the future of brands

Media companies will increasingly have to choose what to own and what to co-pilot. Not every new venture needs to exist as an O&O product, nor does it have to exist within a centralized environment. Licensing out characters to various retailers, or allowing small merchants to use beloved characters in their own designs sought out by different c... See more

Successful Brand Universes are those that when come in contact with, we as consumers instantly react, “Wow, thats SO [insert brand here].”

Everybody should be thinking of their brand as a character. It loosens what you can do and are allowed to do. Our competition is not other brands in the category, we don't give a shit about what others in the category are doing. The competition is the other things that are in your feed; that really funny comedian, that meme account, your best frien... See more

rather than observing and following online trends, brands are fully capable of creating their own, treating social media culture as its peer and equal, rather than a source of culture-mining. What it achieves is a kind of dignity that is hard to come by in the current climate of incessant algorithm-stroking. It reads as effortless, not desperate. (... See more

Good branding signals other things related to class and positionality – if an experience looks good, it’s because it was crafted at some point by a designer and a creative director who had the time, skills, and zeitgeist awareness to know what looks good (one of the founders of the swim club mentioned above is a graphic designer by trade, as an exa... See more