Almost everything I’ve bought lately is secondhand or vintage, and I’m not alone. TikTok is drowning in thrift hauls and vintage finds right now. The cool kids are spending their Saturdays digging through racks, scrolling resale apps, or browsing curated vintage stores, hunting for the one piece no one else has.

Transactions on secondhand platforms are up 22% from last year. About a third of all apparel purchases in the US are now secondhand. And it’s not just clothes - vinyl, film cameras, vintage tech, secondhand books are all having a moment.

Let’s look at what’s driving the rise of thrifting, why now, and how platforms like Vinted managed to turn secondhand shopping into a status symbol and built billion-dollar companies doing it.

Fast fashion made clothes feel worthless. Resale made them feel special again.

Nothing feels special when everything is infinite. When literally anything is available almost instantly, nothing feels precious or special. It’s the same reason your For You Page feels like nothing and everything at once. Infinite scroll, infinite stock, infinite identical $12 dresses. Abundance and easy accessibility kills meaning.

Secondhand fixes this by bringing back the two things fast fashion killed: scarcity and identity.

• Scarcity. A thrifted piece is basically always one-of-one. In a world where the whole internet can buy the same viral dress within 48 hours, “no one else has this” is pretty cool flex now.

• The hunt. Digging through racks (or scrolling resale apps at 1 am, I don’t know, don’t judge me) is the dopamine hit. The effort and thrill of finding something special is what feels so rewarding. Fast fashion optimized away all the friction and, with it, optimized away meaning too.

• Ownership. In a rented, streamed, subscribed-to world, owning a physical object with an actual history feels grounding. Your thrifted wardrobe turns into an identity marker.

Vintage as status is very real right now. People are hunting down 90s Prada and YSL in curated stores in Paris, Tokyo, NYC, or on Vestiaire and Vinted, because old and hard to find now reads as more elite than new and everywhere.

Sustainability is somewhere in there too, obviously. But if we’re being honest, it’s more of an alibi than a motivator. The story we tell ourselves to make the purchase feel virtuous, while the dopamine is coming from the thrill of the find. (Which, combined, is a genuinely dangerous purchasing cocktail, ngl.)

All of this is also not new. 70s punk, 90s grunge thrift, post-recession rise of thrifting as a trend in the 2010s - every generation rediscovers secondhand the second mainstream fashion starts feeling too mass-produced and hollow. What’s actually different this time is infrastructure. While in the past you’d have to spend hours going through racks, now we have online platforms that make secondhand shopping easy and accessible.

Even the brands are catching on. Coach has ReLoved. Patagonia has Worn Wear. Reformation partnered with Poshmark. On has Cyclon. Lululemon has Like New. It’s not a scrappy resale economy anymore but rather mainstream.

The main winner? Vinted.

Vinted took this exact cultural moment that’s been brewing over the last couple of years and did something very smart with it. Instead of trying to be the cool resale app (a spot already taken by competitors like Depop or Vestiaire Collective), they decided to be the sensible one.

All the brand-tracking numbers below are from our sponsor, Tracksuit, which tracks how people perceive brands. Let’s look at the numbers together.

Over the 12 months to June 2026, claimed usage of Vinted among UK women jumped from 48% to 56% - an 8 percentage point jump.

And the whole funnel moved with it:

• Awareness: +5pp to 93%

• Consideration: +6pp to 72%

• Investigation: +6pp to 64%

It shows that Vinted is capturing the category, specifically because it knows exactly which associations it owns and which ones it’s leaving on the table for Depop.

The Depop vs. Vinted split

Look at how people actually describe these two apps, and you’ll see two very different categories of brands.

While Depop is trendy, youthful, fashionable, expensive, vintage, and cool, Vinted is affordable, good, reliable, user-friendly, easy, cheap, second-hand.

Basically: Depop is for the cool fashion kids. It’s curated, trend-led, a little bit of a flex to shop there in the first place. Vinted is for “everyone else” - which sounds like a less exciting brand to build, until you remember “everyone else” is a much, much bigger market.

Depop went narrow and deep - own a specific, stylish, slightly aspirational identity, while Vinted went wide. Be approachable enough that your mum, your little sister, and your uni flatmate can all use it without feeling like they don’t belong there. Narrow can build a strong niche, but wide builds a category leader.

And when people were asked which brand “is for people like me,” Vinted scored 39%, more than double Depop’s 17%. Becoming the approachable and “for people like me” option is the reason why Vinted became a market leader.

The "on the way up" number matters just as much: perceiving a brand as gaining momentum pushes more people to try it. It's the bandwagon effect, one of the most well-documented biases in consumer psychology.

When people think something is popular and growing, they read that as a shortcut for "other people have already vetted this, so it's probably good," and they're more likely to jump in themselves. A brand that looks like it's winning becomes easier to trust, which becomes easier to try. Vinted being nearly double the category average on "on the way up" is very likely part of what's driving that usage jump we saw at the top.

The takeaway for brands

None of this happens by accident. You don’t accidentally end up owning “affordable” and “reliable” while your competitor owns “trendy” and “expensive.” That’s a brand deliberately choosing which associations to lean into strategically.

And you can only do that if you’re actually tracking how people perceive you in the first place. If you don’t know what people already think of your brand, you can’t double down on the good stuff or subvert the bad stuff. You’re just guessing.

Every brand moment has a public-facing story and a behind-the-scenes data story. They're not always the same. Shorts is Tracksuit's fortnightly newsletter covering the biggest brand stories, powered by their always-on tracking insights showing what's actually shifting in brand health beneath the surface.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• Vogue reports on The Rise of Influencer-Investor. The creator economy is growing up; creators are becoming more business-savvy, and equity is becoming a regular part of brand partnership deal flow. On the other hand, having a relevant talent with sufficient reach and cultural pull can give the brand the visibility and clout needed to break through.

• This article about our ever-shrinking attention spans stopped me in my tracks.

• All the baddies are bedazzling, and it says a lot about what we crave as consumers.

• Gap is undeniably on the roll, and the Fall 2026 Studio Collection by Gap’s creative director Zac Posen proves it. Stunning!

• Microdramas are taking over the internet and Hollywood, with Issa Rae and Kim Kardashian leading the trend.

• Meta calls out TikTok and YouTube to please protect children and teens. This happens after Meta was fined $17B in a lawsuit and agreed to enforce protections for children and teens using their products, like daily limits, increased parental controls, and potential cutoffs during school hours.

Perfume is more than a luxury - it’s a form of self-expression and intimacy.

And for today’s consumer, fragrance has become part of their identity. The perfume industry is undoubtedly thriving, with global sales projected to reach €88.7 billion in 2026. A signature scent can reveal just as much about someone as the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, or even their coffee order.

Brands are joining the trend too. Beauty giants like L’Oréal, The Estée Lauder Companies, and LVMH continue to expand their fragrance portfolios, while brands like Glossier have built cult-like followings around scent. At the same time, a new wave of niche fragrance houses is reshaping the category with more personal, artisanal, and story-driven approaches.

So gone are the days when perfume was simply the finishing touch. Today, it’s a market of personality and mood - and consumers are investing in it more than ever.

Fragrance as the new identity marker

Fragrance has evolved from a finishing touch to one of the most personal forms of individuality. Just like fashion and music, the scents we wear have become another way of communicating identity without saying a word.

But scent is also deeply emotional. Borrow your best friend’s perfume for the day, and suddenly you smell like them. Spray your partner’s fragrance on your hoodie before they leave, and somehow they feel a little closer. Long after a moment has passed, scent has a way of bringing people, places, and memories back almost instantly.

Maybe that’s why fragrance resonates so deeply with consumers today. It doesn’t just help us express who we are - it reminds us of the people we love, the places we’ve been, and the versions of ourselves we never want to forget. In many ways, perfume has become less about smelling good and more about feeling something.

It’s also why we’re seeing consumers move away from the idea of one “signature scent” and towards curated fragrance wardrobes. Just as we dress differently depending on the occasion or vibe, we’re beginning to wear fragrance in the same way - layering scents and switching it up with the weather or mood. Often, a big part of someone’s personality could be their very own perfume collection.

So far in 2026, there’s been a rise in popularity of this particular trend, coined “scent stacking.” And this applies to different types of methods too. From mixing and matching body washes, lotions, mists, oils to ouds and perfumes.

With Gen Z’s spending on fragrance increasing up to 26% in 2024, social media has also played a huge role in product discovery and identity exploration. People on TikTok and Pinterest romanticize smelling good by treating daily perfume routines like “that girl” self-care rituals and aesthetic collectibles, whilst creators urge you to find one unique smell that defines what you would want to be known for. In fact, platforms like TikTok influence 45% of U.S. social purchases. The hashtag #PerfumeTikTok alone has amassed 6.4 billion views.

The rise of the little luxury

So, why now? Why are more consumers investing in fragrance than ever before?

Part of the answer lies in how we define luxury today.

With rising economic uncertainty and emotional stress, maybe buying a nice body mist feels like an easy way to treat yourself when big luxuries cost *a bit* too much. It triggers deep nostalgia and gives people a sense of control and joy when the world feels… not so good.

After all, I know we LOVE a moment of adding little luxuries to our collection.

To add, splurging on fragrance can act as an essential, accessible self-care item. Remember seeing your favorite influencer tucked into bed with the cutest pink Victoria’s Secret set, LED face mask on, book in bed, and a candle or incense lit up? Emotional resonance plays a significant role, as 80% of consumers now select perfumes and spend based on their ability to enhance well-being.

This is especially true with younger buyers, where a lot of spending happens impulsively and based on their mood. Bad day? Retail therapy will fix it. Flunked a test? Comfort food and show ON. Going for a date? Best outfit and smelling good, check.

The brands behind the boom

Of course, consumers aren’t the only ones driving this shift. Brands have completely reimagined the way fragrance is marketed, sold, and experienced. You can now almost see visuals so good, you want to grab it through the screen.

The market for “sensory nostalgia” is booming, driven by sweet, comforting notes like caramel and buttery vanilla, with projections placing its value at $23 billion by 2026. And this ties in perfectly with how brands position their products - Sol de Janeiro has found success by appealing to Gen Z with lightweight, gourmand scent mists designed for everyday lifestyle.

Miu Miu also launched Miutine, a premium eau de parfum featuring wild strawberry and brown sugar, capitalizing on the food marketing, sensorial trend. How can we forget those ice cream-like PR packages!

Undoubtedly, brands like Glossier and Phlur continue to resonate with younger consumers by rethinking how fragrance is marketed too; building communities around feeling and storytelling. Their affordable price, product formulations, and social-first approach have transformed fragrances like Glossier You and Missing Person into fan favorites.

Naturally, other brands have taken notice. Lifestyle-led names like Gisou and Summer Fridays have expanded their viral beauty lines into dedicated fragrance collections, introducing multi-sensory hair perfumes, body mists and fine fragrances that extend beyond skincare or haircare. Rare Beauty has also entered the category with its first eau de parfum, while an increasing number of celebrities like Bella Hadid, are launching fragrance lines of their own - further cementing scent as an extension of personal branding and lifestyle.

Even Gap has revived its fragrance range, tapping into the iconic ‘90s nostalgia for a new generation. It reintroduces four scents - Dream, Grass, Heaven, and Om - upgraded to eau de parfums, alongside a brand-new fragrance called Harmony. This further amplifies the idea of the booming industry.

One thing all of these line-ups have in common - from Sol de Janeiro, Glossier and Phlur to newer launches from Gisou, Summer Fridays and Gap - is accessibility. Today, you don’t necessarily need to splurge $100 on a luxury bottle to smell good. These modern fragrance brands have opened up the category to a much wider audience, offering lower price points without making the experience feel any less aspirational.

With that being said, if all this perfume talk has convinced you to start your own scent wardrobe, I’ve got you covered.

Perfume brands you should know:

Stora Skuggan
Stockholm-based niche fragrance house Stora Skuggan is known for its surreal, slightly mysterious approach to perfumery, creating scents that feel more like stories than traditional fragrances. Definitely one for anyone looking to move beyond the usual crowd-pleasers.

Ex Nihilo
A Parisian fragrance house with a cosmopolitan team behind it. My personal fave, Lust in Paradise is a fresh, luminous floral with peony, lychee and pink pepper, making it an easy introduction to the world of niche fragrance without feeling too intimidating.

Lore
Lore takes a more conceptual approach to scent, creating fragrances that feel personal, atmospheric and slightly unexpected. The kind of brand you’ll want to keep in your back pocket when someone inevitably asks, “Wait, what are you wearing?”

Perhaps the rise of fragrance isn’t really about perfume at all.

It’s about a generation looking for new ways to express themselves - through the things they wear, read, listen to and, increasingly, the way they smell. In a world where so much of our identity exists online, fragrance offers something refreshingly personal. It’s invisible, deeply emotional and entirely your own.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• Connor Storie in the new Fall 2026 YSL campaign is perfection!

• I really liked this piece from The Guardian on the copy-paste summer, kinda chic trend and template-slop saga.

• In our hobbyamory era.

• The big business of manosphere.

• Business news: Béis gets acquired by Samsonite, Lemme ventures into the longevity space with their new NAD+ supplement, big week for Alex Cooper shutting down her beverage brand but reaching a $500M valuation for her media business.

So I asked the best person I know for this. Sara Wilson is a strategist and consultant who helps brands build community-powered strategies that drive attention, relevance, and loyalty through her consultancy, SW Projects. Sara coined the term “digital campfires” in a Harvard Business Review piece on the shift toward intimate online communities. She now advises companies like Netflix, Nike, and YouTube on organic community growth, after leading lifestyle partnerships at Facebook and Instagram. Her work has appeared in AdAge, Forbes, and Fast Company, among others.

You can connect with Sara on LinkedIn here and read her newsletter, Community Catalysts, here.

We’re also going live on Thursday at 2 pm ET to talk about how brands can build stronger communities or pour into existing ones in more depth, so come join us - we’d love to see you there!

Below is an interview with Sara and her community-building playbook you can use for your business.

1. Everyone in marketing agrees their brand needs “community.” What’s the most common thing brands do that they think is community-building but in reality it’s not?

The biggest mistake is confusing an audience with a community.

Communities form around personal identity markers. Shared values, beliefs, interests, desires, experiences, or other things that say something about who we are. A fandom is a community. A knitting circle is a community. A skate crew is a community. With rare exception, what brings people together isn’t a brand; it’s some shared aspect of identity.

That’s why I think of communities as containers for personal identity. Each one becomes a port of entry into a group of people who share certain interests, values, beliefs, desires, fears, or ways of seeing the world. A brand’s followers, customers, loyalty members, or email subscribers don’t automatically meet that definition simply because you’ve gathered them in one place.

Look at which direction the value flows. If it only flows one way—from the brand out to the people—that’s an audience. Community is when value flows between members. People show up for each other, not just for you. That’s also why I don’t believe you can simply “launch” a community. You can build the room, light the fire, and set the tone, but there has to be something meaningful connecting the people inside it, and they have to get something from each other once they arrive.

2. Why should brands care and invest in building & supporting their communities?

I don’t think every brand needs to build a community of its own. Powerful communities already exist everywhere—from fandoms and run clubs to professional networks and communities built around hyper-niche interests and hobbies like hobby horsing. Often the bigger opportunity is to identify which of these communities matter to your audience, understand what makes them cohere, and figure out what role your brand can credibly play within them.

The closer you are to the communities shaping your audience, the better you can understand what they care about, who they trust, how they talk, and where culture is moving. And when you earn a meaningful place within those communities, you give them a reason to carry the brand forward themselves.

That’s why I think of community as a relevance engine: it helps brands move from simply reaching people to actually mattering to them. Which, in today’s fragmented media environment, is increasingly the difference between attention you have to keep buying and attention people choose to give you.

3. How can a brand build genuinely loyal community?

Communities cohere first and foremost around shared belief systems. If your brand doesn’t have a clear belief system of its own, it’s very difficult to build a community around it or earn a meaningful role within someone else’s.

That’s why the first step in my work with brands is always getting incredibly clear on the brand’s own foundation: what it believes, the role it wants to play in people’s lives, the transformation it enables, and who it’s uniquely positioned to serve.

From there, you can identify the communities where those people already gather, understand what binds them together, and determine how your brand can create genuine value within them. Loyalty starts with giving people a reason to believe you belong in their world.

4. What are some of the brands that are doing a great job with community-building?

At the larger end, A24 is one of my favorite examples because they understand both sides of community-powered growth: how to cultivate a community around your brand, and how to earn a role within communities that already exist.

They’ve built such a distinctive point of view around creator-driven, unconventional storytelling that being an A24 fan has itself become a marker of identity. Their AAA24 membership gives that identity infrastructure through screenings, exclusive content, merchandise, a members-only zine, and other ways for fans to deepen their relationship with the brand. But what makes A24 particularly interesting is that they also understand how to enter other communities with incredible specificity.

A recent example is the rollout for Tony, the Anthony Bourdain biopic. You can read the full case study about the rollout by PR Girl Manifesto here.

Instead of starting with the widest possible audience, A24 reportedly organized advance screenings specifically for hospitality workers - the community Bourdain spent his career documenting and advocating for. They partnered with OpenTable and Square, brands already embedded in that world; held the screenings on a Monday, essentially the restaurant industry’s weekend; and had local chefs host screenings in their own markets rather than defaulting to celebrities. Every operational choice signaled: we understand who this is for. That’s community strategy showing up not just in messaging, but in the mechanics of the campaign.

At a much smaller scale, Sleep or Die is fascinating because they’re building the relationship before they’ve built the scale. Their core belief is that in a culture designed to keep us awake, and one that has historically treated exhaustion as a status symbol, prioritizing sleep is a radical act. That gives people something much bigger than a product to identify with.

They’ve created progressively deeper ways for people to participate, from the Zombie Club insider community to founding members and beta testers who actually help shape products, along with in-person experiences designed for members to meet and form relationships with one another.

What I love about both is that community isn’t something they’ve bolted onto their marketing. It changes how they behave. Who gets invited, what gets built, how people participate, even when and where something happens. All of those decisions can signal to a community: we understand you, and this was built with you in mind.

5. The best communities make people feel seen and understood. What’s the best way to build this kind of relationship?

Specificity. People feel seen when you recognize something about them that a less attentive person or brand would miss. The more generic your understanding of your audience is, the harder it is to create that feeling.

This is why I think marketers need to move beyond demographics and start understanding the personal identity markers we talked about earlier. Knowing someone is a 28-year-old woman living in Los Angeles tells you relatively little about who she is. Knowing she’s part of a women’s run club, obsessed with Formula 1, or a One Direction fan starts to tell you how she sees herself, what she values, who she trusts, the language she uses, and what she wants to signal to other people.

The goal is to create what I call the “OMG, that’s so me” effect: that moment when someone encounters your brand and sees something about themselves reflected back. That sense of recognition is incredibly powerful because it can turn this brand is for people like me into this is my brand, which is fertile ground for community.

You can’t manufacture that from a demographic profile. You earn it by getting close enough to the people you want to serve to notice the things other brands overlook—and then reflecting those things back with enough specificity that people recognize themselves.

Goop Kitchen’s recent New York launch is a great example. Instead of treating “New Yorkers” as one audience, the brand treated the city as a collection of distinct micro-cultures. It matched different neighborhoods with people who had credibility inside those worlds and created hyper-specific creative for each one—from “We’ve Got Good Stocks” near Wall Street to “Part of the Permanent Collection” on the Upper East Side.

The result was marketing that felt less like a brand talking at New Yorkers and more like a brand demonstrating that it understood the specific cultures, references, and identities that made their corner of New York feel like theirs.

6. What role do creators and the creator economy play in community building? How can brands leverage them better?

I think brands need to stop thinking about creators primarily as billboards and start thinking about them as bridges. The opportunity isn’t just the creator or even their audience, it’s the community behind them. The most valuable creators are often deeply embedded, trusted figures within communities that a brand could never credibly walk into on its own. They understand the language, rituals, tensions, and needs of those communities because they’re actually part of them.

That changes how brands should select creators. Reach and engagement still matter, but I’d add a third criterion: Is this person a central figure in a community we care about? That’s something Patagonia explicitly looks for in its ambassador program. Their ambassadors don’t just tell the brand’s story; they keep Patagonia grounded in where their communities are and help the brand understand how to show up credibly.

And then brands need to give creators a fundamentally different role. Don’t bring them in at the end and hand them a finished brief to amplify. Bring them upstream. Let them tell you what you’re missing, help shape the idea, and create with the community rather than simply market to it. The best creator partnership isn’t necessarily the one that gets your brand in front of the most people. It’s the one that helps your brand earn its way into the right community.

7. What makes a great community-forward campaign?

A great community-forward campaign starts by asking a different question. Instead of “How do we get this community to care about our campaign?” ask, “What can we create that this community will actually care about?” That sounds like a subtle distinction, but it completely changes where you start. You begin with the community - their needs, rituals, conversations, tensions, and desires- rather than with the message your brand wants to push.

The best community-forward campaigns also give people a meaningful role to play. They create something people can contribute to, shape, remix, gather around, or carry forward themselves. The community isn’t simply the distribution mechanism for a finished brand idea; their participation makes the idea bigger or better.

And I think the Tony example we just talked about is instructive here: community-forward thinking doesn’t always need to look like UGC or a big participation mechanic. Sometimes it’s embedded in the decisions surrounding the campaign—who gets invited first, who you partner with, where you show up, when you show up, and whose credibility you borrow. The best campaigns don’t just say, “we understand this community.” The choices behind them prove it.

8. What’s something community-forward you’ve seen recently—from a brand, a creator, or just a random internet account—that made you think “finally, someone gets it”?

One of my favorite recent examples is Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical Parody. It began as a fan-created response to the Heated Rivalry TV phenomenon. Writer Dylan MarcAurele saw this enormous fandom forming around the show and wrote the musical in two weeks, explicitly describing his process as writing for an existing fandom and moving quickly enough to capture the cultural moment while people were still obsessing over it.

What happened next is remarkable. It went from a small concert-style workshop to a fully produced Off-Broadway show in less than five months—a process that would ordinarily take years. The New York production sold out and kept extending, while separate productions quickly emerged for Edinburgh, London and Canada. As one of the producers described it to me, “fandom is surging it forward”. They’re essentially responding to the energy the community is creating.

We usually think about fandom as something that happens after the creative work is finished: make the thing, launch it, then figure out how to activate the fans. This completely flips that model. The fandom isn’t the marketing plan. It’s an input into what gets created next. And I think we’re going to see much more of that.

9. Where do you see the future of community building for brands? What’s next?

I think we’re moving from community as a marketing tactic to community as an operating system for the brand. For a long time, community sat downstream: you made the product, developed the campaign, and then thought about how to get people talking about it. Increasingly, I think the smartest brands will bring communities much further upstream, not just to amplify what they’ve made, but to help determine what gets made in the first place.

That means community intelligence becoming a much bigger part of how brands operate. Which communities are forming around our audience? What are they talking about? Who do they trust? What language are they developing? What unmet needs are surfacing? Brands that stay close to those signals can use them to inform everything from product development and partnerships to content, experiences, and creative. The Heated Rivalry musical we just talked about is an extreme example: fandom didn’t simply create demand for the finished product; its energy helped create the conditions for an entirely new product to exist.

And I think this becomes even more important as AI makes it possible to create essentially infinite content. Content won’t be scarce. Belonging will be. The competitive advantage won’t be who can produce the most things or reach the most people. It will be who understands people deeply enough to create things they want to gather around, participate in, and carry forward themselves. That’s where I think community becomes much bigger than a marketing strategy. It becomes a source of intelligence, innovation, distribution, and ultimately, a competitive advantage.

Below is Sara’s Community-Powered Playbook and all the news from the internet, business and culture that should be on your radar!

Read more

It was supposed to make us happier, and it didn’t.

We’re the loneliest we’ve ever been

67% of Gen Z and Millennials reported feeling lonely in the last year. In-person socializing has dropped by over 20% since the early 2000s.

Third places like cafés, bars, and community spots where people used to meet spontaneously disappeared. Not because people stopped wanting them - they disappeared because nobody was designing for them anymore. With everything designed for speed and efficiency, connection was the last thing on the list.

What’s slowly emerging again is the rebuild of third spaces (one can hope). People are actively seeking IRL connections, and parties and events fill the void that optimisation culture and digital way of living left us with. When optimization culture failed to make us happier or safer, the pendulum swung the other way.

Now the coolest thing you can be is the person who’s invited to hot spots, the host of everyone’s favorite event, the person bringing people together, on top of every dinner invite list, and someone people want to be genuinely close to.

We see this shift everywhere

We see this across fashion, beauty, music, and experiential events. Gen Z and millennials are planning to attend more events in 2026.

Brands are tapping into experiential marketing because it builds what performance marketing could never - emotional connection, cultural relevance, and organic content at scale. A well-run event builds the one thing you can’t buy an ad for: a room full of people having a great time.

I went to Cannes Lions recently, and for most brands, budget was not an issue. But most activations felt flat. One of the most talked-about events at Cannes Lions this year was the Signals party for creators hosted by Stan and JT Barnett. There were plenty of more lavish parties, but this had great energy (I’ve always dreamt about a proper movie-like American house party and this felt pretty close!) and became the talk of town and the internet.

People want to have fun again, and brands are starting to notice - more genuinely fun events that don’t feel like a brand activation but are designed with community and experience in mind.

It’s about participation, not status

The current “party,” or connection scene, isn’t a status play like the 2010s version was. It’s less about bottle service and more about feeling part of things.

Today’s third spaces are inviting active participation. Bars are hosting craft events, games nights and lectures. It’s less about being seen at the right place and more about wanting enriching experiences, joy, and feeling alive.

It’s alcohol-optional, too. While in the pre-pandemic years, you might raise a few eyebrows sipping sparkling water on a night out, it’s becoming very common to go “out out” and not drink at all. That being said, substance use is on the rise in Gen Z in their early 20s, so something to watch.

Brands are adapting to the same shift, just from the other side. Instead of trying to build and own an exclusive scene the way a 2010s brand launch might have, they're plugging into communities and community leaders who already exist - joining the room instead of trying to build one from scratch.

Why optimization stopped working

Optimization culture sold a deferred payoff - sacrifice now, arrive later at the “best version of yourself.” It demands constant self-surveillance: steps, macros, screen time, morning routine. But the goalpost never stopped moving and here’s always a new protocol, supplement, or metric.

A huge amount of the optimization stack - cold plunges, fasting windows, solo runs, sleep tracking - is done alone, often while performing it for an audience online.

Humans regulate stress and mood through co-presence with other humans, what’s known as nervous-system “co-regulation.” No amount of data tracking replaces a moment of close connection. This is why a night out can feel more restorative than another “productive” night in, even when it’s objectively worse for you on paper.

Status is quietly flipping, too. In the optimization era, discipline and visible self-improvement were the status signal. As that fatigues, the new status signal is having a real social life - the person who’s hosting, who’s in the group chat planning something, who has “a crew.”

You can see it in the discourse already: there’s been a wave of videos going around framing party girls as the most successful people in the room (my faves from Hannah and Miranda). The flex used to be “look how disciplined I am,” and now it’s becoming “look how connected and fun I am.”

A personal note

I spent the last four months in Paris, and let me tell you, this city lets you feel alive without even having to go “out out” (although, you totally can! Shoutout to my faves La Patate Deuce and La Fete). There’s something in the air and the energy of connection is palpable. Look at these cuties we saw the other night.

I notice the shift in myself too - back in 2020-2024, all I wanted was to stay inside and optimise and, truthfully, got a little too carried away with it.

Sometime last year things started to shift - I started to go to gigs again, often solo, and those nights became some of my favourite memories. I put myself through the initial discomfort of going to events and meeting people in real life. You know, when you optimise everything, life starts to feel very much like Groundhog Day. You’re productive, sure, but you don’t actually remember the days because there’s no friction and no new experiences.

So let’s hope that the “trend” of connection and hanging out is here to stay.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• Under Armour taps into the Heated Rivalry craze and names Francois Arnaud as their global ambassador and launches their “When It’s Hot” campaign.

• Charli XCX released her latest album - Music, Fashion, Film and the understated rock-forward album is a big step away from her Brat era.

• ASAP Rocky & Rihanna star in the newest “Don’t be Dumb, Use Fenty” campaign, and it’s cute!

• Mugler casts a bodybuilder, Tatiana Horslaville, for their first handbag campaign under the creative direction of Miguel Castro.

• Hailey Bieber is back at Miu Miu.

• Substack partners with Pangram to help you detect AI-written text. Nice in theory, I sure do worry about the cancellations and accusations that will inevitably happen as a result of this.

• Sooo, “Chatfishing” is now a thing on dating apps. People are outsourcing their flirty conversations to ChatGPT and asking AI chatbots to analyze their situationships. AI Chatbots use users’ inputs (yes, even screenshots of messages from Chad) to train their models, so think twice before sharing your personal convos.

• Young women are increasingly becoming sugarmommies for their boyfriends.

• Midjourney purchased Co-Star, the astrology app, in a surprise sale (financials are undisclosed). Their founder, Banu Guler, will stay at the helm of Co-Star and become a Chief Design Officer for Midjourney, which recently extended their services to health.

Can’t win playing by the old rules

Most branded content still comes from one of three instincts that no longer work:

The first is treating content like product photography. Beautiful lighting, beautiful styling, product front and center, zero reason for anyone to actually stop scrolling, let alone engage with it. For content to perform well, it needs to be made with your audience in mind.

And second is jumping on trends for the sake of jumping on trends. A format is popping off, so it must work for you too, right? (Fake apology letters or team childhood pics, anyone?!) Hoping on trends without an actual point of view reads as noise, and people can tell.

Let’s get technical for a moment

We need to talk about the social media algorithms to understand how to create great, effective content. Think of the algorithms as a reflection of your audience.

Every time you post a piece of content, it gets shown to a small sample first, maybe a few hundred people it thinks are most likely to care. If they watch, comment, share, or save, it shows more people. If they scroll past or don’t engage with the content, it stops there.

This is why an account with half a million followers can post something that gets 1,000 views, and a brand-new account can hit a million views in a week. The algorithms now reward relevancy more than anything else.

And so the job now is “make something worth stopping for.” Every brand is now a media company on socials, and the social content brief changes from what we want to say about our product to what our audience would find interesting to watch. And then you can leverage the reach and brand love you created by entertaining people to conversions.

How Loewe became a social media darling

Loewe is the perfect case study of a brand that understands socials. In a time when the majority of luxury fashion houses struggle to gain relevance with younger audiences, Loewe won the internet generation over.

The difference isn’t the money - obviously, they have huge budgets but so do their competitors. It’s that Loewe studied what works on TikTok and reshaped how a luxury fashion brand shows up on socials.

A recurring storyline is the brand’s surrealist personality that translates well on socials. Artichoke bag? Pineapple shoes? They got it!

They understand that humour is SO important on socials and they’re not afraid to poke fun at themselves or just be silly.

And they’re leveraging creators to create cultural relevance too - their UGC content strategy is the best in the game. They often work with TikTok superstars (example here and here) and let them do what they’re great at…while wearing Loewe.

None of these work on their own. It’s the layering, research into storyline, into culture, into language, that turns a fashion house into something people genuinely cannot stop talking about.

Below, for paid subscribers: how to create engaging content, the content formats the best brands are using, what to do when your content isn’t working, and the rules every social media team needs in their toolkit.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• Gap does it again and collaborates with Hailey Bieber on a ’ 90s-inspired campaign. So good!

• Rare Beauty tapped Ella Bright from Off Campus as their first-ever celebrity ambassador, and the internet went wild!

• Loved this piece from Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker about our obsession with plastic surgery and perfect looks and how it makes us disconnected from reality. You can also watch Jia speaking on the topic here. “Everyone is hot, and nothing is erotic” is such a great way to describe the current mood.

• OpenAI released its new merch, and “tasteslop” is probably the best way to describe it.

• My favorite content find of the week: What’s Your Process? on TikTok. Interviews with founders, professionals, and creatives on their process. So fascinating! I came across this interview with LORE’s founder, Melanie Bender, on my FYP and ended up watching the entire archive.

FAO all marketers, brand builders, and people of the internet! Join Hannah Wilson and me for a workshop where we’ll cover all things creating content for your brand.

Creating content that people want to consume, performs well, and drives business results can be quite the task. We will break down what makes an effective, non-boring content strategy and go through specific examples.

Free but limited availability. We have a couple of spots left - get on the list here or join the waitlist!

When was the last time you bought something purely because it worked?

I’m talking pure utility. No aesthetics or story, or a feeling of becoming a slightly better version of yourself the moment it arrived.

Honestly, I can barely remember. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

We’ve pretty much reached the ceiling on buying things for what they do. What we’re spending money on is the stuff that makes us feel like someone we want to become.

And that shift is one of the most important things happening in brand right now. Brands that can’t compete on the highest paid ad budget or the lowest prices can still break through by building an entire world around their product. A world so compelling that being seen with it feels like an identity statement.

We don’t buy things anymore. We buy who we want to become.

Psychologist Russell Belk introduced the concept of the extended self - the idea that our possessions literally become part of our identity. We choose things that reflect who we are right now or who we’re trying to become.

Which is why sometimes the right purchase can feel like finally becoming the person you wanted to be and why owning a pair of Solomons, Adidas Sambas, or Balenciaga sneakers signals very different things about you.

The game these brands are playing is not " Does this product work? “(that’s kind of given) but “What does owning this product say about you?”

Three things drive purchasing decisions at this level. First, identity and social signalling - what group does your product place someone in? What does it communicate to the world without them saying a word? Second, emotion - we make decisions based on feeling and rationalize them afterwards. Third, meaning - People are meaning-making machines, and they will find it wherever they can. Brands that step into that vacuum? Unbelievably powerful.

Build for all three, and you’re not selling a product anymore. You’re selling a version of someone’s life.

The marketing funnel is broken

Old marketing theory said you needed around seven touchpoints before someone purchased your product. That number is now closer to 21. Because we’re absorbing roughly 5,000 ads every single day, consciously or subconsciously, and we’ve all developed extraordinary filters for tuning them out.

In this environment, being louder doesn’t work as well as being desired.

And desire can be built by creating a brand world so magnetic that people feel genuinely drawn to it.

What a brand world actually is

A brand world is the full atmosphere you build around your product - the visual language, the stories, the rituals, the cultural references, the experiences, the people who are associated with it, the feeling someone gets just from being adjacent to it.

The best ones are so coherent you could describe them without ever mentioning the product. You know what kind of person uses Rhode. You know what kind of person shops at Aesop. You know what kind of person wears Patagonia. And what it says about them that they do.

That’s a brand world, so let’s talk about how to build one.

Start with your truest fan

The worst thing you can do early on is try to talk to everyone. The brands that break through do it by speaking so specifically to one person that it almost feels like a private conversation. Think about the one person who gets the brand intuitively. The person who sees it and immediately thinks this is for me.

Most brands stop at demographics. “Women, 25–35, college-educated, city-dwellers, go to Barry’s.” Which is fine, somewhat useful, but not enough to build a magnetic brand world.

What you actually need is psychographics. The inner world of your ideal person. Their desires, the things they relate to, the tiny emotional things that make them take action. ”She wants to be seen as the cool girl with a distinctive style. She wants to look effortless, not like she’s trying too hard. She’ll spend on one perfect piece she’ll wear for years rather than five $35 Zara tops.”

Now you can see her. You know what to say to her, what to show her, and what would put her off your brand.

Make your product a ritual

A brand world doesn’t just need attention; it needs to embed itself into someone’s life.

When your product becomes part of a daily ritual, you stop paying to reacquire the customer every single time. Marketing does itself.

Using Rhode as a marketing case study is overplayed, but stick with me here! The phone case with the lip gloss is genius, not just because it’s cute, but because of what it understands about the specific customer.

Girls who know they’re gorgeous take pictures every day. So now the Rhode lip gloss is always there, in hand, on the most-touched device on the planet, in every selfie, a constant ambient reminder. The product has been inserted into the most intimate daily ritual of exactly the right person.

Aesop understood the same thing differently. A $50 hand soap that is, objectively, not necessary. But Aesop turned a compulsory hygiene moment into a quiet luxury. Every time you wash your hands, you feel something. Once you’ve had the experience, you can’t unlearn it.

The question to ask: what is the moment in my customer’s day that I want to own? And what do I want them to feel in it?

Know why you exist beyond the product

This is the one that separates brands from businesses. If your brand vanished tomorrow, what would the world actually miss?

It’s a confronting question. But it gets you to the real foundation - the thing that lives under the product, the packaging, the campaigns, the content. The thing that would still be true even if you had nothing to sell.

Nike makes shoes. But Nike stood for something that had nothing to do with shoes: if you run, you’re an athlete. Anyone can be an athlete. Remove every product, and that belief still exists in culture. That’s a brand.

Patagonia released a jacket on Black Friday - the single biggest shopping day of the year — and told people not to buy it. Because their entire brand is built on anti-consumerism, they wouldn’t compromise that belief even when compromising it would have been very, very profitable. They did enormous revenue anyway, because brands built on a strong emotional foundation hold well.

What comes next is for paid subscribers - the full framework: visual worlds, cultural references, collaborations, narrative engines, experiences, and how to measure whether any of this is working.

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Google Trends data shows that search interest in “slow living” has hit an all-time high. And that shift is showing up in the media we consume, too. Print magazines, vinyl records, physical books, film cameras, CDs - all of it is making a comeback.

US vinyl record sales topped $1.04 billion last year, marking an unprecedented period of consecutive growth. Independent bookstores are opening faster than they’re closing. Instant film is a $1B+ market. Sales of “dumbphones” - basic phones with no social apps - have been climbing for three years running.

Turns out, convenience isn’t always what we’re craving.

After all, all a girl really wants these days is her wired earphones and digital camera.

Consumers are tired…

The endless digital overload has become exhausting. What once felt accessible, exciting, and oh-so-entertaining has, for many of us, quietly become addictive in the worst way.

The 2010s were a decade of frictionless maximalism. Spotify replaced the record shelf, Netflix replaced the DVD collection, Instagram replaced the photo album, and Tinder replaced the meet-cute. The goal was always convenience - one-click purchases, autoplay playlists, same-day delivery, infinite scroll.

By the early 2020s, the costs started to surface. Attention fragmentation, comparison anxiety, algorithmic sameness, and a creeping sense that everything was optimised and nothing was actually owned. We’d traded the physical for the frictionless and somewhere along the way lost the thing that made consumption feel meaningful.

The irony is that having access to everything turns out to be just as exhausting as having nothing. Endless choice leads to decision fatigue, and algorithmic recommendations lead to a kind of dopamine burnout - you’re fed content you technically “like” but feel increasingly hollow consuming.

A vinyl gives you one album. A magazine offers a finite number of pages. There’s a comfort in knowing where something begins and ends.

Physical media asks more of us. You flip the pages, set the vinyl, develop the film, or charge the digital camera. There’s a level of friction involved. But even that tiny bit of effort transforms consumption into ritual. Listening becomes an activity, reading becomes an experience, and consuming media starts to feel a little more human again.

In a culture obsessed with speed, maybe that’s exactly the appeal.

The analog trend

While nostalgia certainly plays a role, the analog revival runs deeper than aesthetic appreciation. Many younger consumers never experienced vinyl records or magazine subscriptions the first time around. What they’re seeking isn’t necessarily the past itself, but what the past represents: slowness, tangibility and permanence.

In today’s attention economy, every notification, autoplay feature and recommendation is designed to keep us engaged for just a little longer. Choosing physical media becomes a small act of reclaiming control over how we spend our time and attention. Legacy brands like Kodak and Fujifilm have also reported sustained demand for 35mm and instant film.

In a world where algorithms increasingly shape what we consume, owning something physical feels grounding. A CD collection, a shelf of annotated books, or a stack of magazines becomes less about utility and more about identity.

There’s a word for it - anemoia. Nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. What Gen Z is reaching for isn’t the past itself, but what the past represents: slowness, tangibility, permanence. Things that feel grounded in a world that increasingly doesn’t.

This also links to a much bigger macro shift happening right now. Reduced dating app usage, the return of in-person nightlife, a renaissance of social clubs, IRL communities, phone-free events. A widespread, loneliness-driven hunger for what sociologists call “third places.” And physical media is just the most purchasable expression of that same shift.

Brands are turning “analog” into an experience

Naturally, brands have taken notice.

Coach’s Explore Your Story campaign transformed books into an immersive brand moment. The campaign romanticised the tactile experience of actually reading: the smell, the highlights, the creased spines. Books tell stories, and the marks we leave in them are a record of the journeys we’ve taken. As part of the campaign, Coach introduced the Front Row Book Club, where ambassadors like Emily Bader share their current reads and reflect on their libraries. They also dropped limited-edition book bag charms in collaboration with publishing house Penguin- tiny, trinket-sized, readable, and immediately sold out.

Meanwhile, Miu Miu’s literary clubs elevated reading into a cultural event, blurring the lines between fashion, community, and intellectual curiosity. Functioning as a modernised literary salon, the series hosts public reading rooms, lectures, and panel discussions with contemporary writers and thinkers. Their latest instalment at Milan Design Week 2026 explored desire, consent, and AI, alongside live entertainment.

What’s particularly interesting about both of these is the deliberate introduction of effort and participation. You have to attend, browse, queue, and engage. In an increasingly frictionless world, that involvement is exactly what makes the experience memorable. Friction isn’t a design flaw; it’s the point. For younger audiences, especially, these events are becoming spaces for connection, curiosity, and identity.

And perhaps ironically, these offline moments generate some of the most powerful online conversations and organic content.

Below for paid subscribers: the psychology behind why physical media works on us the way it does, and what it actually means for your brand strategy.

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Below, you’ll get an exclusive look at the latest insights about the future of brand, marketing, and the creator economy gathered from the panels (a must-read for anyone working in brand or socials) and a rundown of the best activations on the Croisette.

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Meet Melissa

Today we're sitting down with Melissa Hobley, Global CMO of Tinder - the app that invented the swipe and, in doing so, rewired how a generation thinks about dating. Fifteen years on, the cultural conversation has shifted dramatically.

Women are decentering romantic relationships, Gen Z is pulling back, and dating app fatigue is real. We got into all of it.

Melissa’s Instagram: Follow Melissa here.
Melissa’s LinkedIn: Follow Melissa here.
Follow Tinder: @tinder
Check out Tinder: tinder.com

THE CONVERSATION

Dating in 2026 looks really different from even five years ago. There’s dating fatigue, Gen Z is pulling back from apps, and there’s a renewed taste for meeting IRL. How does Tinder evolve without losing what made it iconic?

Things have changed and shifted. And what’s really interesting is how much connection still matters - you know, it’s food, water, shelter, and connection on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. We are in this era where we’re so connected to our phones, and yet we are starved for real connection.

What’s really hard about being at Tinder right now is that the challenges are also harder. We are spending more alone time than we ever have - the data exploded in Covid and never corrected itself. At the same time, Gen Z and Gen Alpha aren’t spending a lot of time doing the things that used to give you the muscle for friendships, let alone dating, flirting and romantic connections. Everything teenagers used to do in person is down 40 to 70% - sports, going to church or mosque or synagogue, coffee shop hangs, hobbies, it’s all down.

Which means by the time someone opens a dating app, they may not have had much practice at the basic human stuff that dating requires - approaching someone, keeping a conversation going or being a little vulnerable. That's the real challenge, not that the people don’t want to connect.

What does that look like in the product?

We’re in our comeback era. Double Date is probably the most exciting thing - bring a friend, match as a pair, and take the pressure off. The adoption rate with Gen Z women in Europe was so high that we thought we’d broken the app. 70% of users are Gen Z. It’s one of the most exciting launches in any dating app in the past 10 years.

Then there’s Astrology Mode - rising sign, moon sign, compatibility breakdowns, the whole thing. The girlies are experts, so you can’t half-do it. And we didn’t.

And we’ve completely rethought onboarding. Setting up a profile is vulnerable, especially when your social muscles are a bit rusty. So we’ve made it genuinely fun and easy.

What about IRL - you were testing events in LA in April too, right?

Yes. We have huge plans for IRL in 2026 that I can’t fully talk about just yet. But the thinking is the same: we know you want connection, it’s just harder. It’s harder because we don’t have the muscle.

It’s also harder because - and I think this is actually quite positive - women have really full lives now. You’ve started your own business, you’re an executive, you’re getting your PhD, you’re training for a triathlon, you’re writing a Substack, you’re busy. We’re not going to happy hours every night anymore, and that used to be how people met.

So we’re building third spaces. A run club, a dog walk, a concert where you just wish the single people were all in one area so you could talk to each other. No problem, we did it.

You work with anthropologists and sociologists to understand dating culture. What are you seeing right now that the rest of us haven’t caught up to yet?

One of the big ones is that our friends have always mattered, but now they matter even more. In our annual data, 42% of Gen Z singles say their friends influence their dating lives. And I’m sure it’s even higher for women, because we’re not making a move without our girlfriends.

There’s also a really beautiful continued rise in gender fluidity - the idea that your dating identity can shift day to day, and the technology needs to hold space for all of it. Laverne Cox and Gigi Goode (Tinder recently collaborated with Diesel on a capsule collection, and Goode was the face of the campaign) both have said Tinder is the only app they can use as trans women. We’re proud of that, but you’re never done. And for the queer community more broadly, there's less stigma than there used to be, and those are positive shifts we want to keep supporting at Tinder in every way we can. We still have a lot of work to go, everywhere, but the direction is right.

And then there’s something the academics are saying about what happens when societies become less religious - people don’t stop looking for something to believe in, they just look elsewhere. Astrology. Niche communities and fandoms. Sports. Understanding why people do things is the only way to build something that helps them.

There’s a big cultural conversation happening right now about women decentering romantic relationships and centring themselves, taking breaks from dating. How does Tinder think about its role in that, given the business literally depends on people wanting to find love?

It might surprise you to hear this, but when the “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing?” piece came out, I loved it. Because for so long, women have been defined by their relationship status above everything else, and I’m so glad it’s changing.

I’m from Indiana, and I remember being in my late twenties with this career I was so excited about. I had no connections, no money, I told myself I was going to out-hustle everybody, and I did. And when I went home, the only thing people got excited about was the boyfriend I’d brought with me. And I just thought: I have way more interesting stuff happening in my life than this guy.

What I think we should be pushing is this: your life is complete with or without a partner. And actually, the research backs this up - people who feel fulfilled on their own are more likely to attract the right person and build something healthy when they do connect. So this isn’t at odds with what Tinder is trying to do, it’s completely aligned with it.

I also get 100 wedding invitations a month and DMs every day from people who didn’t think they’d ever find their person, and then they did. Dating apps work, that’s just a fact. So our job isn’t to convince people they need to be dating. It’s to be there, and make it genuinely good, for when they are.

What does the future of dating actually look like - and what’s Tinder’s role in it?

I think the future of dating is more expressive, more fun, more personal, more respectful. We believe in connection. We believe in love. And we think it’s pretty exciting.

I also think we have to keep pushing conversations like the ones we’re seeing right now - build your life, that’s when you attract someone great. We’re seeing that on TikTok and YouTube, and I think those conversations matter.

And there are patterns out there that don’t help - particularly around male behaviour and what some men are consuming, especially with the rise of red-pill content. “How do we make men better?” is an actual conversation we have in the hallways at Tinder. Civilization hasn’t quite figured that out, but we keep trying.

The pendulum always swings. And when it does, I want Tinder to be there - making it a little easier, a little more fun, and helping you find someone great.

Quick-fire round with Melissa

Melissa’s media diet

Liz Plank - her YouTube Boy Problems and her Substack Airplane Mode for great commentary on women, feminism, and dating.

I love “Pivot with Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway” for their takes on media.

I follow Esther Perel because her work on the loneliness epidemic and connection is super important.

Best advice for other women in business

Women wait until they have the experience to ask for the job or the promotion - men ask before they’re ready. Think like a man. Ask for more! Take the call from the recruiter. Go to the meeting.

Melissa’s non-negotiables

I spend time outside of work on things that matter. Reproductive Access, LGBTQ Equity, and Supporting marginalized kids in NYC are three areas where I advise, sit on boards, and donate my time, network, and resources.

Put your f’cking phone down. Being the Global CMO at Tinder means I have these amazing folks who work with me all over the world, across every time zone. This also means I do something every day - I ignore my phone for a block of time every night. I spend that time usually with my two hilarious, amazing daughters. OR I’m at a dinner with girlfriends.

Always in my bag. My business card - it’s analogue, but I genuinely love connection, and I give out my card to folks who want dating advice, on their Tinder profile, on how to find their person. My card has my cell phone number on it, so it’s how I let people reach out to me. Oh, and red lipstick and black eyeliner!

Follow Melissa @melissahobley and Tinder @tinder.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• Cannes Lions, AKA the creative Coachella, is happening this week! We’ll be there reporting on all things brand, culture and creator economy.

• Great Britain announces a social media ban for all under-16s taking effect in 2027. Could the US be next?

• Substack is piloting its new native sponsorship program, pairing authors with brands, and you could be landing partnerships with brands like Balenciaga, Yahoo or Uber. Substack also launched Creator Kits that serve as a media kit for your publication.

• Bala babes, gather ‘round! Bala, the it-girl workout equipment brand, just expanded to activewear, and the campaign looks stunning!

• Marc Jacobs’ latest campaign is a sneak peek into the girls’ bathroom.

• Coach launches &Coach Storytelling platform and taps into Gen Z icons like Charli XCX, PinPanteress and Malala Yousafzai as their first collaborators.

• Hot divorcee summer, anyone? There are a couple of articles floating around the internet claiming 2026 is the Summer of Hot Divorcees, and listen, if this means that we’re destigmatizing divorce, putting an end to the nonsense that women are invisible after 35, and having fun while looking glamorous, I’m SO in. This quote from a 50-year-old divorcee about keeping it simple on her Hinge profile made me giggle with joy: “I already consider myself out of everybody’s league. I don’t want to intimidate them.” You go, girl!

• Cinema is having a revival as we try to detox from social media and log off for a couple of hours.

• Michelle Obama wore this custom Acne Skirt to honour her late mother, and it’s gorgeous!

FAO all marketers and brand builders! Join Hannah Wilson and me for a workshop where we’ll cover all things brand world. Building a strong brand world is a necessity for any brand that wants to stay …

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The creator economy hit $37 billion in spending last year, and influencer marketing budgets are set to grow for another year running. But the way the money is being spent is changing completely. One-off, pay-to-post deals are failing to cut through, and the brands still running that playbook are now starting to feel it.

What’s replacing it in 2026 is something more considered, structured, and effective. Creator partnerships are moving from reach to relevance, from one-off campaigns to always-on programs, and from treating creators like vendors to building relationships that actually compound over time. The brands figuring this out are getting more content, more trust, and better conversion, and often for less money.

Here’s what the shifts look like in practice:

Before we get started, make sure to bookmark How to Run an Effective Always-On Influencer Program with in-depth advice on running influencer programs so you can audit your existing programs or build a new one without the trial and error.

Reach is out, relevance is in

The era of paying someone with ten million followers to hold up your product is giving way to creators with nicher audiences and authority in their specific space. The brands making this shift in their strategies are getting better results for less money.

Nano-creators (1k-10K followers) and micro-creators (10k-100K followers) get higher engagement than macro and celebrity creators. Smaller creator communities treat their recommendations like advice from a friend, resulting in higher conversion rates compared to bigger campaigns.

And it’s not just engagement. Nano-influencers’ tightly knit communities treat creator recommendations like advice from a friend, resulting in conversion rates two to three times higher than macro campaigns.

Part of what’s driving this is how algorithms have changed. The algorithms of Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn are no longer built around who you follow, but the topics you’re interested in. Which means a nano-creator making highly specific content about, say, Korean skincare or sustainable running gear can reach exactly the right person without needing a massive following to do it. Niche content finds niche audiences now, and the algorithm does the matching.

Audiences have also shifted what they’re drawn to. The aspirational lifestyle aesthetic that defined the first decade of influencer marketing is on its way out, and what’s replacing it is creators with genuine expertise and a strong point of view.

People aren’t following creators just to see what they buy anymore. They’re following them because they trust their opinion, value their knowledge, and feel like they’re learning something. The educational creator, the opinionated reviewer, the niche expert who goes deep on their thing - these are the people building the most loyal audiences right now. And we know that loyal audiences convert better.

Three roles creators are now playing

The smartest brands are thinking about creators in three distinct ways right now.

Cultural anchors. Large creators have become the modern-day equivalent of celebrities, and brands are renting their distribution and cultural relevance for high-level positioning. When it works, it really works. Think Alix Earle’s partnership with Poppi or Bridgette Pheulong, better known as Acquired Style, almost single-handedly catapulted little-known Swan Beauty into the spotlight. The right creator in the right niche can do what years of traditional marketing couldn’t.

This is still valuable, but we see two new roles emerging, too:

Content engines. Nano and micro-creators are a highly efficient alternative to traditional creative studios, and the content they produce tends to outperform brand-generated content. A creator talking about a product in their own style to an audience that already trusts them lands differently than a polished brand campaign.

The smartest brands have figured out how to get this content at scale. A well-structured affiliate or brand ambassador program doesn’t just drive sales - it floods your niche with creators talking about your product, and suddenly the brand feels like it’s everywhere.

Credibility builders. Niche creators who’ve built genuine expertise and community around a specific topic are becoming the pillar of brand trust. It isn’t about who has the largest following but about the credibility they bring, and whether their audience actually trusts their opinion on things that matter. These are the creators brands are tapping into to distribute their brand through loyal, more likely to convert audiences.

The always-on shift

The industry is moving past transactional influencer moments toward programs built on participation and credibility over time. Creators who can authentically integrate products into their content without it feeling scripted or forced will remain in high demand as long-term partners rather than one-off collaborators.

There are three main ways brands are structuring this:

Affiliate programs. Creators get a commission structure, fewer guardrails on who can join, and let performance do the filtering. Low risk, high reward, though consistency can vary. The most impactful affiliate programs have built-in incentives for creators to keep showing up.

Brand ambassador programs. Like an affiliate program on steroids. But unlike affiliates, ambassadors are known advocates of your brand and have become synonymous with your brand and products. The best programs add flat fees, event invitations, and early access to new launches - things that make ambassadors feel like insiders. This article summarizes the best practices from the 10 most successful brand ambassador programs from brands like Sephora, Astrid & Miu, and Charlotte Tilbury, which you can apply to your business, no matter the size. Worth a read!

Always-on creator partnerships. A handful of creators you partner with on a monthly or quarterly basis. Instead of feeling like a one-off ad, the product starts to feel like a genuine part of the creator’s life. Hot tip: look for influencers who are growing quickly and developing an engaged audience. This combo will ensure you continue reaching new potential customers without “burning through” the audience a creator already has.

Running any of this at scale - finding the right creators, managing sponsorships, tracking affiliate performance, measuring ROI - can get complicated without the right infrastructure.

Modash is the platform built specifically for this: it helps brands find the right creators, run sponsorships at scale, manage affiliate programs, and track performance all in one place. They’ve also put together one of the best resources I’ve come across on How to Run an Effective Always-On Influencer Program. So worth the read!

What this means for your brand in 2026

Algorithms have changed the game. They’re matching content to interests, not necessarily who you follow. Which means the right niche creator can reach exactly the right person without a massive following to do it. Relevance is the new reach.

The role of creators is changing, too. The era of creators with millions of followers flaunting their luxury lifestyle is over. The ones building the most loyal audiences right now are the niche experts with genuine credibility, strong points of view, and communities that find them relatable.

And then there’s the structure of how brands work with creators, which is perhaps the biggest shift of all. Gone are the days when creator partnership looked like a pre-written ad script, a single post, and a payment. What’s replacing it looks more like a program: affiliates flooding a niche with authentic content at scale, ambassadors who are genuinely synonymous with the brand, and always-on partnerships with creators who show up consistently enough that the product becomes part of their world.

Running any of this at scale - finding the right creators, managing programs, and actually measuring what's working - is a lot easier with the right tools. Modash is the platform built specifically for creator marketing: find the right creators using real data, run affiliate and ambassador programs at scale, and track performance all in one place.

P.S. If you want to go deeper on the always-on approach, Modash put together a full guide on running always-on influencer programs. Read it here →

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet.

• Cannes Lions is two weeks away and it’s shaping up to be THE event for Creator Economy! We’ll be going and reporting back on everything brand & creator economy related. If you'll be there, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn - see you at the Croisette!

• We hosted a live with the incredible from Sociology Of Business on all things brands and subcultures. Catch the replay here.

• Lululemon drop in sales is a cautionary tale for diluting your brand.

• Nike released their Rip The Script campaign for World Cup with SO MANY celeb cameos.

• Dua Lipa’s Sicily wedding is so chic! This tweet made me lol.

After back-to-back viral campaigns and high-profile collaborations with leading artists, creatives and brands across different industries like beauty, fashion and music, the brand has done an impeccable job of connecting its product innovation, craftsmanship, and durability to the wider cultural ecosystem it has built around itself. To name a few major campaigns: “Better in Denim” with Katseye, “Get Loose” with Troye Sivan, and their most recent one being “Sweats Like This” with Young Miko (their first ever Spanish video ad too!)

Partnerships with brands like Summer Fridays (ft. Barbie Ferreira), Cult Gaia, and BÉIS became some of their top-performing collaborations, ultimately positioning Gap at the centre of both pop culture and industry relevance.

Selling a story and a lifestyle

From their star-studded 90s and early 2000s ads, featuring iconic pairings like Madonna and Missy Elliott, Gap has always been inspired by music-driven commercials - rooted in individuality, rhythm and expression. The real takeaway is that they didn’t completely reinvent the wheel - they simply evolved the format for today’s audiences shaped by social media, fast-moving trends, and an overwhelming number of choices, driving millions of impressions, a boost in sales surges and topping BoF Insights’ 2025 Brand Pulse ranking. And now, honestly, they’ve just made the brand feel way more immersive and global, while still keeping that core Gap identity alive.

So, what was something they started to do differently?

They understood that attention today comes from participation, not just visibility. Gap’s campaigns weren’t built to only sit on billboards or live as ads - they were made to travel across TikTok edits, fan reposts, dance trends, moodboards and conversation online.

They also understood the power of borrowing cultural equity instead of trying to manufacture it from scratch. By tapping into artists, dancers, stylists and creators who already had strong communities around them, Gap was able to naturally place itself inside spaces people were already emotionally invested in. It made the brand feel less corporate and way more current.

What’s smart is that they never abandoned the simplicity of the product itself, either. At the core, they’re still selling denim, hoodies, sweats and basics. But instead of marketing them as “essentials,” they reframed them as part of a lifestyle and identity. The clothes became a canvas for self-expression rather than just everyday basics sitting on a shelf.

And in a market where so many brands are constantly trying to become louder, more shocking or more trend-driven, Gap’s revival almost feels refreshing because it’s rooted in emotional familiarity. They leaned into nostalgia, but packaged it in a way that still feels fresh enough for a generation discovering the brand for the first time.

The Invisible Dynamics effect

A huge part of Gap’s comeback can be credited to creative agency Invisible Dynamics, led by founder and CEO Oli Walsh. Partnering with the brand in 2023, the LA-based agency helped give Gap a full cultural reset by mixing nostalgic 90s energy with fast-paced, social-first storytelling made for modern audiences.

One thing they did really well was bring back Gap’s iconic dance-focused advertising, but in a way that felt fresh. Campaigns like “Linen Moves” with Tyla felt fun, expressive and made for the internet.

Beyond the campaigns themselves, Invisible Dynamics also helped curate partnerships with brands like Cult Gaia and BÉIS, which made Gap feel way more tapped into fashion, lifestyle and pop conversations rather than just sitting in the “basics brand” category.

And clearly, it worked.

The social-led storytelling and positioning didn’t just create hype online, it translated into actual business growth, too - proving that when branding feels emotionally relevant and culturally aware, audiences pay attention.

Mastering the blend of fashion and entertainment

Besides pop culture moments, creative director Zac Posen has successfully reflected Gap into Hollywood, with A-list styling and high fashion scenes (*cough* Kendall Jenner at The Met Gala 2026) and bridging the gap between their heritage and modern relevance, across the wider brand portfolio!

They stopped relying on traditional static advertising, opting instead for “fashiontainment” - incorporating entertainment-style campaigns that tell a story into their overarching brand strategy. In doing so, Gap truly excelled at the blend of fashion and entertainment, creating campaigns that audiences ACTUALLY want to engage with.

What makes it work even more is the consistency behind it all. From the music choices and casting to the movement, styling and cinematic visuals, every rollout still feels connected to the same creative universe. That consistency helped transform individual campaigns into long-term cultural branding, rebuilding audience recognition through aesthetics and emotion.

Closing thoughts

At a time when consumers are exposed to endless content every single day, Gap recognised that products alone are no longer enough. People connect more with brands that evoke feelings, identity and experiences around what they sell. Through storytelling, music, movement and strong creative direction, Gap managed to make everyday basics feel relevant again without losing the simplicity of the brand itself.

I think their revival also says a lot about where branding is heading overall. The brands succeeding today are the ones building consistent worlds and communities around their products rather than relying on one-off campaigns or conventional marketing alone.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• Sarah Pidgeon for Balenciaga is an absolute movie. Get me to NYC now!

• Everlane co-founder Michael Preysman is teasing a new brand (venture capital and private equity-free) after the recent news of Everlane’s acquisition by fast fashion giant Shein.

• Patagonia sues drag queen and environmental activist Pattie Gonia for trademark infringement.

• Oh well…The Ordinary Shuttle Bus in NYC didn’t last long.

• The MAC Cosmetics team is fast! Amid the Patrick Ta transition blush plagiarism controversy, they launched a Painted By Esther x Olandria campaign. S

• AI sentiment is at an all-time low. OpenAI and Anthropic CEOs are walking back their apocalyptic prophecies, Gen Z is booing AI at their graduations, and even Pope Leo calls on AI to be disarmed in his first encyclical.

• Happy Pride Month! What the Old Gays Remember is one of my favourite internet series ever. If you love queer history niche gossip about pop divas, you will love it! A great palate cleanser for all the AI news.

• Talking about Pride Month, outrageously but in a surprise to no one, given the current political climate, brands are pulling back on Pride sponsorships for the second consecutive year. Jaskaran from The Social Juice (one of my faves!) shared this data deep dive from Omnisend.

• I love women in STEM. This is very cool!

• This made me so happy.

Meet Pia

Today, we’re sitting down with Pia Mance, founder of Heaven Mayhem - the jewellery brand that’s become the secret handshake of the internet’s coolest girls. What began with a single necklace she couldn’t find anywhere, and a lot of orders packed on her bedroom floor, has grown into a brand with a genuinely cult following, stockists like Revolve and Selfridges, and fans including Bella Hadid and Hailey Bieber.

Pia’s Instagram: @piamance
Heaven Mayhem’s Instagram: @heavenmayhem_
Shop Heaven Mayhem: heavenmayhem.com

THE CONVERSATION

Take us back to the very beginning of Heaven Mayhem. What made you go, “I need to make this happen”?

I wanted to start a brand. I had a lot going on, but I didn’t have my thing. So it was less about seeing a product I had to make and more about wanting to build something - the content, the intentional little details, the community events, bringing people along. That was my focus. And then there was this one necklace I wanted that just didn’t exist, so that became my first product. But really, it was a burning desire to build something.

You were a creator before you were a founder. How much did that matter?

Honestly? I didn’t even have a big audience - I had around 35,000 followers when I started. So it wasn’t like I had this built-in launch pad. But the things I learned from that world were invaluable. I also did modelling when I was younger, and the work ethic from a modelling set, the experience negotiating influencer contracts - all of that has been so useful for Heaven Mayhem. It was more about what I learned than the size of my following.

All the coolest girls I know wear Heaven Mayhem. How do you think about building a brand world people want to be part of?

We want everything we do to feel aspirational - like you’re getting dressed for the day, putting in effort. Our price point is quite accessible, so we’re not aspirational in that luxury sense, but we do want it to feel like a lifestyle. The key thing, though, is that we never want it to feel like an exclusive club. Everyone’s invited and everyone’s welcome. So we bring people along for the ride - behind the scenes, the community events, the building process. We want people to feel like they’re a part of it and they’re building it with us.

And there’s something about putting the earrings on, right? You just feel ready.

Exactly. Your big earrings - you wouldn’t wear those eating dinner on the couch, you know? But once they’re on, you’re showing the world and yourself that you’re ready. And because we don’t have huge logos anywhere and we’re not yet a massive household name, it’s that if-you-know-you-know feeling. When you spot someone on the street wearing Heaven Mayhem, it’s this little cool thing you both share.

You recently co-designed a collection with your community. Tell me more about how you think about community.

We really want it to feel genuine. We don’t want to call our customers our “community” and then our influencers our “VIPs” - we want everyone to feel included, full stop. So we invite our community to influencer events, we host them for drinks at Heaven Bar, we’ve done girls’ nights out in LA, and random meet-ups. We’re always giving back without asking for anything in return - like at our sample sale, we did free matcha for the first 150 people.

And then we bring people along through the broadcast channel, our TikToks, the Community Design Lab, and “Conversations in Heaven,” which is a monthly Zoom. The goal is just to make it an environment where people want to be, and they leave having made friends. And they always do.

What are your daily non-negotiables as a founder?

Getting a workout in - ideally a walk too - and then getting ready for the day. If I look good, I feel good. I practice what I preach. I want to wear my earrings and put my accessories on. We’re always buttoned up and ready at the office, never in gym clothes, and honestly, it makes such a difference to your mindset. Beyond that, I try to eat well and see where the day takes me. Every day is different.

(For workouts, I’m loving PVOLVE right now, and Pilates by Bryony - I live by those videos.)

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since starting?

Trusting myself. I have really good intuition and a really strong work ethic, and I’ve found that I almost always know the right decision. There have been so many instances where I’ve trusted someone else in the room - a professional, an outside voice - over my own instincts, and it hasn’t worked out. But every single time I’ve trusted myself, it’s worked out tenfold. So I’m really leaning into that now.

What advice would you give to someone just starting?

Work ethic. I think a lot of people look at being a founder and see something glamorous, but it takes a lot of work. When I started, I was making things on my bedroom floor and packing every single order myself for the first year and a half. We’re a real from-the-bedroom startup. I want to pass on that it’s not easy - it’s actually probably one of the hardest jobs there is - and I think the next generation of founders needs a bit of a reality check on that. But also: if I did it from nothing, so can they.

How do you deal with rejection?

I always try to find the learning in it first. Like, Selfridges said no to me a couple of times because our assortment was too small - so we expanded the range, and eventually it worked. But sometimes you just have to be a bit woo-woo about it and say: what’s meant for me won’t pass me. Something better always comes along.

What’s your current media diet?

I listen to podcasts every day. I love Emma Grede - I’ve basically listened to every episode she’s ever done, across all her different appearances, not just her own show. Once I find someone who inspires me, I want to know everything about them. I also love The Bossticks (previously The Skinny Confidential) for the variety of guests.

And I’m on Substack, though I don’t read it as much as I should. For follows, I have different people for different things - the Rhode marketing team, the Saie events team, certain celebrities for aesthetic, Emma Grede for real talk. A whole roster.

Any brands you’re watching right now?

I’m really impressed with Farah Homidi - I love the packaging and the way they shoot things, it’s very cool girl.

I’m also intrigued by Lara Worthington, who’s been teasing a beauty brand for a while now. I find myself watching how founders roll things out, what their teasing strategy looks like, and how effective it actually is. Though I do always notice I gravitate back to beauty brands - there’s just so much happening in that category.

Follow Pia @piamance and shop Heaven Mayhem at heavenmayhem.com.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet

• The Ordinary is launching a free shuttle bus service to spotlight NYC transportation issues. Great move from the brand, and I loved Sara Wilson’s post about the role of brands during times of economic pressure. The Ordinary x Mamdani collab when?!

• Marc Jacobs Beauty is back, and it looks so fun and whimsical! Expecting to see more and more playful, maximalist designs take over beauty.

• Uh-oh, Everlane gets acquired by Shein, and it officially marks the end of the millennial optimism, purpose-driven brand era. How sad!

• Claire’s is rebranding to celebrate girlhood and win over Gen Alpha girls. According to their CMO, Michelle Goad, their team is operating as a newsroom to gather insights and make decisions, relying on their Gen Alpha kids, social networks and social media listening tools.

• On and Erewhon announce their multi-year partnership, kicking things off with a community wellness club, a new running collection and co-branded juice.

• How did Coach become the darling brand for Gen Z?

People crave brands that feel modern, human and most importantly, entertaining. And brands are finally catching on. In recent years, consumers were inundated with ads, and the most common emotion those ads elicit? Absolutely nothing. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to know that’s not exactly good for brand perception or conversion.

The good news is that brands now have the opportunity to win bigger if they’re willing to put themselves out there and entertain their audiences. They’re competing with creators who mastered the art of getting attention and creating relatable content. It raised the bar for how brands show up on socials too - people expect humour, value, or at least, feeling seen and understood.

What makes an entertaining brand?

The brands people find the most joyful, the most shareable, the most talked about are undeniably the most entertaining too.

In the Entertain or Die 3.0 report, you can find the Top 30 brands that are winning by deploying social-first content strategies that entertain and delight their audiences.

What actually makes a brand entertaining? The brands were scored on the four following pillars based on consumer perception and sentiment:

1. Connection - Do I like this brand? Does this brand foster community? Is it capturing real emotions?

2. Creativity - Does this brand keep things fresh? Do they build a world that’s exciting and imaginative?

3. Distinctiveness - Does this brand catch my attention? Does it feel energetic and expressive?

4. Relatable - Do I find this brand relatable like a TV character? Does it make me feel seen?

   DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT

The ROI of entertainment

When companies entertain people successfully, it changes the entire business’s trajectory. Businesses that are adapting well to the new role of brands in an entertainment-first world are increasingly outperforming their peers.

And The Entertain or Die Index reinforces this shift. Tracksuit & Small World put together a data-driven scoring system that measures how effectively brands create and sustain entertainment value.

Across the Top 30 brands in the Entertain or Die Index, the vast majority are growing. From breakout challengers like Oura (+100%) and On (+30%), to cultural heavyweights like LEGO (+12%), Amazon (+12%), and Apple (+16%), entertainment is proving to be a powerful growth engine.

The biggest impact? Word of mouth travels further than traditional PR. By earning positive attention, brands are building an army of fans willing to share their stories, dramatically increasing reach while reducing reliance on paid media.

And it’s not just the household names that benefit from being entertaining. Newer disruptor brands are building a future cultural momentum and cult-like audiences through creativity and distinctive brand worlds. In today’s newsletter, we will look at the strategies three of these brands are using to break through in the most competitive markets.

Examples of brands

Bandit Running

Few brands cracked entertainment like Bandit Running. At 3% awareness in a market where Nike holds 91%, they’re the perfect example of a disruptor brand. The people who know about the brand find it extremely relatable and entertaining. For a brand with still low reach, Bandit has a very clear brand identity.

Their mini-movies, created to bring awareness to the brand in cities hosting Marathons, are a prime example of entertaining content. Each of these movies spotlights a different city, creating an emotional connection with its local audience. Look at these examples from Los Angeles and Boston.

They’re doing the hard work of creating distinctiveness and connection with their audience early on. Bandit is culturally coherent and associated with words like trendy, stylish and fun. The question is whether they can scale their reach and awareness while still staying true to the brand.

SSENSE

SSENSE is creating a distinct brand in the premium online fashion retailers market. SSENSE holds "Avant-garde" and "Designer" as unique associations, words that nobody else in the competitive set is associated with. NET-A-PORTER's map is dominated by "Premium," "Luxurious," "Expensive" – heritage luxury codes. SSENSE's map sits at the intersection of luxury and cultural currency, which is a harder position to copy and a more defensible one as taste culture continues to shift.

Their content strategy reflects this - from nonchalant, fashion-forward, highly shareable memes to editorial content spotlighting the coolest new names in fashion, they really understand their audience. And this content-as-entertainment strategy is strengthening their perception. They lead the competitive set on “is a trend setter,” “is unique,” “is innovative,” and “is really on the way up,” and sit at the intersection of luxury and cultural currency, a position that’s really hard to copy.

SULT

Sult, the new electrolyte powder brand from the UK, is taking over the internet with their founder-forward storytelling. Their awareness is still small (only at 4%), but they’re outperforming their much larger competitors, like Liquid IV, with relatability and storytelling. Cool, pleasant, and awesome are all words associated with the brand, and they have a huge opportunity to build a brand that’s culturally fluent in a market that’s dominated by functionality messaging.

Their approach to building a brand is fresh, and they’re tapping into something their legacy competitors don’t have access to. From telling the story of how SULT came to be (a failed Hinge date, by the way) and documenting the day-to-day of building a company from scratch to tongue-in-cheek “commercials”, they never fail to entertain their audience and humanise their brand.

Winning small to win big

Audiences seldom think about brands themselves. If you want to get their attention, you need to connect your brand to something they’re already doing or to the kind of content they already engage with. Social algorithms require culture-first, not brand-first behaviour from brands.

Fandoms aren’t new, but it’s helpful for brands to rethink the definition of fandom. Instead of limiting yourself to K-Pop superfans or gamers, think of fandoms as anything your potential customers are spending their time on. This can be anything from long-distance running to cooking or beauty. And all of these fandoms also have their subcultures with certain aspirations, characters and cultural and aesthetic references they intuitively get.

Once the brand is clear on the subculture they want to reach, the questions become clear. What do the people we want to reach care about? How can the brand become part of that passion?

Coach is a prime example of this. In their effort to expand their Gen Z female base, they tapped into the growing book fandom. They introduced new decorative and readable bag charms in the shape of a book, featuring classics like Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. They also launched a campaign called “Explore Your Story”, inspired by Gen Z’s newfound love for books and storytelling. The campaign features social-first series like The Front Row Book Club, interviews with writers and collaboration with Gen Z Book Club Sunnie.

To really succeed in engaging with fans and ideally convert them into fans of your brand too, you have to prove you’re as passionate as they are.

Entertain or die

The best brands understand the importance of using entertainment as a brand growth tactic to build a brand with longevity and an invested audience.

Audiences that are seeking to purchase from brands they feel aligned and emotionally connected to, and the interest-based algorithms have created a landscape where brands must think of themselves as media companies.

As the Entertain or Die report outlines, the result of having more fun with your audience isn’t just vanity metrics but a long-term brand fame, equity and positive perception.

Simply put, people buy from brands they like, and they like brands that just get them. Entertaining your audience builds attention and goodwill - but until recently, there was no clean way to show what that’s worth. Tracksuit tracks what statements people associate with your brand, giving you the raw material to entertain with intention. Then it does the harder job: translating brand activity into commercial impact, in the language your CFO actually speaks.

You can download the full report with insights on how to create entertaining campaigns for your brand here. Thank you, Tracksuit and Small World, for putting this together.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet.

• Charli xcx owns a part of ‘Nothing’. Initially a global ambassador, now a shareholder with equity in a London-based tech company, Nothing, Charli xcx joins The Weeknd & Casey Neistat in the investor lineup. This could potentially change how artists view brand deals in the future. So brat of her!

• The ‘Celebrity-Founder Era’ is not over yet. Olivia Jade launches O.Piccola, a beauty brand that took half a decade to develop. Funded by Olivia herself, O.Piccola introduced its first product: a Bronze & Glow Balm, following Rhode’s footsteps & adopting an overall minimalist theme.

• Cool girl brand 4 AM launches in Target and closes $4M funding round. Loved this interview with Jade, the co-founder of 4 AM, by Ali Kriegsman.

Launching or scaling a brand in 2026 can be quite the task. With venture capital getting increasingly harder to access (especially for female founders, only 2% of VC investments go to women), markets from beauty and fashion to food and wellness saturated with products, and demand for authentic brand stories is higher than ever, the odds can feel a little stacked against you.

For the brands that are succeeding, the key is to resonate with the right audience and have a strong distribution system within their market. They're not trying to be everything for everyone. Instead, they're going deep within a specific niche market (more on that later), and once they make a name for themselves, they're deploying new strategies to scale.

So today, we’re getting into all three. Positioning, content, and distribution.

Positioning

The brands breaking through right now are trying to own something specific. A corner of the market, a particular person, or a very clear point of view.

And it all starts with one question: what trade-off is your customer currently making? What’s the compromise they’ve just... accepted?

Let’s look at a few examples for bigger and emerging brands.

Poppi - people want a refreshing, sparkling drink, but they’re also health-conscious.
Quince - people want high-quality garments, but they don’t want to pay luxury fashion prices. (Quince has had a rough couple of months with multiple lawsuits - one about the use of copyrighted music and one about false advertising, but still a good example of filling a gap in the market.)
Rhode- people want a glowy, healthy-looking skin but don’t want a 10-step skincare routine.

Once you have it, your job is to make that positioning visible in everything - your product, your visuals, your copy, your partnerships. Every touchpoint enforces your positioning.

Content

We can’t talk about modern brands without talking about content. Organic content is how new brands are capturing their customers’ attention and building brand love, one post at a time.

Think of socials as the top of the funnel, and then everything flows from there - your email campaigns, your paid campaigns, or conversion events.

For organic content to work, it needs to be something people actually want to watch. Gone are the days when you could share a picture of your product and call it a day.

What would make your audience screenshot something, save it for later, or send it to a friend? That’s the kind of content you should be adding to your strategy. Entertainment and value get attention and build trust, and if people are enjoying your content, they don’t mind being sold to.

Some examples of brands doing a great job with their organic content:

The Productivity Method - mostly organizational tips and memes that make every Type A gal seen. Their product is planners, so this type of content does a perfect job of finding their target audience.

Olivia Unplugged for Opal - Opal is a screen-time control app, and they created a brand new account with exclusively educational content on how to stop brain rot and get smarter and more productive. Hundreds of thousands of views on each video on TikTok and an extremely engaged audience.

Distribution

To succeed, smaller and newer brands are going deeper with their target markets and winning their core niches first, before scaling outside of them. So how does a brand do it outside of running ads and creating content at scale?

For many brands, this strategy is affiliate marketing. They deploy their existing customers and creators within the niche as their brand ambassadors, promoting their products for a commission. And because this allows brands to work with creators at scale (as opposed to investing a large amount of money into influencer campaigns), they can become visible and soon enough undeniable in their corner of the internet and market.

Think of affiliates as your brand ambassadors - long-term relationships where creators of various sizes are equally invested in your success because it means their success, too. Brand fit matters more than reach. When audiences find the collaboration natural, they trust the product and brand more, and trust converts better than any paid placements.

It works because it's genuinely mutual. Brands get content and distribution that isn't reliant on their own channels or ad budgets. Creators get paid for what they were already doing - talking about the things they love to an audience that trusts them.

Modash, our partner for this issue, is the expert platform for creator marketing and affiliate programs for brands of various sizes. They put together an A-Z Guide to Affiliate Marketing with all the steps you need to launch an affiliate program from scratch or improve your existing one. You can read the full report here.

Once you bring them in, the work doesn’t stop there. The brands that stay hands-on with their affiliates - communicating regularly, refreshing products, building tiered programs that give creators something to work toward - are seeing significantly more active affiliates and more revenue. Set it and forget it doesn’t work here.

Want the full breakdown on building an affiliate program that won’t flop? Modash’s 2026 Report on why some affiliate programs succeed while others don’t is the place to start.

Interesting things from last week

The best things we’ve read, watched, and listened to + news from the internet.

• We have to talk about The Bezos Ball, sorry, Met Gala! There were some fashion highlights, sure, but it was definitely the most politically charged and Capitol-like Met Gala to date. On the other hand, the Ball Without Billionaires hosted by Gabriella Karefa-Johnson and Lisa Ann Walter, featuring current and past Amazon employees, was iconic. Snaps all around!

• Met Gala red carpet turns into a platform to launch new products with Marc Jacobs and Rachel Sennot teasing the return of Marc Jacobs Beauty, and Hailey Bieber giving us a glimpse of new, yet-to-be-released Rhode products.

• Talking about Hailey, this shoot for ALAÏA is stunning!

• Adidas drops a mini-movie starring Timothée Chalamet and Bad Bunny, with a whopping 55M views and counting! Social media is becoming TV, and the best brands are also media companies.

• Content creators are becoming a growth channel of choice for brands as search spend declines. Meta is projected to overtake Google in ad revenue this year, and brands are moving on from one-off creator collaborations to always-on partnerships, affiliate programs, and performance-based creators.

• AdWeek drops the 2026 class of 100 Creatives Changing the Culture Game. We spot some familiar names!

• Have we reached peak celebrity brand? A deep dive into what Kylie Jenner’s brand KHY pivot and what makes a celebrity brand successful. And here’s a handy tracker of the most successful celebrity brands.

• Bumble ventures into generative AI in an attempt to win Gen Z, who is tired of never-ending swiping, and differentiate itself in the market. Onboarding conversation with AI matchmaker called Bee doesn’t sound very romantic, but if it leads to better matches?!

• The Ordinary opened The Markup Marche, where they sell avocados for $305 and bananas for $175 to draw attention to the world of beauty, where luxury products are marked up by as much as 12 times. Love the bold stance!

I’ve always put a lot of thought into curating my belongings, as a way to step into the person I saw myself as and was ready to show myself as to the world. To the point, I’d pay insane shipping fees & surcharges to have Topshop items sent to me from eBay when I was 16 and wanted to channel my cool London it girl fantasy. It was a different time back then!

And if you’re reading this, I’d imagine you love brands and marketing as much as I do and geek out on what makes us obsess over certain brands, while others don’t move us.

For brands to be able to create this level of brand love, they need to know their customer and what resonates with them inside out.

We discussed this in part 1, but the “easiest” way for a brand to become a cult-favorite is to go deep with their perfect customer, rather than going wide and vague.

We see a lot of emerging brands going deep within their subcultures. Heaven Mayhem and their subculture of chic, minimalist, It girls. Halfdays started as a ski apparel brand and has zoomed in on the outdoorsy woman ever since. Bandit Running winning over the urban running communities - my new favorite!

You get your target audience to fall in love with your brand first, and then you expand.

To create a brand that truly resonates, we need to create a clear audience profile that goes much deeper than “she’s in her 20s, lives in a big city, and works for a start-up”. Of course, we need to know who we’re speaking to as a starting point, but great brands that move their audience know exactly who their biggest fan is, what they believe, what narratives they’re living, what they obsess about, and what tensions they're navigating. That’s your map to create brands people want to be part of and a starting point for every decision.

Let’s build an audience profile together, so you never have to guess what to say to resonate with your customers.

Below for On Brand Insiders:

• How to prepare a profile for your target audience

• The best places to get helpful insights for your brand and audience research

• Questions to ask people to dig deeper and create things that resonate on an emotional level

• Invite for a workshop to map out the content strategy for your brand

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