I’ve been on this so-called entrepreneurial journey for over 11 years now, and the biggest come-up of it all hasn’t been a single client, a single brand, or a single deal. It’s been the fact that I’ve had someone to share the whole thing with. I wouldn’t say I took it for granted, but a few weeks ago, I was met with some particularly tough times. It just felt like everything was coming to a point. Cashflow issues, stretched thin cause of growth spurts, yet ultimately I knew it was not something we needed to get through, but rather were going to get through cause of having support. Most of my career has been spent being “the guy with the answers,” yet for that moment in time, I didn’t know how/why this shit was so inexplicably difficult despite doing a lot of things right. You’re never for a second promised success in anything you do, yet showing up and time in the game is meant to balance it all out, but you still get those blips…

Starting a business is really difficult. Starting one by yourself is a different kind of difficult, and the kind that messes you in ways nobody warns you about. While I don’t know the specifics, I have experienced pockets of pain that come with the territory of running your own thing.

Enter the trusted co-founder. Most specifically, mine: Alex.

Over our time together, we’ve launched four things (in chronological order): MAEKAN (a publisher, our first project after leaving HYPEBEAST), Adam Studios (our brand studio in Hong Kong), Adam Ventures (a platform for us to co-create companies), and Adam Insights (our research arm), alongside other investments. In business, we’re always looking for multipliers and areas where 1 unit of input magically yields an output greater than what you put in.

The impact of a great co-founder is not 1+1=2. It’s multitudes larger.

You get divide and conquer: the ability to put real trust in someone to go represent the message, direction and goal of the company, which means at the very least a bottleneck is divided in two. But I think most importantly, you get someone to share in the lowlights, and yes, there will be many lowlights.

As much as I have a sense of confirmation bias around Co-Founders, I did some digging and the research seems to be fairly nuanced. First Round Capital studied a decade of its own investments and found that companies started by two or more founders outperformed solo-founded ones by 163%, and that solo founders were valued roughly 25% lower at the seed stage. Noam Wasserman, who studied thousands of startups, found that only 16% of high-growth companies were built alone, and that co-founded teams had higher average performance with less variance, though solo founders could also swing for the fences. He also traced 65% of startup failures to people problems rather than product or market. Which cuts both ways: the right co-founder is a form of insurance, and the wrong one is a liability. I don’t want to overstate this, the data isn’t unanimous, and plenty of remarkable and durable companies were built by one person. But the pattern is hard to ignore, especially when you’ve lived it. The stats say teams have better odds. What they can’t quantify is what it means to never carry the doubt and experience alone.

THE LOWLIGHTS

I remember stretches with limited money, needing to scramble to figure things out. The work was hard. What carried us was subtler: the energy you get when the person next to you also doesn’t have the answer yet. Neither of us knew the way. We were just both committed to the same outcome, and somehow that shared uncertainty turned into momentum.

The psychology of failure is different when it’s socialized. On paper, that sounds like a bad thing, you’re spreading the failure to people who can’t do anything about the outcome. But in the entrepreneurial lens, having someone to share in the challenges is crazy useful. We all have different levels of energy at different points in time. It’s not always the case that you’re both in the lows, or both at the highs. And that balance, that modulation, is what makes the whole thing stable.

Stability matters more than people admit. Without it, it’s really hard to build anything, because stability is the foundation everything else sits on. There are probably moments where Alex and I should disagree more, if I’m being honest. But the trust mitigates the disagreements, because in some ways we’re pushing ahead, and we just know that the left engine and the right engine are generally going in the right direction for the optimum outcome.

THE VENN DIAGRAM

How do you actually find a great one?

I can understand those who have an entrepreneurial idea and are generally looking to find a partner, devoid of any existing social context. I can only speak to my personal, essentially one-of-one story. But the best co-founders are the ones that you already know. You find them among the people you already know, the ones you’ve been through something real with, where the previous experiences foreshadowed how you’d line up amidst real adversity. I can’t overstate that people who are willing to go the extra mile for a company that is NOT theirs will most certainly carry that over to their own company.

Together, co-founders are a perfect representation of my all-time favorite Venn diagram: one of you represents a talent, skill or perspective, the other represents another, and the middle ground is obviously the company, the thing you build together. That middle is the through line of everything you’re doing, and it has to exist before the company does.

I used to think the best co-founder was someone who covered your weaknesses, which is approaching it through the lens of solving deficiencies first. My real answer is finding someone whose differences are real but whose middle overlaps with yours exactly where it counts. The complexity of business means you will inevitably always have some form of weakness. The overlap is values, ambition, the kind of work you want to make. The differences are everything else, and they’re what make the engine run.

I can only speak from experience, but great founding teams often understand the specific strengths of the partners and also know how to “stay outta the way” in pursuit of executional speed. If you can’t figure out the best person for a role, and be confident that person will run themselves through 23 brick walls, then reconsider.

One interesting thing that I read a long time ago was if you can “survive” an 8-hour road trip with your partner, you’re golden. Naturally they have to bring something to the work table, but it was such an easy measure of success.

WE DON’T NEED TO BE RIGHT

When I think about what made it work, I reach for two things, and neither of them is on a resume.

Trust comes first.

Without trust, divide and conquer is just delegation with extra steps and a fancier title. Then there’s a sense of humility and selflessness, where we don’t need to be right, we just need the company to be right. That’s a harder bar than it sounds. Most people, including me, like being right, especially in our younger years where correctness forms our identity. Failure, subsequently, is a knock against our identity (It’s also a lot easier to say than to practice. I won’t pretend otherwise).

It took years to get to the point where being right about something felt less valuable than the company being right about it.

We used to joke that there were so many differences between Alex and me, yet beyond the differences there was so much shared value, and a real desire to build a great creative business together. That’s the part you can’t verify in a reference check or figure out in a few days together. You either know it or you don’t.

THE GENEROUS ONE

I can say this plainly: Alex is one of the most generous people I know. And while this isn’t necessarily a precursor to a successful business, it most certainly makes the ride more enjoyable and you’re able to enjoy this sense of selflessness on the regular. The fact that we share this sense of building creative infrastructure for people, that’s something I don’t take for granted. I wish we could do it faster, because the goal is to make a great, durable creative company, one that people who want to do great things can plug into. That’s the core of it all, and I couldn’t have been even close to executing what I’m doing now without this opportunity, without the upside that comes with this partnership.

As someone working in a creative industry, we’ve foregone the allure of money for something else. And in doing so, what we don’t always collect in cold, hard cash is experiences. It’s experiences both good and bad, and these are the moments that hopefully can be treated as their own form of currency. The fact that you can share in this with somebody is something that’s really hard to describe. I go back to this idea of socializing the wins and losses. It makes it such an amplified emotion.

If you’re building something and you’re doing it alone, or you’re out there hunting for your person: stop looking where everyone else is looking. Look at the people you already know. The Venn diagram is already drawn somewhere in your life. The middle ground is the thing you’d build together.

I’m looking back on 10+ years, here’s to 20 more.

Never complain, never explain.

I can’t tell you with high confidence that what I’m looking at on screen is real anymore, or at least with 100% certainty. And I don’t think you can either. We’re crossing into a strange phase where the default assumption is flipping: non-mundane* content online is creeping into this space where it’s deemed not real until proven otherwise, and not the other way around. That sounds dramatic, but I think we’re already feeling it without naming it. I’m guilty of brain-rot-inducing group chats like anybody, but what was once novel content is frankly now boring and hardly worth checking. Seeing a European footballer speak Cantonese grows old fast.

(*non-mundane meaning anything viral/entertainment based, that essentially plays well with the algo. I’m not tryna AI doctor a pic of my lunch that I send to you on Whatsapp)

The weird thing is where the pressure valve is. It’s not more digital but rather the opposite. Going back into the real world is how we preserve our sanity. I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks ago and saw this huge photo print featuring Muhammad Ali and the Beatles. It was a photo I’d never seen before (but mostly due to ignorance, a quick search suggests it was a huge moment), but it was undeniably real. The poses were slightly off (if it was taken in 2026, you’d probably blast the moment with a 30fps modern camera and pick 1 or 2 frames from 120 frames), but the capture of the moment was real. The photo was also comforting as an exercise in resource allocation: why would somebody print out an AI-generated image at 8 foot wide and put it into a nice, expensive office?

THE SHIFT BACK

There’s been a lot of attention lately on how the future of our world, or at least a lot of marketing, is swinging back toward physical events and “IRL.” I think a few different factors are coming together. First up is loneliness, and especially male loneliness, something that seems fairly obvious and well-documented. The WHO’s Commission on Social Connection put it plainly in 2025: roughly one in six people worldwide are affected by significant loneliness, and around 871,000 deaths a year are attributed to loneliness and social isolation. That’s about a hundred deaths an hour, which should be scandalous and somehow isn’t.

In the US, the share of men with no close friends went from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021, and men with six or more close friends got cut roughly in half over the same stretch.

I used to think the turn back to physical events was a reaction to too much screen time, actually no, that overstates it. It’s a reaction to the loss of certainty. The screen used to be where you went to check what was real by looking for live news updates and what your friends were up to. Now it’s this massive cesspool where our maxed-out cognitive loads are spent deciphering real from fake. The algo feeds us things that we’ll engage with, irrespective of whether it’s reflective of reality.

These two things aren’t the same impulse. Loneliness is a shortage of connection. And the need for certainty is due to a shortage of proof. Different deficits, but they push in the same direction: toward something that compounds negatively.

VERIFIABLE TRUTH

The deeper reason could be that AI visual generation has gotten good enough that human connection is the only verifiable source of truth left. It’s not difficult to get fooled by digital content these days. Real content is reposted as something that happened hours ago, but took place 5 years ago (such as war or accident footage). Real-life experiences (even if branded), going to a concert, seeing someone in person, that stuff is verifiably true to ourselves. Even though that content can get uploaded, generated, and pushed into online and social media, the experience itself can’t be.

You don’t need a survey to feel it. You’ve had the pause, the double take, and checked to see there are in fact ONE left and ONE right arm on that incredible video you were watching. In the real world, you can’t fake your own memory of being there.

This is where the value starts to move in favor of the intersection of craftsmanship, and in-real-life experiences. My favorite is around restaurants that tell great stories, and the craft around that. Anything where craftsmanship can be put on display and consumed in a particular period of time has increased in interest.

In Hong Kong, the restaurants I love most have always run on this logic: the craft only exists while you’re in it. It’s Oi Man Sang, a dai pai dong with the ripping hot wok in Sham Shui Po, that has survived seven decades on the outdoor streets of Hong Kong. It has a story you can’t download. You also can’t buy it like a product through a reseller and consume it half a world away.

THE UNPAUSABLE

The meal is just the purest version of something bigger. Think about how much control the screen hands you. You curate your feed with your extra seconds of dwell, skip the boring intro, rewind the missed moment, read the comments before you even watch, mute anything that drags. Everything is optimized for the least tension or friction. The algorithm learns your taste and serves you a version of the world with the rough edges filed off.

Live experiences paradoxically hand that control over reality back to you. You can’t control what’s around you, but you can control whether what you’re seeing is real or fake. Sure you can’t fast-forward the mediocre opener to get to the headliner, there are repercussions to telling the drunk guy eating two rows over to shut up. You’re a hostage to time, to the sequence, to the strangers around you. That loss of control is exactly what reads as alive. We’ve learned to associate control with comfort, but offline it’s the surrender of control that feels real.

Loneliness could in theory be patched. But the unpausable thing only gets more valuable as the tools get better. Every new feature that gives you more control over the digital world makes the one thing you can’t control worth more. The feed gets smarter about you, and the meal stays exactly what it was.

FROM IDENTITY TO VALIDATION

Events, concerts, sports games, traveling, all that stuff was highlighted in the past because it was a way to generate identity through consumption. You went to the thing so you could become the person who went to the thing. The consumption was the point.

I think the real thing now is slightly different. It’s a sense of validation for our mind that what we’re looking at is real and it exists. Identity building through IRL will continue to present itself, and it will strengthen as identity creation through product consumption is now essentially dead (my belief is that media companies are one of the most powerful ways of identity creation through product/fashion, but that’s for another day).

We used to build a story about ourselves, for other people. Now we also need to confirm something to ourselves: that it happened, that it was real. The audience for that story quietly shrank to one. Now the another “person” you’re proving anything to is yourself. That’s a quieter need, but it’s much harder to satisfy online, and I don’t think it’s going away with the dominance of AI. Ain’t no way this AI toothpaste is going back into the tube!!!

And yet the pushback is measurable. LinkedIn is blocking a crazy amount of AI-generated comments daily, and nobody misses them. Spotify and YouTube are curbing AI-generated content. Even the platforms that profit from the slop are starting to clean it up as we regain a sense of humanity.

THE BRAND PLAY

If you work in brand or marketing, this is the part that changes the job. For many years, the job was removing friction: one-click checkout, autoplay, a feed that learned you before you learned it. But friction that creates meaning is where the durable bonds live now. It’s the kind that proves intent: the difficult-to-grasp narrative that brings a barrier to overcome and the thing you had to show up for. The wait at Oi Man Sang is part of the meal but so are the flames that light up the sidewalk and the heat that warms your face.

And the unpausable is friction. You can’t pause a meal because time passes and the wok is hot. It’s the friction you can’t engineer away, and that’s why it compounds. After years of enjoying near-limitless scale and having it effortlessly reflected on the P&L, times are changing. It’s a bit of a slog out there, but I think for the better. So find your category’s honest friction, the thing that genuinely can’t be optimized. Make that the centerpiece instead of hiding it.

Second, don’t sell connection, build the container. We’ve finally come to the realization that community and brand are not inherently sustainable due to the commercial wedge we drive in between the two. People can smell it, and the anti-slop reflex means they can smell it faster than ever. The play is infrastructure: the route and the start line, the room and the chairs, the matchday and the pre-game. The connection happens among people, not with the brand logo. Provide the conditions, then get out of the way. I suspect that it will be hard for brands to see this through as there’s a lack of meaningful connection to revenue.

Third, verifiable real is now a positioning. In a world of questionable authenticity and slop, the brand that can prove made by hands owns a trust premium: provenance, live unedited moments, named humans. For better or worse, we’ve seen directors and photographers required to show every moment of the process through BTS to validate everything they created was in fact real.

The inverse is just as true. Fake friction reads algorithmic, and people resent it. Durable friction is reciprocal: both sides invest.

Maybe that’s why the industry is betting so heavily on the return of physical. Not because events are nostalgic, but because they’re one of the last things that can’t be generated. The cinema just had the biggest weekend in its history. Imax stock is at an all-time high. Netflix, which has never believed in theatrical, is keeping a film in theaters for 47 days. When the entire internet is a simulation of itself, the meal is real. The workshops, panels (that we panned but suddenly have renewed value), and the raves are real.

That’s the whole reason we’ll start showing up more.

Never complain, never explain.

Nobody ever pulled the likes of Kobe Bryant aside and told him to take it easy.

Five in the morning, gym lights on, ball bouncing in an empty gym with sweat beads dripping off his chin onto the floor. He was celebrated as a legend for putting in the work. People built entire motivational careers out of repackaging one man’s refusal to be outworked and to constantly hone his craft. Some would argue that even then, that wasn’t enough to be the best ever.

But if you flip the script and apply this same perspective in the creative industry, there seems to be pushback about a “Mamba Mentality” towards creative work. They tell you to protect your mental health. They ask if you’re okay. I’ve given that lecture myself and I’ve been on the receiving end of it. Neither position ever made the work better.

There’s a gap in how we treat discipline across different kinds of output. And I think we lost something when we decided that showing up, consistently and unreasonably, was somehow misguided. Not because burnout isn’t real. It is. But because we collapsed the distinction between unhealthy compulsion and sustained excellence into one category and called it a day.

THE REPS ARGUMENT

Sporting greatness, never came without focus and intention to hone their craft. It came from people who were in the studio/gym/training pitch often enough that the odds eventually broke their way.

It’s the same in creative work. The more briefs you process, the more clients you learn to decode, the faster you get to the answer the next time it comes around. I used to think speed was talent. But it’s just pattern recognition. Your brain has seen this shape before, enough times to know what comes next. That’s not a gift. It’s just reps*.

[*I use reps not necessarily in the context of repetition, but rather subjecting yourself to various types of scenarios such as designing, writing, test shoots etc.]

ABSORPTION IS STILL WORK

But creatives need inspiration too, right? We need to recharge and stay fresh…?

I think the framing is often incredibly nuanced. Because the space between the work isn’t rest. Everyone talks about rest like it’s doing nothing or lying on the couch. I would generally agree with that concept and people love to apply the Austin Kleon quote, “Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored.”

But athletes watch film, engage in active recovery, and stay sharp through holistic things that all come back around to the eventual goal. It’s about the fundamental challenge of solving problems through their chosen medium. For athletes, it’s scoring, defending, and game management under fatigue. For us, it’s image creation, writing, and direction under timelines and restrictions.

The longer I do this, the more I think the distinction of “what is rest” matters more than anyone wants to admit. Rest is passive. Absorption is active. When people advocate for creative rest, what they’re usually describing is closer to absorption. Walks, galleries, conversations, reading. All forms of fuel for the machine and that “machine” just happens to be you.

The real axis is engagement versus disengagement. As creatives we often have this benefit of allowing our entire lives, for better or worse, to represent our identity. It’s not just the hours at the desk, but it’s everything that comes together to forge our point of view that translates into our work.

THE CLIENT AS OPPONENT

Commercial creative work, the kind that comes from a brief, a deadline, and a client, has more in common with professional sport than people like to admit. You’re not making art for yourself. Someone on the other side needs you to deliver on a specific day, at a specific level, against specific constraints.

I used to think clients were the obstacle. That comfortable belief means the problem is always someone else. But the constraint is the point. The deadline, the budget, the specific ask, those are all things that help us draw up the game in which we’re about to participate. Without those, most of us wander.

Athletes don’t choose when the game happens. The fixture list is the fixture list. You show up at three o’clock on Saturday or you forfeit. Nobody asks if you’re feeling inspired.

Clients aren’t an adversarial opponent, but they are simply, our version of the fixture list.

THE HARD THING

I spent years looking for the version of this career where great work happens without the grind. I honestly feel that it’s rather dishonest to sell this perspective. I believed (kinda sorta) the people who told me it existed. The right client, the right brief, the right moment, all of it unlocking something effortless. But if you reframe everything, will the athlete who shows up intermittently to training outperform the one who shows up and engages in the process? Is there a version of Michael Jordan who doesn’t put in the work after getting cut from his high school basketball team? I’d love to see those examples to be proven wrong beyond the outlier because the relationship between volume and quality is more direct than we want it to be. One specific area of relevance: the streetwear photographer.

I’ve come across many one-time sneaker photographers who have been a great representation of my argument. New shoes would come in, you’re battling to release them first, and thus you’re needing to find inventive and creative ways to art direct, shoot, and edit all while getting it out before others.

In the end, people can and will find their own style of working. All I can say is that when keeping so-called talent constant, the other variable that always comes through in the clutch is getting your reps in. Don’t run yourself into the ground every single time. But instead, take an alternative approach to exercising discipline and showing up every damn time even when you don’t feel like it. Your presence at 50% on an off-day is still magnitudes larger than 0, as obvious as that is.

If you’re the kind of creative who finds energy in volume, who doesn’t mind the feeling of being slightly overextended, stop letting people make you feel bad about it. Leaning into the work is not a character flaw. It’s discipline. And discipline practiced consistently is the closest thing to a creative superpower I’ve ever found.

Never complain, never explain.

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This week’s title feels kinda lofty, but if you really break it down, the most rewarding things come off of the back of getting humans together to solve problems.

Money’s goal was to solve human coordination by creating financial alignment. In our creative world, I’m not sure the exact outcome exists but the premise is fundamentally the same. We’ve known for a long-ass time that human coordination is tough. We don’t necessarily have the same way of cutting through to create human trust and creative alignment, yet that’s all we really have.

We were recently in one of the biggest meetings/pitches. A lot of time was spent over-building a deck. The thought was, let’s come super correct with this super thought-out idea and plan. We know the timeline is tight, so let’s line it all up.

Yet in the end, that super detailed deck got stripped away to the bare essentials. Title and End slides inclusive, it was 11 pages.

Here’s what we didn’t expect: the stripped version worked because it left room for them to shape it.

We walked in thinking we needed to prove we’d thought of everything. But what they actually wanted was to know we’d thought through enough to be a real partner—and left space for them to be one too.

That thinking work? Still necessary. You need to do the reps to get clear on what you believe could exist. But then you have to be willing to let it breathe. To start from alignment—”we both want to make something that doesn’t suck”—and build outward from there.

Pushing and pulling together with another human is extremely difficult.

I don’t mean artificially difficult. I mean the actual work of coordination. When you sit across from someone—a client, a collaborator, a designer who sees the world completely differently than you—and you have to figure out how to build something together. That negotiation. That awkward dance where you’re both trying to understand what the other person actually means when they say “feels off” or “needs more energy.”

That’s not a bug in the creative process. That’s the process.

Not many people know this but not so long ago, Alex and I really started to question the stress and challenges of growing and scaling Adam Studios. The responsibility of a team, the cashflow management, the people management… it was all a lot to handle. Yet the one thing that we couldn’t shake is that we genuinely love to work with other people whether those in the team, collaborators, or clients. The fact there’s always a problem to be solved that never quite looks the same is invigorating, scary, and exciting.

There were times when our inability to convey our perspective and reasoning both to our team and to our collaborators left us in a shitty spot. We didn’t feel understood and the other side felt just as confused and unable to trust an idea we ourselves couldn’t fully articulate.

But we kept showing up. We’d seen what it looked like when coordination actually worked—when everyone left the room energized instead of drained, proud instead of compromised. That feeling doesn’t come from perfect decks or flawless process. It comes from the messy work of figuring out the damn thing together.

If you can lean into this belief that the greatest things are off the back of human coordination, the outcome becomes so much more meaningful. Far more meaningful than sending a swarm of AI agents to go and come back with a solution in a way that never questions or pushes back.

Next time you’re stepping up to collaborate, maybe take Alex’s approach: strip out the finished ideas. Leave room for the inbetween and the ability to create interlocking outcomes that combines perspectives, fellow identities, and our combined stories.

The smooth path gets you forgettable work. The friction gets you something worth defending.

Never complain, never explain.

One of the long-standing jokes in the comment section of the old HYPEBEAST was often something along the lines of:

“thsi is dummm. I coulda thot of this.”

-Swagalicious8201

[For a bit of cultural context, HYPEBEAST.com comments back in the day were comedic gold. They were often scathing, but not without truth in many instances. At times people wouldn’t even bother reading the article and scroll straight to the comments.]

Well… your ass both didn’t think of it, nor did you take it upon yourself to make it a reality.

Ideas should forever be treated as fleeting, disposable, and nothing more than a bit of tinder to ignite an opportunity.

I spoke about this the other week but “the idea” is really numerous different levers you can toggle. Some levers are big, some are small. The idea doesn’t need to be revolutionary. It just needs to be something.

The Idea Will Change

The moment you start actually building and exploring, your pristine idea gets muddied by logistics, technical limitations, timelines and of course, the moneyzzzz. Three months in, your revolutionary idea bears little resemblance to the concept you drunkenly scribbled on a napkin. And that napkin? Still more coherent than your actual product roadmap.

I used to think the problem was that people weren’t thinking big enough. Actually, no, that’s not it. Vision is rare and hard to cultivate without a doubt. But you can still build great things without the lofty manifesto. DO NOT LET NOT HAVING THE LOFTY PLAN HOLD YOU BACK.

The problem is we’re all thinking too much and building too little. Every “good idea” that hasn’t exploded into something has a graveyard of half-built attempts behind it. Someone already tried. They hit the wall. They gave up.

Execution is where ideas go to die or multiply.

Starting Somewhere

Adam Studios started as a way for two dudes, to pay bills and to create content, design a few logos. Now it’s a multi-faceted company that comprises Creative Services (Studios), investment (Ventures), and Insights (Asian market-led research). None of it would have been possible if we didn’t just pick an initial lane and do it, with the belief we could improve and iterate as we went.

We mythologize the visionaries and forget the operators. We know Steve Jobs, Kim Jones, Virgil and the like, but not the design team, studio manager, and supply chain gurus who actually made the impossible possible. The person who says “wouldn’t it be cool if...” gets the magazine cover, while the person figuring out supply chain logistics gets burnout.

Many confuse “having ideas” with “doing the work.”

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At Adam Studios, we’ve built our entire model around this reality. Good ideas need exceptional execution, like plants need water. Without it, they wither into the “good idea, failed to launch” folder on your desktop. We’ve learned to be ruthlessly honest about the gap between concept and creation, and to value the operational excellence that bridges it.

One of our biggest lessons as we grow is that time becomes more valuable, which means there needs to be extreme clarity over what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we get this thing to completion.

Your Adaptability to the Ideas

Ideas matter. Of course they do. But they’re abundant. The ability to transform them into reality is highkey the most important thing.

For every successful startup, there were dozens of people who had the exact same idea. Same market insight, same user pain point, same opportunity. The difference wasn’t the idea, but the myriad of things they got right or fought through to GET right.

So the next time you’re struck by inspiration, remember: that idea is just your entry fee to the game. The real work (and the real value) lies in everything that comes after. The constant assessment of how to make sure “the thing” has value to an intended audience.

Ideas are cheap. Execution is expensive. And nobody’s coming to rescue your napkin sketch.

Never complain, never explain.

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When you go into any creative endeavor, you’re managing so many interactions that often go overlooked. Start with a “simple” photo shoot. You’re considering at minimum: talent, lighting, camera gear, posing, color grade, styling, location, and composition. Each one compounds with the others. The location potentially affects the lighting, which changes the editing. The energy and mannerisms of the talent should bring the product to life. Take it to another level with film, which adds a multitude of other layers: music, sound design, cuts, pacing, transitions, and more.

Now think about Apple.

Arguably the most referenced brand of all time, Apple, has long held in high regard the multitude of levers at its disposal. They made the packaging experience a mandatory moment, not a fleeting one. They introduced a perspective of ecosystems to build a holistic platform that spanned software, applications, and hardware. They pioneered a design language that permeates through a considered line of products. There’s the occasional miss but there’s always been a clear orchestration beneath the surface.

Levers Are Everything

Apple has long been lauded for its ease of use and simplicity. But I’d argue it’s the coordination of a mountain of decisions (as well as restraint) that has made it the pinnacle of great brand.

We’re often told the audience (or consumer) wants simplicity. And I agree, from their perspective. Complexity from product usage to messages introduces challenges around understanding the brand, the message, and why it’s deserving of your attention. Yet, oversimplifying things is a trap.

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The best brands aren’t simple. They’re just really good at hiding the complexity. What looks effortless on the front end is usually dozens of levers being pulled simultaneously on the back end. The question isn’t whether to embrace complexity. It’s whether you can orchestrate it without the whole thing collapsing.

Brands have infinite levers.

As I alluded to with Apple, you likely have a vivid image that comes to mind: Retail. Packaging. Website Design. Video production style. Design language. Product Lines. Business philosophies. The list goes on. And the brands that win aren’t the ones that ignore most of these, they’re the ones that understand exactly which levers to pull, when to pull them, and which ones to leave alone, because tackling them incorrectly risks making it a net negative outcome.

What “Managing the Complexity” Actually Means

Manageable complexity is knowing you can pull a lever without breaking the orchestration.

That’s not quite right. It’s more like—you understand your vision well enough that when you engage a new touchpoint, it reinforces everything else rather than contradicting it. Or at least, that’s what it should be. Most brands don’t get there because they never did the work to understand what the vision actually is in the first place. Take AirPods.

Apple knew what was up when they killed the headphone jack. They were pulling a lever that already existed in their orchestration, they just hadn’t made it visible yet. Wireless was already baked into their ecosystem (Bluetooth, W1 chip development, iCloud device switching). The charging case design language echoed the Mac’s clean, rounded edges, and white aesthetic. The setup experience was pure Apple: open the case near your iPhone and it just works. No pairing menu, no instructions, no friction.

What made AirPods feel inevitable wasn’t the tech. Bluetooth earbuds existed. It was that every other lever Apple had been pulling for years: seamless device integration, design minimalism, removing legacy ports, and premium materials. You could reverse-engineer AirPods from Apple’s existing brand DNA.

Getting there means doing difficult and sometimes uncomfortable internal work that most brands tend to deprioritize.

You have to understand what your brand does, why you do it, who it’s for. Whether your creation actually resonates with them. Founder-operator brands (fashion especially) have an advantage here. Their output is just a reflection of what they’re already thinking.

It hasn’t always been easy with Adam Studios. We’d take on projects because the money was good or the timeline fit, not because it aligned with what we were actually building. Brands taken on as a means to an end versus part of a strategic future. Every time we did it, I could feel the dissonance. The team would mutter under their breath “why are we doing this?” and I’d give some rationalization about diversification or learning. But really? I just didn’t want to say no.

The work was fine. We delivered. But it diluted everything. Our portfolio started looking incoherent and at worse, the work would never its way into our portfolio. New clients couldn’t figure out what we were good at. And internally, people stopped knowing what we stood for because I kept changing the answer based on whatever opportunity walked through the door.

Here’s where most brands crack: they either get lazy about the holistic perspective, or they try to engage touchpoints they can’t execute well. Both are fatal.

It Feels like a World

Apple’s easy to point to because the orchestration is visible once you zoom out. In the center is Apple. Radiating outward: iOS, hardware, retail design, color integration, product lines, even which shows get greenlit for Apple TV. It’s not a linear chain where this leads to that leads to that. It’s a hub and spoke model where everything connects back to a central vision.

There’s a design language that permeates the whole system. Clean lines, intuitive interfaces, strong interconnectivity. You know what an Apple product feels like even if it doesn’t exist yet. There’s never been an Apple car (and the restraint to not do one is admirable), but we all have a sense of what would feel on or off brand.

This is world building.

And people care about this now more than ever. Not in the Marvel Cinematic Universe sense (though that’s obviously an example), but in the sense that audiences expect brands to feel like coherent worlds they can step into, not just products they buy.

Look at what’s resonating: Erewhon isn’t just selling groceries, it’s created an entire aesthetic world that people want to inhabit. Patagonia built a world around environmental activism that makes buying a jacket feel like joining a movement. [Insert latest streetwear brand] turned streetwear into a world with its own rules, rituals, and status symbols. It’s obvious that I know streetwear the best, but they’ve always been the best at defining their worlds.

The common thread? Multiple levers pulled in service of a single, coherent vision. Each touchpoint reinforces the world instead of contradicting it. World building used to be a nice-to-have. Now it’s table stakes. Because when everything is commoditized and attention is fractured, the brands that win are the ones that create a world compelling enough that people want to live in it, not just buy from it.

Two Ways to Fail

You either don’t pull enough levers and can’t differentiate yourself, or you pull too many levers that don’t work together.

The first failure mode is understandable. Focus is good, minimalism is seductive. But if you’re only competing on two or three variables, you’re competing on the same ones as everyone else. There’s no orchestration to admire because there’s nothing to orchestrate.

Sure, you can win by focusing on one lever. But properly managing complexity compounds in ways that single-variable competition never will.

It’s easy to copy one or two things. Hard to copy fifteen that all reinforce each other.

The second failure mode is more common. Brands that expand into touchpoints they can’t execute at a high level. The retail experience contradicts the digital presence. The packaging feels cheap relative to the product. The social content has a different voice than the website. Each lever works against the others instead of reinforcing them.

When you zoom out on a great brand, it’s multiple anchor points, all connected. When you zoom out on a mediocre brand, it’s a few disconnected ideas held together by a logo.

The Point

Simplicity on the front end is what people experience. Orchestrated complexity on the back end is what makes it possible.

The brands you admire didn’t get simple by doing less. They got simple by managing more—more levers, more decisions, more discipline about what connects to what. The ones that look effortless? They’re working the hardest behind the scenes.

If you’re building something that matters, stop trying to keep it simple. Start trying to keep it coherent.

Go look at your brand right now. Not the pitch deck version. The one your customers actually experience. Count the levers. Ask yourself: do they reinforce each other, or are they just next to each other?

If you can’t answer that clearly, you don’t have a complexity problem. You have an orchestration problem.

And here’s the thing about orchestration problems—they don’t fix themselves when you add more stuff. They get worse. The only way out is to stop, figure out what your brand actually is, and then ruthlessly align everything to that. Or keep adding levers and wonder why nothing feels right three years from now.

Never complain, never explain.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working with Arthur and Tom Bray (yes, twins) from Yeti Out!, a multi-dimensional brand that spans parties, a fashion line, music consultancy, talent booking and more. They’ve thrown some of the best parties around the world for the past decade. But they came to me with a question that plagues many creative entrepreneurs: What’s the next chapter and is it even possible when we feel like we’re stuck in the mud?

The truth is, Yeti had been running as a lifestyle project for years. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, until the grind leaves you broken and bruised. The 7am raves where you watch the sunset come up actually are all part of the fun, but it’s the in-between, the shit projects, and the bad clients that make you question everything.

The Scarcity Trap

The brothers described a scarcity mentality that had taken root: any project that came through the door, they’d take. I can attest, there’s no guarantee for tomorrow in creative servicing. Regardless of success, you’re always wondering whether there’s a new opportunity… regardless if you’ve proven to be busy the preceding 40 months. This is incredibly common in creative industries, but it creates a vicious cycle. It’s why I always think that having ample access to oxygen (aka cash money) is so important to making good decisions.

When you don’t properly vet and intake projects, you make yourself susceptible to burnout. There’s a fundamental misalignment between the enjoyment of the work, the financial outcome, and the process itself. That misalignment breeds disdain for what you do. Fixing it is easier than you’d think, but it takes effort to set yourself up.

The Restaurant Analogy

I love using restaurant analogies to explain business structure. Restaurants are the perfect representation of how a business should run.

When we laid everything out on the table, it became clear: Arthur and Tom had all the ingredients at their disposal and in fact were really good chefs in many cases. Decades of experience. Deep rolodexes. The Hong Kong hustle mentality. And a community that has followed them around the world.

They knew how to make a great dish, but the steps each time were different and inconsistent. But without a recipe or process, they were relying entirely on natural skill, talent, and hustle. Something great would come out, but it wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t sustainable.

What they lacked was the framework for the restaurant itself. Branding, clientele, pricing of the food, cost to make the food, front of house, back of house, it can all be cross-connected to a restaurant. They also knew that some of the requirements to run a proper outfit just weren’t in their arsenal. Nobody starts a creative thing to sit at a desk and look at spreadsheets. Yet it’s just as important to have somebody who understands how much a dish costs, as it is to produce a culturally impactful event… that also gets your ass paid.

Building the Framework

So what are the fundamentals?

• What are you serving? = What is the offering/product?

• Who are you serving it to? = Who is the audience and what do they expect/want?

• How much does the dish cost? = What is the client/audience expecting to pay?

• What’s the repeatable process? = What is my approach to shipping the same experience each and every time*

*Note it doesn’t mean it becomes a fully productized outcome that you rinse and repeat, but rather you’re picking and choosing which parts become immovable and which parts are actually up for creative thinking. Standardizing legal documents doesn’t need to be modified. The visual identity of a party based on the line-up and genre does need to be interpreted.

These aren’t just business questions. They’re the building blocks of creative sustainability.

The goal isn’t to strip away what makes Yeti special. It’s to create a framework that allows them to do great, repeatable work without burning out in the process.

If you’re running a creative business, whether it’s events, design, writing, or anything else, ask yourself: Do you have all the ingredients but lack the restaurant? Are you making great dishes (albeit inconsistently), cause you lack a recipe?

Sometimes the most visionary creative thing you can do is build the structure that lets your best work come through.

Never complain, never explain.

Picture an actual barbell: two distinct weights connected by a central bar. On one end sits commercial work; on the other, purely creative pursuits.

Commercial work has constraints, client expectations, and market demands. You solve defined problems for defined outcomes. This is where we earn our living.

Personal work has no commercial intent. You explore without concern for marketability or approval. You’re not trying to make money. You’re maintaining creative integrity.

What’s fascinating about this approach is how these seemingly separate worlds begin to inform each other. The personal work, developed through genuine interest, passion, and autonomy, often becomes a reference point that distinguishes us in the commercial sphere. People are drawn to authentic perspectives, and our personal creative explorations reveal ours in ways strategic commercial work rarely can.

The strategy works because it stops you from expecting commercial projects to fulfill your deepest creative needs. It doesn’t mean you can’t creatively flex, but it means that you’re modifying your perspective. It removes the pressure to monetize your most personal expressions. Each type of work gets its proper place.

For the longest time, this has existed in places like Hollywood with the “one for you, one for me” model where Directors create mainstream hits to afford them the room to do that lowkey visionary script they’ve always dreamed about doing.

The barbell approach acknowledges that we contain multitudes. We can be both pragmatic professionals and unfettered creators. The central bar connecting these two weights is us: our core values, skills, and vision, holding these different expressions of our work in productive tension.

The bar connecting both weights is you, holding different expressions of your work in productive tension. This isn’t compartmentalizing your identity. It’s building a creative life that nourishes both your bank account and your spirit.

I’ll leave you with a simple way of looking at the financial side of the barbell: Make enough on the commercial side to fund the creative side. Simple as that. The barbell only works if both ends are balanced, one with financial weight and the other with creative weight.

Your commercial work doesn’t need to be your magnum opus. Your personal work doesn’t need to pay the bills. Stop apologizing for either.

Never complain, never explain.

Editor’s Note: A bit late to this, was sitting on this and it probably should have gone out like 6 weeks ago ha.

Convenience gave us access, not attachment.

We made everything swipeable, tappable, and delivered in under 48 hours, and now we’re shocked that nothing sticks.

But somewhere along the way, we went against the long-standing agreement, things of value are hard. If you want relationships, communities, or outcomes that mean anything, you have to make them a little hard to get. Not impossible. Not gatekept for sport. But rather create a (positive!) barrier to entry.

It’s what we used to know before convenience became a religion.

The Paradox We Built

When we started MAEKAN, what seems like years ago, we built too much friction into what we were doing. A hard gate when nobody was used to paying for content (at time, USD $10, hard gated), an audio-story first format that meant discoverability was difficult and pretty complex stories and interviews about the psychology of creativity.

As a first-time founder, it was a textbook example of product creation. We created MAEKAN under the belief that you felt needed to have every single bell and whistle to show you were visionary, versus the one the world may have actually needed.

Expensive lessons were learned.

But all these hoops did something unexpected, as they became rites of passage. If you made it through, you weren’t just a “reader.” You were part of a small tribe with shared scars. When I mean scars, I mean more like the sheer effort it took to understand this really weird media product. But some of my friends from back then are still people I’m connected to on the regular today, each go months on end without speaking before picking up where we last left off.

There’s a kind of respect that only shows up when the door doesn’t swing open on the first push.

I used to think the problem was friction itself. Actually, no, that’s not it. The problem is fake friction. Pointless hoops that waste time versus real effort that changes you while you do it.

Capitalism Loves the Low Branch

We didn’t get here by accident. We optimized for low-hanging fruit. Cut the steps, flatten the entry, remove the pain.

Tech promised to “simplify your life,” and we didn’t ask questions. Things like one-click checkout, same-day delivery, infinite scroll… all were meant to make things as effortless as possible.

The companies building this stuff had their own math to solve. Tech doesn’t win by being good for 1,000 people. It wins by being good enough for 100 million. Scale is the only thing that matters when you’ve got VC money breathing down your neck, demanding those hockey stick graphs in your pitch deck. Once again, not revelational, but just a little tentpole in the arc around the role friction should play in our lives.

But low-friction was the perfect drug for both sides

The problem is we confused “easier to access” with “better for you.” We flattened everything that required effort and called it progress.

While there’s a bit of a logical leap from tech UX/UI to just the state of affairs around us, I still see it as a dominant shift. The ease of “checking-out” and “not committing” had done its part to shift culture. The biggest downfall is the lack of commitment to mostly everything, it seems because entering and exiting was easy since meaning and connection was so fleeting.

Sneakers Before the Buy Button

Sneaker culture back in the day taught me this better than anything else. If anything, pre-marketplace sneaker culture has arguably been a textbook representation of community building.

Back when I was into sneakers, you did your research. You knew where to find sneakers that were slept on, you knew what parts of the Internet corners to lurk for different things (SuperFuture vs. ISS vs. NikeTalk vs. Crooked Tongues vs. HYPEBEAST Forums). The Internet was luckily a lot weirder and nuanced back in the day.

You built relationships (and beef) by showing up and contributing on forums and the information was currency.

Then came the era where you could buy your way to culture through StockX, GOAT, and resell apps. The value of a sneaker became a clean, optimal force ranking function. Incredible if you love shoes, but it changed the game when accessibility defaulted to bank account size of the buyer.

Ownership got cheaper in effort but also cheaper in meaning. Things that previously required community investment by showing up, contributing, helping others out, were all dismantled because access came down to simply punching in your credit card numbers.

Friction Isn’t the Enemy

People assume friction means gatekeeping. It doesn’t have to be.

Good friction is a ladder, not a gate.

Sports have built-in skill friction. No one “buys” a jump shot, the ability to hit a 60 yard pass, or a kickflip. You earn it with reps, coaching, and humiliation (lots of it) until your hands/feet know what your head can’t articulate yet.

The friction is the practice. The practice makes a person actually value what they’ve just overcome.

The question isn’t “How do we make this hard?” It’s “What filters for the people who actually care?”

Three Places to Add It Back

If you’re building something, add meaningful friction on purpose.

• Make a contribution the price of membership. Ask people to share something real: a story about their worst moment, their favorite artist and why. Something that makes them vulnerable to semi-strangers. Preference is to have actual answers, move past the yes/no ease of entry.

• Create recurring moments that cause a little discomfort. Early calls, live critiques, in-person meetups when it’s raining. Friction becomes story fuel.

• Make engagement require effort. If something takes time to unpack, the people who invest that time leave as connective tissue.

If you want stickiness, you need shared effort, shared risk, and shared memory. Those three bind faster than any loyalty program.

Sneakers used to ask for this. Sports still do. Your thing can, too.

The people who stick around after they’ve overcome friction? They should be seen as special to you and the community, for their presence is a bond.

So pick one thing you’re building and make it a little harder on purpose. Not punitive. Not for show. Just hard enough that finishing it means something.

The friction is the point.

Never complain, never explain.

A few months back, I found myself in a client meeting that was spiraling into the abyss. It’s the one, where the brief is loose and unknown, timelines are aggressive as fuck, the client has no budget in mind, and the goalposts aren’t just moving, they’re in another stadium entirely. It had all the warning signs of a job that could either be bad, or really bad.

A few years ago, I would’ve nodded enthusiastically and jumped as high as the client would request. But this time? I calmly explained the challenges behind the project, and how the lack of briefing coupled with the aggressive timeline would be something we’d have to walk away from.

The difference wasn’t confidence or experience alone. It was optionality.

The Power to Say “No”

We’ve heard that “saying no” is one of the most valuable options. But this advice often fails to address how to create the conditions where saying no is even possible.. We often understand that “saying no” means you can focus your efforts, but for better or worse, bills need to be paid and life needs to be lived.

When we talk about creative freedom, we often romanticize the pure artistic vision, unbothered by commercial constraints. But real creative power in business isn’t just about unfettered expression, it’s about having the ability to navigate toward better outcomes without desperation driving your decisions.

Optionality isn’t just having options; it’s having the foundation that allows you to access and leverage those options effectively. And in our industry’s chaotic ecosystem where you have a shitmix of decent clients, terrible clients, and a once-every-few-years “dream clients,” money functions as creative oxygen.

I don’t say this to be mercenary. I say it because I’ve lived both realities: it’s the breathless sprint of chasing every project regardless of fit, and the measured exploration of opportunities that align with our vision that can properly sets you up for success, for if the client doesn’t agree to your parameters, you simply say “we good and best of luck!”

Money as Creative Oxygen

Money has never NOT been important. We all need it. I’ve changed tune though. We often start our careers with low(er) budgets, but as you ladder up, you hopefully see what’s possible. From what was once a “this will corrupt the purity of the idea!!!” to, more money in the mid and long-term will yield far better work.

Treat money like oxygen for creative exploration. With enough in your tank, you can venture further into uncharted territory. You can take risks. You can push back against bad ideas without fear that disagreement means losing rent money.

A way to look at it is: When you’re running low on oxygen, every decision becomes about immediate survival rather than long-term direction. Your world narrows to the next breath. Creative decisions made from that place rarely break new ground.

The oxygen metaphor works on multiple levels:

• Go too far too quickly, and you’ll burn through your reserves before reaching your destination

• Stay too cautious, never venturing beyond the shallows, and you’ve wasted your capacity to explore and push

• Without proper equipment (financial infrastructure), even abundant oxygen won’t help you explore deeper waters

The creative teams with the most impact aren’t necessarily the most talented, which seems like a misnomer. I really believe that creative growth comes from continuity (of work and always staying sharp) as well as taking on bigger responsibilities. Those who succeed are often the ones with enough oxygen to dive deeper, stay under longer, and explore territories others can’t reach.

Building Your Oxygen Reserve

So naturally, the question becomes, how do we approach this practically? A few thoughts that have shaped our approach:

1. Price for exploration, not just execution: When we quote projects now, we build in the financial cushion for the thinking time good work demands. The oxygen tax, if you will that provides contingency to do more if needed.

2. Maintain a “no” fund/cashflow calendar: Keeping enough cash reserve to survive is important to allow you to walk away from the wrong opportunity, which is obvious. But really the next step is control and clarity over how much money is coming in/going out and at what points of the month is your key. For example if you have a client who owes you a good chunk of money won’t pay out for 3 months (NET 90 sucks as we all know), but you have bills in between, you must account for that difference in payment timelines.

3. Invest in efficiency systems: The less oxygen wasted on administrative chaos or rework, the more you can direct toward meaningful exploration.

4. Diversify oxygen sources: Reliance on a single client or revenue stream creates vulnerability that inevitably impacts creative choices. This one is obvious, if a client’s loss equates to catastrophic loss of income, you have to think about how to mitigate those risks.

The most valuable creative currency isn’t talent (though that matters) or even experience; I truly believe it’s the ability to make decisions from a place of strategic choice rather than survival necessity.

When we reframe money not as the goal but as the resource that enables meaningful creative exploration, it shifts our entire relationship with business development. We’re not selling out; we’re filling our tanks for the journeys that matter. Focus is hardly ever a detriment when it comes to creative work because the idea/output becomes focused and razor sharp. It’s the “creative oxygen” that equips you with that power.

Next time you feel that tightness in your chest during a difficult client conversation, ask yourself: Am I running low on creative oxygen? The answer might reshape how you approach your next business decision.

Because in the end, optionality isn’t a luxury—it’s the prerequisite for doing our best work.

The word “agency” often only meant one thing to me, the business of offering services. Most recently, agency in its secondary definition has eclipsed the primary meaning for me thanks to it being so closely tied to AI these days.

A quick search reveals that agency also means: “action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect.”

Agency as a human’s ability to control their destiny has become an increasingly important topic with the proliferation of AI. We find ourselves drowning in content but starving for meaning. The real challenge for creative people in 2025 isn’t just creating—it’s knowing why we’re creating.

As the signal-to-noise ratio of content gets dialled up to the max, having agency isn’t just about execution. It’s about having the clarity to choose what deserves to exist. It’s about intentionally creating something that first starts with value to yourself, and hopefully value to the audience. One shapes culture, the other clutters our digital landscape. This isn’t a simple strategy to “create” good content, but rather to serve as the catalyst to generate momentum in the first place.

We don’t always create for efficiency nor should we.

Sometimes we make things because a song moved us, or because we felt an inexplicable urge to bring something new into the world. These “inefficient” emotional decisions are actually our biggest advantage. AI can optimize, but it can’t yearn. It can’t wake up at 3 AM with an idea it can’t shake.

The future belongs to creators who can balance multiple dimensions:

• The strategic clarity to cut through noise

• The emotional intelligence to create from the heart

• The agency to execute on your own terms

From today onward, your creative sauce isn’t just what you can make but rather knowing what’s worth making. And sometimes, that means choosing intuition over metrics.

I came across The Importance of Counter-Clockwise Dance Rituals by Ted Gioia (easily one of my favorite writers) which supports what originally started as a mix of intuition and just general vibes around AI and creative work. What the piece reveals is that modern culture has decided that rigid/box-like thinking is the best approach. But the reality is that this overly-structured thinking is counter to what we see basically everywhere.

The pervasiveness of straight lines and box-centric lifestyles in today’s culture is a warning sign that we are fostering a psychically claustrophobic society—one that obsesses over STEM rationality, prefers numbers over emotions, fears lived reality, and cuts itself off from holistic thinking.

There are no straight lines in nature, McGilchrist points out, except for the horizon—and even that is an illusion. The horizon is actually curved, like Earth itself.

The world of creation as we know it will get much bigger. But as is the case time and time again, the more something accumulates energy and pushes forward in a direction, the space it leaves behind is ripe for experimentation, play, and fun.

I’ve been fortunate that most of the things, starting from that first job in the industry at 22 writing about sneakers, were informed by this crystal clear assessment of how emotional resonance could be a simple and consistent way to find value in this world. Whether it be emotive or financial value, creative work that people can feel will increasingly be valuable in a world where AI-generated work will struggle to carry that same humanistic weight.

What’s the last thing you created purely because it felt right, not because data suggested you should? This question might reveal more about your creative agency than any metric ever could.

Editor’s Note #2: This piece took so long to publish that I had to preface it with two editor’s notes lol. Been pretty sick with a stomach thing the last two weeks. This was lingering in the back of my mind I really wanted to get back into the groove before seeing it again with fresh eyes and hitting publish.

Editor’s Note #1: I’ve sat on this piece for longer than most others because I kept wanting a bit of time to poke and prod at the actual topic. It’s pretty silly to invest this much time into something that I still really believe amounts to a series of people’s perceptions and feelings, at odds with each other, but I also think that it reinfroces why brands are so powerful (and fascinating).

I recently came across an interesting conversation exploring this idea of conceptual brand ownership: who defines what a brand represents? Who holds the ultimate authority if a founder creates a brand with a specific vision but audiences and media interpret it differently? And how should founders navigate this tension?

For full context (it’ll take maybe 4 minutes tops), take a few moments to watch the initial interview snippet from the fashion podcast called The Cutting Room Floor. Then check out a follow-up from Amanda Sabrea (who I happened to catch for brunch randomly a few years ago in Vancouver) for additional perspective.

The root of the discussion is around whether Noah (a contemporary menswear1 brand founded in New York City by former Supreme Creative Director, Brendon Babenzien and his wife Estelle Bailey-Babenzien) can be categorized as a streetwear brand2 or not. Babenzien defends that any public positioning of Noah is rooted in his pedigree coming from Supreme, and not the actual reality of the brand and its vision.

Babenzien goes on to explain that the association of Noah with streetwear was based on outsider interpretation and how “streetwear” publications such as HYPEBEAST and Highsnobiety were covering it. In short, they’re wrong and he’s right to decide the ultimate positioning of the brand.

I do think there is/was an anchoring bias in the argument around Noah being a streetwear brand. Yes Babenzien’s roots are undeniably Supreme, and we cannot separate the proximity of Noah’s start in 2015 and his departure from Surpreme. By mid-2015, in my last year at HYPEBEAST3, I definitely wouldn't call HYPEBEAST a "streetwear" publication. To say that Noah was being reported by streetwear publications, I’d say is categorically false but I also wouldn’t argue with anybody on what they perceived the publication to be.

By 2015, HYPEBEAST had doubled down on high(er) fashion, and it became an amalgamation of style, menswear (street, contemporary, and high fashion), design, pop culture, all things Yeezy, and more. Now in 2025 you’re just as likely to hear about the Pope’s passing as you are what new random homeware is dropping. Somewhere in there is a sneaker drop or two. But depending on who you speak to, a 2008 HYPEBEAST reader’s interpretation (likely seen as hardcore streetwear and sneakers) would be different from a 2025 HYPEBEAST audience’s interpretation (“oh, HYPEBEAST, that Instagram account?”).

Keep all of this in mind for later.

But the real discussion emerges around what role a brand has in controlling and managing its perspective to its audience and market. Some argued that Noah's growth came on the back of its streetwear roots and Babenzien’s dismissive tone was unfairly recognizing what his past did to propel his new venture forward. Another recency bias argument was that streetwear was no longer cool, so he shut the door on that. But I’d argue in 2015 when Noah started, streetwear was still very much pumping, and we hadn’t seen many “peaks” yet (Virgil, reselling, outcome of stimi cheques). Sure for some of us, it wasn’t fulfilling anymore, myself included. That’s a personality reality different from the actual size of the market.

But maybe there’s something else more humanistic emerging from the perspective of Babenzien?

Think about the brands you actually care about, not just the ones that dominate your feed, but the ones that have longevity. If you dig under the hood, the best of them don't necessarily begin with product, marketing hacks, or whatever the latest "community-building" playbook dictates. Instead, they start with perspective. The founder's introspective, conceptual take on the world, distilled into something you can feel. Only after that's clear does the commerce trickle in, almost as an afterthought.

The hardest part of building a brand with soul comes down to defining its vision and point of view. This can't be crowdsourced, templated, or outsourced. No algorithm, no market-research panel, and sure as hell no agency can fully take on that early, scary risk. The brands that emerge off the back of a “I was designing for myself,” weirdly have a high degree of success. They combine a sense of intuition and commentary combined with taste and execution.

When I first came across Japanese brands of the Urahara movement, I was so fascinated by their methods towards brand building. Here, an island, as insular as they were, was able to create brands that were unwavering4 in their direction. The rigidity they held equated to an ongoing book, where each season equated to a new chapter. There was continuity and flow, because the previous chapters needed to make sense with the future work. In a pre-Internet world, the likes of NEIGHBORHOOD, WTAPS, UNDERCOVER, BAPE, and the like become globally respected without the heavy influence of their customer’s requests and shouts. Kids in Hong Kong, New York, and London were lining up for some mythical bootleg Air Force Ones from a brand with hardly any English comms. Amazing.

And yet, lately, it feels like we're living through an era where we don't feel comfortable rewarding the risk it takes to be directional. The gravitational pull of the safe and familiar means it's rarer for brands to stick their necks out and actually lead with a strong vision. Instead, they play it safe. Brands and countless DTC startups are seemingly built on market opportunities and trends rather than distinct perspectives. The market, in return, gives us brands that feel like rehashed group projects. It’s often a little bit for everyone, and nothing deeply for anyone.

There's a Naval quote that encapsulates the relationship between business and commerce well:

To build product, "make something people want."

To create art, make something you want.

(The best do both).

I find this to be a fairly succinct way of summing up my thoughts. I felt a lot of comments in the Amanda Sabrea post suggested that Noah was perhaps alienating and excluding an audience. Frankly, if there is no art (the thing the founder wants), there is no product worth caring for, and I wholeheartedly believe that. And the whole thing stops dead in its tracks.

I think this is often the case with brands that go too product-centric. And we’ve seen it now with brands carrying one-trick pony or seasonal hero products. Let's also call out a persistent myth: the idea that a brand, in its quest to be "inclusive," must somehow tell all stories, all at once. That's not just an impossible burden; it fragments the essence of what a brand could be. You can't possibly capture the nuance and context of many lives at once, but you can (and should) tell a world-building story that’s not necessarily to appease the community or audience but rather give them something to latch onto. It’s the founder's worldview, their obsessions, their evolution.

I previously spoke about anchoring bias, and it plays a larger part than many might think. The timeframe in which you interact with a brand, and the cultural baggage you carry, will sculpt your perspective. When Babenzien explains Noah isn’t streetwear, he’s fighting against the gravitational field of his own résumé. Because he was Supreme's Creative Director, every move gets weighted with "streetwear," regardless of actual intent. The inability to pivot—or be allowed to, by your audience—traps the visions of creatives we should be celebrating. Not to mention, I get the sense that Babenzien’s Noah vision (sailing and preppy culture) was rooted in things that he decidedly wouldn’t call streetwear.

[As a total aside, I do wonder how people of different generations would classify NIGO today? Is he the founder of BAPE? The founder of HUMAN MADE? What about Pharrell? A producer? A performer? A fashion designer?]

That's the curse and blessing of brands: you can try to shape perception, but the context is always shifting. People's relationships with brands are personal. You may define your brand's values as X, but someone else will experience it as Y, shaped by the moment they stumbled across it and the stories they've heard. We all acknowledge that customer perception of a brand is up for personal determination and ever-changing. And while a brand can surely be community/customer-informed, the ultimate vision should rest with the brand’s world they’re trying to build. Turning over the keys to anybody else fundamentally alters the course of the brand.

I sometimes question whether I’m not applying enough rigor towards this discussion (although all the preceding worlds would disagree). It feels a bit like a cop out in that “hey, let’s agree to disagree, we can not like the same brands.” Fashion, interestingly enough, is subject to so much personal interpretation that anybody with the interest to dive in, can make their own judgement. Your path of interaction will always have an impact on the outcome of the brand’s success. I’ll oversimplify it into two binary outcomes. If you care, you buy, then the brand succeeds. If you don’t care, you don’t buy, and you were never arguably intended to be the target audience.

The real real shit, is that if you really launch an overly artistic vision and nobody cares (enough to cop anything), the free market takes care of the rest. You adapt, you pivot, or you bow out. That's the fair trade-off for being brave enough to put your vision out there, and one that I’d agree with as a brand, it’s easier to find the right crowd and/or a new crowd, than change the mind of somebody who doesn’t get it or doesn’t care for it.

One of the last bits to chew on is the cliché existential question: What happens when the founder's passion wanes or perhaps they're forced to create something they aren't passionate about? Does the flame go out, with or without the financials stoking the flame? Maybe the brand reinvents itself, fades away gracefully, or enters private equity purgatory. But for as long as the spark lasts, let's reward those who build something unapologetically driven by vision and not just what they think we want.

The beauty of brands is that they exist at the intersection of founder intent and audience interpretation. Neither party fully controls the narrative. While founders provide the North Star, audiences bring their own context and meaning to what they experience with the brand. This tension isn't a bug; it's the feature that keeps brands dynamic, evolving, and ultimately, alive in culture. The most resilient brands keep audiences interested and excited with meaningful things with sufficient novelty.

The best brands compound their vision, and let them come.

If you’ve made it this far and want a fantastic deep dive into Noah that has stood the test of time, head over to MAEKAN and read War Machine. Penned by the talented David Kenji Chang.

At the very core, successful people aren’t exactly made up of some mystery sauce. It’s usually a combo of working hard, staying determined, and being truly passionate about what they do. Somewhere in there, “luck” factors in, but over an extended period of time, there’s a regression to the mean and luck’s role dissipates. But over the course of those inputs of hard work, determination, and passion, I force rank passion as the game-changer. It's what gets great ideas off the ground and keeps them going. It’s this insatiable desire to keep going when nothing makes sense or when most signs point to being wrong.

You know you're passionate when it's 3:30 AM, you know you need to be up at 8, but you just can't stop working on that one last thing. Passion is what makes you ramble to your friends about something until you catch yourself and apologize, only to have them tell you they love seeing you this alive. It's not just drive or motivation—it's the thing that makes the hard parts feel like they matter.

After talking to tons of people, both the ones crushing it and the ones still finding their way, I've realized something: real, genuine passion is actually pretty rare. I'm not sure if it's luck, some people simply stumble onto something they're passionate about, but I've found it to be consistently one of the most powerful determinants of early and sustained, long-term success.

If you're running a team or business, protecting passion is a critical function to put out amazing things. Find those people who light up about their work, and make sure they have everything they need to keep that fire burning.

For me, it's about checking in and being real with people. How are they feeling about everything on their plate? What elements of their day-to-day are a damper on their strengths and passions? When you see that spark in someone, protect it. Let them know that while we cannot forego all the shitty stuff, the goal is continually to spend our time in the things we’re the best at. What can you do to help them channel that passion into something amazing?

Passion doesn't just numb the pain of adversity1, it transforms your process and journey through the creation of sustainable, limitless energy. The most difficult and rewarding outcomes need endurance. It's the fuel of passion that guides you towards your most meaningful work.

Six years into Adam Studios, and we're still terrible at celebrating milestones. We're always chasing the next project, the next challenge, all in pursuit of battling our #1 enemy (and it’s not always creative fulfillment)… but cashflow.

But here's a quick PSA: take time to celebrate your wins. Share your work. Give people a reason to care about what you do. (Consider this post my belated attempt at both.)

One of the most alluring parts of agency work is the excitement that comes with working with different people on different creative challenges. I love seeing different businesses up close and understanding where and how they convergent or divergent across industries.

But while you help other people with their business goals, you're often left without any equity of your own. Only certain opportunities will afford you the upside, and they don't happen often. Even then, equity requires a series of positive events to translate into anything worthwhile.

About a year ago, we started to make a conscious effort to identify the things we enjoyed doing and do them with more frequency. For us, building businesses and having the opportunity to define their direction and story are things we care about. When my partner Alex and I left our day jobs, it felt like risky endeavor but also the right one. Looking back, it's never not exciting to identify gaps and opportunities, to create something of value that can make a difference.

One thing we've actively tried to do is build things from the ground up alongside other passionate founders and operators. We know what we're not good at, and we know what we excel at. Experience has taught us to create situations where our attention is focused on things where we have the most expertise .

One of my favorite projects was the creation of acoa (a change of air), a hospitality company focused on helping experiences for those visiting new places, starting with Nijo (Kyoto) and Takashima (Lake Biwa). From the start, we knew what experience was lacking: the ability to instantly integrate as a local when stepping into a new place. Alongside our friend Takuma, we built a brand that represents the beginnings of a different approach towards hospitality.

We're providing our point of view in a way that can bring a degree of responsible tourism and enable people to experience culture and exchange in a different way. While equity isn't just about financial outcomes, it creates a integral relationship where the collective efforts of all parties are recognized not for their transactional nature but for the cooperative belief that you're driving toward the best possible long-term outcome.

Having equity in something you've conceptualized and launched is nice. But the real reward for us will always be what drove us to step out in the first place: the freedom to bring our vision to life.

Picture a brand as that friend who's simultaneously the most put-together and messiest person you know. They’re this type—perfect taste, immaculate social skills, but also regularly losing track of time, and face uncertainty where next month’s rent money will come from. They’re at the balance of existential crisis about their purpose in life but keep trucking on because they have a belief in what they release has value. Somewhere in the middle they also have to ensure they’re fed and there’s a roof over their head. That's basically what modern brands are: carefully curated chaos trying to make sense of our collective culture.

In my early days at HYPEBEAST, I think I couldn’t quite articulate why I appreciated brands until after the fact. I was young, not jaded by marketing, and well the brands did what they were supposed to do: bottle a feeling and perspective, and sell me on it. They had done their job to an impressionable kid looking for identity through fashion.

But as I became more involved in the complexities of brand-building and running a business, it became clear how utterly difficult this was. I’ve worked with billion-dollar brands, only to come to the stark realization that “success” in traditional metrics don’t even remotely mean that things are all smooth and efficient.

Underneath there’s a lot of messy wires. It’s a coordinated chaos where balancing the operations and business, need to align on key pillars of trust, creativity and cultural resonance. Let's break down this beautiful mess:

TRUST

First, there's trust, an increasingly rare form of currency in a post-social media world, where we're all on the backfoot of questioning the validity of something. Brands are essentially making promises to strangers, which if you think about it, is both wildly optimistic and slightly unhinged. When Nike says "Just Do It," they're not just selling shoes; they're selling the idea that you can overcome your 6 AM snooze button addiction. Trust is built through consistently showing up, keeping promises, and admitting failure when warranted. The moment that trust breaks is when the foundation of a brand/consumer contract breaks and you lose something you worked so hard to earn and foster.

CREATIVITY

Brands sit in this fascinating creativity paradox. They need to be creative enough to stand out in our scroll-through world, but not so “creative” that the message is so cerebral and conceptually it doesn’t achieve its intended goal of well, sustaining themselves. It's like trying to teach your students something that they fundamentally don’t have a foundation for, in hopes they latch on and dive deep. At its core I’m not opposed to complexities, in fact I wish we spent more time diving into them and unpacking them. But it’s a fascinating challenge to adopt the ol’ MAYA approach which has come to dominate the world of creative output. MAYA for those unfamiliar, stands for the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle, coined by Raymond Loewy. It represents the belief that creative success is a balance of innovation and familiarity. RIP to Virgil, cause he practiced this to a tee.

CULTURAL RESONANCE

What I find so fascinating is how brands have become these living, breathing cultural artifacts that take on lives of their own. Crocs became ironic, then post-ironic, then cool. Sure there were really great strategies and tactics. But it takes two to dance and a counterpart to pick up what you’re putting down. I liken it to at times, a cultural Hail Mary, turned movement. Brand builders ultimately try their best to control the narrative around a brand, yet the uncertainty of how brands interact with the outside world is of legitimate excitement. Nobody wants their brands co-opted by an unsavory group, but the reality is that brands create a symbiotic relationship between the creators/operators and the audience/customers.

Over time, brands grow into something their creators never imagined. Like how Dr. Martens went from practical work boots to punk rock symbols to fashion staples. Or how Patagonia became less about fleece vests and more about environmental activism to become a finance bro staple.

Brands have this incredible power to be filters and binders. Allegiance and consumption of a brand forge relationships in an uncanny way (like wearing Stussy in 1995, to represent a certain cultural participation), just as much as repelling those who don’t align with your personal ethos (like buying a Tesla in 2025).

Having worked with start-ups and massive companies, they’re all essentially trying to create cultural and creatively resonant work while making it financially sustainable. These two aren’t always complementary in that their interests differ. In fact running a brand is full of contradictions. They're attempting to be authentic in an artificial construct, to be consistent while constantly evolving, to be profitable while being purposeful. It's an impossible task to get right every single time, which is exactly what makes it so interesting when they pull it off.

And maybe that's the beautiful chaos of it all. In trying to be these perfect, polished entities, brands end up being remarkably human: messy, contradictory, and also brilliant. They're mirrors reflecting our collective desires, anxieties, and aspirations and a barometer for the current state of culture and society. It’s true that superficially, we don’t need another brand in this world but to think of it purely as a commercial outcome is perhaps selling it short. Think of brands as storytellers of belief systems. They take our deepest convictions and transform them into something people can touch, wear, or experience. They're not just selling products; they're creating touchpoints for people to connect with ideas that are reflections of their own truth.