Vans killed it in paris, its the era of the Little Brand + niches, link round ups n more.
Back to skate basics!
Hi friends!
Thank you to the new subscribers who came over from my guest post on
’s Substack! If you are a day 1-er and haven’t read it yet, i didn’t have a chance to cross-promote in a send until now, but I did a little case study/breakdown on how effective an act of Energy Marketing the Brat rollout was. Trying to figure out how to showcase my approach for the world is a constant WIP effort as Strategists and brand people are notoriously left off credits of big campaigns, or also do a lot of work outside of that (particularly in-house). There is also a lot of bad strategy work out there. So showing a live analysis and some frameworks I apply for things was one way around it. It was cool to see how much this post resonated.As a reminder I also do this newsletter for fun (not direct income) and as a way to try and meet people I may eventually work with. So if you need any help with any projects don’t hesitate to ever reach out- even if i’m booked, I can try and help you find someone else who might be available.
Anyway! Welcome. Here’s some things i’ve noticed over the past week; much less of a deep dive, but hopefully still intriguing to you!
Vans’ victory lap in Paris
Vans is so back. They had three activations in Paris the past week, all doubling down on skate as the essence of the brand. My favorite is the visually-arresting marble skatepark from Playlab; you can check a little BTS below and read more on it here.
The new-ish (1 year) CMO Drieke Leenknegt (longtime Nike brand marketer who left in 2020) is making her impact felt with a real return to Skate as the heart of the brand. I’m excited to see what comes from this moment; there’s been a very organic ground-swelling in NYC/also global fashion people bringing back the old authentic low-pro, and their ability to activate so well at PFW while the streets do their thing elsewhere is a pretty big advantage. In hindsight, this is the equivalent of if Adidas had been able to catch on to the samba / gazelle heat a little earlier a couple of years back. I am watching closely where things go! More info on their other events here, which included an exhibition from legacy skate photographer Atiba Jefferson.
It’s been cool to see a lot of what came out of Paris over the past week which felt a lot more fun and alive than other fashion weeks. I think this is mostly due to Fete de la Musique, but still feels a lot higher energy.
Riches in the niches
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ‘commercialization’ and the idea of ‘mass’ as either a success metric OR a creative principle. A lot of brands i’ve worked for historically have preached this idea of mass appeal as the end goal and the audience (I remember in the period I was working at Netflix, the ‘target audience’ for the brand was described as “the 8 billion people on earth” - does not get much more undefined and mass than that).
The ethos really runs counter to what I’m observing in fashion right now, which naturally tends to lead the way for other lifestyle businesses.
Clint419 from explosive UK brand Corteiz talked recently about how he scaled the brand behind a Private Instagram account that he used to quite literally reject people from following.
"Sometimes it's just about consistency in what you do, and people spreading the word for you.The IG account was private, and still is sometimes. I would literally pick, see, go to your page and… if it was shit, I would not let you into the account. Like I was ... if I felt it wasn't for you at that time, I wouldn't accept you into the account."
Can you imagine literally any client you’ve ever had hitting the ‘reject’ button on a follow request?
this commenter said it best. Rachel Tashjian-Wise also talked in this week’s OPULENT TIPS about niches:
“It’s a snoozy time to be a mega-brand that’s not Loewe – and a REVVED UP moment to be a Little Brand. In music, magazines, movies and books, everyone is saying that NICHE is GOOD and that’s true in fashion too.
Maybe it’s that big brands don’t have to deal with the guilt that seems baked into fashion right now – we feel so bad for wanting to feel good, whereas Pharrell, LVMH and Kering brands etc see capitalism / commercialism as synonymous with desire.So the Little Brands have tension. They might have a skinny belly but they’ve got muscle on those arms. They know that if they’re going to ask us to lust, they need to show us they have integrity – they seduce and prove themselves in one fell swoop. And I think many of them are doing that through total beauty, or vulnerability, or studiousness.
The Great Dries Toodle-oo was the apotheosis of this moment. [..] Even when people started wearing his clothes to Coachella, even when he launched it-bags, he thought like a Little Brand.”
I was fascinated by this piece covering the very specific niche of high-end, outdoors magazines thriving in print (against all odds, and the popular narratives about the demise of media right now).
"Like vinyl records and micro beers, they’re aimed at a small audience with appreciation for the craft. Most are at-home operations where the editors are owners, managing a web of freelancers and overseeing every bit of the production cycle. Like Casimiro, many are expats from the wreckage of iconic glossy magazines that lost luster in an era of consolidation, venture capitalism and attention spans deemed too short to consume anything but algorithmic candy.“The screen experience is so reductionist,” Casimiro said. “It just flattens the world, so that a Pulitzer Prize-winning story feels the same as spam. Some things deserve better.”"
I don’t think its any surprise that some of the more breakthrough recent brand successes even in ad-land are kinda big brands that act like Little Brands and have oodles of ‘niche’ personality (i’m not mentioning the water brand here, but you know the one i’m talking about). Anyway, just something i’ve been meditating on and maybe will turn into more of a cogent thought/piece.
There’s probably a brand lesson in this.. but you won’t see me making a b2b saas-style LinkedIn post about it
A lil link round-up
A throwback read (3 years old) focused on a ‘Negative Yield New York’ is the perfect intersection of my interests (political economy and sonic youth) but really dives into how much of the music we love from downtown NYC is a direct result of the 70s and 80s having affordable housing policy. This can also be traced back to other massive cultural moments: e.g Berlin in the 90s, SF in the 60’s preceding Grateful Dead et al- not sure what it means for our present moment (and future) where rents have become inscrutably high.
What is Menswear Going to Do With Itself - heater from Robby Kelly at SSENSE around the anxiety and “bullshit narcissism”™ of the cresting moment of Menswear as it has a newer, bigger audience, with some choice words from Jacob Gallagher: “The notion of an arbiter, be it a designer or a celebrity, that’s really faded. What’s exciting to me is that people are taking from the entire spectrum of history and of clothing that they can access. There’s not a dominant trend.”
The Merchant Prince Would Like A Few Words Our beloved Mickey Drexler shares some insight on the eve of his 80th birthday. I love his anecdote about being a detective; looking for clues in what is selling and what isn’t, and solving for that. The Steve Jobs tidbits are also nice.
Unsolicited career advice for the youths: lately i’ve had to do some late nights to get it all done so i enjoyed coming across this tumblr post from 11 years ago about ‘staying up late’. “Anything I’ve achieved in my career I credit today to those four years [of staying up late]. I loved working late at night. I worked on office stuff, and I worked on personal projects. I played music really loud and drank Mountain Dew. I would design anything: invitations for my friends’ parties, packaging for mix tapes, one-of-a-kind birthday cards, and freebies for non-profits.” I’m sure i’m meant to be past the ‘staying up late’ years but here we are. :)
Incredible stats showcasing the growth of WNBA in a single year.
the FEETS zone
neon green/yellow shoes continue their ascent:
8on8 custom asics:
insane custom salomon slide
really love the vibe/aesthetics of advisory board crystals x merrell. Perfect collab.
oakley x junya watanabe is way nicer than the swoosh cdg’s that leaked this week that i won’t be posting,
the next martine rose x nike sneaker allegedly - i do love it. she’s their answer to adidas wales bonner. hit after hit for the fashion girlies
Thats all for now. Catch you later this week!
GG x
Thank you for the Vans coverage. I was at a comic convention two weeks ago and Vans was by far the dominant shoe among show-goers!
Mm! Yeah, think ‘consistent brand expressions x niche audiences over time’ (CBE x NA / T for SaaS? haha) the more authentic way to connect too vs mass which inevitably smooths over authentic nuance (integrity) for both brand n audience. It’s the “over Time” part that’s so hard, especially with all the humans that come with it, what makes consistency so hard. 🙏