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The fashion press covered it as a governance story. A founder stepping back, a debt restructuring, and a seasoned operator brought in to modernize. That framing is not wrong. It is just not the interesting part. The interesting part is the question nobody seems to be asking… how did one of the most coveted names in luxury get here? The answer has nothing to do with the debt and everything to do with what happened to the brand.

What Made the Brand

Dolce & Gabbana had something in its best years that very few luxury houses have ever achieved… a design vocabulary so specific and so internally consistent that you could identify a piece without seeing the label. Their aesthetic became a synthesis of tradition and spectacle: corsetry, animal print, lace, and references to Italian cinema and southern Italian culture, with Dolce’s Sicilian background informing recurring motifs of black dresses, religious symbolism, and lush ornamentation, all underpinned by close attention to fit, structure, and craftsmanship. The brand’s three founding codes, Sicily, sartorial craft, and sensuality, were the literal DNA of every collection, expressed with enough conviction and consistency that the customer understood exactly what the brand stood for without being told.

That clarity was extraordinarily hard to build, and it turns out, surprisingly easy to spend down. The corset that appeared in their first significant collection in 1991 was still recognizable as a D&G corset a decade later because the brand kept investing in the codes that made it mean something. The Sicilian dress, the baroque embroidery, the campaigns shot like Italian cinema from the 1940s and 1950s— all of it reinforced a world that felt specific enough to belong to and aspirational enough to want to be inside. They turned cultural memory into high fashion, merging nostalgia with modernity in a way that made Sicilian culture feel globally covetable rather than regionally specific. That is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, and they did it better than almost anyone else in luxury for the better part of two decades.

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What Happened

What they did not do was keep building the brand. The shift was not dramatic or sudden; it never is. It happened the way brand death always happens, through a series of individually defensible decisions that each made sense in the room where they were made and collectively moved the brand further from the thing that had made it matter. A SMEG appliance collab that leveraged the Sicilian aesthetic, a Bialetti coffee maker collection, Gourmet pasta, and perhaps most tellingly, a multi-year panettone collaboration with Sicilian bakery Fiasconaro, the traditional Italian Christmas cake that every Italian household buys in December, sold in D&G-branded collectible tins decorated with Sicilian cart motifs, available on Amazon. Each extension felt like a natural expression of the world D&G had built. Together, they did something far more damaging; they made the brand feel like it was selling its mythology rather than creating new ones.

This is the part of the D&G story that gets lost amid the debt-restructuring coverage. The €450 million is the number. Brand death by a thousand cuts is the cause. Every time the brand put its name on a product that had nothing to do with the creative conviction that had made the mythology worth borrowing, it was making a small withdrawal from an account it had stopped depositing into. No single withdrawal was fatal. The accumulation of them was. Because a mythology that is not being fed by new creative work does not hold its value indefinitely— it spends down, quietly and then all at once, until the brand that was once impossible to ignore starts to feel like a very expensive reminder of what it used to be.

Why This Matters

Luxury demand is not created evenly across a portfolio. It is created at the top, in the most iconic, most expensive, most culturally electric work the brand produces, and it flows downward from there. When Dolce stopped producing work at their standard and started licensing the name onto products that anyone could access at any price point, it collapsed the distance that had made Dolce initially desirable.

The woman who once felt specifically chosen by a D&G corset cannot sustain that feeling toward a brand she encounters on a kitchen appliance or a Christmas cake on Amazon. The halo that made everything the brand touched feel covetable does not survive that kind of contradiction; it erodes quietly, over the years, until the brand that was once impossible to ignore becomes easy to walk past.

Entry-point products only work within a luxury brand when the top of that brand is so aspirational that the customer feels fortunate to access any part of it. The entry point borrows its value from the halo above it. When the halo dims because the brand has stopped investing in the creative work that generates it, the entry point loses its value as well. You end up with a brand that has expanded into dozens of categories and lost its authority in all of them, including the one it was built on.

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What Cantino’s Appointment Signals

Cantino has seen this problem before. At Gucci, he watched what happens when a brand loses its creative center and has to find its way back— the discipline it requires, the patience it demands, and the commercial pressure that makes both of those things harder than they sound. His appointment at D&G is the first signal that the people now running this company understand that the debt restructuring is not the real problem. It is the symptom. The real problem is a brand that stopped being extraordinary and needs to become extraordinary again before any financial restructuring will hold.

The proof that the recovery is possible is sitting on The RealReal right now. D&G pieces from the brand’s most iconic periods are among the most sought-after on the resale market. The woman who loved this brand did not move on because she found something better. She moved on because D&G stopped giving her a reason to stay. That is a solvable problem, but only if the brand is willing to do the one thing that licensing deals and panettone tins cannot do for you.

Show up with something so specific and so charged with creative conviction that she feels, once again, like it was made for her and nobody else.

The Lesson for Your Brand

The D&G story is not really a luxury story. It is a story about what happens when any brand mistakes the equity it has already built for a resource it can draw down indefinitely without replenishing. If your brand has a version of the D&G brand codes, the thing it does that nobody else does in quite the same way, a pattern or colour or design language so clear that someone knows it is your brand without seeing your logo, that thing requires constant creative investment to stay alive. The moment you stop investing in it and start licensing it onto adjacent products, you are not growing the brand. You are spending down the only thing that made it matter.

Aspirational brands are built on desire, and desire requires distance. You earn loyalty at the top and let it trickle down. D&G reversed that sequence for a decade, and the €450 million restructuring is the cost of that decision made visible. The question Cantino now has to answer is not a financial one. It is a brand one. And the answer, if there is one, will not come from a debt restructuring or a licensing review. It will come from a collection that makes the customer who once loved this brand feel, for the first time in years, like someone was thinking specifically of her when they made it.

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I’m about to land in Mexico City for some work on a brand that is expanding into this market. It’s my first time, so if you have any recommendations, please send them my way!!

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to more podcast episodes, head to Art of the Brand on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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People are overstimulated by over polished content because, simply, theres too much of it. Unless your content is controversial, polished content doesn’t scale. The format that’s currently winning is lo-fi (low-production) content shot right on your phone, focused on being episodic or ‘series-based’. Why? Because social media has become the modern-day TV we scroll through daily, people want their daily hit of the next episode.

There are so many examples of this being standout successes from Sammy Nussdorf of Meadowlane, who I interviewed here, to HotGirlPickles, who I interviewed last week (dropping soon on Art of the Brand please subscribe!!) Building in public and creating episodic content is all the rage, and Dave Portnoy’s Tea by the Sea is just another example of this.

In case you missed it, Dave Portnoy is the founder of Barstool Sports and one of the most instinctive media operators of the past decade; he started One Bite Everyone Knows the Rule and a spin-off of a bunch of podcasts that own a strong corner of the internet. His newest venture is Tea by the Sea, a daily format where he records from his beach chair his breakdown of the latest pop culture drama. It is unfiltered, unscripted and has no production team and no studio.

The reason it’s successful is that he is consistent: he shows up daily regardless of view count, because it doesn’t have crazy production value, it goes out fast, and he is able to hit the news cycle before it becomes overdone.

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Social Has Become a TV Show

Socials has become a TV show because the core metric is views + engagement. You can increase views if your content is interesting and timely. Engagement comes from having a clear point of view and providing a platform for discussion. Instagram and TikTok measure watch time and completion rates as the most important metrics. The algorithm rewards return viewership, people who come back to watch the next episode, and completion rates, people who watch all the way through, rather than scrolling past. The accounts that understand this are not thinking in terms of individual pieces of content. They are thinking about shows; a recurring format, a consistent character and a reason to come back for the next episode. That is the infrastructure that compounds over time in a way that individual viral moments almost never do.

Most brands are still operating as if social media is a highlight reel; a place to post their best content and hope it gets seen. The brands that are pulling ahead are the ones that have decided what their show is going to be and have maintained it consistently long enough for the audience to find them. The difference in outcome between those two approaches is not marginal. It is the difference between an audience that grows and one that plateaus.

Why Lo-Fi Is Beating Hi-Fi

The assumption most founders make when they think about content production is that higher quality signals higher credibility. The data says otherwise, and the reason is more psychological than technical. Lo-fi content wins because it reads as real. People are sick of the over-edited, over-polished content that once ruled Instagram. We don’t want your highlight reel– we want the journey. The good, the bad and the ugly. It’s why Tea by the Sea is popping off– Dave looks grubby, but the content is timely and relevant to people who like to tune into pop culture news, and it works because people don’t really care how good it looks, but that it’s timely and adds to the larger zeitgeist conversation.

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What Most Founders Miss

Founders think they need an audience to show up to. This is wrong, and it’s what’s holding your brand back. Socials are no longer about how many followers you have, but how many engaged viewers you can generate. And you can create views without followers as long as the content is good. Socials don’t prioritize followers anymore because people don’t follow. The AI in the algorithm continues to serve content you like, so many people don’t feel the need to follow because they can receive it without even realizing they’re following.

The other thing to note is that you don’t need huge views to be impactful. Generating 1,000 views on a video is incredible– you spoke to 1,000 more people than you would have sitting at home in your office responding to emails. The ego of what we don’t have holds us back from what we could become. It’s why Tea by the Sea is such a good case study. Dave Portnoy doesn’t hit huge views every day, but shows up the next day regardless.

Philip made this point well on last week’s episode, saying that 200 people watching your video for 15 minutes is absolutely spectacular. Not because 200 is a large number, but because 200 people who care enough to give you 15 minutes of their full attention are people who will talk about you. They will send the video to someone. They will bring you up in a conversation. They will come back for the next episode because they are already inside your world. That is how an audience builds, not through a single viral moment but through a consistent format that gives the right people a reason to keep returning, week after week, until the compound interest of their attention becomes something real.

What Your Brand Can Learn

The practical application of all of this is simpler than most brands make it out to be. You do not need a studio, a production budget, a creative director, or a media team. You need three things that cost nothing except commitment:

1. A recurring format that your audience can recognize and return to.

2. A genuine point of view expressed with enough specificity and confidence that people know what they are going to get from you.

3. The discipline to show up before the views justify it

The brands winning at content right now are the ones that made a decision about what their show was going to be and then made it consistently for long enough that the audience had time to find them. Hot Girl Pickles did it on TikTok before they had a single product in a retail store. DeMarco did it with DEM before most people had heard of his brand. Dave Portnoy is doing it from a beach chair in Florida with a hat he bought for the bit. The format is almost irrelevant. The commitment to the format is everything.

I hope today’s article inspires you to create content!

If you want help mapping out a social media strategy and how to crush episodic content, book a call with my team here. We are currently building the social + brand strategies behind your favourite brands.

Xx Camille

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What Is Actually Happening Behind the Scenes

Most people outside the entertainment industry are not aware of how the franchise licensing machine works, and understanding it changes how you view the DWP2 campaign and what to expect from large-franchise movies moving forward. When a film goes into production, the franchise rights holder is notified years in advance. That window between greenlight and release is now being used to presell licensing deals, brand partnerships, and merchandise before a frame is shot. The film is the anchor event, and the licensing machine built around it is the true business model. Devil Wears Prada 2 had three years to operationalize partnerships, so leading up to the year of the launch, everything starts rolling out like clockwork, creating insane hype before anyone has seen the film. It’s why this strategy is so effective, the amplification the brand has achieved has created a halo around the movie– a world– that feels so complete and clear that it pulls you in to watch the show (and maybe buy some branded swag).

Movies selling licenses is not a new concept. Star Wars was one of the first properties to understand that the licensing rights were worth as much as the film itself. George Lucas negotiated to keep the merchandising rights when Fox lowballed his directing fee, and it turned out to be one of the most consequential business decisions in entertainment history. What is new is the speed, the sophistication, and the scale at which the window between greenlight and release is now being monetized, and the degree to which the campaign itself has become a world-building exercise rather than a straightforward promotional one.

The Barbie Effect

This strategy existed before Barbie, but Barbie was the standout execution that made the industry take notice– and re-realize that world-building correctly increases the success of the movie’s profits greatly. The Barbie campaign built a world so complete that you felt invested in buying a piece from a collab collection (I was so tempted to buy the Barbie x Ruggable). Barbiecore spread through fashion, beauty, home, and food before the film opened, and by the time opening weekend arrived, the audience was completing a journey they had already started months earlier. The souvenir they bought before the film was the entry point. The film was simply the payoff– the justification that the swag was worth it.

What Barbie understood, and what the franchise rights holders who watched it are now operationalizing, is that the window between announcement and release is the most valuable brand-building period a film has. Once the film opens, the conversation is about whether it was good. Before it opens, the conversation can be entirely controlled, and every brand partnership, every licensing deal, every collab that goes live in that window adds another layer to the world and another reason for the audience to feel like this is a moment worth belonging to before they have seen a single frame.

Based on how well Barbie executed this, franchise rights holders who own legacy IP are now getting organized years in advance to start making deals so that by the time the launch arrives, the noise is already deafening. DWP2 is the most ambitious execution of that playbook yet, and it is worth understanding why the strategy works before asking whether it will hold.

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Why the Strategy Works

The mechanic behind what DWP2 is doing is straightforward once you see it. Volume creates the feeling of relevance. When a brand appears across airports, fast food bags, fashion editorial, gift shops, and social media simultaneously, it stops reading as marketing and starts reading as culture. Each touchpoint compounds the next; the audience that sees the airport wrap notices the Vogue cover, the audience that notices the Vogue cover sees the McDonald’s Happy Meal, and by the time the accumulation reaches a certain threshold, the film starts to feel like an event that is already happening rather than something that still needs to earn its cultural significance.

What makes this so effective is the souvenir psychology beneath it. When enough touchpoints exist around a cultural moment, buying the merch or the collab product stops feeling like a consumer decision and starts feeling like a form of commemoration. You are not buying a Grey Goose bottle but rather a piece of a moment in time that feels significant enough to mark. That is an extraordinarily powerful brand mechanic, and it works because the campaign’s volume signals importance before the story has had a chance to prove it. The question is whether the story can deliver on what the signal promised.

The Risk

Philip and I talked about this at length on this week’s episode of Art of the Brand, and it is the question I keep coming back to. If the movie doesn’t deliver because it’s a sequel and most sequels suck, will that kill the magic of the mini-movie brand worlds? Does the magic only work when the brand is great?

At this level of investment and noise, a failure damages trust in the entire model, and in a sequel landscape that is already straining the audience’s patience for remakes and reboots, a high-profile misfire at this scale could accelerate the move away from the old Hollywood model faster than anyone in the industry is prepared for.

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I’m interested in seeing if the movie is a success and becomes another example of the Barbie effect or becomes its own case study of what happens when the marketing is great but the brand fails to deliver. Let me know your predictions? Maybe we make a Branding with Benefits polymarket bet??

Xx Camille

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If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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So, Who Is the New CEO?

O’Neill is set to take the reins in September. What is relevant is not just her title but the specific period her leadership at Nike covers, almost precisely the years most analysts cite when explaining why Nike finds itself where it does today. She oversaw product and innovation at a time when the brand was pulling back aggressively from wholesale in favour of a direct-to-consumer strategy that looked smart on a quarterly earnings call and proved costly over time. When Nike vacated that retail shelf space, Hoka and On Running moved in, built consumer loyalty, and did not give it back. The product became promotional, and the performance authority that had made Nike the default choice for athletes and aspirational buyers alike for fifty years quickly eroded. She was president of consumer, product, and brand while that was happening.

The Decision Was Sticky

It is no secret that Lululemon’s board is in significant internal conflict. Chip Wilson, the founder who built the women’s activewear category essentially from scratch and who still owns roughly 4.3% of the company, took out a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal in October 2025, describing the brand as being in a nosedive and comparing its decline to a plane crash, the result of a series of compounding mistakes rather than any single failure. He accused the board of forgetting the brand’s muse, the woman who once inspired culture rather than followed it, and of trading its creative DNA for quarterly comfort. In March 2026, he launched a formal proxy contest, nominating candidates for board director positions and publicly calling for governance change. An insider told me that anyone Chip puts forward, the board will not interview. The relationship has broken down to that degree.

The final decision came down to O’Neill and Jane Nielsen, the former CFO of Ralph Lauren and Coach, credited with engineering the margin recovery at both companies. Elliott Investment Management, which holds roughly a $1 billion stake in Lululemon, had been publicly backing Nielsen as the stronger candidate for the brand’s specific situation. Chip supported neither option but made clear he believed the board overhaul needed to come before the CEO hire. The board went with O’Neill regardless.

That sequence of decisions is the story. The board is operating separately from the shareholders who have the most at stake in the brand’s recovery. Chip Wilson and Elliott, two of the most invested and most vocal voices on what Lululemon needs, were aligned on the importance of getting the governance right before making the hire, and both ended up on the losing side of the decision. The result is a brand that is fractured at the top at exactly the moment it needs the clearest possible direction.

What Happened at Nike on Her Watch

The case against O’Neill is worth laying out plainly because the financial press has been somewhat politely framed about it. It is worth noting that O’Neill is among the Nike executives named in a securities class action lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that certain Nike executives made statements to investors about the success and sustainability of the direct-to-consumer strategy that plaintiffs claim were inconsistent with what was known internally at the time. The allegations have not been proven, and the lawsuit remains unresolved.

The backstory is that during her tenure, Nike executed one of the more self-inflicted strategic retreats in modern retail history. The brand pulled back aggressively from wholesale partners, reducing its presence at Foot Locker and major retail accounts in favor of a direct-to-consumer strategy that was supposed to close the funnel and improve margins. What happened in practice is that Nike vacated retail shelf space it had held for decades, and Hoka and On Running moved in, built consumer loyalty, and did not give it back.

At the same time, their product innovation softened, so they lost shelf space in regular retailers, and brands like On and Hoka became ‘Cooler’ brands. The brand became more promotional, running sales at its own stores to drive short-term volume, a move that quietly destroys a brand’s pricing authority over time. O’Neill oversaw product and innovation at a time when Nike faced sustained criticism for falling behind on new products and leaning too heavily on legacy lifestyle franchises.

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Lululemon’s Problem

In her first statement as incoming CEO, O’Neill said her focus would be on returning to the customer. It is the kind of line that sounds right and reveals the underlying misdiagnosis. Lululemon has not lost the customer. It has posted strong international sales numbers, shown product improvement in certain categories, expanded its size range, and opened more stores. The consumer has been attended to, probably more carefully than at any point in the brand’s history.

What the brand has lost is harder to name, which may be why the board keeps reaching for consumer solutions when the problem is not the consumer at all. Lululemon was never really a legging brand. It was a philosophy brand that happened to sell leggings. Chip Wilson built it around a very specific woman… not a demographic, not a psychographic, but a muse. A woman who was ahead of the culture, who was doing yoga before it was mainstream, who believed in personal development and self-improvement before wellness became an industry. The leggings were the physical expression of that belief system. The brand was the belief system itself.

Chip created a new category; love him or hate him, he is a visionary, and that vision is what the business has lost sight of.

That distinction matters because it explains why everything the board has tried since losing sight of it has failed to move the needle in a meaningful way. You cannot solve a philosophy problem with a product refresh. You cannot win back a muse with a size-range expansion, a Disney collaboration, or slapping NFL logos on pre-loved designs. The woman who made Lululemon a cult brand was not looking for accessibility. She was looking for a brand that understood her specifically and was willing to say that not everyone was the customer. Lululemon told her she was special. Then it spent a decade trying to be everything to everyone, and she quietly moved on to brands that still understood what it meant to choose a customer and build a world around her.

What This Means for Your Brand

I call it brand death by a thousand cuts. Lululemon did not lose its way overnight. It lost it through a series of decisions that each made sense in isolation: a Disney collaboration that broadened the audience, a size range expansion that felt inclusive, promotional pricing that moved inventory, and messaging that softened the edges of what had once been a very specific point of view. None of those decisions looks wrong on a spreadsheet. Together, they moved the brand so far from the woman it was built for that she stopped feeling like she belonged to it. And once that feeling is gone, it is very hard to manufacture back.

That is the lesson worth taking from this story. The brands that compound over time are the ones that protect their point of view, even when the market tells them to broaden it. The brands that decline are the ones that make a thousand small compromises and wake up one day to find that what made them irreplaceable is gone.

The lesson from Lululemon is that brands die by a thousand cuts. Hiring O’Neil is just another wrong decision that will compound over time, but it is adding to the brand’s inevitable slow death.

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Let me know what you think of this move in the comments below. I love reading your guys’ thoughts.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to more podcast episodes, head to Art of the Brand on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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The Kris Jenner facelift story broke everywhere this week; people are saying her iconic $300,000 facelift has started slipping less than a year after it made Dr. Steven Levine the most talked-about plastic surgeon in the world. What is buried in that headline is a brand case study worth paying attention to, because the real story has nothing to do with the surgery and everything to do with how quickly a brand built on a great product can be damaged by a bad photograph.

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Let me break it down.

Last May, tabloid photos of Jenner’s new face surfaced during Lauren Sanchez Bezos’ bachelorette party in Paris. The internet had one question: who did her face? Initially, another surgeon, Dr. Ben Talei, a Beverly Hills-based plastic surgeon well known in his own right, started receiving credit online. Jenner did not let that stand. She went to the New York Post and named Dr. Steven Levine specifically, a quietly referred Upper East Side surgeon so deliberately low profile that most people outside a very specific Manhattan social circle had never heard of him. She did not want the wrong person getting credit for work she was clearly thrilled with. That decision changed everything for Levine.

Within months, he was attending Jenner’s 70th birthday party alongside Oprah, Beyoncé, and Mariah Carey. His fee went from $100,000 to $350,000. His waitlist stretched to six months. His consult fee jumped from $1,000 to $5,000, raised specifically to filter out people who were scheduling appointments to create social media content rather than to actually have surgery. His practice remained referral-only, the phone was shut off to general traffic, and every patient was screened before getting through the door (Source: Puck). In less than a year, Jenner had given him one of the most remarkable unsolicited personal-brand moments in recent memory. He had done nothing to seek it and everything to protect it.

Then came the Vanity Fair Oscar Party.

One photograph. Lighting that people who were in that room described as the worst they had seen at a major event in years; every celebrity in attendance apparently looked terrible in the images. That context disappeared almost immediately because context always does. The story that spread was that Jenner’s facelift was already slipping. Surgeons posted lengthy breakdowns. The deep plane versus SMAS debate resurfaced. Medical professionals who had nothing to do with the case weighed in with the confidence of people who had performed the surgery themselves. People close to Jenner called it exactly what it was; the lighting was the problem, she had recently been seen without makeup and looked great, the whole story was, in their words, bullsh*t. None of that mattered because the news cycle had already moved.

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What This Means for the Brand

For anyone not looking closely enough, Dr. Levine has suffered personal brand damage. And that is the uncomfortable part of this story, because Levine has no personal brand infrastructure to defend himself with. He keeps a deliberately low profile. He does not post. He does not speak to the press. He did not respond to the original story, and he did not respond to this one. That strategy worked brilliantly when the news cycle was working in his favour. It becomes a liability the moment the news cycle turns, because a brand that has no public voice cannot correct a public narrative in real time. The people already inside his world, the screened referrals, the serious patients, the inner circle, know the truth. Everyone else is left with the headline.

This is the tension at the center of the low-profile brand strategy. Exclusivity and silence build mythology when the story being told about you is the right one. They offer no protection when it is not. Levine’s practice business has reportedly not been affected yet; the demand is still there, and the referrals are still coming. But the question of whether that holds if the narrative does not correct itself is a real one, and it is the question every founder who relies on word of mouth and reputation over public presence should be asking themselves right now.

What Your Brand Can Learn

Fast brands can be built by one right headline and damaged by one wrong one. The brands that survive those moments are the ones that have built enough public context around their work that a bad photograph does not become the defining story. Levine’s low-profile strategy is elegant and effective right up until the moment it is not; and the moment it is not is exactly when you need a voice and discover you have not built one. The product was never the problem. The lighting was. But wi

thout a platform to say so clearly and publicly, the distinction between those two things is invisible to everyone who was not already inside the world.

The lesson is not that every brand needs to be loud. It is that every brand needs enough of a public presence to correct its own narrative when the context works against it. Silence is a brand strategy. It is just not one that comes without risk.

Let me know what you think about this one. The Levine story is one of the more fascinating brand case studies I have come across in a while, and the bad lighting detail is an interesting development in the story. Will demand maintain, or will headlines like this make Levine’s office a fleeting trend in the coming years?

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I hope you have a fantastic weekend! In case you missed it, here is last week’s episode if you want some weekend listening.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to more podcast episodes, head to Art of the Brand on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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This week, the news broke that Victoria Beckham’s fashion line became profitable; a huge feat, and one that makes a lot more sense when you understand how she has been building toward it for the last several years. For those that do not know, Victoria Beckham, OG Posh Spice, has two brands: her namesake beauty brand and her fashion line. They look like extensions of the same thing, but they are not. They are two completely different businesses serving two completely different functions, and the relationship between them is the most interesting part of the story.

Her beauty brand has been profitable since 2022. Victoria found a true white space for beauty; it’s no shock to say that makeup had gone to the kids. Sephora had become a candy store, and nobody was speaking to the woman over thirty who wanted considered, under-branded, mature packaging with signature staple colours she wanted to reach for every morning. Victoria Beckham beauty is that brand. What few have tracked is that it is also the entry point into her fashion world, and the data is finally here to prove that the strategy works.

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The Diffusion Line Strategy

A diffusion line is not a cheaper version of the main product. It is a deliberate entry point into a brand world; a lower barrier that gets the right customer through the door before she is ready for the full commitment. Victoria Beckham beauty does exactly that… and I know because it happened to me. I picked up some of her makeup at Le Bon Marché in Paris a few months ago because her packaging and aesthetic spoke to my soul. I grabbed a lip balm, a gloss, and her Augustinus Bader collab foundation. A few months later, I needed sunglasses and found myself scrolling through her fashion website. I ended up buying a shirt and trousers. This experience of trying her makeup, made her fashion brand more top of mind and was in my worldview for when I needed to buy clothing. This is why her strategy is so intelligent. Fashion is extremely competitive and hard to make profitable. You have to invest in a range of sizes, change looks seasonally, pay for marketing, top of funnel awareness, and bottom of the funnel sales. It’s a grind. Makeup has a high margin and is easier to get someone to buy a lip gloss from than drop $600 on a shirt for.

This Is Not a New Idea. It Is Just Rare.

The strategy has existed in luxury for decades, but almost exclusively at the very top of the market. The Goyard wallet is a great example of this. Goyard was revived in 1998 by Jean-Michel Signoles. One of the first things he did was introduce the wallet, which gave the brand its modern tipping point. Signoles studied brands like Cartier, who launched the Love bracelet and the Just En Clou as entry points to the larger brand universe. The $600 wallet allowed the average person entry way into a house that had dressed French aristocracy for generations. It made the pattern more recognizable, and more likely for people to climb upwards into the bags, luggage, and more. Diffusion pieces, when done correctly, don’t dilute brands but create new relationships with a larger customer base.

The logic with beauty being an entry point for fashion is also not new, brands like Chanel, Dior, YSL, and more recently Hermes and Louis Vuitton have caught on to expanding the brand for less in a way that doesn’t cheapen the brand. However, what is interesting is that this logic has historically only been applied at the true top of luxury, not high-tier premium of where VB’s fashion brand sits.

It’s no surprise that Victoria Beckham has smart people behind her, from her change in PR, to how she avoided Sephora as the mega retailer chasing away discerning women for appealing to the kids.

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What Your Brand Can Learn

If your brand has a price point that limits the people who can enter the brand, find a diffusion entry point that builds trust, credibility, and keeps your brand top of mind so your customer can graduate into high-tier items.

Victoria Beckham did not make her fashion line profitable by selling more fashion. She made it profitable by building a world her customer wanted to live inside and giving her the most considered, most intentional, most perfectly positioned way in. The question you must ask yourself is not what your most profitable product is or your most visible one… it is what is the product that gets the right customer through the door and starts the relationship that eventually leads to everything else.

Xx Camille

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Business of Fashion ran a piece this week on the Gap comeback, and I have been wanting to talk about it because Gap is on a roll… like literally on a roll. Eight consecutive quarters of positive comparable sales growth and nearly a billion dollars in profit. The highest gross margins in 25 years. For a brand that was losing money in 2022, this is a big brand comeback story and one of the most exciting case studies I have seen play out for a public company in a long time. What makes it so fascinating is that the strategy behind it is something every founder can learn from, regardless of budget or brand size. Gap made itself cool again, not by reinventing the product, not by redesigning the stores, but by stopping trying to be cool and letting the brands that already were vouch for them instead. That shift, executed with discipline and at pace over two years, is what turned a struggling legacy retailer into one of the most talked about brand stories in fashion right now.

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The Man Who Revived Barbie

Richard Dickson joined Gap Inc. as CEO in 2023, coming directly from Mattel, where he is widely credited with engineering the Barbie brand revival that culminated in a billion-dollar film and one of the decade’s most unexpected cultural moments. What Dickson understood at Mattel and brought directly to Gap is that heritage brands do not die of irrelevance. They die from assuming their heritage is enough. Barbie had the name recognition. She needed a reason for a new generation to care. Gap had exactly the same problem, and Dickson ran exactly the same play.

Within months of his arrival, he brought in Zac Posen as creative director and launched GapStudio, a red-carpet-facing elevated line designed to put the Gap name back in the cultural conversation at the highest possible level. The shirtdress Posen designed for Anne Hathaway sold out within hours of her wearing it. A custom GapStudio look appeared on the Met Gala red carpet. The brand that had spent years being synonymous with mall basics was suddenly showing up at the kinds of events where people pay close attention to what you are wearing and why, and the association was landing in a way it had not in decades.

The Collab Playbook

Between 2023 and 2025, Gap ran one of the most disciplined collaboration strategies a legacy brand has executed in recent memory. Truly, it felt like they were dropping a new collab every two weeks, kind of like the Malbon strategy of just being so loud and tapping into so many different niches and the larger zeitgeist that you become impossible to ignore. Gap did collabs with brands like Dôen, Palace, Mad Happy, Cult Gaia, LoveShackFancy, Summer Fridays, Gweneth and Apple, Béis, Sandy Liang, and Malbon Golf, to name a few. More than fourteen distinct partnerships across two years, each one tapping into a completely different cultural niche and each one selling out. The Dôen collab drove a 41% increase in unique influencer mentions in the month it launched. The Better in Denim campaign with Katseye generated 400 million views and 8 billion impressions. Gap’s total influencer mentions jumped 73% year over year.

What made this work was not the individual collabs in isolation. It was the velocity and the selection criteria behind them. Every partner brought a customer who already had a strong relationship with that brand. Cult Gaia brought the premium resort woman. Mad Happy brought the streetwear-meets-wellness crowd. Sandy Liang brought the downtown New York girl. None of these women necessarily had a strong relationship with Gap. But they trusted the brand that was introducing the collab to them, and they knew the Gap brand that the collab felt unique and interesting– worth paying attention to. Gap was not asking these customers to love Gap but to buy into a unique moment that tapped into their world for a brief moment in time.

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Why This Is a World-Building Strategy

Gap’s collab strategy is a branding play, not a marketing play… and that is why you need velocity in order for it to work. Marketing drives a transaction, whereas branding builds the conditions under which your customer decides she belongs to you.

When Gap partnered with any of the brands mentioned, it was not trying to sell a product alone but was laying the foundation for customers of micro-worlds to enter Gap’s larger world. The Dôen customer was not looking for Gap. But Dôen told her that Gap was worth her attention, and that trust transfer compounds in a way that’s deeper than isolated paid campaigns or bottom-of-funnel Google Shopping ads.

The issue is that to world-build, you have to be consistent and build often because it’s not a one-off campaign that moves the needle, it’s multiple. The brand world gets bigger with every partnership, not because Gap is louder but because it is showing up in more of the right places more consistently.

What This Means for Your Brand

Most brands try one collab, see slow results and pivot before the strategy has had time to build. Gap committed to the model over several years before the market caught up to what they were building. Patience is not a passive conviction that the strategy is right, nor the discipline to resist the pressure to change course when the numbers are not moving yet. Brand building compounds slowly and then all at once. The $502 million in 2024 felt like a turnaround. The $844 million in 2025 felt like proof.

The lesson here is that relevance is not manufactured; it is built through consistent adjacency to the right partners, at velocity, over time. You need a partnership with a brand whose customer genuinely overlaps with yours and whose credibility transfers to you. Then you need another. And another. Not because any single one will move the needle dramatically, but because the accumulation of the right associations is what rebuilds a brand world that people want to be inside.

What Gap proved is that any brand, legacy or startup, can reclaim relevance if it is willing to be patient, strategic, and loud at the same time. The collab is not the shortcut. It is the compounding strategy that only works when you trust it long enough to let it build.

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Let me know what you think of the Gap collab strategy, and what collab has been your favourite to date.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, head to Art of the Brand on all streaming platforms.

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I just got back from the desert, and what struck me most was how completely brand-focused the whole weekend was. A lot of people aren’t even going to the music anymore. They are going for the activations, the brand events, the content opportunities, which is a wild thing to say about a festival that was built around the experience of being present for live performance. The music is still there, but it has become the permission structure rather than the core point.

The transition is not new. Brands have always wanted to be where the celebrities are. What changed is the phone. Social media transformed proximity to a cultural moment from a PR play into an earned media engine, and the brands that understood that shift earliest are the ones that rewrote the festival marketing playbook.

Being near the right people at the right moment used to generate a photograph in a magazine.

Now it generates millions of impressions in real time from thousands of creators simultaneously; all in an organic, authentic way that is impossible to replicate with a paid campaign.

Where It Started

Coachella launched in 1999 and lost money its first year. It built its way to relevance through a grassroots music community that found something worth showing up for and kept coming back. That authenticity was the asset. It was also what made it so attractive to the people who eventually came to monetize it. Smart money noticed the cultural heat and moved in. Celebrities started coming because Coachella was where culture happened. Brands started paying to be near celebrities because proximity to culture was the closest thing they could buy.

Over the years, the demand for Coachella shifted, and what began as a music destination became the most valuable moment on the brand calendar; not because the music got better but because the audience it attracted became the most influential concentration of tastemakers assembled in one place at one time worldwide.

How Revolve Figured It Out First

While most brands were still buying banner ads and measuring impressions, Revolve saw Coachella for exactly what it had become. They did not try to advertise at Coachella. They built Revolve Festival around the moment itself, obsessing over the right people and the right environment, then letting the content generate itself. The earned media value generated from a single Revolve Festival weekend became their marketing playbook for EMV activations. Revolve built an insanely successful DTC brand by owning the coolest moments online. What Revolve did that was relevant was that they didn’t buy into a moment but owned it. They never sponsored Coachella, but created the biggest asymmetric event during Coachella weekend, making them the main topic of conversation. And in doing so, they wrote the playbook that every brand at Coachella is now running.

How Brands Are Using It Today

Now everyone runs the same playbook– 818 Outpost, Rhode, Camp Poosh, Gap Hoodies, etc. Each activation is built around one principle: be the loudest brand in the room at the moment that has the most eyes on it.

What we started to see in the last few years, and which was solidified this year in a big way, was the practice of bringing in brand partners to offset costs and amplify reach. By having more brands participating in an activation, brands can generate more eyeballs and cooler activations by bringing in larger social followings and shared budgets to offset the crazy costs of these events.

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There are two core reasons for this:

1. These events are damn expensive: if you can’t create a stand-out event worth posting, you are losing. The bar is so high for a great activation that you need additional dollars to make the event worth it. Bringing in other brands is a great way to spend more without the core brand bearing all the costs.

2. World-Building: By bringing in adjacent brands from other categories, you tap into broader worlds and signal to your customers that they are stepping into a larger one by experiencing other brands you love. This is why Rhode’s collaboration with Cymbiotika for the activation was brilliant– Cymbiotika is not a competitor to Rhode but a world-building, adjacent brand.

Why It Works

Coachella concentrates attention in a way that almost nothing else does at scale. The people in that desert set trends, create content, and influence purchase decisions for millions of followers watching from home. When your brand is inside that moment, it feels more like culture-tapping than advertising. The way to win in the current landscape is to win on culture, as culture is the only thing that makes people want to belong to a brand rather than simply buy from one.

This is the most important distinction in marketing presently, because belonging drives loyalty and loyalty drives compounding brand equity that paid campaigns can’t build on their own.

But It Can Be a Losing Game

The downside is that Coachella is a pay-to-win environment. The brands cutting through are spending big bucks to be there at a level that creates enough noise to matter. If you cannot compete at that volume, you will not get through, and a small activation in a sea of bigger ones does not build brand equity; instead, it’s a cash BBQ. This is where branding and marketing can get tricky– there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to deciding whether you should be at Coachella or not. You need a strategy, goals, and high-level budget oversight to determine whether it makes sense for your brand to pay to play and whether you are playing in a meaningful way.

Before investing in any activation at this level, the questions worth asking are whether you have the budget to be loud enough to cut through, whether your customer is genuinely in that room, and whether owning a smaller moment might do more for your brand than being a footnote at the biggest one.

Moments Are the New Media Channel

The shift Coachella represents is not specific to Coachella. It is happening everywhere attention concentrates; at the right dinner, pop-up, community event, and collaboration between brands whose customers already trust each other. The way to win in branding is to be loud and keep showing up so you can build awareness and stay top of mind with your intended audience.

The brands pulling ahead right now are the ones that have stopped thinking about marketing as a platform problem and started thinking about it as a moment problem. Where does your customer concentrate? What is the moment she already shows up for? What would it look like for your brand to own that moment so that it feels like culture rather than advertising?

You do not need Coachella money to answer those questions, but you do need brand clarity. If you need assistance with achieving brand clarity, here’s a light plug for my branding & social media masterclass (because to win, you have to have a clear understanding of brand) or to get on the waitlist for my physical brand and social media planner, which will launch in May.

Xx Camille

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Is Bieber back?

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The anticipation was enormous. Lines stretched for hours, resale tickets hit $4,000, and the merch sold out before the sun went down. Then the performance happened, and the internet split overnight into two extreme camps. Half called it the worst headline set in festival history– especially based on the payout (compared to talent like Sabrina Carpenter that really put on a show). The other half saw someone working through something serious in public, showing up even when showing up looked nothing like what fans once fell in love with.

I had many people share recaps of his concert with me, from fans proud that he showed up, reinforcing that his performance was a case study in ‘authentic marketing’.

What’s interesting is that almost nobody was in the middle.

It’s also interesting that the core question around the concert was ‘Is Bieber back?’ suggesting that there’s a version of him we all share that we will be able to enjoy again. The polarizing response suggests an interesting brand question I have been mulling over for days: indifference is what a dying brand generates, but polarization is what a brand still alive enough to mean something generates.

So let’s break down the brand implications.

The Two Camps.

The case against Saturday night is straightforward.

Bieber was paid $10 million, the highest fee in Coachella history, and spent a third of his 90 minutes sitting at a laptop scrolling YouTube, singing karaoke versions of his own catalogue over the recordings. YouTube sponsored the festival and live-streamed it to hundreds of thousands of viewers globally. Pulling up the platform mid-performance was not purely nostalgia but a brilliant way for YouTube to insert itself into the festival’s most anticipated performance. For the fee to be there, the show lacked the performance standard that headlining Coachella demands, and compared to Sabrina Carpenter and Karol G, both of whom delivered the kind of sets that define a career moment, the gap was hard to ignore.

The case on the other side is harder to articulate, but just as real. Justin has obviously struggled with substance issues, health, and darker speculation that has swirled around him for years. His fans were not there for a show. They were there because, simply, he showed up, in whatever form that looks like right now. And the numbers suggest that alone means something. The stats are wild: his music was streamed 24.6 million times in the US the day after the set, a 211% surge compared to the previous Sunday. Spotify reported a 250% increase in streams globally. The SKYLRK Bieberchella merch sold out within hours, and vintage tour pieces started moving online overnight. The platform that discovered him as a twelve-year-old in Stratford, Ontario, became the centrepiece of his comeback, and 64 million views in 12 hours confirmed that he still has an insanely strong fan base.

Whatever you thought of the set, the brand was never the problem.

The problem is something more complicated. Justin Bieber built one of the most powerful personal brands in music history before he had any real say in what that brand was or what it stood for. Justin, who was discovered at 12, became world-famous before he could drive. He was shaped by an industry before he understood what was happening to him. The foundation is extraordinary, and the numbers this weekend proved it is still intact.

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But a brand built around who you were at a specific moment in time carries a huge brand risk, because that person can no longer exist.

Justin is an example of someone who has transformed his personal brand without a clear sense of what that brand is today. Especially at his magnitude. It’s hard to be a boy who’s known for performance and who hasn’t completed a tour in almost a decade.

Brand equity is not a fixed asset. It does not sit in an account accumulating interest while you are away from the thing that built it. It holds its shape for a while, sometimes a surprisingly long while, but it is always spending down when nothing new is being added to replenish it.

Saturday’s performance was not a brand killer. If anything, the demand proved the brand is more resilient than almost anyone had a right to expect. But resilience is not the same as health. A brand can be alive and spending down at the same time, and the question of which direction this one is moving in is genuinely difficult to answer.

Both camps that formed overnight were focused entirely on where the brand is right now, either defending its current state or mourning what it is no longer. What neither camp is really asking is what happens next. The artists whose personal brands compound over time are the ones who keep feeding what made people show up in the first place. Some, like the Backstreet Boys, find a way to sustain themselves by continuing to show up in the version their audience nostalgically loves. The brand stays consistent even as the moment passes. But Bieber’s situation is different, because what made his brand extraordinary was never the nostalgia… it was the performance itself. I went to many of his concerts, and every single one was a highlight. The energy, the talent, the complete inability to phone it in– he is a true star. It’s his talent, and people’s love for his talent that sold the merch, filled the arenas, and made an entire festival rename itself Bieberchella.

That performance standard is what the brand was built on. And the question I keep coming back to is whether a brand that powerful can maintain its hold if the thing that built it is no longer consistently present.

I don’t know that I have the answer, but I think it’s an interesting question, given the show’s response. What do you think of the divide and the future of Justin’s brand? I love reading your comments.

Xx Camille

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Fragrance is the hottest trend right now in beauty– why, because it’s the ultimate sign of world-building. It’s collectible, it’s personality-defining, and it allows you to tap into your tribe by smelling like your favourite influencer, brand, or political views (in case you missed Brittany Aldean’s MAGA perfume that she dropped last week called VADA).

To understand why Estée Lauder needs Puig, you have to understand what is happening to the beauty consumer right now and why the category she is spending in has fundamentally shifted.

Skincare has a problem that nobody in the industry wants to say out loud. There are too many products and too many brands, and not enough days in the month to use your product fast enough to buy more. There’s also a limit to how many face creams you will have– few people have 8 face creams, but could easily have 8 bottles of perfume. Why? Because they are collectible, giftable, and usable for different moods.

The data also supports this. According to Circana, prestige skincare was the fastest-growing beauty category in 2024, growing just 2% while the overall prestige market grew 7%. Fragrance grew 12% in the same period (six times faster) and became the second largest category in prestige beauty for the first time in history, now accounting for 28% of total prestige beauty sales. That gap is not a coincidence; it shows that consumers have figured out that she does not need another face cream but absolutely wants another fragrance, and the two decisions feel entirely different from a purchasing psychology standpoint.

Beyond being a collectible, fragrance is one of the most giftable categories in beauty. It’s why Summer Fridays got into fragrance this year. Buying eye cream for someone for Christmas is weird; buying them a vanilla perfume is… not weird. Circana’s data shows that nearly 30% of consumers plan to gift beauty products, with fragrance consistently the top gifting choice. It is a category where the consumer regularly buys multiples, a signature scent, a seasonal rotation, something for the office, and something for evenings, and where mini sizes and travel formats grew at extraordinary rates as consumers leaned into the collectibility of the category.

But Estée Lauder understands all of this, which is why they are moving to acquire Puig for 40 billion dollars. Why? Because ELC doesn’t own the gap where fragrance is the strongest.

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What Estée Lauder Built

Estée Lauder is not a brand that missed fragrance. Jo Malone, Le Labo, and Kilian Paris are world-class… deeply loyal customer bases, genuine cultural credibility, and the kind of brand equity that takes decades to build. The problem is not what they built. It is who they built it for. These brands are designed around exclusivity and scarcity, which means they are structurally built to remain small. That is not a flaw but the point. But it also means they are not built to capture the consumer who has been driving the category’s explosive growth.

According to Circana, the acceleration in prestige fragrance that started in 2024 did not happen at the top. It happened in the accessible luxury tier, with the consumer spending $80 to $150 on something that feels considered without requiring justification. That is the Charlotte Tilbury customer, the Rabanne customer, the Jean Paul Gaultier customer. While Estée Lauder was deepening its hold on the luxury end of the category, Puig was building at the price point and cultural register where the volume lives. And while all of this was happening, L’Oréal completed its €4 billion acquisition of Kering Beauté, bringing Creed, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and eventually Gucci fragrance into its portfolio. The chess piece ELC needs to build its fragrance empire is the Puig piece, which owns the mid-tier brands and their corresponding playbook.

What Puig Built Instead

Unlike ELC, Puig spent the last decade making some of the most deliberate acquisitions in the beauty industry. Charlotte Tilbury at the peak of her cultural momentum. Byredo, before the mainstream had fully caught up to what founder-led fragrance could become at scale. Jean Paul Gaultier and Rabanne have the fashion credibility that designer fragrances require to justify their place in a consumer’s collection. Every acquisition was made at the right cultural moment with the right founder still attached, and every brand speaks to a consumer who wants fragrance to feel personal and aspirational without being unattainable. That is the tier Puig owns. It is also the tier where the category’s growth has been most consistently happening. Puig’s stock rose on the merger news, but Estée Lauder’s fell by more than 15%. That asymmetry tells you everything about who needs this deal more.

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Why Estée Lauder Needs This Deal

Estée Lauder’s revenue has fallen for three consecutive years. Skincare down 12%, makeup down 6%, and haircare down 10%. Fragrance was their most resilient category over this period, with growth coming from Le Labo and Kilian Paris, while legacy brands softened, but even that resilience was in the wrong tier of the market. The portfolio needed a new engine, a new direction, and a new consumer relationship in the category that is doing the most work in prestige beauty right now. Puig provides all three.

What This Unlocks for the Brands Inside the Portfolio

The most interesting downstream consequence of this deal is not what it does for Estée Lauder at the corporate level. It is what it does for the individual brands that have been sitting in the portfolio without a fragrance strategy attached. MAC is one of the most recognized makeup brands in the world, yet it has almost no meaningful fragrance presence. Clinique built its entire identity around dermatological skincare and never leveraged the emotional and sensory extension that fragrance represents. La Mer has the luxury positioning to support a fragrance line that could sit comfortably alongside the most expensive bottles on any shelf in the world. None of these brands has moved seriously into fragrance because Estée Lauder, as a parent company, did not have the infrastructure or the cultural authority in the designer fragrance tier to support them. Puig changes that entirely, giving every brand in the portfolio a growth lever they have not had access to before.

The Lesson for Your Brand

Estée Lauder did not ignore fragrance. They built it thoughtfully and well at a market tier that made sense for their portfolio. What they missed was that the consumer was not moving toward greater exclusivity. She was moving toward more personal, more collectible, more accessible, without sacrificing aspiration. The most expensive strategic mistakes are rarely about doing nothing. They are about building in the right direction at the wrong altitude and watching the market move to a floor that you are not occupying.

The brands that compound are the ones that keep asking where the consumer is going before she gets there. Estée Lauder asked the right question about fragrance and arrived at the wrong answer. Puig asked the same question and built the right business. At forty billion dollars, the gap between those two answers is now very precisely priced.

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Sorry for the darkness on my side– last week was tight with having to head into the valley for Coachella. Many of you might not know this, but my full-time gig is running Third Eye Insights, my strategy + creative firm that turns 10 next year. So, on top of creating content, writing these swipes/substacks late at night and running a business (plus doing the work and managing a team), I had a week where getting these out was a challenge. But I’m back in action! I hope not to disappoint with this weeks line up.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, head to Art of the Brand on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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I want to be fair to what Allbirds built in the beginning because it was very interesting; it had legs to be a cult-followed Harley Davidson-like brand... but lost it. When the wool sneaker launched in 2016, it tapped into something specific that the tech-focused Silicon Valley founder was looking for. The timing was perfect for identity-aligned branding; the shoe signalled the right things: environmentally conscious, understated, unbothered by the kind of logo-driven status game that felt at odds with the culture they were building their identities around. Allbirds gave them that. The shoe became a uniform for a very specific kind of person, and for a few years, that specificity was the brand’s greatest asset. You saw a pair of Allbirds, and you knew something about the person wearing them.

The problem is that Allbirds confused that feeling with a foundation. What they had was a moment of cultural resonance with a narrow and highly specific customer. What they needed to build was something that could exist independently of that moment, speak to a customer who was not already in the Silicon Valley bubble, and defend its position when the inevitable wave of competition arrived. But Allbirds didn’t invest in expanding its brand (now known as World Building) and continued to lean into a feeling, but feelings alone don’t compound into profitable brands.

Instead, Allbirds took the feeling (sustainability, comfort, quiet cool) and assumed it was a brand. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars and spent them trying to scale a feeling, which is a fundamentally different and far more difficult problem than scaling a brand.

Sustainability Was the Permission Structure, Not the Brand

Sustainability was never the thing the Allbirds customer was buying. It was the permission structure. It was the story that let a certain kind of person justify spending $135 on a wool sneaker when they could have spent $80 on something from Nike. But permission structures do not create loyalty, nor do they create moats, because the moment a better-capitalized competitor can tell a similar story with a better product, the permission transfers.

The customer Allbirds needed to graduate to critical mass was never going to buy a shoe because of what it was made of. They were going to buy it because of how it made them feel and what it said about who they were. Allbirds never built that second layer of identity. They stayed at the level of the material and hoped the material was enough. When Nike, Adidas, and On Running arrived with comparable sustainability credentials and significantly better performance stories, the Allbirds customer had no reason to stay, rooted in anything deeper than habit. And habits are not hard to break when the alternative is a better product with an equally clean conscience.

Rather than using the time and capital to build something that competitors could not replicate, i.e., a design language, a community, a sensory world that belonged only to them, Allbirds refreshed colorways, opened stores, and hoped that the original feeling would carry the weight of a business that needed brand architecture to survive.

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The Dilution That Finished The Brand

The expansion decisions made everything worse. In the five fiscal years that ended in December 2024, Allbirds lost $419 million on sales of $1.24 billion. They opened 45 retail locations in a moment of peak optimism and had to close most of them when the numbers made the scale impossible to justify. They launched wool leggings, performance running shoes, and apparel lines that had nothing to do with the specific, narrow, culturally resonant thing that had originally made people care about them. Every horizontal expansion diluted the brand further and pushed the original customer further away. By the time Allbirds tried to come back to what it had done best, the category had moved on, and the credibility that comes from being first had expired.

Sustainability was never a key consideration for most footwear consumers, falling well behind style, price, and comfort. Allbirds could have leaned into any of those things alongside its sustainability story, but it largely chose not to. The brand that once felt built specifically for a certain kind of person started to feel like it was trying to be everything to everyone, which is the fastest way to become nothing to anyone.

The Lesson for Your Brand

What is worth understanding for any founder building in a purpose-driven category right now is that Allbirds is not a cautionary tale about sustainability or DTC economics or the cruelty of public markets. It is a cautionary tale about the difference between a brand and a value proposition. A value proposition is a reason to buy, whereas a brand is a reason to belong.

Allbirds built one of the most compelling value propositions in the sneaker market in 2016, yet failed to build the brand infrastructure to sustain and scale it.

The brands that survive category disruption are the ones that have built something their customer cannot find anywhere else, and that thing is almost never the product itself. It is the world the product lives inside, the identity the customer borrows when they buy it, and the brand that captures a deep feeling that represents more than a shared value buying habit.

If your brand can get ahead of a trend or cultural moment, you need to do more than offer a ticket into a feeling that makes them feel better about themselves.

Let me know what you think about this sad loss of a brand that could have been.

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I am finally getting my footing here in LA, getting back into finishing my book, which is so exciting but so scary, so much more enjoyable working through these daily Substacks than tackling a beast that never seems to end. Oh, the joys … I mean tortures of writing. On the upside, the Social Media and Brand Planner that I have been waiting to be live, in the world, in its physical form for your planning pleasure will be launching in MAY!! So excited to start rolling more of that out shortly.

Otherwise, I hope the sun is shining for you and good vibes are coming your way!

Xx Camille

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Horst Schulze is the co-founder of The Ritz-Carlton. He left school at fourteen, had no MBA, no business school background, and no obvious path to building what became the global standard for how a brand makes a person feel. He grew up in a small village in Germany, where working in a hotel was considered below the kind of honourable trade his family had in mind for him. His grandfather was embarrassed by it, but none of that stopped him. What Schulze had instead of credentials was a genuine obsession with one question that most business leaders never stop to ask seriously… what is the exact moment that determines whether a guest leaves happy and comes back, or leaves and never returns?

He spent years trying to find the answer, and he eventually found it in 400,000 comment cards.

Shulze learned that when the first contact with a guest was excellent, a complaint never followed. And when the first contact was negative, a complaint always followed. He realized this almost every time, without exception. Schulze built the entire Ritz-Carlton philosophy around this because it showed him how important experience was to client happiness and, therefore, increased the likelihood that they would return.

Based on this finding, he implemented the ten-foot rule, which required that within ten feet of any guest, every Ritz-Carlton employee stop what they were doing, make eye contact, and offer a genuine welcome. Not “hi,” but a “Welcome.” Schulze was specific about the difference. Hi puts two people on equal footing, but Welcome tells the other person that you are there for them. It is a small thing that, according to his data, shaped all of the awards that followed.

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Steve Jobs flew to Atlanta to learn this before opening his iconic Apple Stores. He took the ten-foot rule back to Cupertino and built it into every retail location, which we now see through the greeter at the door, the Genius Bar that is designed as a destination, as well as the overall careful removal of friction points that might make customers feel uncertain about where to go throughout the store. Apple Retail went on to become one of the highest-revenue-per-square-foot operations in retail history, and the thinking behind it began with Schulze’s data.

The other part of the Ritz-Carlton story I love is the $2,000 rule. Every employee, from the general manager to the person clearing your breakfast table, was empowered to spend up to $2,000 on the spot to resolve a guest complaint. In the final three years of Schulze’s tenure, the full amount was used exactly once. Because most of the time, a busboy saying please let me take care of your breakfast this morning was enough to turn a difficult moment into a story the guest retold for years. The policy was never really about the money but about making sure that every person who touched the customer understood what the brand stood for well enough to protect it on their own.

After Schulze left, Ritz-Carlton eliminated the escort standard (the practice of walking guests to their destination rather than pointing them there) because it was considered too costly to pull an employee away from their post. It had been the single most complimented standard in the brand’s history. The brand went from number one in the world to twenty-sixth. Capella, the brand Schulze built afterward with the same philosophy, is number one today.

What I find so useful about this story is what it asks of every founder sitting with it today. The moment Schulze obsessed over was when a customer chose to trust a brand. In hospitality, that was the first moment someone greets you; in today’s digital landscape, that might not be your first moment, but you should obsess over figuring out what it is so that you can win the trust game.

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I hope this case study makes you think about how you can take your brand to the next level. Whether it’s through leadership changes, culture tweaks, or finding a moment to own to make your customer feel bought in and a part of your world.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, head to Art of the Brand on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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Lauren Sherman published a piece in Puck last week on Barbara Sturm, the German aesthetics doctor who built one of the most talked about skincare brands in the world, sold a majority stake to Puig at a $400 million valuation, and has since become something of an industry cautionary tale for making claims that dermatologists openly dispute. Sherman’s piece is sharp and worth reading, but the conversation it reminded me of is one I keep having with industry insiders who use Sturm as a punchline rather than a case study. That instinct is costing them more than they realize.

Sturm is not a dermatologist, she is an orthopedic specialist from Germany who pivoted into aesthetics and built something that board-certified dermatologists with impeccable credentials could only dream of. The industry finds ways to tear down founders who do things differently without recognizing that doing something differently is exactly what created the conditions for the exit. I think it is more useful to learn from the winners than to keep score of their imperfections.

The Blood Cream Was the Scarcity Entry Point

What most people do not know (and I include myself in this) is that the Barbara Sturm line sold at Sephora and Net-a-Porter had nothing to do with why celebrities were posting photos with her.

Sturm built her name on a bespoke product made from your own blood. Barbara extracted it personally, spun it in a centrifuge, and returned it to you in a jar within five business days. It cost over $1,400. You could not order it online or find it at Sephora. Barbara had to take your blood personally, which meant you had to know Barbara, which meant you had to be on the list for when she flew from Europe to set up in a hotel room in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Chicago. Victoria Beckham posting a photo with Barbara Sturm was not a paid placement but a way to signal she’s on Sturm’s list and to secure her spot for when her jar is empty. The access was the product, and to everyone on the outside, it looked like one of the most credible women in fashion was organically celebrating a skincare line sold in department stores and high-end boutiques. So the rest of us bought it. And because of that halo, Sturm was able to sell her direct-to-consumer line, which contained no blood, to Puig for $400 million.

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Why This Strategy Worked

The gap between what the celebrities knew and what the customer saw is what built the brand. The people buying the shelf products assumed they were buying into the same world that Victoria Beckham, Gwyneth Paltrow and Hailey Bieber were inside. They were not. But the halo was real, and it sold everything beneath it.

This is a masterclass for any founder fighting to win in a saturated category. One of my favorite lines is that the people who are best at what they do are the worst at marketing themselves. Sturm is the inverse of that problem. She understood that she was not in the business of selling skincare, she was in the business of selling access to the most aspirational circle in the world, and she used that access to move products at scale without spending a dollar on advertising.

What Sturm Got Right

Sturm knew her customer was not the dermatologist, it was the woman who wanted to look like Victoria Beckham. She created headlines with sound bites that made publications write about her lack of credibility, knowing that a high percentage of her actual customers would read those articles and trust her anyway, because the celebrities they admired already had. She was not playing to the industry elite, she was playing to the woman on the other side of the velvet rope who desperately wanted in.

The beauty industry loves to criticize. It criticized Barbara Sturm. It is now criticizing Alix Earle for launching Reale Actives with an imperfect ingredient list that credible founders want to rip apart. What they are missing is that Alix is a content creator who understands attention, and her launch was a masterclass in anticipation marketing. While her competitors are busy dissecting her formula, she is likely selling out. Perfect products with no velocity lose to bold brands with momentum every single time.

I am not advocating for making egregious claims or compromising your integrity. What I am advocating for is understanding when to be bold and when to let go of industry judgment, because the longer you play it safe, the longer you stay invisible in a category that has no room for average.

The 15 Percent Uncomfortable Zone

The reason you are struggling is not because your product is not good enough but because you are so focused on being perfect that you are not doing anything different. And different is the only thing that compounds in a saturated market.

I say this to every founder I work with: your industry competitors are not your target. Your customer is. The people who are dissecting Barbara Sturm’s credentials and Alix Earle’s ingredient list are not the ones buying or the ones you should be designing your brand around. Stop measuring yourself against what the industry thinks is correct, and start measuring yourself against what your customers respond to.

I am not asking you to compromise your ethics or your standards. I am asking you to stop using other people’s imperfections as a reason to stay comfortable. Because the longer you use their flaws as an excuse not to move, the more ground the bold ones capture. Find the thing in your brand that makes you ten to fifteen percent uncomfortable; the version of the blood cream that is specific to you, that creates a feeling of access and scarcity that your customer cannot find anywhere else, and lean into it. That discomfort is directional, and it is telling you exactly where the opportunity is.

Do something bold this week.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, click here or head to Art of the Brand to listen to past episodes on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

World-building isn’t optional anymore, it’s the difference between brands that grow and brands that get left behind.In this episode of The Art of the Brand, Camille and Phillip break down what world-building actually looks like in practice, from restaurant experiences and Nike’s campus to Sephora activations and Zara’s latest strategy moves.

They unpack why most brands are still thinking too small, where companies are misallocating resources, and how smaller brands can outperform massive corporations by moving faster and thinking more creatively. The conversation also dives into real-time case studies, including Nike’s internal culture vs external experience gap, Sephora’s evolving customer base, and the risks of losing brand identity under pressure.

The episode closes with a powerful mindset shift on content creation, why most people avoid it, and the one reframing that can change how you show up instantly.

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Alix Earle has a large following and a strong personal brand. Anything she would have sold would have, in theory, done well. But what Alix knows as a content creator is that it is very hard to make people care; so she did what she does best, capture attention and compel people to be interested in what she has coming.

Weeks before the reveal, Alix started posting bare-skin content and talking openly about her acne journey. Then a mysterious account called @wtfisalixdoing appeared on Instagram and TikTok, posting cryptic content that accumulated 400,000 followers in a single week. Influencer friends received PR packages containing puzzle pieces and locked suitcases they could not open.

Then, a billboard went up in SoHo, and it looked like a puzzle with pieces missing. Each week, the pieces were filled in on the physical billboard synchronized with her digital posts; the full image was completed only on the day the brand was revealed. Fans were making their own mini puzzles at home. The internet was convinced it was self-tanner, or maybe swimwear, or possibly makeup. By the time Reale Actives was announced, people had already spent weeks caring about something they didn’t know existed.

Every week, I have hopeful brand owners who want to wait to share what they are doing until they have launched. They want to throw a grand event and hope their inventory sells out. Sadly, the world doesn’t work that way anymore; it’s why the best breakout brands are using anticipation marketing strategies to build a community and make people care before the product is available.

Even with Alix Earle’s fame, money, and access, she had to leverage a tease strategy because even for Alix Earle, the market is competitive, and she has to make people want what she has to sell.

That is the new game that founders have to play.

The Old Launch Model is Dead.

The conventional launch model focuses on developing the product, finalize the branding, and planning for a *perfect* launch. The steps seem rational; you want to look polished and ready before you go to market. The problem is that no one cares. We live in such a time-starved economy that by waiting to launch to talk about your brand, you are faced with having to do way more touch points to reach the marketing rule of 7 to explain what your brand is, why it’s important, why someone should care, and that they should part with their money along the way. By using an anticipatory strategy, the build-up for the rule of 7 exists before the product is available for sale, which increases the likelihood of your bottom of the funnel tactics once you are live because you’ve nurtured people into your funnel as you were building.

The reason why this works is straightforward. You cannot ask people to care about something in the same moment you introduce it to them. Caring takes time. It takes familiarity, narrative, and the feeling that something is already in motion before you arrived.

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What Alix Earle understood, and what the brands getting this right are all doing in their own ways, is that the launch is a report card on everything that happened before it. A quiet launch day does not mean you need better distribution or a bigger ad budget. It means you did not give anyone a reason to care before you asked them to buy.

It’s Hard to Sell… It’s Harder with a Bad Strategy

We are living in the most competitive attention environment that has ever existed. Every founder, every brand, every creator is competing for the same scroll at the same moment, and a product announcement on its own does not stop anyone. What stops people is a story they have been following, a mystery they have already been trying to solve, a brand they feel like they discovered rather than were sold to. Anticipation is the one input that cannot be outspent or copied, because it has to be earned over time, which is exactly why the brands that build it own the moment when it arrives.

There are many brands winning with this strategy that literally have zero transitional marketing budget.

Sammy Nussdorf opened Meadow Lane, a gourmet grocery store in Tribeca, in November 2025, with lines for over 3 weeks. People who had never set foot in the space felt personally invested in the business and flew to be there the day of its opening. That did not happen because of a press release or a paid campaign. Nussdorf had documented every step of the build on TikTok under his handle Brokeback Contessa for nearly two years. By the time the doors opened, his audience had watched him make thousands of decisions, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. I recently sat down with Sammy and had an incredible podcast conversation with him. I look forward to dropping it! (If you aren’t already, subscribe to our weekly podcast called Art of the Brand here).

Sisters, Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar, are another great example of building in public and anticipatory marketing. Their brand Hot Girl Pickles is literally killing it and is an example of asymmetric operations. They launched their pickle brand under their larger umbrella, Good Girl Snacks, in February 2024 and sold out in the first two months. They had no paid media budget. What they had was a hook, two girls in their early twenties who quit their corporate jobs to start a pickle company, and the discipline to tell that story consistently before anyone could buy the product. They identified that pickle content was generating billions of views on TikTok, that there was a clear gap in the market for a brand with a Gen Z point of view, and they started building the community around that identity before their jars were ready to ship. By the time the preorder went live, people were already waiting.

The most successful launches are all using slightly different strategies, but all centre on the same core thing: building anticipation. Alix used mystery and participation, turning her audience into detectives working toward a reveal. Sammy used radical transparency, making his audience feel like co-creators of something they were watching come to life. Leah and Yasaman used cultural identity and community to build an audience that aligned with the brand’s identity.

What connects all three is the same underlying principle. They did not launch and then try to generate interest. They generated interest and then launched into it. The audience arrived already caring, which meant the product only had to deliver on a promise that had already been made and believed.

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The era of announcing a product and expecting the market to meet you there is over. What you need to win is a unique strategy that focuses on creating a community and investing in creating anticipation. You have to make people feel connected to your brand before it’s available; without that pre-created relationship and desire, you are working against larger resources and deeper ties with other brands. It’s hard to compete without a tribe, and you don’t have to be Alix Earle to create one. Let go of perfectionism and lean into creativity. People want vulnerability, they want a storyline, they want to contribute to what you’re building, and they want to feel a part of something bigger. That’s the heart of world-building, and it’s why the brands that understand this are the ones that are winning.

I look forward to seeing Alix’s products going on sale next week. I suspect it will be a sell-out success. Why, because she made a hell of a lot of people care. If you can make people feel, you are winning.

See you tomorrow, my friends.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, click here or head to Art of the Brand to listen to past episodes on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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In this episode of The Art of the Brand, the co-founder and COO of Cymbiotika breaks down how they built one of the fastest-growing wellness brands by focusing on transparency, technology, and community.
From identifying a massive gap in the supplement industry to creating a product people actually feel, this conversation dives into what it really takes to scale a brand today. We talk about product innovation, form factor, influencer strategy, experiential marketing, and why most founders spread themselves too thin too early.

If you’re building a brand, or thinking about it, this is a masterclass in doing it with purpose, clarity, and long-term thinking.

In case you missed it, last week’s punchline centred on the iconic designer John Galliano being hired by Zara to go through the archives and reimagine pieces, with the punchline being: what archives?

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The implication being that Zara, a brand that churns out thousands of pieces a season, has nothing worth a couture designer’s attention. And on the surface, that reads as obvious. Galliano’s tenure includes Dior, Margiela, and now Zara… a trend we’re seeing with Zac Posen for Gap and Clare Waight Keller for Uniqlo.

However, what these jokes miss is how this fundamentally changes Zara’s positioning, as it allows the brand to lean into the most powerful thing of all, storytelling.

Even though Zara is not Shein, Pretty Little Thing, or other bottom-of-the-barrel mass retailers, it’s definitely closer to these brands than, say, Khaite. But what makes Zara unique is that, despite its size and scale, the clothes are seriously fashionable, and it’s not embarrassing to pair a pair of Chanel flats, Khaite jeans, and a Zara jacket. In fact, it’s the opposite; Zara is the true staple of high-low pairing.

Leaning into storytelling allows the brand to differentiate itself from the flood of cheap fast-fashion retailers. Zara is trying to maintain its place as the affordable, accessible alternative to mid-tier wear that it created white space in over 50 years ago. Yes, Zara was started in 1975.

It’s easy to criticize big brands for what they are, but truthfully, this is an extremely smart move to create hype, drive meaning, and tap into storytelling. Especially when you learn how competitive behemoths like Shein have become.

Shein, The AI Monster.

Zara is currently in a fight to differentiate itself from the Sheins of the world because, bluntly, they are different business models. Shein launches up to 10,000 items a day at $14, powered by AI that scrapes trends before they have names and tells suppliers what to manufacture within 72 hours. There is no designer involved, no point of view, and no story underneath any of it. It’s why Kim Jones talked about leaving LVMH but wanting to stay involved in fashion in Asia; the tech is unbelievable, and it gives a proverbial cliff step above the competition working on the traditional fashion calendars. The reality is that Shein is an algorithm; when your competitor is a soulless robot, you cannot win by running faster or pricing lower, because the machine will always be faster and it will always be cheaper. The only move available is to become something the algorithm structurally cannot be: creating a halo around a story that has meaning.

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That is what Marta Ortega has been building since she became Inditex chair in 2022, and the Galliano partnership is the clearest expression of that strategy yet.

What I also want to push back on is the idea that Zara does not deserve this kind of partnership, because I think that takes misunderstandings about where Zara sits in the market.

I feel it’s disparaging to say Zara is simply a brand people throw away. Zara, for many people, is how they are able to access the fashion of the moment in a way they can afford. Zara is fashionable, and it has democratized fashion. It’s cheaper than mid-tier premium or light luxury, but it’s still desirable to alot of people. In the same way that Target collabs with brands like Missoni, Kate Spade, etc., were exciting for the masses, even those with money. Allowing desirable things with weight and meaning to enter into the accessible zeitgeist is brilliant when it’s done correctly.

Galliano’s side of this is also worth thinking about, because nobody really is. Working at a heritage house means working inside significant constraints, a set number of pieces per season, a specific production window, the weight of a house’s history bearing down on every creative decision. Zara doesn’t operate like that. Despite the big cheque, it’s also reasonable to consider that a house like Zara may allow Galliano to test and be an artist in a way that allows his art to be art without the constraints of working with a highly regulated brand house.

There is volume, there is speed, and there is the creative freedom to put out ideas and see what resonates in real time across a global audience. For a designer with that level of accumulated experience and technical mastery, the ability to move faster, test more, and reach a completely different kind of customer might be genuinely exciting in a way that another couture appointment simply would not be.

People are measuring this partnership by prestige, but Galliano may be measuring it by what it allows him to do creatively that he could not do anywhere else.

The lesson from this is that story wins, because story (when selected correctly) holds weight and meaning. It’s why brands like H&M, Target, Gap, etc., have brought in names with personal brands because it creates hype and meaning that AI algorithms can’t compete with. I respect Zara as a brand, because sometimes, I want to buy the Zara version of the $400 satin Le Ligne pants that may be trendy for a moment. I get compliments, and my wallet is happy about it. I am excited to see how Galliano reimagines the pieces and want to encourage your brand to find ways to leverage storytelling to stand out.

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I would love to hear your thoughts on this! I read all the comments shared on these pieces.

Thanks for reading today.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, click here or head to Art of the Brand to listen to past episodes on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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Here’s why this is a case study that your brand should learn from.

It’s no surprise that viewership is down. Traditional TV struggles to compete with its clunky, bureaucratic approach to being compelling and lacks the resources that streaming houses-turned-production houses have (like Netflix and Paramount).

Like Traditional TV, the Bachelorette has been struggling for years. Primarily because it’s been running for 22 years and hasn’t evolved. The young adults who started watching it are deep into their middle-aged lives, and the new young 20s want something spicier, like what they are finding on Love Is Blind or 90 Day Fiancé. Pair this with the added complexity of second screens, where most people are on their phones while something is on in the background. The stakes have to get higher, which is exactly why ABC cast the polarizing figure of Taylor Frankie Paul.

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For those who don’t know, Paul is a TikTok personality and star of Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives who built millions of followers by publicly sharing that her relationship with her husband was falling apart because their friend group started ‘Soft swinging’ and she had caught feelings for one of the husbands that she was swinging with (yikes).

Because she got ahead of it and cried online, the internet came to her defence (vulnerability wins in today’s landscape). This crazy moment launched the show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which was an instant success. Well, the important additional detail is that Paul pleaded guilty to a domestic misdemeanour arising from a fight with a new boyfriend (neither of the men that I mentioned previously). The charges arose from a fight where she was screaming, hitting her boyfriend and throwing stools at him while her daughter was present and potentially hit. The show started with the police being called and the body cam footage, but they fast-forwarded to her being pregnant with his baby, showcasing that all was fine and good!!

Before we move on to the real tea, it’s important to note that Taylor Paul and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Dakota (who she threw the chair at), have been in her life up until the morning she was off to film the Bachelorette. Not my business, but the show built for finding love may have started with the host not being single?? But much in show business is not real.

The real drama comes days before the launch of the Bachelorette when TMZ released the video of the 2023 incident (apparently sold to them by Dakota), and Taylor looks, well, nuts. Her daughter is heard crying in the background, asking her to stop while she continues to throw heavy things at her ex and ultimately ends up hitting her daughter. The video is pretty bad. The internet freaked out when they could see the incident in real time, rather than simply knowing about it. Some sponsors pulled out, and ABC’s CEO cancelled the entire filmed season before a single episode aired.

This is not about domestic assault, because if it were, the fact that she pleaded guilty would have been a bar to being on the show; this is about optics and a response to facts that everyone knew existed beforehand.

I see this as one of the worst brand moves that’s happened this year. We talk about this segment on this week’s episode of Art of the Brand, which will be out on Wednesday, where Phillip characterizes the CEO of ABC as “getting treed by a Chihuahua”. Which is the idea that you get barked up a tree by something that you shouldn’t be afraid of.

So why do I think ABC should have aired the season?

For starters, the public knew of the charges; she pled guilty; we just didn’t see the visual proof of why a mother would willingly plead guilty to a misdemeanour. Second, ABC’s entire R&D and legal team knew of the charges. Let me remind you that over $30 million was spent on producing this show. ABC knew exactly what they were signing up for. They wanted a train wreck on TV, and that’s exactly what they got. The moment they got the reaction they invested in, they pulled the plug? Imagine how much goes into production. The timing of the sale was perfect for the buzz to launch the season; this literally would have been the most successful Bachelorette in history.

For anyone thinking that the brand cancelled the show because ABC doesn’t want to support domestic violence is respectfully BS. Did the KTLA news support OJ Simpson when it aired the iconic chase down of the police? Does Netflix support murder when it shares murder documentaries violently? No. You include a disclaimer and allow people to make decisions for themselves. Let me remind you that the charges occurred before the already successful reality TV show Secret Lives of Mormon Wives AND before the recording of The Bachelorette.

Aka, they knew what they were getting into.

Leaders often overreact to ‘noise’, which in today’s world is the hordes of online thought police making demands before there is time for the dust to settle. The ‘signal’ is what top CEOs pay attention to. The information that matters, and what mattered, whether you agreed with ABC’s decision to choose Paul, is that this video release is exactly what they wanted to build an audience. People who were outraged online were not Bachelorette consumers OR consumers of romantic reality TV shows; that was noise. Losing a few sponsors would have resulted in many more vying for the eyeballs the show would have created.

The CEO flinched and sent mixed brand messaging. The Bachelorette was never about morality; it was about hope, redemption, and a possible fairy-tale romance amid dysfunction. The Twitterati and armchair virtue police will never miss an opportunity to cancel something to increase their views.

This is no different from when Shay Mitchell launched her kids’ line, Rini (a clean, kid-safe face mask line). The same twitterati freaked out. Every parent who commented on my video or whom I met after was so thankful for her brand. You try being a parent, arguing with an 8-year-old that she is the only girl in her class who can’t wear Summer Friday’s lip gloss, good luck! Parents are dying for a safe alternative. The noise online is noise if you don’t know who your target customer is.

When you try to be for everyone, you end up being for no one, and your brand dies. This is exactly where the Bachelorette franchise is, and why they tried to amplify the discord by selecting a dumpster fire of a bachelorette and not simply selecting a loser from the previous season.

Reality TV is a special kind of entertainment. At the end of a long day or week, you want to be entertained by lives that are crazier than yours. You want to judge, give your opinion, and deep down, feel better about yourself. Like the P. Diddy documentary, ABC could have easily curbed salacious attacks by placing a disclaimer before every episode. Better yet, make the next bachelor or bachelorette an absolute devotee angel to create a crazy contrast between the two selections. Taylor Paul would have made for great PR, and they would have had record ratings, because at the end of the day, if it bleeds, it leads.

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What Our Brand Advice Would Have Been.

What ABC should have done is what any brand owner should do when the thing they built comes under pressure from people who were never their customers. Run the show. Own the heat and make tons of money in the process. Controversy is not for everyone, but in a business focused on viewership and attention, and with a programming storyline that has no value without some level of drama, they should have doubled down; they were handed a gift. It’s why traditional production houses are dying: they don’t have a clear understanding of their brand, and there are too many decision-makers to do anything interesting.

What this comes down to is weak leadership. When your brand is on the decline, you often have 1, maybe 2, moments you can leverage to come back on top. We call these asymmetric upsides, and you have to leverage them when they are handed to you. The thing about asymmetric upsides is you often have to hold them by the horns and make a bold call.

What ABC taught us is that they are losing to Netflix and Prime for a reason, and until they can start making bold decisions, they will die a fast death.

For any business owner watching this unfold, the lesson here is not to be controversial for its own sake. Understand your strategy and lean into it when the world responds. To win in the current landscape, be bold. It’s important to say that bold is not hateful, but to do things that create buzz, that create conversation, that create disagreement, that’s why they picked Paul in the first place. People loved her online, and people hate her. That balance creates a conversation, which the algorithm loves most. Be bold and lean in, it’s the only way to win.

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, click here or head to Art of the Brand to listen to past episodes on all streaming platforms.

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1. Amplify your reach, and;

2. Reinforce what you stand for.

Partnerships are all the rage these days, especially for brands looking to amplify their reach. On one hand, the thinking is correct. Cross-connecting with other audiences is a smart and cost-effective way to reach more people. The problem is that most brands miss the math of what makes a strong partnership work. They optimize for reach and forget about reinforcement. Three months later, neither brand is stronger for it. The audience didn’t stick, the positioning got muddier, and the partnership became a line item in a marketing report rather than a moment that built the brand.

I stumbled across a recent partnership between Eight Sleep and Aston Martin F1 that caught my attention because it gets the math right. Eight Sleep is one of my favorite brands. They have crushed branding and built strong credibility around being science-first without ever feeling cold or inaccessible. I met the founders last month when I spoke at Harvard. They were the slot before me, and everything they said reinforced my understanding of the brand and why I have been a fan for years. The Aston Martin partnership is an extension of everything they have been building, and it offers a useful case study for evaluating whether a partnership will amplify and reinforce your brand or quietly dilute it.

This week I taught at Columbia Business School in a class called The Art of Partnerships. The room was full of MBA students who wanted to know what separates partnerships that build brands from those that just generate a press release and a modest sales bump. I told them the same thing I tell my clients: most brands approach partnerships backwards. They start with reach when they should start with reinforcement.

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Evaluating Partnerships Through the 4 P’s

When I evaluate partnerships for clients, I use the same framework I use for brand strategy: the 4 P’s. Purpose, Position, Personality, and Perception. These pillars should guide every marketing decision, and that includes who you choose to align with. I will walk you through how the Eight Sleep x Aston Martin partnership stacks up against each pillar, and later in this article, I will show you how to define your own 4 P’s so you can use this framework to evaluate any partnership opportunity that comes your way (if you want my full approach to brand building check out my Brand & Social Media Masterclass here or get on the waitlist for my Brand and Social Media Planner here)

I find myself constantly navigating this question. Many of the brands I work with want more opportunities to sell. They want distribution, exposure, and access to new audiences. What they do not always think about is the brand they are building while they chase those things. I was at Female Founder’s Day earlier this week and interviewed the CEO of Away, who said something that stuck with me: “Having a successful product does not mean you have a successful brand.” Focusing on sales and building a brand is not the same thing. The same principle applies to partnerships. A partnership that drives sales but confuses your positioning is not a win. It is slow erosion dressed up as growth.

A partnership should reinforce all four pillars. If it only serves to reach, you are trading long-term brand equity for short-term exposure. The question is not whether a partnership will get you in front of more people. The question is whether it will make the right people believe you more.

Purpose: Do You Share the Same Underlying Belief?

Eight Sleep exists to optimize human performance through sleep. Aston Martin F1 exists to win races through marginal gains. Both brands believe that performance is the accumulation of small advantages compounded over time. F1 is the pinnacle of this philosophy. Hundredths of a second decide races. Teams obsess over aerodynamics, tire compounds, fuel loads, and driver recovery because every variable matters.

Eight Sleep positioned itself within this logic. Sleep is now being treated as a controllable performance variable, much like teams think about downforce or pit-stop timing. The partnership makes sense because the underlying purpose is the same: optimize every input that influences results.

When purpose aligns, the partnership feels inevitable rather than forced. You do not have to explain why these two brands are together. The logic is self-evident. When purpose does not align, you end up with partnerships that require extensive explaining, and if you have to explain why you are together, you have already lost.

Position: Does the Association Reinforce or Confuse?

Eight Sleep has positioned itself as the performance tool for high performers, not a mattress company for people who want better sleep. That distinction matters. They are not selling comfort. They are selling optimization. Aston Martin F1 has positioned itself as a team built on engineering precision and data-driven decisions. Both brands occupy the performance optimization territory in their respective categories.

This is where most partnerships go wrong. Brands get excited about audience size without auditing audience fit. They partner with someone who reaches a lot of people without asking whether those people are the right ones or whether the association makes sense for what they stand for.

A weak partnership puts two brands together that occupy different positions. You end up confusing both audiences about what each brand means. The sustainability brand that partners with a fast fashion retailer for distribution. The luxury house that shows up on a discount platform for volume. The quiet, craft-focused founder who partners with someone loud and promotional because the reach was appealing. Each of these partnerships might drive short-term results, but they erode the positioning that made the brand valuable in the first place.

Eight Sleep and Aston Martin reinforce each other’s position. The F1 context makes Eight Sleep’s performance claims more credible. Eight Sleep’s technology makes Aston Martin’s marginal gains philosophy more tangible. Neither brand is reaching for something it does not already own.

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Personality: Does the Content Feel Native or Forced?

Eight Sleep’s personality is science first, data-driven, and quietly confident. They do not oversell. They let the metrics speak. Their marketing references clinical studies and sleep data rather than lifestyle aspirations. Aston Martin F1’s personality is precision engineering, technical excellence, and relentless optimization. Neither brand is flashy or hype driven. They both communicate through proof rather than promises.

When personalities clash, partnerships feel awkward. The content does not work. The messaging feels forced. The audience can sense that something is off, even if they cannot articulate exactly what it is. I have seen this happen with clients who got excited about a partnership opportunity and then struggled to create content that felt authentic to both brands. The partnership looked good on paper, but fell apart in execution because the personalities were fundamentally incompatible.

When personalities align, the partnership generates content that feels native to both brands. Eight Sleep is showing up on cooling vests, on handheld fans, and on equipment that reinforces what the product does. The logo placement is not decorative. It is functional. That is the personality match in action.

Perception: Will This Make You More Believable?

Eight Sleep wants to be perceived as the performance standard for serious athletes and high performers. Aston Martin F1 wants to be perceived as a team that leaves nothing to chance. The partnership reinforces both perceptions.

This is where the distinction between endorsement and adoption becomes important. Eight Sleep has built its entire brand through athletes who use the product, not celebrities who pose with it. Charles Leclerc is an investor, not just a spokesperson. Taylor Fritz travels with his Pod to every tournament. The EF Cycling team used Pods during the Tour de France. Over 300 professional athletes across disciplines have adopted the technology.

The Aston Martin partnership extends this philosophy to the team level. The drivers sleep on the product. The Pods travel with the team. The technology is embedded in how the team operates, not painted on top of their marketing. When your partners use your product as part of their performance infrastructure, the perception becomes “this works” rather than “this is sponsored.”

The difference matters more than most brands realize. Endorsement creates awareness. Adoption creates belief. Eight Sleep has consistently chosen adoption, and the Aston Martin partnership is the logical extension of that strategy.

The Formula

Good partnerships come down to a simple equation:

Shared Philosophy + Complementary Position + Authentic Integration = Amplification and Reinforcement

Shared philosophy means both brands believe the same things about what matters. Eight Sleep and Aston Martin both believe performance is built through marginal gains. That alignment is the foundation.

Complementary position means both brands occupy territory that makes the other more credible. Eight Sleep gains the F1 performance context. Aston Martin gains a tangible expression of their optimization philosophy. Neither brand is borrowing something it does not already own.

Authentic integration means the product is embedded in operations, not just painted on marketing. The Pods travel with the team. The logo appears on functional equipment. The partnership is demonstrated, not declared.

When all three pieces are present, you get amplification and reinforcement simultaneously. You reach more people, and you make those people believe you more deeply. That is the formula.

How to Define Your Own 4 P’s

Before you can evaluate whether a partnership will reinforce your brand, you need to know what your brand stands for. That means defining your own 4 P’s. Here is how I approach each one:

Purpose is why your brand exists beyond making money. It is the underlying belief that drives everything you do. To define it, ask yourself: why did I start this? What problem am I trying to solve? What would be lost if my brand disappeared tomorrow? Your purpose should be specific enough to guide decisions but broad enough to allow for growth. Eight Sleep’s purpose is to optimize human performance through sleep. That is clear, differentiated, and directional.

Position is the territory you are trying to own in your market. It is not what you sell but what space you occupy in people’s minds. To define it, ask yourself: what do I want to be known for? What makes me different from everyone else who does something similar? Where do I have permission to win? Eight Sleep positioned itself as a performance tool, not a mattress company. That distinction shapes everything from their marketing to their partnerships.

Personality is how your brand shows up in the world. It is your tone, your visual language, the way you communicate. To define it, ask yourself: if my brand were a person, how would they talk? What would they wear? How would they behave at a party? Eight Sleep’s personality is science-first and quietly confident. They let data do the talking. That personality has to show up consistently across every touchpoint.

Perception is how you want to be seen by the people who matter most to you. It is the impression you leave. To define it, ask yourself: what do I want people to say about my brand when I am not in the room? What feeling do I want them to associate with me? Eight Sleep wants to be perceived as the performance standard. Every decision they make reinforces that perception.

Once you have defined your 4 P’s, you have a filter for every decision, including partnerships. If a partnership reinforces all four, it is worth exploring. If it only serves reach, think carefully about what you might be trading away.

If you want to go deeper into building your brand pillars, I teach this framework in detail in my masterclass, or you can get on the waitlist for my Social Media Planner, which walks you through defining your 4 P’s step by step.

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The Audit

Before you say yes to a partnership, run it through the 4 P’s:

Purpose: Does this partner share the same underlying belief about what matters? If you have to explain why you are together, the purpose is not aligned.

Position: Does this partner occupy complementary territory? Will the association reinforce your position or confuse it?

Personality: Does this partner communicate the way you communicate? Will the content feel native or forced?

Perception: Will this partnership make the right people believe you more? Or will it just reach more people who do not understand what you stand for?

If the partnership only serves reach, it is not a brand partnership. It is a media buy. Treat it accordingly.

The Standard

The brands that build lasting equity understand that partnerships are positioning decisions, not distribution opportunities. Eight Sleep and Aston Martin work because they share the same operating philosophy. The partnership makes both brands more believable to the audiences that already matter to them.

That is the standard. Not whether a partnership will get you exposure, but whether it will make you more credible. Not whether the audience is big, but whether the audience is right. Not whether the deal makes financial sense, but whether it makes brand sense.

Most partnerships are built to sell. The best ones are built to reinforce what you already stand for while amplifying your reach to the people who should know about you. I hope this substack better guides your understanding on how to navigate brand partnerships, when to say yes, and when to say no. I use this framework for all of our clients at our agency, and it’s helped our brands stay focused and grow in the right direction. Without the Brand Pillars framework, you can be generating attention without effect. The downside to this is that by the time you realize you have been growing away from your core audience, you’ve wasted too much time and money to get back on track (which I call Brand Death by a Thousand Cuts). Let me know if you have any questions on this framework. My goal is to guide your brand in the hopes that one day, we can work together through my agency, Third Eye Insights!

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I hope you have an awesome week!

Xx Camille

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If you want to listen to this week’s podcast episode, click here or head to Art of the Brand to listen to past episodes on all streaming platforms.

If you are interested in working together or hiring Third Eye Insights, my international strategy + creative firm, click here.

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From Revolve’s event strategy to Tesla’s diner experience and the rise of TikTok Shop, this episode unpacks why campaigns are no longer enough, and why brands need to think like media companies. They also explore why most launches fail, how world-building actually works, and what founders need to understand to win in today’s attention economy.