The anatomy of a cult brand.

Hello friends,

I am writing this from Montreal, which is the second of five cities I’m visiting in two weeks. I started in New York, I am headed to Liberia (Costa Rica) next, then Boston, and I finish in Las Vegas, i.e. three countries and a lot of airports in fourteen days. What I did not expect is that every room I sat in this week ended up circling the same idea, which is consistency.

A $4B Company Asked Me This

I gave a talk this week to a textile company doing 4 billion dollars in revenue, one that manufactures for a list of brands you would recognize immediately, including several we talk about all the time. The part of the talk they kept returning to was consistency. They understood the premise straight away, that consistency is the most powerful force in branding. What they wanted to know was the harder question, which is how you actually achieve it, because consistency is easy to agree with and very difficult to execute across a company of that size.

The answer is that consistency is not a discipline problem, it is a clarity problem. You cannot show up the same way twice if nobody in the building agrees on what you are, which is why the work starts with the four Ps:

1. Purpose
2. Position
3. Personality
4. Perception

Once those are settled, consistency stops requiring willpower, because everyone making a decision is working from the same brief, whereas without them you are asking.

The LoveShackFancy Lesson

Yesterday I interviewed Rebecca Hessel Cohen of LoveShackFancy, and the moment I walked in I felt like I had been transported into the LoveShackFancy world. Every single detail in that office is exactly what you would picture if you closed your eyes and imagined it. Even the podcast setup required nothing from them, i.e. they did not have to change or stage the room, because the room was already perfectly styled the way everything else there is. Every girl who worked there was on brand and dressed to the nines. She did not do the run of the mill version of an interview where two people sit at a table and talk about a brand—she brought me inside the world instead.

They dressed me when I arrived, even though I had come in my full LoveShackFancy attire, and Rebecca and I picked the same dress, which is hilarious and we absolutely ended up rocking it.

Watching her work is the part I keep thinking about. While we were choosing jackets to layer over the dresses, she was giving her team edits on how the pieces could be improved, catching things as small as a loose thread in the background, and that level of attention is not something anyone can be taught. She embodies the brand completely. She arrived with on brand flowers, in heels and everything in her purse was an extension of the world she has built. That is what a cult following is built on, which she is living proof of (since she was not even aware that there is an anonymous Reddit community of around thirty eight hundred people devoted to the brand).

The clearest thing I took from the whole day is the obsession with consistency, and specifically that she has never gotten bored or tired of her own brand cues. Most founders start reaching for something new long before their audience is anywhere close to done with what they already have. Obsession is not something you can teach a person, whereas the part that separates the people who build worlds from the people who simply work hard is knowing what to be obsessed about, and she has known from the beginning. Very few brands launched in the last twenty years have brand codes this strong, where you can look at a single product and know instantly which world it belongs to, and it is why I cannot wait for this episode to drop.

What I loved most is a practice she calls the “big ideas meeting”, where the team takes one isolated thing and works it all the way through. The example she gave me was ‘holiday’. They sat down with holiday as the single subject and started with the question of how they want people to feel, and only once that was settled did they break it down into every element that carries it, from the mannequins to the visuals. That order matters, because most companies start with the deliverables and back into a feeling afterward, whereas she aligns the whole team on the feeling first so that consistency becomes the natural outcome rather than something anyone has to enforce.

This week's episode is about the gap between owning your brand and performing it. Every story this week made the same point: the brands that lean into an ugly moment, defend what they actually stand for, or tell the truth in public keep winning. The ones faking authenticity, or fighting the wrong battle, are paying for it. Some of the biggest names in fashion, beauty, wellness, and law all learned this the hard way.

On the episode:

● Louis Vuitton won its lawsuit over counterfeits, but the damage to exclusivity was already done.
● Kim Kardashian just did something with attention that brands spend millions failing at.
● What Charlotte Tilbury's dupe fight says about the future of premium brands.
● The Gymshark lawsuit that every brand using influencers should be paying attention to.
● ASU is now offering a degree in influencing and it’s forcing education to catch up with culture.

Since I’m travelling so much over the next month, I wanted to share my must-haves that go everywhere with me.

♢ Social Media & Brand Planner: The ultimate tool to build your brand and your social media at the same time. Purchase Here.

♢ My Masterclass: Learn the exact system top brands use to turn attention online into customers and sales. Enroll Here.

♢ My International Marketing Agency: Strategic and creative services for leading brands and ambitious small businesses alike. Inquire Here.

♢ Substack: Daily case studies and breakdowns that go deep on what separates brands that scale from brands that stall. Subscribe here.

♢ Podcast: Tune in for the most informative and entertaining debates on brand, business and trends. Subscribe & Listen.