My theme of the year is FLOW STATE.

Which, depending on your tolerance for astrology, Human Design and conversations involving the phrase “the universe is giving me feedback”, may require some explaining.

Apparently, Taureans have just emerged from a particularly sticky seven-year astrological chapter. I won’t pretend to understand the planetary mechanics of it all, but the basic premise is that us Taureans have been going through a period of fairly significant upheaval, change and disruption.

Whether you believe in astrology or not, I can tell you this much: it tracks.

The last seven years of my life have contained an extraordinary amount of change. Not necessarily bad change. Some of it has been wonderful. But there has been a feeling, at times, of pushing shit up a hill.

There have been roadblocks, challenges, endings and deaths. Some literal, some metaphysical. Many yeses that should have been noes. Overextending myself in directions that weren’t necessarily giving anything back. Trying to make certain things work because I’d decided they should work. A general sense that I was expending enormous amounts of energy without always feeling like that energy was moving me forward.

Then, earlier this year, something shifted.

Again, perhaps the planets moved. Perhaps I moved. Perhaps I’ve simply done enough work on myself over the past seven years to finally recognise what I want.

Probably a combination of the latter two, if we’re being sensible.

But I could feel it.

Things started moving again.

Fittingly, 2026 is also the Year of the Horse: movement, freedom, energy, forward momentum. If the universe is laying the metaphor on that thick, I’m happy to take it.

And when I thought about what I wanted the year ahead to feel like, the theme that kept returning was flow state.

Not ease, exactly.

I’m not particularly interested in an easy life. I love challenge. I like having slightly too much on my plate. I like looking at something that feels enormous and wondering whether I’m capable of pulling it off.

I didn’t want less challenge or ambition.

I wanted less friction.

I wanted that feeling of steady water: energy, optimism, connectedness, momentum. Presence, but not in a still or idle way. Presence in motion. Being completely connected to where I’m going without feeling like I’m dragging myself there.

Focused, but not forcing.

That’s what flow state means to me.

I’ve been reading Optimal by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, and their discussion of flow made me realise there was actually language for a lot of what I’d been feeling.

The original research into flow looked at moments when people performed at their absolute best. Different disciplines, same internal experience. The researchers identified a handful of recurring conditions: the challenge and the person’s skills were well matched, self-consciousness disappeared, their perception of time changed, the experience felt good and, perhaps most interestingly, something incredibly difficult could feel almost effortless.

I know that feeling intimately.

When I’m deeply immersed in something creative, ‘Tess’ disappears from the equation entirely.

I’m not wondering whether I’m doing a good job. I’m not particularly aware of myself at all. Ideas seem to arrive faster than I can execute them. There is this strange combination of calm and speed - an energised clarity - where I know what to do next without having to labour over the decision.

Time becomes completely elastic.

Most days when I’m working on Land Lab, I’ll eventually look at the clock and think, shit, it’s 3pm, before racing out the door for school pick-up.

Hours have passed, but they haven’t really felt like hours.

I’ve always imagined creativity in those moments as an energetic channel. Something coming through the top of my head and moving through me. I’m obviously doing the work, but there is very little sensation of pushing.

It spills.

And reading Optimal made me wonder about something.

If we know what flow feels like, why do we treat it as a happy accident?

What if, instead of waiting for those moments to appear, we became much more deliberate about creating the conditions that allow them to happen?

-

Human Design has given me another lens for understanding this. Specifically, this book by Jenna Zoe.

I’m a Generator, which essentially means I have an enormous capacity for sustained energy when that energy is directed towards things I genuinely want to be doing.

The very simplified version is: if it’s not a fuck yes, it’s a fuck no.

Again, you don’t have to believe in Human Design for this to be useful. What interested me when I discovered it was that it gave language to something I’d already experienced repeatedly in myself.

I have a lot of energy.

The problem has never really been how to conserve it.

It’s where I point it.

Give me something I care deeply about and I can work on it obsessively. I’ll think about it in the shower. At the gym. Driving the car. I’ll work for hours without noticing I’m working. The energy seems to regenerate through the doing.

Point that same energy towards something that feels fundamentally wrong for me and it behaves completely differently.

Everything feels heavier.

I procrastinate. I become distracted. Small tasks feel disproportionately difficult. I can still force myself through them - I have, many times - but the energy feels like it’s leaking rather than multiplying.

This has changed the way I think about protecting my energy.

Maybe protecting your energy isn’t about conserving it. Maybe it’s about directing it toward something genuinely meaningful to you.

-

This year, I’ve become quite ruthless about that direction.

I’ve been joking that I’m creating my own mini utopia.

Not in a private-island-and-never-answer-an-email-again kind of way. More that I’ve deliberately created enough space in my life to ask a question I hadn’t been able to ask properly for a long time:

What do I actually want to fill this with?

Selling Smack Bang created an enormous amount of space.

Selling our house created another kind.

Both were significant endings, but they’ve given me something incredibly valuable in return: freedom to make empowered choices about what comes next.

And I’ve resisted the instinct to immediately fill every available gap.

I’ve said no to jobs. No to consulting work that I could absolutely do but don’t particularly want to. No to little obligations that individually seem harmless but collectively start eating away at the edges of your life.

I’ve become much more interested in the fuck yes.

Not because I expect every day to be filled exclusively with things I adore. I still have emails and accounting and school admin and all the deeply unsexy infrastructure required to be a functioning entrepreneur.

I outsource a lot.

I batch a lot.

I try to do the hard thing first.

But I’m becoming far more protective of the large blocks of energy underneath all of that. Because I’ve realised I don’t need another opportunity simply because there is space for one.

Sometimes you don’t need another opportunity. You need enough empty space to recognise the right one.

-

I’ve also started paying much closer attention to the physical conditions in which I work best.

Autonomy is enormous for me.

So is uninterrupted time.

Creativity.

A beautiful environment.

The ability to move at my own pace.

Human Design apparently describes my ideal environment as a “cave”, which is both ridiculous and extremely accurate. Give me an enclosed room, by myself, with nobody moving around me or asking me questions, and I’m very happy.

This is one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between running Smack Bang and building Land Lab.

At Smack Bang, my time was inherently connected to other people’s time. Clients were waiting. My team needed decisions. Meetings were booked. Deadlines were immovable. Even when I loved the work, there was an external rhythm I had to operate within.

At Land Lab, my days are much more self-directed.

I can sit down in the morning and ask: What’s the most important problem to solve today? What am I most energised by? Where can I create the most traction?

Then I go there.

Some days that’s brand. Some days it’s product. Some days it’s growth or practitioners or some obscure business problem I suddenly become determined to solve.

I’m still working towards very clear objectives.

I’m just giving myself more freedom over the route.

That distinction has been enormous for me.

Even my mornings have become part of it. I have ADHD, and my brain can be a noisy place to live. This year I’ve committed to going to the gym every morning, partly because I’ve realised how dramatically it changes the state I bring to my desk.

The noise settles.

My mind feels more spacious.

I can operate with clarity.

None of these things guarantee flow. But together, they create much better conditions for it.

What I know to be true is that flow isn’t the absence of structure. Sometimes structure is what makes flow possible.

-

There’s another part of this philosophy that is probably slightly harder to explain without sounding like I’ve started tarot cards (I have, by the way).

I think flow is information.

I often describe myself as being in conversation with the universe.

Something opens.

Interesting.

A person appears at exactly the right moment. A decision becomes unexpectedly easy. Something moves faster than anticipated. One thing leads naturally to another and you can feel momentum building underneath you.

Green light.

Then there are the other experiences.

The door closes. Then another one. The person disappears. The timeline blows out. The thing you keep trying to make happen somehow becomes more complicated every time you touch it.

I’ve had both.

Years ago, we were renovating our first house in Coledale, and the entire process felt like friction. Everything took longer than it should. Mistakes happened. Routes closed. Problems seemed to create more problems. We kept pushing and pushing and pushing.

We ended up giving up half way through.

We pivoted and brought a block of land in Lennox Head. And the experience was almost comically different.

Building a house was still hard. There were still thousands of decisions and an enormous amount of work involved.

But it moved with ease.

The right people appeared. Decisions felt easy. Timelines shortened rather than stretched. Things seemed to resolve themselves instead of multiplying.

It felt like one enormous green light.

You could explain that as luck. Better planning. Different people. Timing. The universe. All of the above.

I’m less interested in proving why than I am in noticing the difference.

Because I’ve stopped assuming every obstacle is something I’m supposed to overcome.

Sometimes an obstacle is information.

That doesn’t mean the second something becomes difficult I abandon it and declare the universe has spoken.

In fact, all of the best things I’ve done in my life have been incredibly hard.

Challenge and friction aren’t the same thing.

Challenge stretches you. It asks more of you. Sometimes it scares the shit out of you. But somewhere underneath the difficulty there is still movement. Energy. A sense that the work is asking you to become bigger.

Friction feels different.

Friction is repeatedly pouring energy into something that refuses to move and never stopping long enough to ask whether the direction itself might be the problem.

I’m trying to get better at knowing the difference.

I think this is where my relationship with ambition has changed most.

For a long time, I assumed success required some degree of constant grind.

Push harder. Do more. Take the meeting. Accept the opportunity. Figure it out. Keep going.

And there is obviously enormous value in persistence. I don’t suddenly believe we should all abandon discipline and spend our lives waiting for inspiration to strike.

But I no longer think the highest-performing version of me is necessarily the one exerting the most effort.

Increasingly, I think success is about intentionality.

Making smart, tactical decisions about where your energy is going and why.

What deserves your effort?

Where does your attention create the greatest return?

Which hard thing is worth doing?

Which apparently impressive opportunity is actually going to take you further away from yourself?

Where are you pushing because the challenge is meaningful, and where are you pushing because you haven’t stopped to question the direction?

Those questions feel much more useful to me now than simply asking how much more I can fit in.

I haven’t become less ambitious.

If anything, I think I’m more ambitious than I’ve ever been.

I’m just less willing to waste ambition.

Share

I have ideas constantly.

This would be useful if I had unlimited time, money and attention. I do not. I already have enough businesses, projects and half-finished thoughts competing for space in my brain, and I am trying very hard to practise the increasingly important skill of not turning every good idea into a job for myself.

So I’m giving them away instead.

These aren’t fully formed business plans. I haven’t built the financial models, spoken to 50 customers or discovered the fatal regulatory hurdle lurking on page 73 of some government website.

They’re observations. Little pockets of friction or whitespace that make me think: why hasn’t someone properly solved this yet?

Please steal them. And if you build the next billion-dollar company from one, at least send me some merch.

1. Off-Market

I recently bought a house, which reminded me how strange the property market is.

At any given moment, there are houses people desperately want to buy that aren’t for sale, and homeowners who aren’t actively looking to move but absolutely have a number at which things might get interesting.

I want a marketplace for that middle ground.

As an owner, I could quietly indicate: I’m not selling, but above $X, I’ll have a conversation.

As a buyer, I could create an incredibly specific brief: these streets, this many bedrooms, north-facing backyard, pool, architectural style, budget.

Then the platform looks for matches between latent supply and explicit demand.

Perhaps the owner’s number isn’t even visible. The platform simply knows their fuck-it price and only wakes them up when genuine demand reaches it.

The marketplace dynamics would be horrendous. Trust, privacy, liquidity, circumvention, agents, stale listings. All the fun stuff.

But property transactions are enormously valuable, and I can’t shake the feeling that there is a gigantic invisible property market sitting behind the visible one.

Someone please unlock it.

2. The Collaboration Company

Some of the most interesting products happen when two completely different worlds collide. Pamela Anderson × Flamingo Estate. Kelly Wearstler × H&M. The kind of pairing that makes you think: Oh. Of course.

But collaborations are much easier when both parties already know how to make the thing.

(Four more ideas I have absolutely no business pursuing below…)

Read more

Martha Stewart was recently asked what she still wants from life.

At 85, after building one of the most recognisable lifestyle empires in the world, becoming America’s first self-made female billionaire, going to prison, rebuilding her career, becoming a Sports Illustrated cover star and generally refusing to become less interesting with age, her answer was surprisingly simple.

She wants to be comfortable. She wants her family to be comfortable. She wants a roof over her head.

And she wants a yacht.

“A big yacht.”

Lol.

I love this so much.

Partly because it is just so magnificently Martha. Of course the woman who taught generations of people how to fold a fitted sheet doesn’t merely want peace and security in her twilight years. She would also quite like to be drinking something cold off the coast of Capri on a very large boat.

But mostly I love the complete absence of apology in it.

We’ve become very good at dressing our desires up as more respectable things.

We don’t want money, we want financial freedom.

We don’t want a beautiful house, we want a sanctuary for our family.

We don’t want success, we want impact and purpose.

We don’t want to be hot, we want to feel our best.

We don’t want to be famous, we want a platform to amplify meaningful ideas.

And look, sometimes those things are completely true.

But sometimes you just want the fucking yacht.

There’s something incredibly refreshing about someone - particularly a woman - being able to hold both kinds of desire at once.

I want my family to be safe.

I want a roof over my head.

I want the people I love to be comfortable.

And while we’re here, I’d also like something wildly unnecessary and fabulous, please.

I don’t think wanting more automatically makes you ungrateful for what you already have. I don’t think every desire needs to be translated into something virtuous before we’re allowed to admit to it.

Some things can simply be wanted because they’d be fun.

Or beautiful. Or luxurious.

Like a big-ass yacht.

If Martha wants the yacht, boy do I hope she gets it.

We’re about to have more ideas than we know what to do with.

For most of history, making was the hard part: You could have a brilliant idea for a business without knowing how to build it. Imagine an incredible photograph without having the technical ability to shoot it. Know exactly how you wanted your home to look without being able to render it. Have a book sitting in your head for twenty years without possessing the skill, or perhaps the confidence, to write it.

Making was hard.

So naturally, we built enormous value around the people who knew how to make.

AI will collapse that gap.

Which creates a strange new problem.

When everything can be made, what deserves to be?

I think this is the question that will define creativity in the AI age.

And I suspect the people best equipped to answer it are about to become extremely valuable.

I think creativity (and access to creatives) is about to get very expensive.

Which sounds ridiculous when we’re entering an era where anyone can generate an image, write an essay, build a website, compose music or develop a business idea in seconds.

But that’s exactly why.

Whenever something becomes abundant, value moves somewhere else.

AI is making execution abundant.

So the value moves upstream: to ideas, judgement, taste, curiosity and the ability to see what everyone else missed.

The cheaper it becomes to make, the more valuable it becomes to know what and how it should be made.

When execution becomes abundant, judgement becomes the advantage.

Prediction #1. Execution will become abundant. Judgement will become expensive.

As execution becomes easier, we’re going to find ourselves with an entirely new problem: too much possibility.

Twenty campaign ideas. Fifty logo directions. One hundred headlines. A thousand images.

Who’s going to make the cull? Which idea has life in it? Which one feels derivative? Which is strategically right but creatively boring? Which is culturally interesting? Which could become much bigger than it first appears? Which needs another week? Which should be deleted immediately?

I think we’re moving from an execution economy to a judgement economy.

Taste. Discernment. Editing. Cultural instinct. The ability to recognise something good before everybody else agrees that it’s good.

These skills are notoriously difficult to measure, which is perhaps why we’ve spent so long undervaluing them.

AI might change that.

The more capable our tools become, the less impressive capability becomes.

Prediction #2. Having something to say will matter more than expressing it.

There’s something slightly confronting about being able to make something look finished before you’ve decided whether it’s worth starting.

AI is already very good at this.

It can make an average idea sound intelligent. An obvious idea look beautiful. A derivative idea feel polished.

And I think that’s going to make the thought underneath the work increasingly important.

What do you actually really believe? What have you noticed that I haven’t? What’s your point of view? What do you believe that isn’t already sitting neatly inside the cultural consensus?

For years, I’ve believed that creativity is less about making things and more about seeing things. AI has only strengthened that conviction.

Because increasingly, the machine can help us make.

But seeing is another matter entirely.

Prediction #3. Your weirdest interests will become your competitive advantage.

I collect inspiration compulsively.

My Pinterest boards are chaotic. My camera roll is full of things that would mean absolutely nothing to anybody else: the inscription of a tyre rim, packaging, someone’s kitchen, an unusual colour combination, a screenshot of half a sentence, a shopfront I walked past once, a chair I love but simultaneously have no intention of buying.

Sometimes I save something without even knowing why.

I just know there’s something there.

Months later, it might collide with another completely unrelated reference and suddenly become useful.

I’ve come to think this is how a lot of originality works.

Original people aren’t necessarily inventing things from nothing.

They’re combining from somewhere different.

And I think this becomes important in an AI world.

If we’re all using broadly the same technology, trained on broadly the same body of knowledge, to create broadly similar things, then our advantage lies in the inputs that aren’t shared.

The obscure book you read. The town you visited that nobody talks about. The hobby you’ve had since you were twelve. Your grandmother’s house. The failed business. The person you sat beside at a dinner party. Something your kid said in the car. The rabbit hole you disappeared down at 11pm last night for no commercially useful reason whatsoever.

These things become part of your creative vocabulary.

Perhaps we don’t need to consume more information.

Perhaps we need to consume stranger information?

A rich, peculiar, highly personal bank of references might become one of the most valuable creative assets you can have.

Prediction #4. The people who outsource their thinking will become less creative.

This is the part that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I use AI constantly. I think it’s extraordinary. It has expanded what I’m capable of doing and dramatically accelerated certain parts of my work.

But I’ve also started noticing a temptation in myself.

The temptation to ask too early.

Why struggle with the opening paragraph when I can generate ten? Why sit with a half-formed idea when I can ask AI to finish it? Why decide what I think before asking what it thinks?

The biggest creative threat of AI may not be replacement.

It may be atrophy.

Creativity is a faculty. And like any faculty, it strengthens through use.

There’s a reason the blank page is frustrating. Sitting with an idea you can’t quite articulate is uncomfortable. Trying something, hating it, starting again, getting distracted, coming back two days later and finally seeing the thing you couldn’t see before is wildly inefficient.

But I wonder if some of that friction does more for us than we realise.

AI can remove the friction from making. We should be careful it doesn’t remove the friction that makes ideas good.

So I’ve started thinking more deliberately about the order in which I use it.

Think first. Ask second.

Arrive with the hunch, the observation, the strange reference, the opinion, the thing I can’t stop thinking about.

Then use my ai friend to help push it further.

I really do believe, the greatest creative risk of the AI age might be becoming extraordinarily capable while slowly losing the ability to think originally.

Prediction #5. Asking great questions will become a superpower.

We’ve spent most of our lives being rewarded for knowing answers.

School taught us that particularly well. Memorise the information. Recall it correctly. Put your hand up. Ahhh, yes: “Good girl”.

Then the internet made answers easier to find.

Now, AI has made them almost instantaneous.

Which makes me wonder if the intellectual advantage is shifting somewhere else entirely.

Towards the question.

Ask AI to “give me ten marketing ideas” and you’ll probably get ten perfectly reasonable marketing ideas.

I like asking questions that are more subversive, and that might the tension points where things get interesting. eg:

What does everyone in this category believe about the customer that might not actually be true?

Or:

What would we do if the convention of this industry didn’t exist?

Or:

What’s the most interesting contradiction inside this problem?

Suddenly you’re somewhere else. Someplace more interesting.

The quality of the output is constrained by the imagination of the question.

And in an age of infinite answers, I think the people capable of asking interesting questions will become disproportionately valuable.

Maybe knowing more isn’t the advantage it once was.

Maybe the advantage is wondering better.

Prediction #6. The most creative people will become insanely more powerful.

For all the anxiety around AI and creative work, this is the prediction I’m most excited about.

I think AI raises the floor. But for genuinely creative people, it also raises the ceiling.

Someone with exceptional taste, curiosity, judgement, cultural instinct and a strong point of view suddenly has access to capabilities that once required significant money, technical expertise or an entire team.

AI can give someone the ability to explore far more possibilities. Prototype faster. Research deeper. Build things they previously couldn’t. Move between disciplines that once required entirely different technical skill sets.

That’s extraordinary leverage.

Which is why I don’t think the interesting divide will be between people who use AI and people who don’t. Soon enough, almost everyone will.

I think the divide will be between people who use AI to replace their thinking and people who use AI to extend it.

The first arrives at the machine empty and asks it what to think.

The second arrives with something of substance.

A hunch. An observation. A strange conviction. A point of view. A question they can’t stop thinking about.

Then they use the machine to interrogate it, stretch it, challenge it and take it somewhere they couldn’t have taken it alone.

One uses AI as a substitute.

The other uses it as leverage.

I suspect the second person is going to become formidable.

We spend a lot of time talking about preparing for the AI age by learning new tools, and of course we should. I’ll absolutely be learning them too.

But I’m equally interested in what we need to protect.

Our curiosity. Our attention. Our taste. Our strange interests. Our willingness to wander. Our ability to sit with an unfinished thought. Our instinct to form an opinion before asking a machine for one.

Perhaps the more artificial intelligence becomes embedded in our lives, the more valuable these distinctly human faculties become.

The thing is, creativity has never really been about how much you can make.

It’s about what you notice. What you connect. What you question. What you choose.

And, increasingly, knowing what deserves to exist in the first place.

The future won’t belong to the people who can make the most. It will belong to the people who can see what is worth making.

Share

I’ve never really liked the word authenticity.

It’s become one of those words that the culture’s used so often that it’s almost collapsed under the weight of its own meaning. Brands are authentic. Influencers are authentic. Leaders are authentic. Everyone is being encouraged to “show up authentically”, which usually seems to involve talking to a front-facing camera about being vulnerable.

The fascinating part for me lies in not who is or isn’t authentic, but what happens when we actually are authentic.

Not performatively authentic, or strategically vulnerable. Not “being yourself” because someone on Instagram told you that’s the secret to personal branding.

I mean the deeper kind. The feeling of being so congruent with who you are, what you want and the life you’re living that there is very little friction between your internal and external worlds.

In my 37 years on this weird planet of ours, I’ve experienced enough periods of both alignment and misalignment in my life to become convinced that something strange happens when those two worlds match.

Things open.

Ideas arrive. People appear. Opportunities seem to find you. Decisions become easier. You have more energy. You’re less preoccupied with how you’re being perceived because you’re not constantly negotiating with yourself.

I’ve always described the feeling as the universe handing me a set of keys and suddenly there are doors everywhere.

It’s magnetic.

For a long time, one of my biggest ambitions was to build a big agency.

I wanted the NYC-style warehouse. Loads of staff. Desks everywhere. People coming and going. Energy and ideas bouncing around the room. I wanted to walk into this thing I’d built and feel the scale of it.

And for a while, that desire was completely real.

Then I had my kids.

Something changed in me, but it took me years to admit that my ambition had changed with it.

I’m an incredibly giving parent. When I’m with my kids, I’m with them, and that requires a lot of energy from me. But then I’d arrive at work and step straight into another role that required me to give. I had a team that needed leadership, direction, decisions, feedback, encouragement, management, nourishment.

I was giving at home.

And I was giving at work.

And somewhere in between the two, I had designed myself almost entirely out of my own life.

The strange part was that, from the outside, nothing was particularly wrong. I had built the thing I said I wanted. The agency was successful. I loved the people. I loved the work.

But the dream had expired before I was willing to let go of it.

I spent probably six or seven years trying to make myself fit inside an ambition that belonged to an earlier version of me.

Eventually, I read Jenna Zoe’s book on Human Design. Whatever you think about Human Design, and I don’t think you need to believe in any particular system for this to be useful, it gave me language for something I already knew.

I wasn’t in alignment.

So I did something that probably looked, from the outside, like I was moving backwards.

I restructured the entire business. I let go of the model I’d spent years building. We moved away from full-time staff and towards a much more flexible contractor model, and suddenly I could work alone again. I could disappear into an idea. I could spend uninterrupted time in the parts of the business where I was actually good.

The effect was almost immediate.

I felt lighter, more creative, more energetic and more decisive. Things started moving again.

I felt like myself.

And that’s when I started to understand something I wish I’d understood much earlier:

Sometimes the most inauthentic version of yourself is simply an authentic version you’ve outgrown.

I think we misunderstand authenticity because we imagine there is some fixed, true version of ourselves buried underneath everything else, waiting to be uncovered.

Find her and you’re done.

I don’t think it works like that.

I don’t want to be the person I was three years ago. I certainly don’t want to be the person I was ten years ago. I want to continue becoming. I want to shed what no longer serves me, bring in what does, change my mind, follow new curiosities and occasionally blow up perfectly functional things because I can feel that my relationship with them has run its course.

Moving forward requires change.

And sometimes remaining “true to yourself” requires betraying an old version of yourself.

This is where I think authenticity becomes much more interesting than simply knowing who you are.

It’s knowing who you are now.

-

I’ve experienced the opposite sensation too.

I once had a very close friendship that, over time, began to feel different. We’d begun to evolve in different directions, and somewhere along the way, the ease we’d once had was replaced by something that felt more like friction.

I began to feel judged for parts of who I was and the choices I was making. Whether that judgement was actually there almost doesn’t matter. What mattered was what started happening to me in her presence.

I became insecure. And I’m not an insecure person.

I noticed myself explaining things I wouldn’t ordinarily explain. Softening opinions. Becoming more conscious of how I was being perceived. I suspect there was some version of that happening in both directions: we’d both changed, but perhaps neither of us felt entirely safe enough to let the other person change.

Eventually, the friendship fell apart.

I’ve thought about it since because there was something almost physical about the shift. A person I’d once felt naturally drawn towards began to feel difficult to be around.

Like we’d gone from opposite poles of a magnet to matching ones.

What I learned is that relationships don’t always end when staying connected requires one or both of them to become less of themselves.

And any relationship that requires you to edit yourself eventually becomes exhausting.

-

Most people talk about magnetism as though it’s a quality certain people possess.

She’s magnetic.

He’s charismatic.

They’ve just got something.

But the most magnetic people I’ve met aren’t trying particularly hard to be interesting.

They’re not performing themselves at you.

They have an undeniable sense of self, and there’s something incredibly energising about being around that kind of clarity.

You know what you’re getting.

Their opinions are their opinions. Their clothes look like their clothes. Their house feels like their house. Their choices make sense in the context of who they are. Even when their taste, life or worldview is completely different from mine, I find that kind of self-possession magnetic.

Their energy isn’t being spent second-guessing itself.

It’s available.

Maybe that’s what we’re sensing when we call someone magnetic.

Not charisma.

Congruence.

-

I’ve been doing the To Be Magnetic work for around eleven years now, and one of the things I like most about its approach to manifestation is that it doesn’t really allow you to sit around waiting for the universe to deliver the Range Rover straight from your vision board to your driveway.

The basic premise is that you expand your sense of what’s possible by finding evidence of people who already have or have done what you desire. You examine the subconscious beliefs and patterns that might be keeping you stuck. You work on your sense of self-worth. And then you take aligned action towards the thing you say you want.

I’ve used that framework in different forms for more than a decade, and I can honestly say I’ve manifested an extraordinary amount of what I’ve wanted in my life.

Whether you believe there is something energetic happening in manifestation or something entirely psychological, I think the mechanism is interesting either way.

When you believe something is possible, you behave differently.

When your self-worth expands, your standards change.

When you’re clear about what you actually want, you notice opportunities that are relevant to it.

When you’re no longer contorting yourself around other people’s expectations, you have considerably more energy available to pursue your own.

And when you take action, things happen.

-

Maybe that’s why authenticity feels energetic to me.

Inauthenticity requires an extraordinary amount of maintenance.

You have to remember who you’re supposed to be. Monitor how you’re being perceived. Suppress the thing you actually want. Continue pursuing the goal you’ve outgrown. Stay inside the friendship where you can’t quite relax. Make the sensible decision when every part of you wants the strange one.

All of that creates friction.

Authenticity removes it.

The energy that was being used to hold yourself in place becomes available for something else.

Creativity.

Connection.

Ambition.

Curiosity.

Action.

Life.

Magnetism might simply be what happens when your energy is finally moving in one direction.

Which is why I don’t think becoming magnetic is about becoming more charismatic, interesting or impressive.

It’s probably the opposite.

Stop trying to be interesting.

Get interested in yourself.

Pay attention to what makes you feel expanded and what makes you contract. Notice the people around whom you become more yourself, and the ones around whom you start editing. Question the goals you’ve been carrying for years. Look closely at your jealousy. Follow the weird desire that keeps resurfacing. Deal with the beliefs that tell you you’re not the kind of person who gets to have the thing you want.

And then move towards it.

Not recklessly. Not because every impulse is divine guidance. But thoughtfully, deliberately and with enough self-knowledge to distinguish between something you genuinely desire and something you’ve simply been taught to want.

If my daughter, Dylan, came to me at 25 and asked how to become one of those people who seems to have that inexplicable pull, I don’t think I’d tell her to work on her confidence.

I’d tell her to get to know herself.

Find out what makes you feel alive. Look at the beliefs that make you smaller. Work out where they came from. Decide which ones you’re ready to stop carrying. Pay attention to what you desire before the world tells you whether it’s sensible, impressive or appropriate.

Then don’t sit around waiting for it.

Go towards it.

Because maybe the universe isn’t handing us keys at all.

The doors are always there.

We just become much better at seeing them when we’re finally walking in our own direction.

Share

I was recently asked where I think taste comes from. Hard question for someone who’s not normally that deep. But it got me thinking.

Taste is a weird, hard-to-grasp concept. Is it subjective, or is there such a thing as objectively good taste? Is it something we're born with, or something we build over time?

I’m not talking about the kind of taste that’s confined to fashion, interiors or graphic design. I’m talking about the broader kind. The kind that quietly shapes almost every decision we make without us even noticing.

The restaurant you choose over the one next door.

The books that end up on your bedside table.

The people you’re drawn towards.

The brands you build.

The homes you create.

The life you slowly assemble through thousands of seemingly insignificant decisions.

Most tend to think of taste as something aesthetic. I think it’s much bigger than that.

In many ways, taste is simply judgement: the ability to recognise what belongs.

What feels coherent. What feels inevitable. What deserves to exist, and what doesn’t.

It’s one of those things that’s incredibly difficult to define, but instantly recognisable when you encounter it. We’ve all walked into a home that feels considered. Read a sentence that couldn’t have been written any other way. Seen a brand identity that feels so aligned with the business behind it that it’s impossible to imagine an alternative.

It’s as though everything just clicks, naturally.

Not because it’s objectively beautiful, but because it belongs.

I’ve realised that’s the feeling I’ve been chasing for as long as I can remember.

When I was little, I rearranged my bedroom almost every weekend. I’d move furniture from one side of the room to the other, swap posters around, reorganise shelves and endlessly edit my environment until something inside me settled.

I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. (My 10-yr old mates didn’t give a sh*t!)

I just knew when it felt right.

Looking back, I don’t think I was simply decorating my room.

I think I was training my eye.

At the time, I couldn’t have explained what I was doing. I didn’t have words like composition, proportion or visual hierarchy. I simply followed a feeling that something could be better than it currently was. That there was another arrangement, another combination, another version of the room that felt more like itself. And I guess, helped me feel more like myself.

That instinct has never really left me.

These days it shows up differently. It’s brands instead of bedrooms. Writing instead of posters. Moodboards instead of magazine clippings. But the process feels remarkably similar. I’m still moving pieces around, bringing bits in and chucking stuff out until something clicks.

The difference is that now I’m fascinated by why it clicks.

Because I don’t think taste is something we accidentally stumble into.

I think we build it.

Not through expensive furniture or European holidays or knowing which chair Charles and Ray Eames designed.

We build it by paying attention.

I’ve always been a participant in culture. I’m endlessly fascinated by what’s emerging. New brands, hotels, fashion, architecture, products. I collect references almost compulsively, not because I’m looking for things to copy, but because I’m trying to understand why certain things resonate while others don’t.

Why does this campaign stay with me?

Why do I feel closer to this creator over that one?

Why does this lounge feel timeless while another feels dated after six months?

Why does one sentence make me stop reading, while another makes me want to dive deeper?

Those questions have become far more valuable to me than the answers themselves.

Most people consume culture. I think creative people interrogate it.

Every observation becomes another distinction. Another tiny calibration of your internal compass. Over time, you begin recognising patterns that other people simply haven’t spent enough time noticing.

I reckon that’s what taste is.

Accumulated attention.

But attention, on its own, isn’t enough.

Because eventually there comes a moment where you have to choose.

This. Not that. Again. And again.

Which is where I believe taste becomes something much deeper than aesthetics.

It becomes identity.

One of the biggest lessons of my career came during the early years of Smack Bang. At the time, we didn’t offer brand strategy. We were designing identities without first helping our clients understand who they were trying to become.

The result was predictable.

I’d present work that, deep down, I believed was right. The client would ask for changes. We’d discuss colours, logos, layouts and typography as though they were simply matters of personal preference. And because I didn’t yet have a framework to support my thinking, I’d often compromise.

I knew it was a mistake.

I just didn’t have enough reasoning-ammunition to explain why.

Everything changed when we introduced strategy.

Suddenly there was a shared understanding of the customer, the positioning, the role the brand needed to play adn the white space we were gunning for. Design stopped becoming a conversation about personal preference and started becoming an expression of strategic intent.

The work didn’t improve because our taste suddenly became better.

It improved because we finally trusted it enough to defend it.

I’ve thought about that lesson a lot over the years.

I no longer think it was about branding.

I think it was about self-trust.

Which leads me to something I’ve come to believe quite deeply.

Taste requires self-trust.

Self-trust requires self-possession.

And self-possession requires doing the work.

Not design work… Inner work.

Because the clearer I’ve become about who I am, the clearer my taste has become.

Not because I’ve become more cultured. And definitely not because I’ve become more sophisticated.

But because I’ve become less interested in borrowing somebody else’s judgement.

I wonder if that’s what we often mistake for “bad taste”?!

Not a lack of aesthetic ability, but rather a lack of identity.

I really do believe that people who don’t yet know what they think inevitably end up outsourcing their thinking. To trends, algorithms, influencers. To the consensus. They spend so much time looking outward that they lose the ability to recognise what genuinely resonates inwardly.

Taste can’t exist without identity.

One informs the other.

Your taste is simply one of the ways your identity makes itself visible.

Which also explains why I think taste and instinct are inseparable.

People often ask me how I know when something is right.

The truth is, I usually feel it long before I can explain it.

Something just... belongs.

It feels internally consistent. Cohesive. Like every decision is reinforcing the same idea. I can sense the logic before I’ve found the language.

Only later does analysis catch up.

(Sometimes I’ll save a image to Pinterest and have absolutely no idea why. Six months later, I’ll stumble across it again and suddenly understand exactly what I was seeing. I’ve stopped expecting my taste to explain itself immediately.)

Maybe that’s all instinct really is: Pattern recognition that hasn’t yet become conscious.

And maybe taste is what happens when you’ve spent years training that instinct through observation, curiosity and relentless attention.

So, how do you develop better taste?

Read widely.

Travel when you can.

Visit galleries.

Notice details.

Study brands.

Build moodboards.

Collect references.

All of those things matter.

But they’re only inputs.

The real work begins when you start paying equal attention to yourself.

To your reactions.

Your instincts.

Your curiosities.

The things you return to over and over again for reasons you can’t quite explain.

I don’t think taste is about becoming more like the people you admire. I think it’s about becoming more unmistakably yourself.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve stopped thinking of taste as an aesthetic skill altogether.

I think it’s a human one.

And like any muscle, the more deliberately you use it, the stronger it becomes.

There’s a particular kind of silence happening on Instagram right now. If you’re a brand posting organically on Instagram, you’ll know what I mean.
It’s not the peaceful kind of silence, but the eerie, post-apocalyptic kind.

Instagram is now a digital wasteland where even great content goes to die; posts that would’ve soared two years ago now land with all the grace of a dropped brick. Content crafted with precision, intention, and the same magic that once guaranteed lift. Now? It hits the feed like a ghost signal. No boost. No spark. Just tumbleweeds rolling over content that deserved a crowd.

Stare at your engagement (or lack thereof) long enough and you start to wonder:

Is anyone… actually still on here?
Are we performing theatre to an empty room?
Desperation sets in as brands begin wandering the platform with little bundles of content, hoping someone, somewhere, still sees us?

Instagram wasn’t always like this. It used to feel like the centre of culture. A living, breathing city where brands could build worlds, architect desire, and be rewarded for originality and, let’s face it, simply just showing up.
Now, it feels like trying to broadcast poetry from inside an airport food court. Loud. Chaotic. Everyone numb.

For me, the question isn’t “Is Instagram dead?” That part feels quite certain.
It’s “What does a brand do when the main stage goes dark?”

From where I stand, today’s brands are digital refugees; unable to remain on a platform that wrings them dry, forcing them to churn out content that adds nothing to their equity or their cultural weight. They can’t stay… but where exactly are they meant to go?

The Algorithm Ate the Audience

Let’s name the villain. Engagement isn’t low by accident, it’s structural.

Instagram didn’t just move the goalposts; it replaced the sport.
We trained for community, craft, narrative.
And then, with what felt like the click of a finger, it gave us roulette.

Brands are now competing with:

• People’s group chats

• AI-generated faces

• Rage-bait commentary

• Micro-celebrity therapists

• The release of the Epstein files (or lack thereof)

• Dancing cats with better retention rates than global skincare brands

How does a brand, any brand, cut through a feed optimised for chaos, virality, and emotional whiplash?

Are we meant to out-shock shock culture? Out-dance Reels? Out-spam creators who spend 14 hours a day reverse-engineering watch-time metrics?

And the deeper question:
Should we even try?

The Myth of “If You Post More, It Will Come”

We’ve entered the era of desperation posting.

Brands have become the corporate equivalent of a situationship sending “???” at 2am.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

No one ever scaled a cult brand by appeasing an algorithm.
The algorithm has no taste, no ethics, no vision.
It does not care about your brand story, your craftsmanship, your nuance, or your thousand-person waitlist.

So why do brands keep feeding it like it’s a god?

Could it be that we’ve confused distribution with meaning?
Frequency with resonance?
Attention with affection?

What if engagement wasn’t the KPI we think it is anymore?

If Instagram Is a Wasteland, What’s the New Homeland?

Let’s sit in the refugee metaphor for a second:
If Instagram is a scorched-earth city, where do brands migrate?

What terrain allows for depth, nuance, memorability?
Where do we build culture now?

Some emerging answers:

1. Private Feeds > Public Feeds

Communities are going underground.
Discord servers, Close Friends, SMS clubs, Substack threads.
Places where intimacy can be earned, not algorithmically rationed.

Is the future not “audiences” but inner circles?
Not reach, but relationship density?

2. Personality-Led Media

If brands can’t win as brands, do they need a face?
Not an influencer (I personally feel like that ship has sailed).

They need a thinker.
A founder with a POV.
A head of brand who writes essays.
A practitioner who speaks in ideas, not slogans.

Are brands becoming media companies, whether they want to or not?

3. Search, Not Scroll

Instagram invented the infinite feed; TikTok perfected it.
But consumers are getting tired.
Fatigue creates a new opportunity: intent-led discovery.
Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok Search; platforms where people arrive with curiosity, perhaps a little more intention than they do on Instagram.

Do brands need to show up where the audience is actively looking, not numbly scrolling?

4. IRL as the Last Frontier of Cut-Through

Events. Salons. Pop-ups.
Actual human energy.
The one thing the algorithm cannot throttle.

If everyone is invisible online, does offline become the new visibility?

5. Depth Content > Snackable Content

The pendulum always swings.
After a decade of digital junk food, the appetite for intellectual nourishment is rising.

Articles. Essays. Long-form conversation.
Aesthetic intelligence paired with cognitive substance.

Are the smartest brands about to win in the most old-fashioned way possible, by having something worth saying? This is why we turned to Substack. It doesn’t feel like another doom-scroll of a platform; it feels like a long-form supper club for the intellectually hungry. A home-cooked meal in a world addicted to digital snacks.

Maybe the Real Question Isn’t About Instagram at All

Maybe Instagram’s decline is simply revealing something bigger:
We’ve mistaken platforms for power.
We’ve outsourced brand building to places that were never built for us.

Instagram was never designed to make brands iconic, it was designed to make users scroll.
When that incentive misaligns, the brand dies first.

So instead of asking:
“Where should brands go?”
Maybe we should ask:
“What kind of brands are worth following anywhere?”

Brands with:

• A thesis

• A worldview

• A cultural edge

• A point of intellectual heat

• A creative signature no algorithm can erase

Brands that don’t need the feed to validate them, because they build gravity, not content calendars.

Instagram may be a wasteland, but wastelands create new worlds

When the old city collapses, pioneers emerge.
Culture simply finds a new host.
Power reshapes itself into many hands.
Community drifts toward the places that feel alive enough to hold it..

So here’s the provocation:

What if Instagram dying is the best thing to happen to branding in a decade?
What if this is the permission slip we needed to stop optimising and start imagining again?
What if the next era of brand building revolves around resonance; the kind that lingers long after the scroll? The kind built on substance. The kind defined by intellectual and emotional gravity.

Instagram is a wasteland.
Good.
Wastelands are where the most interesting revolutions begin.

Few grocery stores double as social hubs, but Erewhon isn’t most grocery stores. With curated shelves of raw nut butters, biodynamic kefirs and anti-inflammatory tonics, it has become a wellness mecca: part boutique, part café, a place to see and be seen. Stop by any of the Los Angeles locations, and you’re guaranteed to find preternaturally beautiful young people milling under bougainvillea-covered awnings with a $20 USD smoothie in hand or browsing the supplement aisle like it’s a concept store in SoHo. Those who don’t ‘get it’ could never fathom paying $19 USD for a single strawberry from Japan, but luckily enough for its founders, plenty of people do.

Once a niche health food co-op, Erewhon has morphed into a lifestyle monolith — a byword for a certain type of rarefied self-optimisation. It’s not just a grocery store, it’s a mise en scène for a curated, collagen-boosted life. A living, breathing billboard for $500 juicers and custom mushroom powders, and as The Cut once put it, an allure so strong, people will hold down three jobs just to afford to shop there.

Elsewhere, in yoga studios from Hollywood to Holland, eyeballs struggle to land on anything but the stitched “A” of Alo Yoga leggings as they move into their downward dogs. The successor to LuluLemon, Alo alchemised athleisure into something aspirational. Their playbook wasn’t product innovation, it was proximity. To the right bodies. In the right places. With enough high-saturation content and vitamin D to make spandex look spiritual.

Then there’s the original cult brand, Glossier, Emily Weiss’s pink-tinged beauty juggernaut which taught an entire generation of millennial women how to buy into a mood. As any woman of a certain age who visited NYC in the 2010s will recall, cueing around the block to stand in front of the “You Look Good” mirror or watching as your Boy Brow descended from a Willy Wonka-like conveyor belt, as if from the heavens, was the apex of earthly happiness. The iconic pink pouches wouldn’t pass the sustainability vibe check today, and the formulas were often average — but that was never the point. The point was identity. The products were just the access code. And as consumer tastes have evolved, so too has the beauty landscape: In 2022, Rhode stepped in as Hailey Bieber’s Gen-Z heir to the beauty throne Cloud Paint once ruled, with parasocial intimacy and a glazed aesthetic in place of millennial pink.

These brands aren’t just examples of hype well-executed. They’re case studies in modern brand devotion. And they all follow the same loose architecture: clarity, contradiction, community. Taste, tension, tribe.

So what’s the secret sauce? The winning formula? Make yourself comfy, nestle into your office chair or the butt groove of your couch, and let’s get down to demystifying it all…

Step 1: Defining A Cult Brand

Cult status has nothing to do with market share. It’s about meaning density.

The best cult brands are coded through language, design and behaviour in ways that make their audience feel not just seen, but selected. They don’t go wide. They go deep. This specificity creates something mass brands can’t manufacture: emotional exclusivity. You don’t stumble into a cult brand. You adopt it. You choose it, like you choose to be part of a certain scene or belief system. There’s a reason it’s called a cult brand, because like any good religion, it thrives on ritual, identity and a little bit of blind faith.

Cult brands don’t push. They pull. They build self-contained worlds with their own rituals, semiotics and values. Walk into an Erewhon and you know what’s expected of you. Same with a Glossier showroom. Same with the TikToks of a Rhode girl applying glazing milk with the unbothered finesse of someone who’s never had a breakout or a bad tax year. It’s not marketing. It’s myth-making.

Step 2: Deconstructing the formula: Taste + Tension + Tribe

Taste
True taste, not algorithmically-generated aesthetics, is as hard to fake as it is to define. Yet there is no such thing as a cult brand without a singular point-of-view. These brands make design and language decisions that repel the wrong people just as much as they attract the right ones. Look at Our Place: launched with a single pan, layered with cues that spoke directly to a subculture of domestic modernists. Madfe for people who revere tablescapes, who are convinced the aesthetics of a meal are as paramount as the taste of it, who approach hosting as if it were a dying artform. It’s a cooking brand, yes, but it’s also a thesis on third-wave adulthood. The aesthetic is soft, the strategy is sharp.

Tension
Every cult brand sits on a paradox. Hoka would make your geriatric parents’ heart sing as much as it would the next fashion girlie. Glossier introduced the concept of no-makeup makeup. Erewhon is wellness with the price tag of haute couture. Tension creates friction. Friction creates intrigue. Cult brands don’t explain themselves, they let the contradictions hum beneath the surface instead.

Tribe
There’s always an “us.” And there’s definitely a “not-us.” Cult brands define their audience so clearly. They don’t pretend to be for everyone. They give you symbols, be it a tote, a glazed-skin glow or a beige non-stick pan, that say: I get it. I belong here.

The result is a kind of commercial intimacy. A brand that doesn’t just understand your aesthetic but seems to share your worldview. And for everyone on the outside looking in, it becomes something to aspire to.

Step 3: Study The Icons Like A Religion

Erewhon
POV: Grocery store as luxury wellness theatre. Cult because it knows it’s absurd, and leans in. Product drops like streetwear. Smoothies like status symbols. Their entire business model is built on turning exclusivity into aspiration (and making it extremely Instagrammable).

Alo Yoga
POV: Activewear as aspirational lifestyle. Cult because it understands proximity. They don’t sell leggings, they sell the illusion of spiritual alignment. Yoga retreats, influencer-led classes, infrared saunas. It’s wellness as both practice and performance.

Glossier
POV: “You’re the beauty editor.” Cult because it offered identity, not just product. With packaging designed for shelfies and tone designed for DMs, Glossier blurred the lines between consumer and community.

HOKA ONE ONE
POV: Max cushioning, minimal hype. Cult because they made comfort cool. From orthotic-core to normcore to gorpcore, a running shoe that won the fashion crowd by not trying to.

The Row
POV: Quiet luxury, even quieter branding. Cult because it communicates by withholding. No phones at fashion week. No logos. No fuss. Just the unadulterated thrill of being part of a club of elite fashion girlies who can spot a $4,000 cashmere sweater a mile away.

Our Place
POV: Cookware as cultural belonging. Cult because it sold more than a pan: it sold an aesthetic, a dinner party fantasy, a lifestyle where hosting is identity. The Always Pan, completely inescapable for anyone living in 2025, isn’t a kitchen tool, it’s become a pastel-saturated starter pack for your “soft life” era.

Rhode
POV: Glazed skin, perfect branding. Cult because it feels personal. The tagline “one of everything, please” is grammatically incorrect — and completely intentional. It’s a wink. A tone. A text from Hailey herself. The brand works because it doesn’t just leverage celebrity; it feels like an authentic extension of her, glazed donut skin and all.

4. Building Cult Status (Without Forcing It)

You can’t manufacture a cult, but you can cultivate one (it’s all in the name ;). Here’s what the smart ones get right:

Clarity > Reach: Be loud about what you are. And what you’re not.
Don’t Be A Tryharr: Make it feel discoverable not aggressively over-marketed.
Own Your Codes: Design, tone, behaviour — everything should feel like a signature.
Protect the Core: Don’t overextend. Scale don’t wrong can kill mystique.
Say Something: Don’t aim for polite. Cults have an edge.
Reward the Obsessed: Easter eggs, layered meaning, slow reveals. Let your insiders feel in.

The most magnetic brands aren’t chasing relevance. They’re shaping identity.

Share

Cult brands aren’t lightning in a bottle. They’re engineered through clarity, consistency and cultural tension. Never through volume, but rather through vision. Not with ads, but with atmosphere. The product is just the entry point, the real sale is who you become when you buy it. Where some brands are still optimising for virality, cult brands are playing a longer, stranger, smarter game. And as figures in the billions show, it’s paying off.

There was a time (prehistoric, if you ask anyone born after 2000) when “influencer” was practically a slur. It was the advent of the internet, a time when Myspace was making way for Facebook, magazine editors still ruled the roost, and celebrities were the only genetically-blessed humans called upon to sell a product. Fashion girlies, as they’d now be known, poured over magazines like the best of them, but were slowly yielding to the appeal of bloggers. Fast-forward a few years and those bloggers graduated from the .com to rule Instagram’s feed: faces of campaigns, founders of brands, arbiters of taste. But just as fast as they rose, the shine has begun to dull like an old ring left out in the sun. The algorithm is tired. And guess what? So are we.

At first, influencers felt like the antidote to sterile ads and vapid celeb endorsements. They felt real. Like a good friend recommending a cleanser that actually worked. But after a decade of #sponcon, dubious skincare routines, and a million brands soft-launching in stretchy sets and self-care soundbites, we’ve reached peak influence exhaustion. As the French would say, “Je suis fatigué.”

Influencers, once a live wire, have become white noise. Carousel posts pass unnoticed.

Sponcon is something to scroll past as your eyes glaze over. Branded endorsements blur into a sea of snooze-inducing sameness. The line between endorsement and earnestness? Almost imperceptible.

The influencers who once sold us serums alongside self-actualisation are slowly being edged out. Not because influence itself is obsolete, but because the mechanics of trust have changed. According to Vogue Business, the Instagram-born brand founder with a pastel grid and a polished product line is no longer moving the needle. And as Forbes notes, the meteoric rise of the relatable creator, the ones with day jobs, side hustles, and a lo-fi aesthetic, reflects a deeper truth: audiences aren’t anti-influence, they’re just done with the false theatrics of it all.

Welcome to the anti-influencer era.

The influence bubble is deflating

If there’s one thing we humans hate more than anything else, it’s to feel like we’re being deceived. We crave authenticity as much as the air we breathe. And increasingly, …

…we can sniff out when it’s missing. We are savvy, we know what a spawn-con looks like, and deceit feels even more treacherous when it’s dressed up as being genuine. According to Vogue Business, brands that built their identity around highly-curated Instagram founders are seeing diminishing returns, because audiences have grown weary of the polish, the sameness, the sense that it’s all been stage-managed. Meanwhile, Forbes reports a distinct shift toward creators with “day jobs and depth”, the kind who don’t pretend to be perfect, who speak plainly, and whose content isn’t dictated by PR cycles. In other words: people who feel real.

Oversaturation is another pressure point. There are too many faces, too many products, and too little discernment. Everyone’s an influencer now, and that makes influence… well, less influential. Consumers are no longer impressed by reach alone. The signs are everywhere. A glut of faces, filters, and recycled discount codes that blend into one long, muted scroll. Strategic partnerships now get side-eyed if they feel too broad, too bland, or too transactional.

And the symptoms of the burst bubble are everywhere. Fake reviews and filter scandals. One-size-fits-all gifting strategies that reek of cold-call desperation. Viral backlash from disingenuous collabs, like the influencer overload at NYFW. Audiences have peeked behind the curtain, the PR boxes, the affiliate links, the deals made in DMs, and they have questions. Who actually uses this? Who actually cares?

Welcome to the age of cultural fluency

Behold the next wave of influencer marketing. It’s subtler, slower, more steeped in substance. Cultural fluency, not clout, is the new currency. Rather than chase reach, smart brands are chasing relevance. They’re partnering with insiders: people who hold authority within their niche because they live and breathe the culture, not because of a staggering follower count. Think chefs, stylists, runners, designers, community leaders. People who carry social capital because they’ve earned it, not because they optimised a grid.

Think Salomon’s ongoing collaborations with trail runners and sneakerheads that feels more authentic than any big-name partnership. Ghia’s buzz that came from bartenders and moodboarders, not viral TikTokers. A24’s rollout of merch and marketing through meme pages, artist collabs, and niche creators that gave it resonance beyond the typical film promo playbook. Even Dries Van Noten leaned into tapping working creatives over the traditional roster of fashion influencers.

This is what cultural fluency looks like: earned relevance, not purchased reach.

Move from influence to involvement

To thrive in the anti-influencer era, brands need to move from influence to involvement:

Stop looking for influencers. Start looking for insiders. The people worth betting on aren’t always in the front row. They’re often the ones shaping culture behind the scenes — stylists, editors, community builders, curators.

Replace “reach” metrics with “relevance” metrics. A smaller, more dialled-in audience with genuine engagement beats a disengaged mass every time.

Co-create, don’t just feature. Involve collaborators from the ground up. Let them shape the product, the process, the message.

Invest in relationships, not just impressions. The best partnerships take time. Build with people who understand your brand, rather than just post mindlessly about it.

Prioritise contextual alignment over follower count. If your campaign could work with anyone, it’s not working hard enough.

We’ll never inhabit a world without influence. From Cleopatra anointing herself with rare oils to Princess Diana in bike shorts, cultural cues have always been passed down from aspirational figures to their followers. But what’s shifting now is how, and where, that influence accrues.

Like the bloggers who dethroned glossy magazines, or the kids of Tumblr who rewrote fashion codes, today’s anti-influencer movement isn’t about rejection as much as it is readjustment. This is a decentralised model of influence that privileges genuine alignment over tired affiliation, community capital over algorithmic clout.

In the end, the question isn’t whether influence still matters. It’s: influence from whom, and for what? Brands who get this are building deeper, smarter, more culturally literate ways to move through the world. And, as both brand builders and culturally-savvy consumers ourselves, we are here for it.

There was a time when brand newsletters felt authored. Penned by someone with a point of view, a voice you’d recognise in a blackout, and a first line that hooked you before you even knew what they were selling. You looked forward to it, like a regular check-in from a brand that felt more like a friend than a funnel.

Now most emails land with a dull thud. The tone is polite, the layout is pretty and the content reads like it was lifted straight from your Notion doc called “Q3 marketing calendar.” You scroll through it the way you scroll through everything else that lacks intrigue: quickly and without consequence. Let’s not blame the format.

It’s not the medium. Email isn’t dead.
It’s the execution that’s on life support.

The inbox isn’t what it used to be, either. Your newsletter now jostles for space with receipts, security alerts, calendar invites and emails from people your reader actually knows. If it doesn’t offer something, it gets ignored. Or moved to read. Or worse, unsubscribed.

The Decline of the Dispatch

Most brand newsletters read like they were produced, not written; briefed, templated, signed off, sent. Something to “get out the door,” engaging writing optional.

Newsletters have become too polished and too empty. They look good, but they don’t say much. A lot of brands are sending emails that read like press releases dressed up in a pastel template. The language is safe. The format is familiar. The result is forgettable.

Part of the problem is funnel logic. Readers can smell a nurture sequence before the hero image loads. When every email opens with “Hi [First Name]” and closes with “10% off,” it feels automated, and so you can’t begrude the audience for automatically deleting in return.

The other issue is clarity without point of view. Most newsletters tell you what’s in stock, what’s new and what’s on sale. But they don’t explain why it matters. There’s no sense of taste, no framing, no context, no reason for the reader to care beyond the transaction.

The AI Problem

AI didn’t kill the newsletter. But it handed every marketer the tools to send more, faster, with less thought.

When everything is grammatically correct, “on brand,” and perfectly aligned in the template, nothing stands out. Voice disappears. Personality flattens. Emails stop reading like they were written and start reading like they were formatted.

Email was already being misused before generative tools became mainstream, but AI has only accelerated that decline. It’s made it easier to send more, faster, without ever stopping to ask if the content is worth sending at all.

The New Inbox Reality

Your newsletter isn’t arriving in a vacuum. It’s fighting for attention against receipts, security alerts, calendar invites, and emails from people your reader actually knows.

If it doesn’t offer something (insight, entertainment, exclusivity) it gets ignored, archived, or unsubscribed.

The inbox is still one of the most intimate spaces a brand can enter. But intimacy has conditions. If you want to be invited in, you have to have something useful and interesting to say. Write like it matters. And if it doesn’t? Simple: don’t send it.

Write A Newsletter That Actually Gets Read

If your open rates are stalling and your click-throughs feel like polite pity, you don’t need more emails, you need better ones.
Here’s the blueprint we use inside brand campaigns that consistently outperform.

STRATEGY AND STRUCTURE

Say one thing well. The best newsletters do one job at a time. That means one idea, one CTA, one clear throughline. The more links and sections you add, the more diluted the message becomes. Focus wins. Campaign Monitor found that single CTA emails increase click-through by 371%

Write to a person, not a segment. Forget “audiences.” Use “you.” Avoid brand tone. Drop into second person, write with intent and avoid sounding like an FAQ in disguise. Emails work when they feel like they’ve come from someone who knows the person who’ll be reading it.

Make the subject line earn the open. Don’t summarise. Tease. Remember that the subject line is a headline and curiosity drives clicks. “You’re not going to like this” gets opened more than “Monthly Update.”

Shorten your pre-header. Think of it as your hook, not your second sentence. It’s the copy that shows up next to your subject line, prime real estate in the land of email marketing.

Lead with text. A full-bleed hero image might look clean in the template, but it performs poorly on mobile. Start with a line. Let your copy carry the first impression. Make it good enough to stop the scroll.

PSYCHOLOGY AND POSITIONING

Keep people scrolling. Use open loops: a question or idea in the first line that doesn’t get resolved until the end. It builds momentum without relying on gimmicks.

Acknowledge the inbox. Don’t pretend your email is the most important one they’ll receive that day. Break the fourth wall. A simple line like “You probably weren’t planning to open this” creates trust through honesty.

Social proof works (just don’t overdo it). Name drop, but be strategic. A sentence like “30,000 people opened this last week” signals value without sounding desperate.

Create tension. Don’t just offer information, show the stakes too. Why does this matter now? Why would someone regret not reading?

Have a point of view. Emails that hedge or try to please everyone tend to disappear. If you have something to say, say it. Clearly and with conviction.

COPYWRITING AND TONE

Trim ruthlessly. Cut a third of your copy after your first draft. Most newsletters are too long. Every sentence should justify its place.

Format like you care about how people read. Avoid giant paragraphs. Use short, punchy lines to create cadence and white space.

Be specific. Generic language makes the reader’s brain switch off faster than a light switch. Details matter, precision builds trust.

CTAs don’t need to be boring. “Shop now” works, but “Click this if you hate money” is better. Match your CTA to your tone, or use it to flip the mood.

Write like you text. Lowercase intros. Ellipses. Parentheticals. Readers respond to what feels familiar, not what’s been filtered through a tone-of-voice guide.

DESIGN AND DELIVERY

Send from a name. People open emails from people. “Jess at Brand” feels personal. “hello@brand.com” doesn’t.

Don’t over-design. Too many boxes, banners or modules create banner blindness. Keep the design minimal and clear.

Segment thoughtfully. Send targeted content to your top performers, but don’t build a web of unnecessary flows. If it’s hard to maintain, it’s not working.

Say more, less often. One email a month with something meaningful to say is worth more than four with nothing new. Respect the reader’s time and inbox.

Use the PS. People always read it. Use it to drop your sharpest thought, tease the next thing or say something personal.

Bonus tricks and tips:

1. The Hook Hierarchy

7 subject line formats that work every single time:

• The “curiosity gap” (Hint at the punchline without giving it away.)

• The “shared enemy” (We’re done with [X])

• The “counterintuitive claim” (Stop sending pretty emails)

• The “timely trigger” (“Before your next send, read this.”)

• The “self-interest” (Get [result] in 10 minutes)

• The “micro-story” (We made one tiny change…)

• The “the cliffhanger fact” (Only 3 brands got this right.)

2. The Pre-Header Cheat Sheet

Your pre-header is prime real estate. Think of it as your second hook, not a sentence fragment.
Examples that beat the default “View in browser”:

• “One tweak changed everything.”

• “The cost of a forgettable send.”

• “Fix this and double your clicks.”

Examples of headers and pre-header tension:

• Subject: “You’re going to hate this one”
  Pre-header: “…but you’ll love the results.”

• Subject: “We deleted half this email”
  Pre-header: “You’ll see why.”

• Subject: “Stop inviting me to your launch”
  Pre-header: “Here’s what to send instead.”

3. The Single CTA Rule

One idea, one link. Campaign Monitor’s study shows a single CTA increases clicks by 371%. Strip out the rest. If you can’t explain the purpose of the email in three words, you don’t have an email yet.

4. Inbox Psychology Tricks

• Open loops: Ask a question early, answer it late.

• Break the fourth wall: “This is the 12th email in your inbox today. Here’s why you’ll read it.”

• Urgency without cheap tactics: Tie your email to a why now that’s real, not made up. Please.

5. The 10-Second Test

Before you send, open your draft and give yourself 10 seconds to skim it.

• If you can’t instantly tell what it’s about → cut.

• If there’s more than one “ask” → cut.

• If the first line doesn’t earn the second → cut.

When you stop sending emails to fill a calendar and start sending them to fill a need, people notice.
And when they notice, they click.
And when they click, you’ve officially joined the 1% of brand newsletters people actually look forward to.

A few years ago, I started noticing something.

The people doing the most interesting work weren’t necessarily the smartest in the room.

They weren’t always the most qualified. They didn’t have the most followers, the fanciest credentials, or the most polished personal brands.

What they did have was a different way of seeing.

They noticed things others missed. They connected seemingly unrelated ideas. They collected inspiration obsessively. They followed curiosities most people ignored.

And when everyone else was looking for answers, they were asking better questions.

In other words, they were creative.

Not in the paint-splattered, tortured-artist sense of the word.

In the broader sense, they just approached life creatively.

-

For the better part of two decades, I’ve built a career around ideas. I’ve helped launch brands, build businesses and develop points of view. Along the way, I became fascinated by a question that sat beneath all of it: why do some people consistently see opportunities, stories and possibilities that others miss?

This question has quietly followed me for most of my life.

While I’m still exploring its answer, I’ve arrived at one unshakable conviction: that creativity may be one of the defining competitive advantages of the next decade.

And increasingly, I think this might be the most valuable skill of all.

Not because creativity is changing. But because the world around it is.

We are entering an era where more people can make more things than ever before.

The barriers between imagination and execution are rapidly disappearing: Ideas can be generated in seconds. Images can be created on command. And, expertise is increasingly accessible.

And yet, the abundance of possibility doesn’t make creativity less important.

In fact, I think it makes it more important.

Because when everyone has access to the same tools, the advantage no longer lies in making.

It lies in seeing.

In knowing what is worth paying attention to. In recognising a pattern before others do. In connecting ideas that appear unrelated. In developing a point of view. In cultivating taste. In deciding what deserves to exist in the first place.

These are not artistic skills. They are deeply human ones.

-

And so, while the world races to become more efficient, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in a different question:

How do we become more creative?

Not more productive or more optimised. (We seem to have enough people working on those problems already.)

But, how do we see more?

How do we cultivate the ability to notice what others overlook? To recognise patterns before they’re obvious. To follow curiosities that don’t yet have a practical application. To develop a point of view in a world overflowing with opinions.

How do we become more creative?

Not because creativity is useful. But because it is fundamental.

It’s one of the primary ways we make sense of the world around us.

For too long, creativity has been confined to a category: something reserved for artists, designers, writers and musicians.

I think it’s much bigger than that.

To me, creativity is how we navigate uncertainty.

It’s how we solve problems without obvious solutions. How we build businesses, shape homes, raise children and imagine better futures. It’s how we transform information into insight. Experience into perspective. Observation into meaning.

In many ways, creativity is less about making things and more about seeing things.

Yet despite its importance, very few of us are taught how to cultivate it.

We’re taught how to memorise. How to analyse. How to optimise.

But rarely how to develop taste. How to trust our instincts. How to sit with ambiguity. How to connect disparate ideas. How to build a rich inner world from which original thoughts can emerge.

That’s what Extra Curricular is for.

A platform dedicated to the art of becoming creative.

Part publication.

Part studio.

Part ongoing investigation into what makes ideas resonate, what shapes perspective and how we can become more thoughtful, imaginative and original in our work and lives.

-

Maybe you’re a founder trying to think beyond the obvious solution. A designer searching for a stronger point of view. A writer trying to find your voice. An artist who feels creatively stuck.

Or perhaps you’re none of those things.

Perhaps you simply suspect that life becomes richer when approached with greater curiosity, imagination and intention.

Extra Curricular is for those of you who refuse to outsource your imagination.

-

Ahead, you’ll find essays, interviews, observations, products, recommendations and frameworks exploring creativity from every angle.

We’ll explore art and business. Design and culture. Curiosity and confidence.

Taste, instinct and execution.

We’ll study the habits of creative people. Collect ideas worth keeping. Ask better questions. Follow interesting threads wherever they lead.

Most of all, we’ll explore what it means to live a creative life.

If you’ve ever felt that there must be a more interesting way to move through the world, then I think you’re going to feel at home here.

-

Welcome to Extra Curricular. See you differently.