But the strongest brands understand that once people feel part of something, they look for ways to express it. Whether it’s a Sweet Pickles Book Store cap, a Fanelli’s T-shirt or a Dover Street Market tote, these symbols become shorthand for belonging and something we all need to feel right now.

Sport remains one of the few places where collective identity still exists at scale. One of the few places where people gather in person, wear the uniform, know the history and feel connected to something larger than themselves.

A phrase I’ve been loving and hearing a lot recently is collective effervescence: the feeling that emerges when people come together around a shared purpose and experience a sense of connection that is difficult to replicate alone.

Watching New York over the past few weeks, it felt like the perfect description.

Until next week, Holly x

Ways we can work together

Over the last decade, I’ve helped brands grow through strategy, partnerships, communications, community, influencer and market expansion, both in-house and as a consultant.

Today, I partner with founders and leadership teams on brand strategy, partnerships, communications and PR, community and editorial positioning.

I work with brands at the intersection of creativity and culture, helping them launch into new markets, build advocacy and connect culture with growth.

Working across Sydney, New York and London, I maintain a deliberately small client roster to ensure depth, continuity and direct access.

To enquire about working together 💌 hollyajchapman@gmail.com

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Image: My toddler - Miles - cheering on our local team - go swans (we lasted until halftime and ducked out for a well deserved ice cream)

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My answer was immediate. Yet before expressing it publicly, I felt the need to qualify my position, as though agreeing might somehow place me among those resistant to progress, nostalgic for a pre-digital age or, perhaps worst of all, professionally behind. A dinosaur in an industry increasingly obsessed with the future.

Use AI and people assume you’ve cut corners. Don’t use it and people assume you’re resistant to change, clinging to an increasingly outdated way of working. The judgement runs in both directions. Open any industry newsletter and the message is hard to miss: adopt or get left behind, automate or become irrelevant. At the same time, we’re witnessing a growing celebration of human-made work, with brands increasingly labelling it as such while anti-AI sentiment continues to gather momentum.

So which is it? Are you lazy for using it or a dinosaur for not?

Like most people working in marketing, communications and creative industries, I use AI. When I migrated from ChatGPT to Claude, influenced by a steady stream of TikToks and subway ads insisting it was the better, cooler tool, I was immediately impressed. The interface was beautiful. “I even love the font,” I remember telling my husband, slightly giddy at how quickly it could pull things together.

Having spent years around founders, consultants and agencies who obsess over presentation and detail, I could appreciate the appeal immediately. Documents emerged polished. Loose collections of thoughts became something resembling a finished piece of work in seconds. It was a thought partner, and a very servile one. According to Claude, all of my ideas were excellent.

AI occupies a strange position. In some circles, fluency with these tools has become a proxy for being strategic, analytical and ahead of the curve. In others, there’s an incentive to downplay just how much they contribute to the finished work. At the same time, a different status signal is emerging: the insistence that no AI was involved at all, as proof that the thinking, creativity and output remain entirely your own.

In many organisations and businesses, AI is encouraged for certain tasks and discouraged for others. We’ve even developed informal hierarchies around what feels acceptable: ad copy might be AI-assisted, while brand writing and organic social content are expected to come directly from the copy team.

Perhaps this tension explains why AI has become such a difficult topic to discuss. Opting out, or even expressing hesitation, can make you feel as though you’re on the wrong side of history. For years, the loudest message booming from tech companies, media outlets and business leaders was consistent: learn it, adopt it and integrate it into work and your life. The implication was clear, those who embraced AI would move forward and those who didn’t risk being left behind.

I’ve noticed this in my own behaviour. I save videos and newsletters about prompts, workflows and AI powered productivity systems with every intention of implementing them. Yet I increasingly wonder how much of that interest is my own curiosity and how much is down to a fear of missing something that everyone else is telling you is inevitably coming.

Perhaps this feeling has always accompanied periods of technological change? Yet, to me, this moment feels different because adopting AI has become a status signal in its own right. Fluency signals ambition, competence and future-readiness. Particularly in industries like marketing that pride themselves on being strategic and forward-thinking.

Which brings me to the concealment issue.

I’ve sat through many meetings where it was obvious the presenter had only a loose understanding of the material sitting on their beautifully formatted, Claude-generated slides. The work looked polished, and the narrative appeared coherent. But dig a little deeper, and the understanding underneath wasn’t always there. Occasionally, the data was wrong, dismissed and laughed off as a Claude hallucination and worryingly, only discovered at the moment of presenting. More often, the issue was more subtle: the thinking hadn’t been done alongside the production of the work. Whilst we admire the polish and finesse that AI provides, we’re less certain about what it means for authorship and expertise.

And ironically, more people are using AI than ever before, and fewer and fewer seem entirely comfortable admitting the extent to which they rely on it. After editing some AI-pulled text for a LinkedIn post recently, I found myself wondering why I had run it through ChatGPT in the first place. If the goal was efficiency, why was I spending so much time removing the evidence of having done it?

Why are so many of us feeding our writing into AI only to ask it to make it sound less like AI? Why are we deleting the em dashes, removing the overly breezy hyperbole and prompting the LLM to “make it sound more like me”?

For all the conversation about productivity, what we’re really negotiating is (I think) authenticity. We want the speed, polish and efficiency. We also want the credit for the thinking. We want to use AI, but we don’t necessarily want people to feel that AI used us.

Image: A post from Henry Holland I’m loving

At the same time, I’m seeing “not written by AI” appear on newsletters and posts with increasing frequency. , founder of Sporty & Rich, recently included it in the header of her newsletter. It struck me because the phrase functions less as a disclosure and more as a label of provenance, akin to handmade, organic, locally sourced that we’re used to seeing on other products. Has human-made become a selling point? Miranda Shananan did a TikTok around typos as a sign of intelligence watch it here.

Because it’s not slop it’s average

We talk a lot about AI slop, but what if the real problem isn’t slop at all? What if it’s just not quite good enough?

Because most of what I’m seeing isn’t obviously bad. It’s technically pretty competent but missing the rigour that comes from wrestling your idea into a distinct point of view. There are strategic words but not always strategy, ideas without any taste or cultural fluency attached to them. Presentations that sound right but don’t really say anything at all.

I think we all recognise that feeling when someone whose work we admire has clearly used AI to write something. I can’t quite work out whether it’s disappointment or like being cheated on in some way but either way I let out an audible sigh. Is it a symptom of the tool that we’ve become less confident in our own thinking.Not because we have fewer ideas, but because we’re more and more reluctant to present them before they’ve been polished, structured and validated by a machine.

I miss the fizzing energy of watching someone present an idea they’re really really excited about. Not because every pre ChatGPT idea was better, but because people seemed more invested in them. When an idea is yours, grown from a seed in your mind, you defend it, develop it and obsess over it. You notice things out in the world that strengthen it and build on it.

Increasingly, I’m seeing campaigns, partnerships and brand ideas that feel as though they could belong to almost anyone. They’re polished and they’re coherent and often entirely sensible. But they’re missing that cultural intrigue, that insight and perspective that comes from looking beyond the internet and out into the world for inspiration.

And here's my final observation. The time saved by Claude, ChatGPT, Wispr, Cluely and all the AI agent integrations into Notion and Figma isn't time I've observed flowing back into deeper thinking. While Claude is blinking, I'm the first to admit I'm probably on TikTok or checking slack. Numbed by more and more consumption, not less, and I don't think I'm the only one.

Written by me, a human - Holly

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Reading About AI:

• Debate About AI Plays OUt on Subway Ads NYT

• Atlantic The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI

• AI can’t save a brand with bad taste by

Other Things I’ve Consumed (Not AI):

• All the Knicks brand takeovers. Love it all!

• The Toy Story 5 trailer and of course, the Taylor song in preparation for the release.

• I also watched Interstellar over the weekend. Those who know me know I don’t watch very many films, so I know I’m very late to this particular cultural moment, but wow. My mind wa blown. If you have any space fiction book recommendations (from someone not previously into space) - please send them my way.

• Currently Reading: The Mother Is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why great non-fiction!

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about business, leadership or building brands. I was thinking about people. Why some seem able to move through periods of uncertainty convinced things will eventually work out, while others instinctively curl up and brace for the worst. Perhaps it’s because I’m figuring a few things out myself at the moment, but I’ve found myself thinking about optimism a lot lately.

It wasn’t long before the question began to feel less psychological and more cultural. I became less interested in whether optimism can be learned and more interested in why we’ve started treating it with suspicion.

Spend enough time online and it begins to feel as though cynicism has become a form of cultural currency. The fastest way to demonstrate intelligence is often to identify what won’t work, what has been overhyped or why somebody else’s idea was flawed. Entire content genres have been built on dissecting failed campaigns, predicting the downfall of brands and explaining why the latest trend has already peaked or a think piece on the Nike comeback.

Cynicism is often framed as realism. Optimism, by contrast, has developed something of a reputation problem.

The word itself can conjure images of naff motivational quotes on Pinterest, manifestation culture and blind happy-clappy positivity. The optimist is often portrayed as somebody who hasn’t quite grasped how difficult things really are. They are unworldly with their head in the clouds and wearing rose-tinted glasses (chic I say!)

In many circles, particularly among educated, creative and strategic people, optimism can feel slightly unsophisticated. The optimist is portrayed as naïve. The realist is the one pointing out risks, and the strategist is the one identifying flaws. The smartest person in the room is often assumed to be the most sceptical.

Yet the more I thought about it, the harder it became to reconcile that idea with the people responsible for building all the things I admire most.

For me, the past few years have involved more uncertainty than I would have voluntarily put my hand up for. A move from London to New York, then back to London and, before I knew it, Sydney. Leaving a brand and role I loved. Building a consultancy business in a city where I knew almost no one. Starting a media brand. Welcoming another baby. Taken together, it’s meant spending a lot of time in the uncomfortable space between making a decision and knowing whether it was the right one (not the baby - no doubts there!).

Looking back, none of those choices were driven by certainty. If anything, certainty was in remarkably short supply. They were pushed forward by something else.

Almost every meaningful decision I’ve made in the last few years required a degree of optimism. Not because I believed everything would work out exactly as planned, but because I believed there was enough possibility on the other side of uncertainty to make the leap worthwhile.

The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. So many of the things we value most are acts of optimism. Deciding to have a child without knowing exactly what the future holds. Walking away from a stable career to start something of your own. Spending years writing a book, recording an album or making art without any guarantee that anyone will ever see it.

Or take festivals. Every year organisers spend months erecting stages in fields, hoping the weather holds, the tickets sell and that for a few days thousands of people will gather to sing, dance and believe in the same thing. On paper, it sounds slightly absurd. Yet some of our most beloved cultural institutions are built exactly that way.

Yet somewhere along the way we’ve started treating optimism as though it’s a lesser form of intelligence. The optimist is portrayed as naïve. The cynic as sophisticated. The realist as strategic. But if optimism has been the driving force behind so much innovation, creativity and progress, why are we so quick to dismiss it?

Perhaps part of the confusion is that we’ve started using optimism and delusion interchangeably. “Be delusional” has become a popular piece of internet advice, usually offered as a remedy to playing it safe. But I’ve never found the idea particularly helpful. The people I admire aren’t delusional. They’re often painfully aware of the obstacles in front of them but they simply believe those obstacles aren’t the end of the story.

None of these people, builders, founders and creatives strike me as naïve.

If anything, they often possess a remarkably clear understanding of what could go wrong. What separates them is not an inability to see risk but a willingness to proceed despite it. They understand the reality of the situation. They simply refuse to mistake uncertainty for impossibility.

The economist and writer of Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, once described optimism as an engine of capitalism, arguing that many businesses would never exist if their founders had accurately calculated the odds of success. There is undoubtedly some truth in that. Few companies are built by people who begin with the assumption that failure is inevitable.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether optimism might be one of the most overlooked ingredients in building. Whether that’s a brand, a business, a creative project, a media brand, podcast, a career even a life.

Taste has become one of the defining currencies of modern work (and conversation.) Founders are told they need it. Marketers are encouraged to cultivate it. Entire industries have become fascinated by the idea that taste will become the defining advantage in an age of AI. And I agree with much of that. But taste alone isn’t enough.

Taste helps you recognise potential. Optimism is what gives you the confidence to act on it.

Other Things I’ve been Consuming:

The Atlantic: Are We Wrong About Screen Time? A thoughtful piece exploring whether we’ve become so focused on reducing screen time that we’ve overlooked something equally important: giving children compelling alternatives. Particularly relevant given the conversations around boredom, creativity and independent play. Ft Yoto.

Charlie XCX: love the new music, and my friend Jess’ first single on her new album Pretty Little Mouth go listen!

Dazed: Why Are Celebrities Obsessed With Taste? Given I’ve just spent the past week thinking about optimism, taste and why we seem suspicious of positivity, this felt particularly timely. An interesting look at how taste has become a form of cultural currency.

Spread the Jelly’s Motherhood Archive: Can I love any more? The team launched a motherhood archive bringing together essays and reflections on motherhood in New York. It’s thoughtful, beautifully curated and exactly the kind of thing that makes me excited about independent media.

See Your City as a Rothko: I wish I was seeing the Rothko exhibition in Florence. Instead, I’ve become mildly obsessed with this project that lets you view cities through a Rothko-inspired lens. Thank you to for sharing this. I love people who make wonderfully unnecessary things for the internet.

Farah on TikTok: If you work in marketing and don’t already follow Farah, you NEED to. Her breakdowns of paid social, creative performance and what actually works are some of the most useful marketing content I’ve come across!

Last weekend I wandered the NSW Art Gallery (alone without my kids) and it was just the loveliest morning - Sydney gets a bad rep for a lack of culture (often from me) but I loved the Archibald prize portraits.

Last Thing -

My first Sydney event “Build Your Brand Lore” is this Thursday, hosted by the wonderful - tix here come along!

Until next time - Holly

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I’m Holly Chapman, a brand strategist and advisor working across consumer brands in the UK, US and Australia.

Over the last decade I’ve helped brands grow through strategy, partnerships, communications, influencer, community and market expansion, both in-house and as a consultant.

Today I partner with founders and leadership teams to build cultural authority through strategic counsel, partnerships, communications, community and editorial positioning.

I’m particularly drawn to brands at the intersection of creativity, culture and everyday life.

I maintain a tightly curated roster to ensure depth, continuity and direct access. Working across New York, London and Sydney, I help brands connect culture and commercial growth through thoughtful, integrated work, with particular experience launching brands into new markets and building cultural relevance.

I work with a small number of clients each year. To enquire about working together: hollyajchapman@gmail.com

Scroll LinkedIn for 2 mins, and someone is diagnosing why a campaign failed, why a partnership didn’t land or how a brand lost the much-coveted cultural relevance. Open TikTok and there’s another piece of fantasy strategy content explaining what a brand should have done instead things like “If I was CMO of XYZ” and comments like “Call me, [insert brand name].”

The problem I’m seeing is that not all of it holds up once you’ve actually been in the meetings where marketing decisions and alignment happens. Ideas can dramatically change shape once budgets, timelines, creative resources and business priorities are in the mix.

I think this tension sits at the centre of modern marketing culture right now. The line between commentary and capability has become increasingly blurred. Because increasingly, strategy itself has become content.

I’m writing about this with a bit of hesitation. It’s been coming up a lot in conversations I’ve been having lately, here in Sydney but also with friends in London and the US. Partly because, hello, nice to meet you, I participate in the very same ecosystem myself. I write online, post opinions, share cultural commentary, strategic observations and the things I’m noticing in the world of brand marketing.

And look, I understand why this type of content performs. You’ve seen it where it’s like if Crocs x Stanley (or any other brand) did a partnership and makes it seem like the brand has never thought of it. Without opinions, the internet becomes a sea of sameness. I’ve posted opinion-led observations before and watched them outperform nuanced perspectives by a mile. Dramatic conclusions will always travel further than operational complexity online.

And the more I thought about it, the more it felt connected to a wider shift happening online:

• AI has flattened access to strategic language and frameworks.

• TikTok transformed expertise into entertainment.

• LinkedIn increasingly rewards conviction over complexity.

• Fractional work and portfolio careers lowered the barriers to positioning yourself as a consultant.

• Commentary became a business model.

• Visibility started masquerading as credibility.

• The creator economy shifted away from aspirational lifestyle influence in search of more expertise, depth and point of view.

And because most brands are understandably guarded around budgets, timelines and internal decision making, the final output has become far more visible than the realities shaping it.

Consumers and marketers see the campaign. They don’t see the retailer pushback, the legal limitations, the commercial trade-offs, the sometimes confusing and changing nature of founder opinions or the budget conversations which reshape the vision and idea behind the scenes.

The constraints are invisible. So the creativity required to work around them becomes invisible, too.

A creator once made a fantasy strategy about a brand I worked on and it eventually made its way back to me as Head of Brand via our CFO, which felt like a fairly perfect encapsulation of modern marketing culture.

This was also the same person who had previously suggested we might consider a collaboration with Taylor Swift which, respectfully, was a touch ambitious given the budget realities we were working with.

The internet has also flattened what “good” looks like. The same brands, campaigns and references circulate repeatedly until they become accepted shorthand for taste itself. Visibility drives legitimacy now.

Which is not to say outside perspectives don’t matter. Some of the most interesting observations come from people adjacent to industries rather than deeply embedded within them. But there is still a difference between recognising patterns and understanding what it takes to execute against them.

We are living through a strange moment where distribution is outrunning experience and where sounding informed online has never been easier to mistake for the real thing.

other things I’ve consumed

I went along to Sydney Writers Festival at the weekend and saw Jacinda Ardern speak - I left feeling so inspired and full of hope for the future and being a woman and a leader - what a woman. It also connected with a word I came across: respaire which has largely fallen out of use, it means hope after a period of hopelessness. I came across it in the latest issue of Mother Tongue and I keep returning to it.

Reading: I always have fiction and non-fiction on the go at the same time, swapping based on mood. Right now it’s John of John alongside Woman’s Work: Reclaiming Radical Mothering, which I cannot recommend enough.

I’m on a panel next week in Sydney talking about brand lore alongside Jessy Wu, hosted by . Tickets here. Would love to see you there.

And finally, this piece from , are you a bad mom for going back to work, has been living in my head. If you work in kids’ brands and you’re not already talking to this community, you should be.

And OBSESSED with Burberry’s star studded good sport campaign.

hi holly is a brand intelligence publication exploring strategy, culture and the brands shaping both. Written by brand consultant Holly Chapman, it’s read by founders, marketers and creative teams building modern brands.

here’s how I can help you:

strategy projects

I work across brand strategy, partnerships, PR & creative communications and community, helping brands shape cultural relevance, positioning and ideas consumers actually want to engage with.

consulting + advisory

For founders and marketing leaders looking for strategic support, outside perspective or an ongoing thought partner across a particular challenge, launch or growth moment.

market entry

Expanding into Australia, the US or the UK and want your brand to feel culturally plugged-in rather than simply present? I’ve helped brands build relevance, partnerships and traction across all three markets and it remains one of my favourite areas to work in

Get in touch: hollyajchapman@gmail.com

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I keep noticing the same themes everywhere: analogue experiences, tactility, intimacy and more creative forms of connection. Brands moving away from scale at all costs and towards participation, feeling and yes, the buzzword of the year, world-building. Maybe that’s why I keep finding myself drawn towards books, audio, salons, dinner parties and slower forms of media again.

Anyway, here are a few things I scribbled down this month. Would love to know what you’ve been curious about lately.

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new: brands want participation, not just attention

Brands are becoming less interested in simply reaching people and much more interested in becoming part of their lives. No longer just aiming to be top of mind, but embedded as something you participate in rather than passively consume.

I keep noticing brands experimenting with access and community infrastructure in ways that feels really exciting - As Good As Any is a brand I first spotted on someone’s TikTok wishlist. They recently launched a hoodie that could only be purchased via password access. You had to join waitlists, apply to be accepted into a WhatsApp group and even request to follow the Instagram account before you could see their content. Really leaning into IYKYK culture.

At the same time, brands are leaning back into slower, more analogue forms of connection. Papier recently launched its first Snail Mail Club alongside partnerships with creatives already embedded in the letter-writing world. Business Insider wrote about the boom in letterwriting here too. In a culture optimised for speed and scale, sending a letter suddenly feels surprisingly personal again.

Meanwhile in New York, Nécessaire sponsored the VIP breakfast at Frieze around the launch of its new hand wash and it instantly caught my attention as a wish I had thought of that moment. Guests arrived to giant hand-shaped cushions created with artist John Sohn, inspired by the idea of caring for the hands that make things. There’s something elegant about a hand care brand launching within the art world rather than simply placing products at an event or in the loos somewhere.

It felt very intentional. Frieze has become shorthand for a certain kind of tastemaker audience, and more and more, brands seem interested in cultural adjacency rather than pure scale. Being seen in the right places, by the right people, within the right context. That’s why beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands keep moving further into art, publishing and hospitality too. Traditional influencer marketing can sometimes feel predictable, whereas these worlds offer something much harder to manufacture: context, taste and emotional texture.

now: softness, tactility and emotional utility

I keep noticing people becoming more intentional around small rituals and everyday moments. Things that once felt rushed or functional are suddenly being slowed down, styled and shared.

Even snacks have somehow become a ritual rather than something wolfed down at 3pm. Creator The Naked Light started posting her daily snack ritual and it ended up featured in Vogue. Carefully packed fruit in stainless steel snack tins, sliced vegetables arranged like still life paintings. Tiny moments of pause and taking care of yourself are becoming aestheticised in the same way skincare routines or tablescaping once were.

I came across LLBean by chance the other day and noticed that the brand switched off its Instagram entirely for the month of May and I haven’t actually seen much commentary on it - in a landscape where every brand is trying to post more, optimise more and say more, the idea of silence feels quite appealing.

And then Zara Home emailed me this week simply to share a curated Spotify playlist. With no CTA and no shopping push in sight. Just a beautiful, understated email built around mood and taste. Which felt more memorable than most campaigns landing in my inbox lately.

At the same time, probably a reflection of where I’m at in life, I’ve also been noticing more attention being paid to children’s creativity and culture. I was really moved by a recent New York Times piece positioning children’s books as coping manuals for adults, alongside the news of the Children’s Booker Prize relaunching next year.

It’s partly why Yoto feels particularly interesting right now too [note: I work with the brand across Australia and the US]. Beyond being a screen-free audio player, there’s a huge amount of craftsmanship behind Yoto Originals, from writers and musicians through to sound design and illustrated artwork. It feels connected to a wider shift where children’s culture is increasingly being treated with the same taste and creative reverence as adult culture.

That same instinctive creativity keeps appearing elsewhere too. I’m obsessed with the idea of turning children’s drawings into jewellery and heirlooms. This necklace by Brent Neale fully falls into the category of things I cannot stop thinking about.

next: smaller communities w/stronger identity

After years of internet culture pushing everything towards mass scale and hyper-visibility, I think there’s a noticeable return towards smaller circles, recognisable faces and experiences that feel emotionally specific.

recently reported on the rise of local newsletters across the US, while neighbourhood projects like The Longest Table continue building gatherings around shared meals. It makes me think of The Beast newsletter landing in mailboxes across Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs each month, or Service95 launching its community dinner series.

At the same time, some of the more visible forms of internet culture are beginning to feel slightly out of step with where attention is moving. The traditional influencer trip is probably the clearest example. Consumers have seen the beautiful infinity pools, matching robes, branded towels, sunset dinners and near-identical itineraries many times before.

What feels much more compelling now is specificity. I loved seeing my favourite shirt brand With Nothing Underneath host a pub quiz in NY with branded pencils, a Marmite trophy and guests including Tatiana Hambro and Coco Mellors. It felt playful, self-aware and deeply rooted in Britishness without trying too hard and electrolyte brand SULT did a screen-free hike which also ended up with a pint and pub quiz.

To me, people aren’t necessarily looking for bigger, glossier experiences anymore. They’re looking for experiences with texture, things that feel emotionally resonant, recognisable and rooted in something real.

other things I’ve consumed:

Reading: this piece by Emily Oberg founder of Sporty and Rich on why she wouldn’t start a brand today if you want to understand some of the challenges:

“A decade ago, you didn’t need notoriety to start a brand.”

I keep returning to it because it taps into something I think many founders and creatives are feeling right now: that audience ownership and visibility have become almost inseparable from launching a company. Mystery used to be an asset, and now visibility is essential it connects to this piece I published last week.

I was also interviewed recently by Luci at Starr Studio about brand building, careers and finally pressing publish on this newsletter after 3 years -

Shopping: I’m heading into winter here in Sydney and currently very into this belted suede bucket bag from Liffner and I cannot stop thinking about these pale pink ballet flats from Yuni Buffa the lime are also beautiful but first boot season.

Listening to: pod - my friend Sharina was on this episode - how cool is she - listen for thoughtful, honest conversations around motherhood.

hi holly is a brand intelligence publication exploring strategy, culture and the brands shaping both. Written by brand consultant Holly Chapman, it’s read by founders, marketers and creative teams building modern brands.

here’s how I can help you:

strategy projects
I work across brand strategy, partnerships, PR & creative communications and community, helping brands shape cultural relevance, positioning and ideas consumers actually want to engage with.

consulting + advisory
For founders and marketing leaders looking for strategic support, outside perspective or an ongoing thought partner across a particular challenge, launch or growth moment.

market entry
Expanding into Australia, the US or the UK and want your brand to feel culturally plugged-in rather than simply present? I’ve helped brands build relevance, partnerships and traction across all three markets and it remains one of my favourite areas to work in

Get in touch: hollyajchapman@gmail.com

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plus some popular posts you might have missed:

I also recorded this as a podcast for anyone who prefers listening to reading and my dulcet tones.

Every founder suddenly has a podcast, a Substack, a dinner series or some kind of “founder diary” on TikTok documenting what they’re reading, thinking, buying, listening to and optimising before 7am. Increasingly, it feels more unusual to find a founder without a media platform than with one.

This week alone, Substack launched Open Tab, a new show focused on media founders hosted by Hamish one of Substack’s cofounders (I really enjoyed the first episode with Emily Sundberg), while Crown Affair founder is launching her own podcast Take Your Time (today!) exploring creativity and intention alongside her existing Substack. Joining a growing list of founders building what can only really be described as media platforms alongside their businesses. You can see versions of it everywhere: newsletters becoming communities, podcasts becoming brand extensions and founders increasingly becoming cultural commentators alongside operators.

I found myself thinking about why this is happening, and I don’t actually think it’s about ego or vanity, nor do I think it’s simply “building a personal brand”, a phrase that feels far too flimsy for what’s actually happening. I think we’re watching the rise of a new company model where media, distribution and audience ownership are becoming almost as important as the product itself.

For years, brands relied on traditional media, advertising in all its forms, paid social (RIP to the golden DTC years when Meta ads basically printed money) and increasingly organic social platforms to reach people. But social now feels fragmented, algorithms are unstable, customer acquisition costs are painfully high and AI is beginning to completely reshape how consumers search for and discover information online through LLMs. Consumers are also increasingly tired of being sold to via heavily scripted influencer campaigns, and so much online content now feels so engineered rather than interesting, and we’re all becoming influencers thanks to ShopMy, LTK affiliate.

In response, more companies are trying to build direct relationships with audiences through newsletters, podcasts, editorial platforms, events and communities that they actually own. And I think we’re seeing the ripple effects of this far beyond the output of the media. It’s changing hiring, brand building, founder visibility, partnerships, strategies and even what consumers expect from the people behind companies.

It’s also starting to blur the line between founder and influencer in a really interesting way. For years, influence sat largely with creators and internet personalities whose main product was content and then often, eventually, they would pivot into launching a brand. But increasingly founders themselves are becoming the tastemakers and trusted voices people follow. Founders like from Ghia or from Donni and of Glassette have audiences that are interested not just in the product, but in their taste, recommendations, references and point of view more broadly. The founder is no longer just the person running the business behind the scenes, they’re increasingly part of the brand’s distribution strategy itself.

Image: by Melanie Masarin founder of Drink Ghia.

And perhaps that’s also why some traditional influencer marketing now feels slightly flat. Audiences are becoming more interested in proximity to people who are actually building something, not just promoting it. Expertise, taste, access and point of view are becoming forms of influence in their own right.

I also think it changes the type of founder we’re seeing emerge. Ten years ago, the archetype of a successful founder was probably someone slightly elusive, operating behind the scenes while the brand itself took centre stage. Now, visibility feels almost baked into the role. The modern founder is increasingly expected to have opinions, references, cultural fluency and an ongoing dialogue with their audience. In some cases, the founder themselves becomes one of the brand’s most valuable media assets.

The phrase “every company is now a media company” has floated around marketing circles for years, but suddenly it feels much more literal. I read in The Economist that the closest historical comparison is probably the corporate magazine boom of the 20th century, when brands realised publishing could shape perception and loyalty far beyond a traditional advert. According to historian Roland Marchand, hundreds of corporate magazines launched in the 1930s alone. But what’s happening now feels much more intimate and personality-led because founders themselves have become the publication.

We no longer just buy products from brands. Increasingly, we buy into a person’s taste, recommendations, references, point of view and cultural lens. The founder becomes both operator and distribution channel at the same time. The lines between entrepreneur, editor, influencer, host and creative director are collapsing into one role.

And yes, part of me does occasionally wonder whether these audiences actually convert into customers in a meaningful way or whether some of this is just internet theatre, but ultimately I think the answer is probably yes. Maybe not immediately and maybe not in perfectly trackable attribution windows, but over time that familiarity compounds.

You can see it clearly in brands like Goop, which arguably wrote the blueprint for founder-led media years ago, but now the model stretches much further. TALA founder Grace Beverley has built an audience that extends well beyond activewear, while founders across beauty, wellness and fashion, from Siff Haider to Connie Nam and Amy Smale, are increasingly acting as podcast hosts and more of their own mini media operations. Even platforms like Substack are evolving beyond newsletters into broader publishing infrastructure, with podcasts, video and communities all becoming part of the same offering for those using the platform. You can even listen to this newsletter - are you? Hello!

I also think people underestimate how much of this is actually network building. A podcast gives you a reason to speak to people you admire, a framework for building relationships and a kind of cultural proximity that would otherwise feel inaccessible. Under the guise of “having someone on the pod”, founders are also building incredibly valuable networks around themselves and their businesses.

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And then there’s the bigger macro layer sitting underneath all of this: AI.

What does it mean that OpenAI bought a media company? That doesn’t feel like a random acquisition. It feels like a sign that trusted voices, archives, recurring attention and audience relationships are becoming incredibly valuable assets in the next era of the internet. Distribution is no longer just a marketing concern sitting somewhere downstream. Increasingly, it feels like one of the most defensible parts of a business.

That said, I do occasionally wonder whether we’ve collectively accepted a slightly strange new internet economy where consumers are expected to buy the product and subscribe to the founder’s thoughts alongside it (I’ll muse on that!)

At the same time, I’m also conscious that there’s a slightly darker layer to this expectation economy, particularly for female founders. More and more, the modern founder role seems to require being simultaneously brilliant operator, compelling storyteller, internet personality, community leader, trend forecaster and permanently accessible public figure. Nobody explicitly says women need to do this, but the market increasingly rewards founders who are visible, emotionally articulate and constantly online in a way that I don’t think exists to the same extent for men.

And perhaps that’s why this current era feels different from previous waves of entrepreneurship. The expectation isn’t simply that you build a good company anymore. Increasingly, you’re expected to build an ongoing media narrative around yourself while doing it.

The companies that feel most culturally relevant right now are adapting to a changing media landscape, experimenting with formats that feel native to them and finding new ways to stay in people’s orbit beyond simply trying to sell them something (directly!)

Anyway. I’ll obviously still be subscribing and listening.

That’s all for this week - Holly

Other things I’m consuming and thinking about

• I watched The Devil Wears Prada 2 over the weekend and what a riot! I loved it so much! This was an interesting read on their marketing rollout and why it worked so well culturally.

• I really enjoyed the latest piece from on Rodeo and have also been seeing the Tiny Dinner app pop up and the continued rise of curated IRL communities.

• The spring issue of Vogue US had a brilliant interview with Rosalía and Jonathan Anderson - pick up a copy and I just ordered the new Mother Tongue with a whopping $35 shipping but worth it.

• I started John of Johns by Douglas Stuart - is anyone else reading it? I’ll need to discuss it!

• My kids husband made me a homemade mini Mother’s Day zine and it might be the best gift I’ve ever received. Alongside a Rashi swim vest ready for swimming in Spring.

This is my series where I look at what's been going on in brand and culture and try to find the thread that ties it all together. The through-line of this issue is delight. Not a vibe or an aesthetic direction, but a deliberate commercial decision. The brands I'm loving right now are the ones that make people stop, feel good, smile, and immediately want to tell someone else, whether on Instagram or in person. If you’re looking for marketing inspiration, this is for you.

new: discoveries

Treat Yourself - Unna

I have been watching Unna for a while now (discovered via this creator) and there is something worth paying attention to here, especially given how much noise there is at the moment about Nike’s direction. I’m not saying Unna is taking market share (it isn’t, yet), but what it’s doing is something the big performance brands have largely stopped doing: making everyone feel included. The brand runs (pun intended) a weekly Smiles Run Club, the framing is warm, community-first, and deliberately not elite. Their clothes are colourful and playful (the stripes!), and the whole thing feels organic in an increasingly rare way. Their recent campaign with Hoka leans all the way into it: crayon-drawn graphics, a caterpillar-to-butterfly narrative built around the idea that every runner starts somewhere and progress is slow but powerful. It is the right level of whimsical. In a category that has spent years selling aspiration through performance, Unna is selling something most people actually want: to feel good about where they are.

Sweet Tooth

Candor Candy just opened in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and I am already planning a visit when I’m next in the city. It’s the kind of place you wander into for one thing and leave an hour later having discovered six others: there’s scoopable candy in every colour and flavour imaginable and beautiful velvet sofas to sit and stay a while. Founder vision is a neighbourhood institution where everyone, from the stroller crowd (I love that this was a thoughtful part of the design) to the locals, finds a little everyday delight. And for every Substack subscription, Instagram follow, and Google review, she donates $1 to local food banks including City Harvest. A direct rebuke to the M&M World school of candy retail.

And speaking of chocolate: Harry Styles' brand Pleasing just collaborated with Alice Mushrooms on a limited chocolate drop, and it makes complete sense. Pleasing has always sat in that considered, slightly whimsical wellness space, and Alice, with their functional chocolates, fits right in. Joy everywhere.

now: what's in motion

Delight as a launch mechanic

Three things landed in my feed this fortnight and they belong together. Miu Miu sent their new fragrance out with an ice cream scoop and a tray of “icecream”[kinetic sand] so that recipients had to dig to find it underneath. Zara Home opened their Milan store as a gelateria, sunshine yellow everywhere (the sunshine yellow alone, my heart). And Marni set up a flower kiosk in Milan, with blooms made entirely in their signature prints. It is the most Marni thing imaginable and I mean that as the highest compliment. The print, the flowers, the market stall format: every single element is so thoughtuful and beyond a stunt. They are considered decisions about what the moment of discovery should feel like. Plenty of brands launch a product. Very few think about engineering the feeling that accompanies it.

Bandana Bags

Every time I wear my Call It By Your Name bag I get stopped and asked about it. Validated this weekend by the FT, as it turns out. The bags come in bold primary bandana prints with first names appliquéd across the front in large rainbow lettering. Not the wearer’s name, but their children’s. I first spotted one on Monica Ainley years ago and immediately wanted it. For someone with a pretty minimal wardrobe, something this joyful and a little silly felt exactly right and apparently lots of people feel the same. The brand strategy is simple: these bags are conversation starters by design, every one a walking referral.

next: coming up

Retail earning its place again

The conversation about multi-retailer struggles is real, but it is obscuring something more interesting: the retailers investing in experience are pulling ahead, at least in driving genuine buzz. London friends, has anyone been to MagCulture at Selfridges yet? I am desperate to go. The Clerkenwell shop has curated 200 magazines celebrating the new generation of publishers reinventing the medium as part of a wider Club Culture season at the store. It is exactly the kind of thing that makes a department store feel like a destination again.

The Coach Charm Playground is running alongside it until 22 May, all oversized maximalist pieces, a Rex the dinosaur, an apple-shaped photobooth, charm customisation. Joyful, shoppable, highly photographable. Selfridges also just launched a Membership Club. This is a store that knows what it is doing.

Jil Sander’s Reference Library with Apartamento is a different register entirely but the same instinct: physical space as editorial statement. It is just beautiful, full stop. And you know I will find a way to mention books in every single issue.

Alex Mill doing personalisation at a Vogue Magazine pop-up at Altro Paradiso in New York, the Roxanne Assoulin collab, more colour, more joy. I think we’re watching Alex Mill find its footing in a very good way. And the Madewell x Get Happy Medium denim pastels are a reminder of how well the big brand plus small buzzy brand collab formula works when someone commits to it. More more more!

When the most digital company in the world hires for IRL

You know I’m team brand building and for anyone who still needs to make the case for experiential internally. Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, recently posted a role for a head of brand events at up to $400,000 a year. The piece noted that startups have been pouring budget into in-person experiences as a growth marketing strategy, with brands like Halfdays hosting nearly 200 events across 40 cities in a single year, and Kendra Scott opening a permanent bar in Nashville because 70 percent of their customers said they wanted more experiences from the brand. When the most digitally native companies in the world are competing on physical presence, the argument about whether experiential “works” is over and it’s actually a case of doing it.

things I’m currently loving

This piece by Ro Spinks on why having a project saves you. This is not brand-related but perfect for Saturday morning reading with a cup of tea.

Just ordered John of John by Douglas Stuart. So excited I have adored all of this other books!.

The Style-ish pod has been on a run lately, and their episode on Substack is worth a listen. Finally, people saying what they actually think. They riff on this Cut piece on celebrity brand names which is very fun.

Emily Sundberg’s ran a guest lecture with Gwyneth Paltrow and it is exactly as interesting as it sounds.

Lena Dunham did a Substack press tour instead of a traditional one for her new book, and the piece on how it went is fascinating. The future of book marketing is being figured out in real time and it looks like this.

And finally, my friend wrote a piece that I related to an unreasonable amount. The observation that we buy the exciting piece and never quite get around to replacing the stained white tee or the jeans that stopped being comfortable a year ago. I felt personally called out -go read it!

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hi holly is a brand intelligence publication for people who build brands — strategy, culture, and the thinking behind both. Written by me, Holly Chapman.

here’s how I can help you:

• strategy projects: Whether you’re building something new or figuring out what’s not working — across brand, partnerships, PR or community — I work with founders and marketing leaders on both the strategic foundations and the creative roadmaps that deliver.

• 1:1 consulting and advisory: For brand and marketing leaders who want an ongoing outside perspective on a specific challenge, without the overhead of a full engagement.

• market entry: Taking a brand into Australia, the US, or the UK - I’ve done it across all three, and I know what it takes to scale in each market.

Get in touch: hollyajchapman@gmail.com

This year the most talked-about activations are not from furniture brands. They’re from Zara, Chloé, Arket, Byredo, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Marni. What they're collectively showing is that Design Week has become the place where the most interesting brands come to express how they think about creative living — about craft, objects, and the texture of daily life. Luxury is shifting from aspiration to lived reality, and being part of this world is its own form of credibility.

Picture a working antique carousel in a public garden in Milan, its horses replaced with oversized fruits and vegetables, slowly rotating, inviting you to slow down, take a moment. That's Arket this week — and it's as wonderful as it sounds. The Nordic lifestyle brand has launched a collection with Laila Gohar, the artist and food creative whose aesthetic - warm, surreal, considered - translates perfectly to clothes. It's a move straight from the luxury fashion playbook: find a collaborator whose world you want to live inside, and build something together that neither of you could have made alone. There's a café alongside the carousel, ticket draws, small programmed moments all designed as an invitation to slow down. Whimsical but not frivolous. The right level of playfulness. What it tells you about Arket is that the most powerful brand expression isn't a social campaign, it's a world, and the right world, in the right week, in front of the right people, does more for brand perception than a year of content

Chloé did something equally interesting but in a completely different vibe. Rather than building an installation, they went into the archives, and what they found there was a tomato. The 1970s Tomato chair, soft and fluid leans into the surreal and has been reissued on a made-to-order basis with Italian manufacturer Poltronova. It’s the perfect piece of brand archaeology: Chemena Kamali has been celebrated for reviving the house’s free-spirited, bohemian energy, that adventurous, slightly wild spirit that defined Chloé in the 70s, and a tomato-shaped chair from that same era is exactly the right object for this moment, really building out the Chloé world. The archive is one of the most underused assets in brand building - but only when the dig turns up something that feels interesting, ownable with a bit of magic rather than only nostalgic.

Both of these moments involve produce. I’ve also been seeing the Loewe artichoke clutch everywhere. Vegetables are apparently having a moment in fashion and design, and I am completely here for it.

Then there’s Marni, who teamed up with café Cucchi to celebrate what they’re calling Milanese social rituals and a full takeover of the space, from textiles to pastry packaging to staff uniforms, running until July. The café itself is woven into the fabric of the city: the counter-top espresso first thing, the spritz at aperitivo hour, the pastries and chatter in between. It’s the perfect distillation of how Milan actually lives, which is exactly why this works. Creative director Meryll Rogge didn’t invent something new - she found something that already existed and made it unmistakably Marni. That’s a move only someone deeply tapped into culture would think to make, and it’s what separates this from the brand café moment we’ve all seen a lot of recently.

The best collaborations work like this, not just as a press moment, though it absolutely delivered on that, but as a creative unlock where two sensibilities meet and produce something neither could have made alone. Design Week is the best showcase of what that looks like in practice, and I have a lot more to say about how to do partnerships well. I’ll come back to it.

Finally, Miu Miu hosted what Vogue called the hottest ticket of the week — a literary club with lectures, live music and conversations on sexuality and consent, channelling the energy of the artist salons of another era. A fashion house that could have done anything chose to build a space for ideas.

What all of this points to is something I’m watching closely with the brands I work with. There is a real hunger right now for the physical, the considered, the handmade - for experiences that don’t require a screen and objects that carry some sense of artisan craft and beauty. In showing up at Design Week, these brands borrow the cultural cache of the world’s most serious design conversation — and it changes how we read them. Arket isn’t fast fashion anymore, despite being owned by the H&M group. It’s considered, thoughtful, design-led. That’s what the carousel does for positioning.

If you’re a founder or a brand director thinking about where your brand earns its credibility in 2026, the answer might not be where you expect. Maybe it’s not the Coachella outposts. Maybe it’s the carousel in the garden in Milan, merrily going round.

currently:

• Everything from the Lena Dunham Press Tour - every newsletter, every interview. Can my book arrive yet already!

• I didn’t need more stripes in my wardrobe but I treated myself to this top from Basikke and I cannot stop wearing it.

• On books, my friend recommended London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe - I loved his other work so I'm looking forward to that one arriving.

• This newsletter really resonated - Doing it all is a delusion by

• And ’s piece The Cultural FlyWheel is worth your time

hi holly is a brand intelligence publication for people who build brands — strategy, culture, and the thinking behind both. Written by me, Holly Chapman.

here’s how I can help you:

• strategy projects: Whether you're building something new or figuring out what's not working — across brand, partnerships, PR or community — I work with founders and marketing leaders on both the strategic foundations and the creative roadmaps that deliver.

• 1:1 consulting and advisory: For brand and marketing leaders who want an ongoing outside perspective on a specific challenge, without the overhead of a full engagement.

• market entry: Taking a brand into Australia, the US, or the UK - I’ve done it across all three, and I know what it takes to scale in each market.

Get in touch: hollyajchapman@gmail.com

Read More:

Subscribe now

And when I was back in New York last month, it was one of the first places I went (after eating at Ivan Ramen).

The Lower East Side store doesn’t read like retail in the conventional sense. It feels closer to stepping into someone’s home, not in the over-styled, retail-as-theatre way, but in a way that suggests the person behind it actually lives like this. Where so many stores lean into a kind of polished uniformity, there’s a looseness here, but also a clarity. Nothing feels accidental, and it resists the kind of sheen most brands default to.

That sense of world-building extends beyond the shop floor. There’s a bar, a coffee spot, tailoring happening in the background, details that feel less like add-ons and more like part of a wider rhythm. It’s homespun, slightly idiosyncratic, rooted in a vintage sensibility, but never overly brand-y.

That sensibilityc has shaped more than just the space. Over the past decade, Bode has quietly shifted the direction of menswear, making the historical feel not just relevant, but desirable, cool again. Jackets cut from antique quilts, shirts made from lace tablecloths — pieces once associated with feminine domesticity now sit comfortably within a broader, more personal definition of masculinity, worn by actors like Jacob Elordi and a wider cultural set of tastemakers and celebrities that has moved away from overt signals of status and logos.

The aesthetic is often described in familiar terms — artisanal, nostalgic, a little grandpa-coded — but that only goes so far. What made Bode resonate so quickly was its specificity. The clothes feel personal, designed from something and with references that extend beyond fashion and into memory, domestic life and history.

From the outset, it presented a question the fashion industry still hasn’t fully resolved: how a brand rooted in one-of-a-kind garments, antique textiles and deeply personal narratives might grow without losing the very qualities that made it distinctive, even as it expanded beyond sourcing into developing its own fabrics.

image: Bode on Hester Street

image: Inside Bode’s LA Store

when growth doesn’t dilute

Most brands begin with a real level of clarity in their early work; it’s specific, considered, and sometimes a little eccentric in the best possible way. Growth tends to complicate that. A retailer comes in, or a board forms, or the question of scale starts to impact decisions. The original idea is translated, rationalised, softened. And over time, the edges are smoothed out until the thing that once felt distinctive becomes easier to understand, more commercial, mass and inevitably, slightly less compelling.

Bode has been growing for nearly a decade, and yet the essence of the brand feels largely intact.

Its spring 2026 Paris collection was presented on 12-inch dolls arranged around the Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique, with clothes shown across multiple seasons because Emily doesn’t believe ideas should be rushed. The collection drew on the life of a jazz pianist’s father, a composer whose 1950s Paris and New York had been passed down through family stories.

At a time when fashion has often relied on immediacy and recognition, that kind of reference point feels almost counterintuitive, requiring a level of engagement that many brands have moved away from.

craft as a system, not a story

Their Senior Cord programme is where that philosophy becomes particularly visible.

Based on the twentieth-century college tradition of decorating corduroys with drawings and lettering, Bode has revived something deeply niche and turned it into one of its most sought-after offerings (and of course TikTok is onto it). Customers complete an in-depth questionnaire or 30 min consultation, and pieces are created in collaboration with artisans, entirely specific to the individual.

In an industry that has spent years trying to streamline personalisation — making it faster, easier, more scalable — Bode’s approach feels deliberately resistant. The process is slower, more involved, and at times inconvenient (there’s currently a waitlist) but that friction is part of what gives it weight and makes it cool. It creates a different kind of value, one that isn’t easily replicated or scaled.

What’s notable is how little separation there is between product and narrative. In many brands, storytelling is layered on through campaigns or positioning. At Bode, the provenance sits within the product itself — in the fabric, the construction, the references — meaning the storytelling rarely needs to be overstated.

Across the brand, that same instinct repeats. Quilts turned into jackets. Tablecloths into shirts. Techniques and materials that might otherwise disappear are reworked into something contemporary and the values tell themselves.

controlling the world

From the beginning, Bode has been intentional about where and how it shows up, favouring neighbourhoods that feel lived in over traditional luxury retail corridors. I read in W Magazine that the stores are positioned to be within the rhythm of daily life - places where people are running errands, meeting friends, moving through their routines — rather than existing as isolated shopping destinations.

At the same time, as multi-brand retail has become increasingly volatile, Bode has invested in its own spaces, maintaining direct control over how the brand is experienced.

There are also no outside investors shaping expectations, no known over-reliance on third-party platforms, no visible urgency to scale beyond what the brand can support. The result is a model where growth is closely tied to control, allowing the brand to maintain a consistent expression across every touchpoint.

Because as distribution expands, so too does interpretation, and with it, the risk of dilution. Bode’s universe is too specific to be loosely interpreted, and its business model reflects that.

what it takes to hold the line

Every brand reaches a point where it is encouraged to become more accessible — to broaden its appeal, to simplify its message, to make itself easier to understand and easier to scale.The logic is sound, but the long-term impact is often less visible.

Bode’s response has been to move more selectively, making decisions that preserve the integrity of the original idea rather than extending it beyond recognition. That shows up in where it shows, how it presents, and what it chooses not to prioritise.

Even moments of visibility eg via celebrity feel incidental rather than orchestrated, a byproduct of cultural relevance rather than a driver of it.

Underneath that is a level of conviction that is difficult to replicate. From the outset, the brand has treated clothing as something to be preserved and carried forward, positioning itself less as a producer of fashion and more as a custodian of the stories garments can hold. It’s a far cry from the logic of fast fashion, and one that has remained consistent as the business has grown.

There’s also a more practical expression of that philosophy in how the product is treated over time. If something is damaged, it can be brought back and repaired, reinforcing the idea that these are pieces designed to move through a life, rather than be replaced at the first sign of wear.

What emerges is a different relationship to clothing altogether. Garments are not just worn, but carried forward — accumulating memory in the same way the original textiles once did. That sense of continuity stands in quiet contrast to a wider fashion cycle that has become increasingly fast, driven by constant newness and a more transient approach to clothing as identity.

the takeaway

What makes Bode interesting isn’t that it has slowed down, but that it has been deliberate about how it grows.

In practice, growth is rarely neutral. Decisions around distribution, partnerships and product gradually reshape a brand, often softening the very qualities that made it distinctive in the first place.

Bode offers a reminder that it is possible to build a business that protects its edges — its point of view — rather than smoothing them away, allowing the original vision to remain intact as the brand expands.

That approach has translated culturally. In New York, it has become one of those brands that people talk about - not just within fashion, but beyond, with a kind of quiet buzz that tends to build when something feels different.

A huge part of that comes down to creative risk. There’s a willingness to follow ideas that don’t immediately make commercial sense, to present collections in unexpected ways, to prioritise instinct over optimisation. It gives the brand a certain unpredictability, and with it, a sense of momentum.

It also reflects a broader shift in taste. Where traditional markers of status once leaned overt — the logo, the suit, the recognisable uniform — Bode offers something more considered. A jacket cut from a quilt or a tablecloth carries a different kind of meaning, which perhaps explains its appeal (and is why we all want one.)

Great articles about Bode here for more reading:

• WSJ

• The Cut

other things I’ve consumed this week:

• Music: Courtney Barnett’s new album, and this podcast episode about her shared by my friend Jess - 101 Part Time Jobs. She says: “Perfectionism doesn’t mean you make something perfect, it means you keep working on it forever trying to make it perfect.” I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

• Podcast: Lena Dunham on The Interview. I’ve also preordered her book.

• Reading: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (although, according to we’ll all soon be reading the reissue of The Tunnel).

• Cooking: I bought a $24 (£12) slow cooker over the weekend and haven’t looked back. Everything is now slow-cooked it’s the new me!

older reads:

new

are we having fun? the maxxing era

Funmaxxing has been in the cultural conversation for a while, but something has shifted in how it’s showing up. Games nights. Dinner parties. Creative Gatherings. Talking Salons (so much chic-er than a panel convo) People are gathering around things that are slow, physical, and deliberately, unapologetically fun.

Brands are leaning in too. Burberry used dice and a wooden puzzle for a recent activation (I read that it was handcarved!). Alex Earle announced her skincare line with a billboard that was a puzzle. Mel Walker (LOVE) created this cool creative for Aritzia. Papier launched board games last year and sold out. Réalisation Par put a leopard print photobooth in their store. These aren’t novelty. They’re products and spaces designed to bring people together, and people are showing up because that’s exactly what they want right now.

A puzzle on someone’s dining table stays there for days. A photobooth strip lives on a fridge for years. But a reel is gone in four seconds. The brands that understand the difference are building in a completely different register.

leon bagels x tony’s chocolonely

Tony’s Chocolonely popped up at Leon’s Bagels on Thompson Street in New York for three days, debuting a brown sugar cinnamon bagel with salted caramel cream cheese and chunks of Tony’s Everything bar. Silly, specific, completely of its moment. This is what a localised activation looks like when it’s done well: two brands with strong points of view finding a genuinely fun overlap, making it time-limited, making it worth the trip.

now

sound on

From listening parties to campaign films, music isn’t the soundtrack. It’s the strategy.

I’m still thinking about the way Rosalía invited fans into a darkened former bank in Williamsburg to hear LUX for the first time. Phones sealed away, stark white benches, near-total darkness. Before the music began, a single question appeared on the wall: “When was the last time you were in complete darkness?” It was beyond a launch event. It was an experience that reframes what an album can be, and more broadly, how sound can work in any space.

That mood is everywhere right now. Grassroots listening spaces in London where people go to listen like Shia Space and Spiritland. Music is so often just background to daily life, but when you listen with full focus on great speakers, you notice the amazing details. Sometimes you hear a song you already love in a completely new way.

Then Chanel, who just made the most interesting brand film in recent memory. A full reimagining of Kylie Minogue’s “Come Into My World,” directed by Michel Gondry who made the original, with Minogue herself appearing 25 years on. The song is the entire idea, and the PR it delivered proved it.

Bandit Running (cool interview here) built a hi-fi listening room into their West Village store (NY). Le Baus in Paddington (Sydney) launched with vinyls, coffee and menswear. The brands getting this right aren’t using music to fill space. They’re using it to create it. That could show up for you in curated playlists for collections, exclusive audio drops, or events that lean into music and the talent already in your world.

the third space is back. brands are building it.

Something is shifting in how the best brands think about physical space. Not “where should we open” but “what reason do we give people to stay.”

Sporty & Rich just opened on Melrose: 5,000 square feet, a garden, a coffee section, and it is beautiful. The café and garden isn’t just a nice detail it’s creating a reason to pop in.Two blocks down, Aritzia acquired Fred Segal and signed back the lease on the original ivy-covered 29,000 square foot flagship, vacant since 2017. They’re restoring the ivy. The plan is an experiential destination combining retail with community programming, designed to transcend traditional retail and function as a lifestyle hub.

A store that only sells things is a warehouse with mirrors and better lighting. The brief isn’t “open a store.” It’s “create a reason to be somewhere.” The brands that understand that are building community around their brands and that compounds beyond a campaign.

next

affiliate: the most underrated lever in your toolkit

Instagram just launched affiliate, and now is the time to make sure your strategy is set. When I first started working in PR and brand I didn’t fully understand it. Now I think affiliate is one of the most misunderstood and underused tools available.

The rise of Shop My, curated storefronts, and affiliate for press and influencers is enormous, but it’s hard to get right. What makes it interesting right now is the connective tissue it creates between community, culture, content and creative. Non-influencers, founders, and everyday customers are using affiliate links in their bios. Anyone can be a source of discovery regardless of their following size. Your customer is an influencer. The question is whether your brand has made it easy for them to act like one.

If you want to dig into what a proper affiliate strategy looks like in practice, I’m doing a small number of 1-1s this month.

pinterest is becoming a full commerce platform. pay attention.

Pinterest just annouced its first shoppable TV series on Roku, “Bring My Pinterest to Life,” a six-episode show pairing creators with everyday Pinners to turn their boards into real spaces, with QR-enabled shopping built directly into each episode.No traditional ad breaks and brands woven into the story. Pinterest is extending its planning behaviour into the living room, positioning inspiration-led viewing as a pathway to measurable action.

This is a platform that has always sat at the top of the purchase funnel quietly doing its work. It’s now moving toward closing the loop entirely, from inspiration to transaction without the user ever leaving. The brands that have been building on Pinterest seriously are about to be very well-positioned.

also worth your time: ’s recent LinkedIn post on how brands should approach their social feed and she just released the Q1 social report too here

things I’m currently loving

• The Calmm Rose Bay which is in a former little Church - I had my first lymphatic drainage treatment. Turns out I’m stressed, and my jaw knew before I did. I’ll be going back!

• Aussie friends - Norma’s Tiramisu in a Tin, the best example of gifting-as-branding I’ve seen in months

• ’s Substack, which I’ve been enjoying

• Sheet Society: the item I wanted wasn’t in stock so they sent it with a handwritten note and the most fun copy on the packaging.

• Donni’s colour palette right now. Just love it

  

• The Ladies Who Launch podcast with Aila Morin, CMO of Merit. Not one I typically listen to but I took a lot of lessons from it.

• The Quiet Media Mag inaugural edition by ordered it, loved it

• ’s MOM Friend issue 131: 15 things I wish I had in my wardrobe. For my shopping friends

And I’ve been sitting with something Emma Grede said in a WSJ interview last week: that she thinks about time with her children like limited-edition fashion collabs, creating high-impact core memories through big moments rather than constant presence. My husband and I do something similar, carving out half a day each on weekends for the things that fill our cup. For me that’s (sometimes!) a workout and then writing this newsletter in a coffee shop. Sometimes I go shopping and marvel at moving through stores without a giant double pram, being able to touch things without stressing about my toddler pulling a mannequin over. And my favourite thing to do is go to a gallery and be quiet. I need that time to be better at everything else. I think a lot of us do, and I think we’re finally giving ourselves permission to say it out loud.

What do you think? Share with me anything cool you’ve been noticing this month.

Leave a comment

Image: From the show FX Hulu

TikTok searches for JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette grew by over 9,100% in the month after the show premiered and estimates close to 30m videos relating to Bessette have been posted since the show started. Instagram shows 38.6m tagged posts.A tortoiseshell headband sold by a small pharmacy on Sixth Ave that Bessette once wore sold more units than in any period in that store’s 188-year history; [more alternatives here for my fellow shopping lovers.] On The RealReal, searches for vintage Calvin Klein jumped nearly 140% in the week after the premiere. 25 million streaming hours in the first five episodes alone. And according to brand performance firm Launchmetrics, Calvin Klein earned $16M in media impact value (or EMV) from Love Story mentions in the month since the premiere, and all without any formal involvement in the show or its costumes whatsoever.

And Calvin Klein’s response to all of this? They waited weeks before putting the lead actress in anything Calvin Klein. When they finally did, at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, they dressed Sarah Pidgeon in a custom gown (I liked it, but it didn’t really feel or connect to the refined slinky eveningwear CBK was known for and it wasn’t black) with a bag shaped like a bottle of CK One (??) It read to me as a brand noticing the moment, but knowing they had arrived a little late, and gesturing at its own history without quite connecting any of the dots.

To me, this is worth examining - not as a pile on, but because what happened here is an instructive case study (or warning) about the gap between cultural intelligence and brand agility, and most CMOS, brand directors and comms teams are working inside that gap every single day.

so, what was the moment?

To understand the scale of what was on the table, you have to understand what Carolyn Bessette meant to Calvin Klein, and what Calvin Klein meant to her.

She didn’t just wear the clothes. She was the embodiment of the brand’s entire aesthetic thesis at its peak. The restraint, the confidence, the sense that less was always more. She advocated for Kate Moss’s casting in the brand’s early 90s campaigns at a moment when the company was, by some accounts, on the verge of bankruptcy. The Moss campaigns helped save it. Bessette’s instinct for what was cool (her taste) was not incidental to the brand’s story.

And the show showed it, Calvin Klein is a character. The offices, the campaigns, the culture of the brand in its most potent era, all of it dramatised across nine episodes watched by tens of millions of people, many of whom were encountering this world for the first time.

The CK Valentine’s Day campaign window opened just as the show premiered on February 12th. Calvin Klein’s history of casting pop culture icons and up-and-comers made a Love Story moment feel, to many observers, practically guaranteed. Instead the brand chose Grace Van Patten and Jackson White, stars of Tell Me Lies, a different show entirely (one I haven’t watched - should I?). Both are wonderful but neither has any connection to what was consuming the cultural conversation that week and it feels like a miss.

What followed told its own story. Every retailer except Calvin Klein seemed to understand the assignment. Ssense’s homepage featured a paparazzi photo of the couple. Uniqlo staged a shoot with a brunette man in a backwards baseball cap and a blonde woman in head-to-toe basics, captioned “90s minimalism… inspired by icons of the time.” Tuckernuck promoted a “Bessette” shirt. Selima Optique built a waitlist for her oval sunglasses. J.Crew landed a win when Sarah Pidgeon wore its rollneck in episode 5 (on my wishlist). Vestiaire Collective built a partnership with FX timed to the premiere. Rhode tapped Sarah Pidgeon directly. Media outlets ran get-the-look round-ups that barely featured CK at all.

Image: Rhode

The archival market mirrors this - loudly - searches on Depop for 90s Calvin Klein increased by 1,646% in February, with vintage CK up 571% overall (similiar story to TRR). According to The Obserever searches for “Calvin Klein 90s” have shot up 850%, according to Google Trends. Viewers weren’t looking for what Calvin Klein is now. They were looking for what it was.

CK did eventually post a 90s edit, but by then everyone else had already drowned them out and it felt halfhearted. And anyone who walked into a store before that found something else entirely. A 20-year-old NYU student told Bloomberg she went straight to the SoHo flagship after watching the show. She found logoed sweatshirts, windbreakers, and denim dresses. She walked out empty-handed.

but the question nobody can answer from the outside

Here’s what’s hard to know: did nobody at Calvin Klein understand what was happening, or did someone understand it perfectly and couldn’t move fast enough to act on it? There’s a third read too: that this was cool, calm, collected CK, staying above the fray on purpose. I don’t buy it. The 90s edit posted two weeks in reads more like a brand scrambling to catch up than a brand making a deliberate choice.

We don’t know their processes, their stakeholders, or their structures. But the honest answer is probably somewhere in between, leaning toward the second scenario.

Major brands have cultural intelligence teams, agency relationships, social listening infrastructure. Someone in a meeting almost certainly said the words “Love Story” and “Valentine’s Day campaign” in the same sentence. The more uncomfortable and more common scenario is that they understood it and couldn’t move. Campaign calendars for Valentine’s Day are typically locked months in advance. Casting decisions go through legal, through approvals, through licensing conversations. Cultural moments don’t arrive on schedule. They arrive when they arrive, and the brands that can meet them are the ones that have built a parallel track, a fast-response capability that sits alongside the planned calendar with the mandate and the budget to move quickly when something real happens.

Most brands haven’t built that track. Most brand directors know they should and can’t get the internal buy-in to do it, because it requires holding resource in reserve for things that haven’t happened yet. That is a hard case to make in a budget meeting. It becomes a slightly easier one after a case study like this.

beyond the missed campaign moment

There is a second layer worth sitting with. Even if CK had moved faster, even if they’d dressed Pidgeon on opening night, there is a question about what audiences would have found when they went looking.

The minimalism that Calvin Klein owned in the 90s is no longer distinctive because everyone does it now. The brand that was transgressive for stripping everything back now exists in a market where stripped-back is the default. What made CK special was the specificity and confidence of the point of view, and that point of view no longer stands out the way it once did because the rest of the market has absorbed and commodified it.

This is not a campaign problem. It is a harder, more structural question about what Calvin Klein actually stands for now that its most distinctive aesthetic contribution has become the water everyone swims in. Love Story surfaced this tension in a way a normal news cycle wouldn’t have. It reminded everyone what CK was at its peak, which inevitably raises the question of what it is now. That is not a comfortable question. But it is a useful one.

the so-what

3 things for brand directors and CMOs to take from this.

First, cultural agility is a structural question, not a creative one. The brands meeting cultural moments in real time aren’t necessarily smarter or more culturally attuned than the ones missing them. They’ve built internal processes that mean they can actually move when something happens. Pre-approved budgets. Pre-agreed decision rights. A clear mandate for who can say yes quickly whether thats a reactive social post or influencer partnership or something bigger.

Second, precision beats volume when it comes to cultural references. A vague gesture at brand heritage can do more damage than no gesture at all, because it signals that the brand noticed but didn’t really understand or care. When you move on a cultural moment, be precise about which specific part of your mythology connects to what audiences are actually responding to. Get that wrong and you look like you read the headline without watching the show.

Third, a cultural moment can expose a product truth you weren’t ready to address. Love Story didn’t just raise the question of whether CK was culturally connected. It raised the question of whether the brand audiences are being reminded of still exists in the stores. That’s a much wider product and brand positioning piece.

The cultural lore around Carolyn Bessette is real and it isn’t going anywhere. The question Calvin Klein needs to answer is not whether it can move faster next time. It’s what it wants people to find when they arrive to the brand.

If you're working on your brand strategy and want a thought partner, you know where to find me.

book a consulting call

currently loving

• ’s piece Shoot Your Shot Wednesday, and my own commitment to taking part.

• CULTURED magazine a new discovery for me - I specifically loved the artist-to-artist interview formats here the conversation goes somewhere a standard profile never would.

• MOTHER TONGUE another print magazine and a gift from my friend Amanda exploring motherhood - it’s incredible I’m subscribing.

• These chopping boards by CHOPIT, discovered via a founder interview by Luci Starr on LinkedIn full piece here. Proof that LinkedIn occasionally delivers.

• A flower motif moment that started with Tory Burch shoes and has now expanded to include this flower chair by Rachel Donath that I cannot stop thinking about.

76% of people say posts on Reddit feel more honest than content they find anywhere else online. That number tells you something about Reddit. It also tells you rather more about the state of everywhere else.

121 million monthly active users. 88% growth in the UK. Half the audience is women. The "niche forum for tech bros" story ended around 2019 - most brand strategies just haven't caught up.

why this moment

In February 2024, Google struck an expanded content deal with Reddit, and threads started surfacing in search results at a scale that rearranged the SEO conversation overnight. The reasoning was straightforward: as AI-generated content flooded the web, Google started weighting sources that couldn’t be manufactured. Opinionated, community-moderated, written by people with no brief to please anyone. Thirty billion Google clicks on Reddit posts in the twelve months to May 2025 - a reordering of where trust lives online that is structural and not cyclical.

And then there’s the AI layer, which is where it gets strategically urgent. Reddit is now the most-cited source across major LLM platforms. The conversations happening in subreddits today are shaping what AI systems will tell your potential customers tomorrow. Absent from the real conversation in your category, you’re not just invisible in the present - you’re being written out of the future, one AI Overview at a time.

The conversations happening in subreddits today are training what AI systems will tell your potential customers tomorrow.

four brands. four lessons.

Yes, beauty has moved fastest here - CeraVe, Dove, the entire K-beauty ecosystem on r/SkincareAddiction with its 4.8 million members dissecting ingredients at a granularity no focus group ever reached. But the reason beauty brands got there first isn’t that Reddit is a beauty platform. It’s that beauty has always been a category driven by peer recommendation, and Reddit is peer recommendation at scale. The same logic applies to fitness, finance, travel, food, tech, fashion — anywhere people have strong opinions and want to hear from someone who’s actually been there.

The most instructive recent example begins, improbably, with an Ogilvy strategist going down a Reddit rabbit hole late one night. The question someone had posted years earlier on r/stupidquestions: did Michael Cera create CeraVe? It wasn’t a groundswell. A handful of posts, at most. But the team saw it clearly - a dormant conspiracy, a name that rhymes with a brand claim, a celebrity with exactly the right energy to play it completely straight.

What followed was forensically planned. Four weeks before the Super Bowl, a leaked paparazzi photo appeared of Michael Cera signing CeraVe bottles at a pharmacy. A TikTok went viral. Influencers speculated. Dermatologists issued rebuttals. A fake website launched. The brand, brilliantly, denied everything. By the time the Super Bowl ad aired, the story had already accumulated 15.4 billion earned impressions — before a single dollar of paid media ran that night. Final tally= 32 billion. The origin point was a Reddit thread no one at the brand had planted. They just had the presence of mind to go looking.

I saw the other version of this in New York last month, getting on the subway. Dove had taken Reddit reviews of their hair mask - all of them, including the ones that said it smells like an old lady and like expired hotel shampoo - and flyposted them across the city and OOH spots. Rather than bury the negative feedback, they built the entire campaign around it. “r/eal reviews.” What struck me standing on that platform wasn’t the confidence of it - though that’s considerable - it was the implication. That Reddit had become so culturally legible, so shorthand for this is what people actually think, that you could put the r/ on a subway wall and everyone would understand immediately what kind of honesty you were claiming. That’s a brand that has worked out where trust lives now.

And then there’s Runna - the running app acquired by Strava last April for a reported £150 million - which is the slower, more instructive version for most brands to learn from. Runna built a Reddit community of 47,000 members before running a single platform ad. The product was good enough that runners wanted to talk about it, and the team showed up consistently when they did - founders in threads, giveaways that felt native to the platform, the upvote system used as a ranked product backlog. When a potential subscriber searches “is Runna worth it” they find hundreds of unprompted testimonials from people with nothing to gain. That’s what happens when you earn a community and don’t ruin it. I’m biased because I work with the brand but I think Yoto also have one of the most passionate and wonderful parenting communities on Reddit too.

Yoto is another version of this, and arguably the more remarkable one because the category is harder. Parenting communities on Reddit are notoriously opinionated. The r/YotoPlayer community is something so unique: parents sharing homemade pixel art icons for each other's cards, recommending content, troubleshooting together, building what amounts to an open-source library around the product. Yoto didn't manufacture the community but they did build a product worth gathering around. Full disclosure: I work with Yoto - so take this with that context.

Four brands, four completely different relationships with the same platform. CeraVe found cultural intelligence in a years-old thread. Dove used the community’s own voice as the creative. Runna built a home in it. Yoto earned a community around the amazing product. None of them are doing the same thing, which is the point. Reddit isn’t a channel with a set playbook.

the thing that has to come first

All of this is contingent on one thing worth stating plainly. Reddit is the most efficient amplifier of both excellence and mediocrity the internet has produced. A weak product given access to authentic community accelerates its own undoing faster than any bad press cycle. No positioning exercise overrides a product problem at scale on Reddit. What brand strategy can do is create the conditions for word of mouth to travel - but only if the word of mouth is worth having.

So before asking whether you need a Reddit strategy, ask what Reddit would say about you if someone searched right now. That answer is more strategically revealing than almost anything else in a brand audit. And the gap between what a brand believes about itself and what its Reddit threads actually say — that gap, for a lot of businesses, is the most important brief on the table.

Before asking whether you need a Reddit strategy, ask what Reddit would say about your brand if someone searched right now.

if you want to start somewhere

Before you post anything, search your brand name on Reddit and read without flinching. What you find - the complaints, the comparisons, the unprompted recommendations - is a more accurate picture of brand perception than most agencies will give you.

1. Listen before you post: find the two or three subreddits where your actual customers are already talking. Not to participate yet — to understand the language, the complaints, the questions that surface repeatedly. Reddit tells you what people think about your category in words they’d never use in a focus group.

2. Put a person in the room, not a brand account: the brands that work on Reddit are almost always represented by specific people - a founder, a product manager, someone with genuine knowledge and a point of view. A branded account posting content performs like a branded account posting content. A person who works there and actually knows the answer is something else entirely.

3. Treat the upvote as a brief: if you have any community presence - even just people discussing your category - the upvote system is giving you ranked, consensus-driven intelligence on what matters most to your audience. Runna used it as a product backlog. There’s no reason a brand strategy team couldn’t use it as a creative brief.

4. Show up when someone asks: the most common missed opportunity on Reddit isn’t posting — it’s not responding. Right now there are threads in your category where someone has asked “is X worth it” or “has anyone tried Y” and got twenty answers from strangers, none of them from the brand. That’s the moment. A founder or product person who shows up in that thread - not to sell, just to answer - does more for brand trust than a month of content.

Most brands are still deciding whether Reddit is worth their time. Their customers are posting without them.

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hi holly is written by me, Holly Chapman, brand strategist and cultural synthesist. I work with founders and marketing leaders on strategy andconsulting projects. If that's you, get in touch.

In 2026, influencer marketing budgets are still growing, but the way brands deploy that spend is changing. According to CreatorIQ, the average brand’s influencer marketing investment is set to increase by 171% year-on-year — more than the previous four years combined. Sponsored creator content is now embedded into most brand strategies, and 92% of marketers say influencer content outperforms brand-owned content. [The report here is helpful]

The question is no longer whether influencer marketing creates value. It’s how brands should be working with creators as their role, and their influence, continues to expand.

The era of one-off, pay-to-post partnerships has long felt narrow and transactional. As platforms mature and audiences become more discerning, influence is no longer generated through volume alone. Brands doing influencer marketing well are prioritising depth: longer-term relationships, clearer roles for talent, and partnerships that extend beyond distribution into strategy, creative direction and cultural relevance.

Creators, too, are evolving. Video-first environments have reshaped how content is made and consumed. Production value still matters, but it now shows up through format fluency rather than overt polish — content that feels native, credible and culturally attuned, rather than promotional. At the same time, audiences are exhausted by content designed purely to sell. In response, many creators are building more intentional worlds around their work: newsletters, podcasts, community-led gatherings and real-world events, offering brands access to audiences defined less by scale and more by trust.

For brands, this opens up a different way of thinking about creator partnerships. The more useful question is no longer what post do we want? but how do we integrate into a creator’s ecosystem? How can a brand show up within an existing world — rather than interrupting it?

what does “influencer” even mean anymore?

The definition of influencer has morphed well beyond its original meaning.

Influence today looks less like aspiration — although that still plays a role — and more like authority: cultural, creative and intellectual. It belongs to people with a point of view that audiences actively turn to, whether in fashion, beauty, parenting, finance or culture more broadly. We’re also seeing growing influence from experts — consultants, marketers and operators — whose credibility is built on lived experience rather than aesthetics alone. Trust is formed through proximity and consistency. You don’t just follow these creators; you believe them. Their ideas reflect something you recognise in yourself.

This is where platforms like Substack become especially relevant. The rise of newsletter-led creators reflects a more sophisticated audience appetite for depth, taste and substance. These creators are followed for perspective. Smaller audiences paired with deeper engagement fundamentally change the value exchange. Consumption is slower and more deliberate, with trust earned through repetition rather than reach. And landing in someone’s inbox each week means brands can reach people without competing with the algorithm.

On Substack, creators don’t simply publish content — they host a world. Their audience shows up for how they think. That opens up space for collaboration that feels closer to editorial than advertising.

We’re already seeing brands test this shift. Rhode partnered with Feed Me in a way that felt embedded and organic with an interview with a guest lecturer interview with co-founder Lauren. J.Crew worked with not simply for reach, but for her authority and point of view - she also hosted an event at their pop-up. Screen-free audio player Yoto sponsored Laura Jackson’s newsletter here, aligning with her world - and within the context of her paid subscribers - rather than getting lost on social feeds.

Beyond newsletter sponsorships or reviews, there are multiple ways brands can work within Substack ecosystems: community chat takeovers, sponsoring live conversations, or hosting integrated founder interviews. When done with the right creator, this becomes a shortcut to trust and proximity — brands integrating into an existing ecosystem rather than interrupting it.

This broader redefinition of influence is reflected in where brands are placing their bets. Almost three quarters of agency leaders believe niche influencers will outpace celebrities in the year ahead, as audiences gravitate toward creators they relate to on a personal level. Podcasts and their hosts specifically have emerged as a powerful influence channel, with long-form listening and sustained attention creating familiarity that short-form social content struggles to match.

Image: Shameless Podcast hosts Michelle and Zara are dissectors of pop culture.

creators as collaborators, not executors

As creators gain authority, their role inside brand partnerships is shifting.

Brands are recognising that a creator’s value lies not just in output, but in judgement. Nearly half of brands now give creators full creative control on briefs, and we’re starting to see budget traditionally reserved for agencies or consultancies reallocated toward creator collaboration.

This requires brands to become more comfortable with looser content guidelines. Audiences are quick to spot when a creator’s voice has been flattened by brand scripting. As creators move from promotion to participation, authenticity becomes less about aesthetics and more about authorship.

It also means involving creators earlier — shaping ideas beyond campaign execution, informing creative direction and contributing to product development. In these partnerships, creators operate as collaborators rather than amplifiers. Their value lies in taste, cultural fluency and proximity to audience sentiment.

This shift is already showing up upstream. In 2026, according to Vogue Business lifestyle brand Heaven Mayhem is introducing a community-led design panel, inviting creators and customers into the development process itself. Rather than reacting to a finished product, creators are helping shape what comes to market — influencing design, direction and campaign thinking from the outset.

Some of the most effective work I’ve seen recently has come from creators acting as creative sounding boards - pressure-testing ideas, refining launches and offering clarity before campaigns go live. At Papier, we used creators and customers in this way ahead of a couple of our product launches. It provided not only support in terms of the launch of the product but also verified the direction.

offline but online

This evolution is unfolding alongside a broader cultural shift toward offline experiences.

As digital spaces become more commercial and more crowded, physical moments have regained significance. Events, salons, listening lounges, workshops, talks, book clubs and dinners create memory and meaning in ways digital content rarely achieves. Increasingly, creators act as hosts shaping how brands appear in real-world spaces.

This is where creators who operate as cultural connectors rather than content factories become especially valuable. Lizzy Hadfield’s book club is a clear example of how far creator partnerships can stretch when they’re built around taste and trust rather than output alone. Through Buffy’s, Lizzy has partnered beyond books — working with institutions like the Royal Opera House, jewellery and beauty brands and physical spaces like hotels— creating moments that sit at the intersection of culture, community and commerce.

These partnerships don’t rely on constant posting or overt promotion. They’re rooted in shared values, curiosity and real-world participation — creators acting as hosts, curators and collaborators rather than distribution channels.

Traditional influencer trips and heavily staged group events still exist, but the appetite for them is waning. The moments that land now tend to feel more intimate, intentional and creator-led and hosted rather than brand hosted.

commerce, curation and restraint

Commerce has evolved alongside influencer marketing, with affiliate models becoming more sophisticated and more visible.

Platforms like LTK [this TIME piece from 2024 is a good read] and ShopMy have shifted affiliates away from generic swipe-ups toward curated storefronts, where creators act as editors rather than salespeople. The value sits in selection and point of view, not volume. Consumers aren’t just buying a product, they’re buying into taste.[side note I read a great piece today about the rise in affiliate use for “non-influencers” here]

This shift has also reached publishers. Condé Nast’s introduction of Vette signals how seriously media companies are taking creator-led curation, blurring the line between editorial recommendation and commerce.

These tools offer clearer commercial outcomes at a time when influencer costs are rising. But they also sharpen the risk: when every recommendation is monetised, relationships can quickly feel transactional. The strongest affiliate strategies tend to be deployed selectively, aligned to moments, categories or long-term partnerships, rather than layered indiscriminately across every piece of content.

measuring what actually matters

For many years, influencer marketing followed the logic of paid media. Reach, impressions, CPMs, conversions. A campaign would launch, attention would spike, and the partnership would conclude.

That logic still has a role, but it doesn’t explain the full picture. CreatorIQ’s 2024 report highlighted that campaign measurement remains a persistent challenge for brands. Influence doesn’t behave like a media buy. It accumulates through familiarity, consistency and credibility - or it doesn’t and gets dwarfed by the algo.

As competition for top creators intensifies and rates rise, brands are becoming more selective. Creator selection is increasingly informed by metrics such as the ratio of sponsored to unsponsored content, posting frequency, long-term conversion potential and brand affinity. Authenticity erodes quickly when audiences see creators promoting a different brand every week.

The goal in 2026 isn’t perfect attribution. It’s better judgement — understanding where a creator sits across culture, community and conversion, and how their influence compounds over time.

where influencer marketing is heading

Once treated as a channel, influencer marketing now operates as an ecosystem.

Creators publish across platforms, host communities, launch products, convene events and shape culture in ways most brands cannot replicate through owned channels alone. Influence now lives across newsletters, podcasts, social feeds, physical spaces and commerce — often all at once.

For brands, this raises the bar. Success is no longer about briefing a post or optimising a metric. It requires creative judgement and open-mindedness: understanding how to enter an existing world without disrupting it. Strategic thinking: knowing how different creator touchpoints connect across the funnel. And restraint: recognising that not every moment needs to be monetised.

In 2026, the brands that stand out won’t be the ones doing more influencer marketing. They’ll be the ones treating it as part of a wider system — selecting partners carefully, committing for the long term, and building influence through context, repetition and trust.

This isn’t a volume game, the brands that win are backed by strategic teams - and powered by creative, integrated thinking.

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Most brands fixate on the US. It’s the market everyone eyes. But having seen launches succeed, stall and reset, I’ve learnt that progress is rarely about a single moment. It’s about sustained presence and continued investment across resources and for founders and brand not moving onto the next shiny thing but really connecting with the market.

That’s why Uniqlo’s current moment in the US caught my attention. A recent Vogue Business piece captured the shift – it’s not a launch story, or wholly a buttoned-up success story but a recommitment to focusing on the market. After more than twenty years since it launched in the US, Uniqlo is stepping up - accelerating store openings and positioning North America as a pillar of its future growth. The region remains its smallest globally (around 8.6% of Uniqlo’s total revenues for Q4) yet revenue is growing at pace, up more than 30% year on year in the most recent quarter. And the US is the big bet for the company.

What interested me wasn’t the ambition, “doubling down on the US” is a familiar phrase banded around leadership teams and in strategy decks but the patience and awareness to say “we’re not there yet”. After two decades in the market, and despite a significant retail footprint, Uniqlo still hasn’t fully captured the American consumer in the way its global scale might suggest. This renewed push isn’t about acceleration for its own sake. It reflects a recognition that while Uniqlo has built presence in the US, it hasn’t yet built sufficient brand gravity, and that further scale will require investment beyond retail expansion.

The focus of recent coverage has been on their retail footprint. The harder - and more decisive - question is what has to change beyond store count if Uniqlo wants that expansion to translate into lasting growth.

The limits of utility

In the US, Uniqlo is often entered through need rather than desire. Shoppers arrive because something practical is missing: a warm layer during a cold, snowy spell, a reliable basic before a work trip, a quick replacement for something worn out. The brand performs exceptionally well in those moments, solving real problems with speed and consistency. That strength has driven penetration, but it’s also shaped how Uniqlo is perceived. When a purchase is driven by necessity alone, the emotional attachment remains limited. The opportunity now is to build on that utility and translate it into preference, so that Uniqlo becomes a considered choice rather than a last-minute solution.

Retention as a growth engine

If Uniqlo has an advantage in the US, it’s retention. Once customers understand the product, they come back. Heattech becomes a wardrobe essential, the puffer coat pulled out year after year, your AIRism becomes your seasonal wardrobe. Basics are replaced every year.

In a market exhausted by drops, micro-trends and constant novelty, that kind of dependability is so powerful. This is where I would anchor my growth strategy: not by focusing only on acquisition, but by turning retention into advocacy.

At the moment, that loyalty remains largely invisible. Customers rely on Uniqlo at practical moments,weather shifts, travel, life changes, without framing that behaviour as brand affinity. That’s a missed opportunity.

Retention also opens up more deliberate (less historically cool) channels that reward continuity rather than novelty. Around 38% of US shoppers still engage with catalogues or direct mail, particularly outside major coastal cities. Not as nostalgia, but as editing. A tightly curated seasonal Uniqlo catalogue could reinforce the message of considered innovation, showing how pieces work together over time. In a market saturated with digital noise, especially in middle America, tactile media offers a great way to connect.

I’d layer retention deliberately: encouraging sharing and word-of-mouth, translating repeat purchase into cultural proof, and aligning with tastemakers not to manufacture hype, but to make reliability aspirational. Dependability doesn’t have to be boring — but it does need framing.

Fix the foundations: back to basics

Before introducing new initiatives, Uniqlo needs to strengthen the foundations that shape how the brand is experienced in the US. This isn’t about adding more channels or louder marketing. It’s about returning to basics and making sure the brand’s intelligence is legible wherever consumers encounter it.

The most obvious pressure point is digital. The website is functional, but emotionally cold — transactional rather than brand-led. For a business of Uniqlo’s scale, it feels oddly cheap. In a market where roughly three-quarters of consumers shop online, this isn’t a secondary channel; it’s the front door. Right now, it doesn’t reflect the quality, confidence or thoughtfulness of the product itself.

Social follows a similar pattern. Uniqlo US has reach — around 700k followers on Instagram — but limited creative distinctiveness. The opportunity isn’t to post more, but to be clearer. Recognisable formats. Real-life usage. Storytelling around why certain items become defaults, what gets replaced season after season, and how people actually rely on the brand. Simplicity should be a creative asset, not a limitation.

This is where investment in creative matters. Not in a trend-led, fashion fantasy sense, but in articulating craftsmanship, innovation and everyday design with restraint. Uniqlo’s Japanese heritage is an advantage here, not as aesthetic shorthand, but as philosophy: precision, consistency, utility and respect for process. As Uniqlo founder Tadashi Yanai has said, “Without a soul, a company is nothing.” The task now is making that soul legible in the US, across site, social, influencer, stores and ATL, so the brand feels coherent rather than fragmented.

Image: This more editorial direction from Uniqlo, styled and shot by Harper’s Bazaar, feels more resonant than colder campaign creative. It shows there’s a cooler, more culturally fluent way for the brand to show up — one that builds on Uniqlo’s strong bones and product truth.

Personality, without performance

When Jacquemus announced its first global ambassador - the designer’s grandmother last week, it worked because it had emotional resonance, it felt true to the brand and it was unexpected. It was a signal of values.

There’s something here for Uniqlo. Not in copying the gesture, but in recognising that personality doesn’t have to come from celebrity or over-extended ambassador contracts. The brand currently has ambassadors like Roger Federer but at Uniqlo’s scale, that can feel forced - and often invisible.

Rather than chasing ambassadors, I’d foreground the human intelligence already inside the business: the teams refining fabric and fit, store staff who understand layering better than any ad, and customers who treat Uniqlo as everyday infrastructure. This isn’t sentimentality. It’s authority.

Creative leadership plays a role here too, but selectively. Most consumers don’t need to know who Clare Waight Keller is. Culturally it matters for the positioning of the brand in the market. Used sparingly, creative direction signals judgement — not fashion fantasy, but intent.

Collaborations should follow the same logic. Many of Uniqlo’s partnerships currently read as licensing rather than cultural participation - Miffy etc. And though I love the JW Anderson partnership it feels and is very UK feeling - finding who is the US equivalent is key for growth. In the US, I’d prioritise artists, designers and musicians (especially with the Austin store launch) with real relevance to specific communities — taking cues from brands like Skims, which understand that credibility compounds when partnerships feel native rather than imported.

Image: JCrew x JW Anderson

From craft to culture — and what retail should do next

Uniqlo already runs in-store workshops - embroidery, customisation, repair (did you know?) - but in the US these often land as craft rather than cool. They don’t need to shift the activity but the framing and partners they work with.

Working with culturally relevant artists and studios would reframe these moments as participation rather than programming. Thinking like a curator — closer to Hermès commissioning artists than a retailer hosting events — changes the energy entirely. It drives brand equity and more clearly inserts Uniqlo into culture.

The same applies to localising activations eg Fashion Week. February in New York is cold, impractical and unforgiving. Almost everyone has a version of the same story: ducking into Uniqlo to buy Heattech or a puffer they hadn’t planned for, but suddenly couldn’t live without. That is an insight worth building a story around.

Rather than staging a runway (not very on brand), Uniqlo could formalise that truth: a utilitarian pop-up near the shows offering winter essentials designed purely for warmth and survival. Editors wouldn’t come to be impressed. They’d come because they needed it - it’s a huge op for engagement and positioning.

Their retail experience should feel warmer too and Uniqlo has tried to do this by incorporating Japanese coffee bars into some of the stores like 5th Av, but the execution matters, and it’s not designed to be shareable (I’m not saying it needs to be novelty) but the experience has to feel interesting, to be leveraged as an acquisition driver and bring people in.

Video: The execution is missing for me in the cafe, but I like the idea. I wonder if there could have been a way to partner with a Blank Street and bring in a speciality coffee or experience to drive more reach and buzz?

Uniqlo doesn’t need to arrive again in the US - it’s doing so many cool things already. But it needs to keep showing up - warmer, clearer and more culturally fluent.

Most brands don’t fail in the US because they lack scale. They fail because they stop reinvesting resource, budget and in making the brand relevant for that audience. Uniqlo’s next chapter suggests something more honest: that growth here isn’t about arrival, but accumulation — staying long enough to be understood, and committed enough to keep building when the work isn’t finished.

I’m excited to see what’s next for the brand!

Notes: How I’d approach scaling the US

Embedding the brand into culture would be the focus.

Priorities:

• digital foundations that reflect the intelligence/innovation of the product and brand

• creative execution that makes basics feel intentional, not anonymous

• value positioned as judgement not about price

• retention converted into advocacy

• an earned media ecosystems - PR, repeated influencer formats and investment, tastemakers over ambassadors

• physical presence that feels human, not theatrical

• local cultural participation — from SXSW in Austin to music, partnerships, publishing and sport
  

  
  Leave a comment - what have I missed?
  

  Leave a comment

Resources: Vogue Business, Business of Fashion, Vogue Business
Tokoyo Creatives Series Common Problems New Designers Face w/ Clare Waight Keller (Creative Director Uniqlo) Youtube

Consumers are seeing more. Brand teams are seeing more, too. We’re exposed not just to ads, but to an endless stream of content, formats and references from other brands, creators and platforms, often all at once. A billboard now competes with the shopfront beneath it. A TV spot competes with the show it interrupts — and the second screen in your hand while it plays. On Instagram and TikTok, brand content sits directly alongside organic posts and trending formats, blurring the line between advertising and entertainment altogether.

A friend recently told me she’d spent an evening watching “what I packed in my hospital bag” videos - despite not being pregnant and not planning to be anytime soon. That’s the level of distraction brands are competing with now.

the attention economy has changed

This abundance has its upsides. Access is democratised and popular formats travel easily. Inspiration is everywhere. But it also means that sameness sets in quickly. It’s easy to replicate what’s working for other brands, easy to follow a format and easy to lose any sense of what makes your work recognisable.

Which is why creative strategy matters more than ever and shouldn’t be treated as an output.

As WGSN head of consumer forecasting Cassandra Napoli when speaking with BOF described 2026 as shaping up to be the “year of great exhaustion”. Her call for “slow advertising” reflects a wider cultural fatigue: a desire for work that feels more human, more intentional and less relentlessly optimised and also a return to offline touchpoints.

Brands, she notes, have to play both ends of the coin - entertaining audiences while also being deliberate about what they stand for. That tension is exactly why creative becomes critical again.

Video: Drink Ghia shows that entertainment-led creative doesn’t have to dilute brand clarity — its content is playful and culturally fluent, but always anchored in a recognisable visual language that stops the scroll without losing the brand.

from optimisation to indifference

For much of the last decade, growth was driven by paid social. Platforms like Meta and Google rewarded those who best understood targeting, bidding and performance mechanics. Marketing became increasingly operational, and creative adapted to fit the system: clear CTAs, fast iterations, functional messaging.

It worked - until it didn’t.

As access to the same tools levelled out, so did results. As costs rose, many brands doubled down on the same approaches, pushing increasingly similar ads in an attempt to maintain performance. The same optimisation logic applied everywhere led to a familiar outcome: different brands, increasingly indistinguishable work.

Audiences didn’t consciously reject advertising; they simply learned to scroll past it. And so the focus on creative returned — not through nostalgia, but because the system stopped working without it, and marketing teams began searching for more effective ways to acquire and retain customers.

why creative carries more weight now

When attention is filtered by both algorithms and instinct, the work that cuts through tends to feel intentional. Creative that signals care. Creative that feels considered — dare I say it — on brand.

I’ve said before that the funnel, as we know it, doesn’t at all reflect how people behave. I’ve never been a big proponent of the analogy because we simply don’t consume in neat stages (if only!) We dip in and out, notice things out of order, subconsciously absorb, make connections and return later or not at all. Designing “upper” and “lower” funnel creative in isolation increasingly misses the point.

Creative strategy can’t just apply to ads anymore. It applies to every forward-facing asset: pop-ups, emails, organic social, partnerships, packaging, retail theatre. The creative is the brand, experienced in real time.

Image credit: ZARA HOME
Consistency as strategy: Zara Home applies the same creative language across partnerships and very different categories and channels even Youtube, even their sale messaging reinforces brand recognition over novelty.

US design magazine Domino wrote “new Zara Home editorials are akin to Beyoncé album drops. They don’t look like the cold, overly styled catalogs many big-box retailers put out. Instead, each campaign falls somewhere between a dreamy escape and a cozy, lived-in home. These are no staged sets either. They’re real-life locations, ranging from a Greek island mansion to a Tuscan villa”

the cost of creative fragmentation

Creative consistency is often framed as an aesthetic choice, but in practice it’s structural. The brands that struggle here aren’t short on ideas — they’re short on alignment.

When teams work in silos, creative fragments. Each channel optimises for its own objective and each campaign competes for attention. The result is a lot of activity without accumulation.

When planning is integrated (sorry, I’m a broken record), your creative travels further. One campaign can live across multiple touchpoints. One idea can be extended, adapted and reinforced rather than replaced. Seasonal moments become chapters, not resets.

Fragmentation is expensive. It weakens recognition, slows momentum and forces brands to keep reintroducing themselves. Coherence, by contrast, compounds.

And the key to this is bringing in creative teams earlier - they aren’t at the end of the brief they are before the brief - the ideas are created in tandem.

when ideas are allowed to bloom

There’s a persistent belief that creative needs constant novelty to remain effective. In reality, most creative never gets the chance to do its job.

Recognition is built through accumulation. Meaning forms through familiarity. Trust grows through consistency. When creative is refreshed too frequently, attention may spike briefly, but memory doesn’t form.

Strong creative behaves more like an asset than an output. It works harder over time, requiring less explanation and less persuasion as audiences begin to recognise it instinctively.

Some channels demand variation. Organic social is one of them. But variation doesn’t require new ideas - it requires new expressions of the same one. Different formats and moments, returning to a consistent message rather than treating creative as one-and-done.

Across the brands my community flagged as doing this well, one thing stood out: their social feeds felt considered. A clear throughline in tone, colour and pacing made each post feel part of something larger.

As platforms like Instagram increasingly function as a shop window, that coherence matters. Social isn’t just distribution; it’s where creative worlds are reinforced. And it only works when creative direction and organic strategy are shaped together, not handed over at the end and not led by disparate teams.

Image Credit: Crown Affair Instagram feed - an example of different formats that all cohesively work together. Refy, Drink Ghia, Graza are also great examples of this.

What good creative looks like in practice

Much of what resonates creatively does so instinctively — you feel it before you can fully explain it.

I was recently introduced to the work of Jasmine Dowling, described to me simply as “everything she touches is brilliant”. What stands out is how despite working across a number of brands there’s a consistency both to her work but also a connection to the brands. Her work feels considered. And most importantly lives as part of a wider campaign.

That investment in creative care creates a particular feeling as a customer. When brands creative is thoughtful you get the sense that you might be treated well — whether or not that’s objectively true. Creative, in this way, becomes a proxy for trust.

I was also speaking recently to who pointed me towards Manors (a golf brand). What stands out isn’t a single campaign, but the cinematic world the brand inhabits. The creative feels ingrained rather than applied (I believe the team worked with the amazing Emily at Sonder and Tell - their substack is great) and the creative has a clear sense of atmosphere, pace and point of view carried across every touchpoint.

That coherence is easier when creative thinking is embedded from the outset. It’s harder to reverse-engineer once a brand is already in market. But it’s not impossible - it simply requires discipline, and a willingness to treat creative as foundational rather than decorative.

Aesop as an example

What Aesop demonstrates is that brand consistency isn’t about uniformity — it’s about coherence. Different stores, different architects, different physical constraints, yet a recognisable creative language runs through all of it. The customer doesn’t need to decode each experience from scratch. The brand feels familiar before it’s consciously recognised.

That familiarity is doing commercial work. It reduces friction. It builds trust. And it allows creative decisions — whether architectural, digital or campaign-led — to compound rather than compete. When a brand’s creative language is this clear, every new expression reinforces what came before it.

This is ultimately why creative consistency matters. Not because it looks good, but because it makes brands easier to understand, easier to remember and easier to return to — across channels, moments and markets.

Image credit: Aesop Website and adore this creative by Jasmine Dowling - mentioned later in the piece which shows how consistency is also achieved on organic social creative.

inside the creative systems that scale

Creative that travels well tends to come from systems rather than moments of inspiration. The brands doing this best have shared review processes, strong feedback opportunities, integration of planning between marketing and creative and shared strategy sessions. The best teams I’ve worked with all have a sense of ownership over the work, from those on the briefing side to the execution but most importantly the results.

Campaign ideas are stress-tested across channels early, and creative teams are also empowered to make decisions, provide suggestions, and recommendations — and are accountable for the outcomes. The process isn’t to be rigid, but very deliberate and for brands doing it best the creative is an evolution, but it never feels scattered - there’s a clear creative vision that is easily distilled when working with both internal and external teams to maintain that.

where brand strategy and creative strategy converge

Taking “big creative swings” is increasingly necessary in today’s attention economy - but only when those swings are anchored in something solid. When creative ambition outpaces brand clarity, it rarely lands - it’s confusing. When it’s aligned with a brand’s ethos, it can do extraordinary work.

This is where the distinction between brand strategy and creative strategy starts to collapse. The strongest brands aren’t treating creative as an executional layer that follows strategy. They’re using creative to define strategy - to articulate how the brand behaves, what it prioritises and what it’s prepared to repeat.

In practice, that means creative directors are being brought into the strategic conversation earlier, with clearer ownership over how the brand expresses itself over time. Not just what a campaign looks like, but how it shows up — across channels, seasons and moments.

When that alignment is in place, big creative swings don’t feel risky. They feel right.

@jacquemusMaking the #Jacquemus Rond Carré clutch in Glass — Handmade in Osaka, Japan by artist Miwa Ito @glassman.poopoo who reinterpreted our bag with her craft. #MakingOf #Glassblowing #Craft #Satisfying

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the creative decisions shaping 2026

As I’ve been working on 2026 strategies, one thing has become increasingly clear: creative decisions shape far more than campaign performance. They shape trust, cultural relevance and long-term growth.

As The Future Laboratory’s Rose Coffey puts it, consumers are gravitating towards brands that can clearly articulate who made something, why it exists and what values shaped it. Imperfection, humanity and authorship are becoming signals of authenticity.

Creative matters in 2025 not because it looks good, but because it’s one of the few remaining ways a brand can be recognised, remembered and trusted in an increasingly crowded world.

And that only happens when it’s treated not as disposable output - but as something worth building, protecting and repeating.

brands my creative friends are watching for creative inspiration

A running directory of brands shared by readers and peers — not because of individual campaigns, but because of how consistently and thoughtfully their creative shows up over time:

• Jacquemus

• Burberry

• Aesop

• Loewe

• COS

• ZARA HOMEc

• Ferm Living

• Glassette

• Ghia

• Graza

• Away

• Damson Madder

• Manors

• YETI

• Summer Fridays

• Crown Affair

• The Go-To

• Sezane

• Toast

• Nomasei

  I’m curious - which brands stand out to you?

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I’ve been thinking about work this year. What’s actually worked, what hasn’t, and what I’ve learned by doing rather than over-planning.

So instead of resolutions, I’ve written this as a mini review - loosely inspired by - of what I learned (and earned) in 2025, the year I started building a portfolio career. My 2026 goals are still a work in progress - check back in for those.

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Exec Summary

2025 was a year of movement — geographically and professionally.

I moved from London to make a new home in Sydney, left a full-time role and brand I loved, had my second baby, and went freelance without the kind of strategy I usually insist on. I’d known for a while that this was the direction I wanted to move in, but beyond that, I didn’t plan much. I was led more by a loose vision than a fixed roadmap.

I went into the year with relatively low expectations. I assumed it would be about settling in, finding my feet, and creating space. Instead, work unfolded more quickly and more fully than I’d expected. New clients, senior fractional roles, and projects followed — the kind that reminded me I’m at my best when I’m building and being challenged.

It left me more confident in the decision I’d made — admin, tax, and operating across two countries notwithstanding.

It wasn’t a smooth year. Pregnancy and relocation made the low points feel heavier, and there were moments where I wondered if I’d made everything harder than it needed to be. But alongside that came clarity: a much better understanding of what makes a portfolio career work, and where its limits are.

This is a review of year one.

Image: My expectation of freelance life, Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.

What Worked

If you’re considering a portfolio career, these are the parts that made the biggest difference for me in year one.

Freelancing worked better than I expected, largely because I anchored my work in senior, strategic roles, supported by a small number of short-term projects. Taking on two fractional positions gave me continuity, credibility, and the kind of long-term remit I enjoy most — brand building, driving growth, and setting direction, rather than execution in isolation.

It helped that one of those roles was with a business I already knew inside out. Having an anchor with minimal ramp-up gave me early stability, and freed up energy to take on new clients and learn new categories and teams. Structurally, this mattered more than I realised. One of my fractional roles was focused on Australia, which meant I could work directly in-market — learning quickly, building relevance, and growing a local network far faster than I’d expected after relocating.

That consistency mattered during a year of personal transition. It gave the work a rhythm and me something solid to build from, rather than constantly starting again.

The projects themselves spanned very different categories — from media to tech — and that confirmed something I hadn’t fully appreciated before: experience really does travel across companies, markets, and product verticals.

Financially, the year matched my previous salary. With additional projects, I earned slightly more — although between tax across two countries, accountants, and six weeks off to have a baby, it will likely net out evenly.

I’d also quietly set myself up for freelancing months earlier by sharing my work and thinking publicly. Yes, I climbed (and continue to climb) the cringe mountain on LinkedIn, but most project and consulting opportunities came from people who already knew my work and had been following along. A reminder that reputation compounds — and that showing your work, ideas included, really does matter.

Writing, Visibility, and This Year’s Favourite Word: Distribution

Substack became my place to think in public, stay connected to the industry, and shape ideas as they formed. It also kept me visible when I wasn’t physically present. Writing became a way of staying in the conversation — and, in its own way, a form of networking.

I did, however, neglect LinkedIn this year, and I’m feeling the consequences now. Re-entering the algorithm is humbling. It’s pushed me to think more seriously about distribution — what it actually means, and how intentional it needs to be. Visibility compounds when you stay consistent; it fades faster than you expect when you don’t. One of my biggest learnings this year has been the importance of staying top of mind with the people who might need your thinking, your experience, or your support — often before they realise it themselves.

The Operating Reality

The Work Worked — But It Wasn’t Light

Fractional roles are often framed as flexible, but in practice they require deep context, emotional energy, and constant switching. Learning brands, processes, people, and category-specific challenges — all while delivering value — takes time. Yes, my days are technically flexible. I can swim after nursery drop-off. I just don’t always manage it. (A note to myself for next year.)

Two senior remits, alongside freelance admin, pitching for projects, and delivery, left limited space for experimentation — or for working out how to scale in a way that’s less directly tied to my time. There’s also a quiet pressure to prove value when you’re not embedded full-time continually, something I’m very aware of — and perhaps where my own perfectionism comes into play.

Pitching, too, takes longer than you expect. Conversations can stretch on for months. You can spend weeks imagining an opportunity before it materialises — or it doesn’t. It’s something I’m still learning to separate from my sense of self, and it makes planning ahead more difficult than it looks from the outside.

As a working Mum (why don’t we call Dads who work working Dads?!) Childcare has been another ongoing challenge. Committing to nursery days when your workload fluctuates is something I haven’t quite cracked yet — and I suspect I’m not alone in that.

I’ve also learned that stability matters to me more than I realised. When contracts near an end, uncertainty gets so loud. I spiral, briefly. And yet, each time, something else has followed. The real work has been learning to trust that pattern — rather than overcorrecting or making decisions from a place of fear and also to plan ahead.

What I’d Refine

Not everything landed this year — and that’s been useful too.

I experimented with offering ad-hoc consulting calls, but without a clear intake or brief. Too often I joined calls with little context and no thinking time, which made the work harder than it needed to be. I took close to ten advisory sessions over the year and would happily do more — just with more structure around what’s being asked for, and how I prepare. For anyone interested you can book a call here

I also poured a lot of time into a free Black Friday strategy book that, in hindsight, arrived too late and without enough distribution behind it. It was downloaded by 5 people - flop. That one stung, mostly because of the time investment, but it hasn’t put me off downloadable guides altogether. If anything, it clarified that these need to be simpler, earlier, and more top-of-funnel to work properly. The idea wasn’t wrong; the execution was.

There’s also been the ongoing tension where a lot of people want to “pick your brain”, and I’m naturally inclined to say yes. Learning where to draw that line — and how to do it without losing warmth — is still a work in progress.

Finally, time allocation remains tricky. Balancing paid work with things that compound more slowly — writing this newsletter, LinkedIn, building visibility — is hard when client work is busy. I know those channels matter. I’m just still learning how to protect space for them when everything else ramps up.

Growth

This was the year my work stopped feeling tied to one context or brand. Marketing foundations, comms, partnerships, integrated planning: the same instincts apply, even as the category changes. What’s shifted is my confidence in naming where I add value - and being honest about where I don’t.

A lot of that clarity has come from the people. Working across different businesses has meant learning alongside thoughtful, talented teams, and being exposed to new ways of working that have quietly reshaped how I think. As a generalist, the variety has been clarifying. I’m much clearer now on the work I enjoy, where I’m most useful, and what I’d happily leave behind.

I also learned there isn’t a perfect version of this to unlock. A brief stretch of being fully in mum-mode (when I first moved) confirmed something useful: I don’t want everything to be work, but I don’t want work to disappear either. I like building things. I like being stretched. The aim isn’t less work - it’s the right work, with enough structure around it to do it well.

That’s why saying no has mattered. I walked away from a really exciting project right at contract stage because my gut wouldn’t settle. Protecting the quality of my work — and the energy I bring to it — matters more to me than squeezing everything in. I hope it’s one I can go back to next year.

I’ve also realised that learning and embedding in a new market isn’t just something I’ve navigated by living in New York and now Sydney — it’s something I genuinely enjoy. Understanding context, spotting what travels and what doesn’t, and building relevance from the ground up is where my experience feels most useful, and where my curiosity works best. Another note for myself for next year - more of this please.

Conclusion

Looking back, 2025 wasn’t about finding a dream client. It was about understanding how I work best — and what needs to be in place for that work to last. It’s made me more deliberate about what I take on, how I show up, and where I place my energy. Less chasing. More structure. Fewer decisions made in a rush.

I don’t think a portfolio career is a shortcut to having it all. That’s probably been my biggest learning. What it’s given me instead is the freedom to redefine what all actually means.

Has anyone watched the 1987 film Baby Boom? Rewatching it made something click for me. Diane Keaton’s character is forced to make real decisions about how she wants to live, and what kind of work fits alongside motherhood. When the version of success she was chasing in New York no longer works, she builds something of her own instead - not as a compromise, but as a different expression of the same drive.

It deeply resonated with me. Choosing your children doesn’t mean giving up the work you care about. Sometimes it means changing how it looks.

I’m also clear that a portfolio career isn’t a fix. Work still needs doing, and the pressure doesn’t disappear. What’s changed is that I feel I have more agency over how that work fits around my life — not the other way around.

What I’ve come to understand is that there isn’t one version of “having it all” — just choices, seasons, and trade-offs.

And if there’s one thing I’m carrying forward:
don’t forget to imagine the best case scenario too.

Image: More my reality Dianne Keaton in Baby Boom