Don't fundraise for your brand, the Corteiz Twitter roast, and is everything just an ALD dupe?

Sharing a few things that are top of mind this week.

Aug 31, 2023

Welcome to Commerce Thinking, an ongoing content series where we tell stories about the world's fastest-growing brands and those shaping the new luxury market.

A quick note—

Hello friends! In addition to our interview series, we’re adding another layer to THOUGHTS. We’ll round up a few bits of news and share light commentary on what’s happening across the luxury and consumer market.

“Raise money, they said; everyone’s doing it, they said”

Ty Haney, founder of Outdoor Voices, recently interviewed for a piece with The Cut where she aired some dirty laundry about the brand she started, and how she feels about it now.

And a lot of those feelings aren’t good.

It’s worth noting that OV has raised $64.4 million since its inception.

Sixty four million dollars.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But the DTC growth era is long gone. It was a time where brands could peg themselves as “the next _______ brand,” with the following playbook:

Outsource a cool design studio to make a bland logo that looks the same as all the others
Photograph your products with a sleek backdrop
build a minimalist Shopify website with all the cool tools and widgets
Sell a pipe dream that you’ll scale it to an IPO!

And yet, we’ve seen the now colossal reprecausions of that taking shape (ahem, Allbirds stock tank, Lunya bankruptcy, etc).

There’s a whole wave of brands that have shed their skin, pivoted massively with rounds of layoffs, or worse, died off.

All because they took much money to scale too fast without building a proper brand foundation.

And you know what? That isn’t how brand building works!

Look at the very best household name brands around the world, especially within the luxury space. They’re often—at least—50 years old. Why? because it takes a long time to:

Make a good product
Win customers
Spread the word
Grow distribution, and so on

Is raising for your band bad? Absolutely not. Many use it opportunistically as a lever for growth—when they need it.

Coming back to the OV story, though: Let Ty Haney’s story be a cautionary of raising too much money too fast. The more you raise, the less control you have over your destiny. And if you want to build something lasting with your imprint on it, focus on profitability over growth vanity metrics.

Letting your community do the work

This was fun.

Last month, Clint—founder of Corteiz, the one of the hottest independent brands in the world right now—teased a new football kit design on Twitter.

Someone came into his mentions and called it “boring,” so Clint put him on the hotseat.

“I’ll give you 24 hours to design a football jersey on Illustrator or Photoshop. If I think it’s good enough, I’ll pay you £1000.” he said on Twitter.

Then, he changed his mind, and opened it up to be a design competition where anyone could design a Corteiz kit and submit it to win the £1,000.

The submissions poured in and he held a public vote on his profile for the top design everyone liked most.

Looking back, this revealed how much sway and trust a brand like Corteiz has with its fans. There’s a duality that exists with this brand.

On the one hand, there’s an aspirational and clout-driven element to Corteiz and the products they make. On the other hand, Clint isn’t afraid to build and grow that same brand in public, which is a core tenant of streetwear.

And in an age where it feels like luxury has taken advantage of the caché that comes with streetwear, Clint is doing everything in his power to rightfully take that back for the culture and keep it underground. On his terms.

Is everything just an ALD dupe?

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter (as I do), you may have come across an internet debate about how all creative campaigns or editorials seem to look like ALD these days.

It’s a broad statement, but there’s something to it. When you look at studio shoots like the one below, it’s hard not to feel like brands are either

a) creatively zapped, or

b) riding the momentum of commercial marketing format that seems to work.

While ALD doesn’t really own the whole “model stands in front of a backdrop” look, there’s an argument to be made this is, indeed, a big, fat rip on the aesthetic that ALD has popularized.

The truth is, ALD seems to have capitalized a “look” on the millennial zeitgeist. There’s a spirit to the styling, positioning, and pieces that feels like our era of brand.

Something to keep in mind, though, as ALD founder Teddy Santis has said recently in a NYT piece, he pulls a lot of inspiration for his brand from… Ralph Lauren.

What a thought: we’re all just pulling references from someone else.

Creating movement through photo

Speaking of great campaigns, Bandit Running’s new fall capsule is looking fantastic. Bandit’s become one of the best running independent running brands the last few years, providing a more affordable place in the market compared to brands like District Vision or Satisfy.

Since day one, Bandit has always focused on communtiy-driven editorial content as a way of building trust and loyalty from its customers. And it’s working.

You really feel a sense of movement and connectivity through the content. It feels creatively thought through, you can put yourself in the place of the runner and their world, instead of just taking photos of a model in front of a plain backdrop.

No knock on keeping the creative direction simple, but thinking through how your products fit into a larger narrative is the best way to execute on a campaign.