- Tasteful Manifesto↗ 22 Oct 2026
A manifesto for 'Tasteful,' a culture-driven gathering celebrating expertise, originality, and human-made craft over algorithms, AI, and shortcuts—positioning slow, niche-aggregating growth and deep community as antidotes to commodified digital culture.
- K-shaped culture↗ 19 Oct 2026
K-shaped culture mirrors K-shaped economics: as wealth diverges, culture splits into extractive (asset-driven) and generative (access-driven) forms, creating fundamentally different operating principles for how groups engage with products and society.
- In the spotlight: Cargo Crew↗ 15 Oct 2026
Founder Felicity Rogers discusses how Cargo Crew transformed uniforms from commodity into coveted cultural symbols by infusing fashion design, brand identity, and care into workwear—creating pride in wearers and extending brand worlds beyond workplace utility.
- The access inflation↗ 13 Oct 2026
As institutions democratize access to maintain revenue, the scarcity that once anchored social and cultural capital erodes—challenging the historical role of gatekeepers and status signaling in luxury and exclusivity.
- In the spotlight: Sue S. Chan↗ 8 Oct 2026
Sue S. Chan, founder of Care of Chan events agency, discusses the cultural shift toward curated, analog experiences and expert-driven gatherings as a counterweight to algorithm-driven virality and the declining ROI of digital advertising.
- Merch Guide is out. Here’s who gets it right↗ 5 Oct 2026
A guide to merchandise strategy positioning merch as cultural capital rather than marketing gimmick, with rankings of top 30 brands and frameworks for integrating merchandise into brand programs.
- Revenge of analog↗ 1 Oct 2026
Newsletter housekeeping and event promotion for Tasteful Summit, a conference on food, media, and hospitality culture.
- Market to the Middle↗ 29 Sept 2026
Connor Archbold of Tracksuit discusses how brand sentiment works across human audiences and LLMs, arguing that effective brand marketing targets the silent majority—not the vocal extremes—and builds future demand through emotional connection and consistency rather than chasing clicks.
- Post-Friction↗ 21 Sept 2026
As AI agents handle customer requests at scale, brands must actively choose how to allocate scarce access—through auctions, membership, loyalty scoring, or social reputation—rather than relying on friction to manage demand.
- Agenda for Tasteful is here↗ 16 Sept 2026
A Substack newsletter invitation to 'Tasteful,' an event exploring how luxury brands recreate cultural capital through scarcity, effort, and identity now that access restrictions have dissolved in a frictionless digital world.
- Celine x Reebok: all business is IP business↗ 14 Sept 2026
All companies sit on intellectual property—founding stories, aesthetics, community practices, archived materials—but most activate far less than they own. Brands that treat IP as dynamic cultural assets, not static legal ones, create durable competitive advantage by programming and extending it across categories and channels.
- Simulation marketing↗ 10 Sept 2026
As AI-generated content erodes baseline trust in all media, marketing is bifurcating into two paths: Stealth Acceleration (viral manipulation, astroturfing, cheap reach) and Intentional Slowdown (analog formats, IRL events, long-form content, localized trust). Anthropic's cultured brand positioning via intimate dinners and print outperforms OpenAI's incoherent influencer trips, signaling a shift away from social media scale toward offline credibility.
- Six faces of luxury↗ 8 Sept 2026
A framework mapping six types of luxury—traditional, modern, quiet, mindful, aspirational, and low-key—showing how luxury is shifting from outward status symbols to inward personal meaning, experience, and well-being.
- How brands make culture↗ 3 Sept 2026
Brands are not logos but complete systems—rituals, products, behaviors, and infrastructure—that manufacture and sustain culture through repetition, mobility, immutability, aggregation, and organizational control of supply and demand.
- RIP Dolly, the tiny rollneck, and the first round of Tasteful speakers is here↗ 27 Aug 2026
Reflections on Dolly Parton's legacy as a narrative-owner and American archetype, followed by speaker announcements for the Tasteful event in New York.
- The Stone Island Test↗ 25 Aug 2026
Stone Island has built a luxury brand by mastering three distinct loops—recognition, community, and resale—that accumulate cultural capital through art partnerships, exclusive experiences, and subcultural authenticity dating back to its 1982 founding.
- Cultural liquidity↗ 19 Aug 2026
Burberry's return to profitability reflects a strategic approach to activating cultural market actors—examining how brands orchestrate cultural narratives through speculators, arbitrageurs, and regulators to drive business outcomes.
- 4 types of brand worlds↗ 11 Aug 2026
Brand worlds are coherent fictional-but-real spaces where companies convert cultural capital into commercial value through iconic products, experiences, and community. The piece defines four types of brand worlds centered on product, place, person, or practice—a framework for understanding how fashion and food brands build lasting relevance.
- Fandom is not a marketing channel 31 Jul 2026
- 3 types of brand gravity 25 Jul 2026
- In Defense of Brand Myth 23 Jul 2026
- New new rules of brand marketing 20 Jul 2026
- Tasteful 16 Jul 2026
- Attack of the gimmick 13 Jul 2026
- The reign of the mighty creator 9 Jul 2026
- Assembling a cultural portfolio 29 Jun 2026
- Tasting menu 22 Jun 2026
- The Sellout 15 Jun 2026
- The "Backrooms" Shocker 8 Jun 2026
- The power of subcultures in brand 4 Jun 2026