REMINDER: Cult Brand Accelerator enrollment is open for our September cohort — this is a 6-week experience to build your cult-status brand. Register here.
The new status symbol? Being a regular.
New York Fashion Week wrapped last week, and I arrived on my LAX-NYC Delta commuter right at the tail end. I used to come every year back in the era of fashion-Andi running an incubator program and writing a fashion column (#eras), and it seemed like this season, somewhere between the shows, dinners, store openings, and after-parties, there was a pretty big pivot happening.
The clothes are obviously part of Fashion Week. The whole point even.
But increasingly, Fashion Week people seem to be coming for everything happening around the actual, well, fashion shows.
I remembered this article from 2018 in The Business of Fashion, back when publications still felt it necessary to clarify these people “calling themselves influencers.” What a funny thing to look back on now, especially considering how convinced people were that this whole “bubble” would eventually burst.
Spoiler: lol.
Vogue pointed out this season there were practically as many store opening cocktail parties as runway shows. Apparently retail really isn’t dead, buuuut, it has to feel like an experience to work.
Brands were opening stores, throwing dinners, taking over restaurants, building one-night-only spaces and generally making sure there was somewhere to be around the collection.
“Oh, have you been to....!?”
Status used to sound like that.
It was all about the newest destination, the newest bag, or the first table before the newest joint ever had a Google review. All of it took money, timing, and pretty good connections, and could be bought in a single swipe of the ol’ Amex.
It tracks with what Vogue Business wrote about last month and what I noticed at Cannes this past June (I talked about it here): access itself has become a status symbol.
But access has levels now.
There’s the access you can increasingly engineer with the right credit card perks, points, concierge, Substack recommendation, or “where to go in ______ city” guide. Then there’s the private room. The members club. The preview before anyone else gets it. The invitation that comes because somebody already knows your name.
These days getting there first just isn’t rare. The restaurant with no sign has 700 TikToks about it, every “hidden gem” gets found within a week, and by the time you’ve decided you want the bag, you’ve already watched seventeen people unbox it.
So status had to get on and go somewhere else.
So maybe now it’s the standing table? Or the order already started before you graced the doorway? Or being greeted by name without anyone checking the list? I think we all kind of love being known somewhere. And none of it shows up on your first visit, no matter what you’re willing to pay.
Enough visits to the same place start to create these tiny accommodations, preferences and familiarities. Your table. Your bartender. Your order. Your lighting preferences, apparently.
Eventually, the experience starts adjusting itself around you.
And brands should be chasing their own version of the standing table.
Social has spent the last decade training brands to obsess over whoever hasn’t found them yet. More reach, more eyeballs, more followers, more people discovering you for the first time.
Meanwhile, there’s the person who’s been following you for three years. They know the founder lore, get the reference without an explanation, recognize the recurring characters, and remember something you posted six months ago that you barely remember posting yourself.
Those people are your ride or dies. They already know the place.
And the question becomes: how do you, as a brand, through social, make your people feel like you already know their order?
Give your people things to get.
Inside any group of people who’ve spent enough time together, a little shorthand starts developing. There are references that need zero context, stories everyone already knows, phrases people start using back at you, callbacks buried in captions, and running jokes that would leave a new follower wondering what the hell they missed.
That’s IYKYK insider culture.
The longer you’re around and the more closely you’re paying attention, the more fluent you become in the brand.
This is also your permission slip to repeat yourself.
Regulars love familiarity. There’s a reason you keep ordering the same dish, want your favorite bartender working, or have decided a particular table belongs to you even though absolutely nobody at the restaurant has agreed to this arrangement.
Your brand gets to have a “usual,” too. The stories you keep telling, the phrases that resurface a lot, the references your people recognize immediately, the rituals and weird little details that have appeared often enough to become part of the furniture.
Eventually, that familiarity becomes part of the reward for paying attention.
The good stuff is usually already happening.
Go back through your comments, DMs, customer conversations, old captions and the screenshots people send back to you. Pay attention to what gets quoted, what somehow becomes communal knowledge, and which phrases your people are already repeating without you ever asking them to.
Let this stuff become part of the lore.
Over time, your people start accumulating context. They know the lore so well they tell it for you. They speak the language. They recognize the references. They know which things are very you because they’ve watched you build the world in real time.
Eventually, someone new walks in and there are already people at the bar who know the place.
Those are your IYKYK insiders.
And this is where I want you to look at your own brand for a sec.
THE REGULAR TEST
Ask yourself:
What do my longtime people already know?
What story have they heard enough times that they could probably tell it themselves?
What phrases have started coming back to me?
What references require absolutely zero explanation to the people who have been paying attention?
What little ritual, recurring bit or weird detail would they notice if it disappeared?
What does someone experience after being around my brand for a year that they couldn’t possibly get on day one?
That last one is the biggie.
Because you can make a beautiful brand, make great content, and get somebody’s attention for thirty seconds. Cult brands give people something to accumulate over time.
History. References. Language. Stories. Rituals. Context.
Eventually, someone has collected enough of it that they know how the place works. They get the jokes, recognize the references, know the stories and understand the shorthand.
They’re in on something.
Conveniently, I am teaching this entire thing on Tuesday.
If you’ve been reading Must Be Nice for the last few weeks going okayyyyy, I understand the lore and the POV and the IYKYK insider thing, but what exactly are MINE? this is literally why I’m doing this workshop.
On Tuesday, September 22 at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET, I’m teaching The Cult Brand Blueprint™ live and completely free.
We’re breaking down the anatomy of today’s hottest cult brands and getting into the actual pieces underneath the attachment: Founder Lore, Perfect Person, POV, shared language, rituals, aesthetic, vibe and the content that makes the whole thing visible.
And then we’re going to start finding yours.
This is for founders, brand leaders, marketers and creators building something that is already good and asking the much harder question: how do I make people care about this deeply enough to remember it, talk about it, come back to it and bring other people with them?
Come with your brand. Come with your questions. Come with your weird ideas.
I’ll see you Tuesday.
🧠 Smart Girl Opportunities
01. The Cult Brand Blueprint: Live Workshop + Audit
September 22 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET. It's free, and if you do the homework above first, you'll come in with plenty for us to work with.
→ Save your seat
02. Cult Brand Blueprint™ Accelerator — Fall Cohort
Doors are open. Six weeks of actually doing this work on your brand, with the frameworks, live labs, assignments and feedback to turn what you know intuitively into something you can build from.
→ Join the fall cohort
03. Content Weekend New York
We're officially sold out for next weekend (!!), but the waitlist is open for the next one.
→ Get on the waitlist
Okay. Go investigate your brand.
There is probably something pinned beside your desk that you've been looking at for years and haven't realized is telling you something yet.
More Ways to Work With Oui, We Studio
Fractional CBO — Brand Direction: Think of me as your brand sherpa: I know where you're going, how to get there, and I make sure nothing goes out misaligned. Monthly strategy call, updated content plan, and a brand strategy document — all built on the Cult Brand Blueprint™ framework. Our next opening for this work is September.
The Content Studio Brand strategy from me. Content from my Studio team, created and delivered to you each month — ready to post. Photo-forward or video-forward, depending on where your brand lives and what we decide you need.
→ Let us know you're interested here, and we'll set up time to chat.
Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for a weekly dose of No Gatekeeping Strategies, Cult Brand Thinking, and Smart Ideas.
Want more Unschool in your ears? Listen to the Unschool Podcast here.
