Nobody's born into a cult (well, a few people are, but that's a different newsletter)

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Last week I wrote about the +1 Theory (scroll right after the cease & desist deets ICYMI). It’s the idea that one bit of extra makes an outfit, or a brand, and that extra makes the whole thing impossible to replicate. Basically, codes are easy to copy. Specificity isn't.

The obvious next question: okay, but where does specificity come from?

Let me tell you where you won’t find it. It’s not in a better tagline. Not from more moodboards. Not from asking AI for forty variations of your brand voice until one sounds vaguely human.

It's usually already sitting inside you, un-mined.

If you’re doing brand work you’ve seen some version of the same advice everywhere: create a world. Build in public. Have a point of view. Make your brand feel like a community.

Okayyyyy. But how?

Well, here’s how you do it (in one minute and twenty seconds or so).

So you get the gist:

…it’s Lore, POV, Rituals and Vibes.

But the harder question is: how do you figure out what these things are for your brand? These aren’t things you’ve a) likely thought too deeply about before or b) will figure out in one sitting.

A good place to start is with the material you’ve already got. Here's where I'd look.

One of my favorite examples of this is Emily Oberg and Sporty & Rich. Before Sporty & Rich was a brand, Emily was working at Complex Magazine in New York. She had two photos pinned up beside her desk: one of 90s-era Michael Jordan and one from a Phoebe Philo-era Celine campaign. That's it. Two images.

She has since said putting those two references next to each other felt like the exact thing she wanted to create: the collision of sport and luxury. Michael Jordan + Celine. Sporty + rich.

She calls it the first unofficial moodboard for the brand. From there, she started the Sporty & Rich Instagram as a place to collect the images, references and old photos she loved. It became a print magazine, then she started making tiny runs of apparel, and eventually it became the very cult brand we know now.

I love this story because the brand was basically sitting there before there was a brand.

Emily didn't invent an elaborate founder narrative after the fact. She noticed that these two seemingly different worlds kept pulling at her, put them next to each other, and suddenly there was a thread.

That's what to look for in your founder lore.

Your version probably isn't Michael Jordan and Phoebe Philo. It might be the hotel your family went to every summer, the magazine you hoarded in high school, the weird first job that taught you everything about customer service, the designer you've referenced for fifteen years, or the thing you've been talking about since long before anyone was paying you to talk about it.

Those are the things I want you to start looking for when you trace your origin threads.

Once you start tracing your origin threads, you'll probably notice that you have opinions about your industry that go way further back than your business. Things you've always loved. Things that have always annoyed you. Things everyone else seems to accept that you think are b.s.

Something coming to mind? Good. That's where I want you to go next.

Make four lists:

Now look across all four lists and find the tension underneath them.

Maybe you're obsessed with independent hotels, old-school hospitality and places where someone remembers your name. You think generic luxury is wildly overrated. You wish more hospitality brands understood that specificity makes people feel something. And you will probably never believe that expensive automatically equals good taste.

Okay okay. Now we have something.

The goal isn't to turn every one of those opinions into a hot take for Instagram. You’re looking for the belief that keeps surfacing underneath all of them.

That's your POV.

And once you think you've found it, see if it actually has teeth. Does this belief affect what you make? Does it change how you talk about your category? Does it help you decide which collaborations make sense and which ones feel completely wrong? Would you still believe it if nobody ever turned it into a piece of content?

That last question matters because brands have gotten very good at performing a point of view. We have founder manifestos, contrarian hooks, and “things I would never do as a ___” posts everywhere. But the brands with a POV are the ones where we can see that belief show up in their decisions.

Patagonia's environmentalism changes the materials it uses, the organizations it funds, the products it repairs and the things it tells you not to buy. That's a POV with consequences.

Your version doesn't need to be Patagonia-level activism. The point is that if you believe something strongly enough to make it part of the brand, you want people to find evidence of that belief somewhere besides your Instagram captions.

When I think about this for my brand Casa Noon, one of those beliefs is that aging because you’re experiencing everyday life, and even being a bit of a sun worshipper, shouldn’t be vilified.

This is where people tend to jump immediately to: what should we call our community? Or, what cute little thing can we make everyone do?

Please don't start there.

The best rituals usually begin with a behavior that's already happening. There’s usually some trigger to look for. Your customer already has daily behaviors and habits around your category. The opportunity is to notice the behavior and ask: is there a way my brand can own a piece of this?

Rhode is probably the easiest example. Their customer was already taking mirror selfies. She was already holding her phone in the photo. She was already carrying a lip product around all day. Consider these daily habits your clues. The Lip Case connected those behaviors into one product, and that one product has generated something like $30 million in revenue. Suddenly the thing people were already doing became unmistakably Rhode.

This is why rituals are something to study before you try to create them. Pick one part of your customer's experience and follow it all the way through. What gets photographed? What gets texted to a friend? What words keep showing up in their language? What seems to happen almost every single time?

Write all of it down. Then look at the behaviors that repeat and ask: what could we make ours?

Maybe there's a moment already connected to your brand. Maybe customers always order the same two products together and you've never actually named the combination. Maybe everyone photographs the same detail in your space. Maybe there's something your customer does immediately after an appointment that could become part of the experience. Maybe your community already has a phrase for something that you've never thought to use yourself.

This is also where shared language starts to get interesting. You can put a clever phrase on a tote bag tomorrow, but that doesn't automatically make it brand language. I pay much more attention to the words people naturally pick up and start repeating.

The real magic is when a customer uses your phrase in a caption and you didn't ask them to. When someone says it to another customer. When you see it in the comments. When the people around the brand start using the language to identify something about themselves, each other, or the experience they're having.

That's when you've moved beyond copywriting and into culture.

Now, finding your vibe is how you bring this all together. It’s how you create an aesthetic and not just copy one.

Pull up the ten images you've saved recently that you cannot stop looking at. Before you drag them all onto another moodboard, I want you to investigate them.

This is what I mean when I say follow the credits. Go one layer backward, and then another. Most of us are saving the end result without actually knowing what we're responding to.

Maybe your saved folder looks something like:

At first glance, those are just three images you like. Start pulling at the thread, though, and maybe what you actually keep responding to is late-'90s Juergen Teller flash photography, 1970s Mediterranean resort design, French New Wave color, Slim Aarons leisure photography, old surf and travel magazines.

Now we know something about your taste.

Let's do it again. Maybe your folder is full of:

You could throw those onto a moodboard and call the direction "European summer." Which, respectfully, tells us almost nothing.

Follow the credits and suddenly you might find yourself looking at mid-century Riviera tourism posters, 1960s resort typography, vintage airline graphics, Gio Ponti-era hotel interiors, old Côte d'Azur postcards, and that particular kind of slightly overexposed leisure photography that makes everything feel like it happened before you got there.

That's material.

Now you have actual places to go. You can look at the typefaces used on those tourism posters. You can study the color combinations in the airline graphics. You can see how those hotels used signage, menus, uniforms and interiors to create a world. One vague aesthetic has turned into a whole library of references you can learn from.

It's somewhere in the job that changed how you think, the references you've been collecting for fifteen years, the thing about your industry that makes you love it and sometimes hate it too, the words your customers keep repeating, the customer habits... All of that is evidence.

The goal is to get better at noticing.

The work is finding the pattern, deciding which parts actually belong to you, and repeating them long enough that other people start recognizing them too.

That’s how an origin story becomes lore, an opinion becomes a POV, a daily behavior becomes a ritual, and a folder full of references starts becoming a visual language. Eventually, someone goes from “I like this brand” to “this brand gets people like me.”

Before you leave this newsletter and open Instagram, do the investigation:

If you did those four exercises and immediately opened seventeen Notes app tabs, hi. This is basically what we spend six weeks doing inside the Cult Brand Blueprint™ Accelerator, except you don't have to sit alone at midnight trying to decide whether something is an origin thread or you're just weirdly attached to an old magazine.

We take all of this material and start building the actual brand around it: your Founder Lore, Perfect Person, POV + Language, Aesthetic, Voice, Vibe + Rituals, and eventually the content system that makes all of it visible to everyone else. You leave with the work organized inside your Brand Identity Dashboard, rather than scattered across Notes app pages, half-finished Canva decks and a saved folder on Instagram.

Doors for the fall cohort are open now.

If you're brand new to my Cult Brand Blueprint™ world, though, come hang out with me first. On Tuesday, September 22 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET, I'm teaching The Cult Brand Blueprint live and for free.

Bring the homework from this issue. We'll start putting the pieces together live.

→ SAVE YOUR SEAT FOR THE FREE TRAINING

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.
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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.
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03. Content Weekend New York
We're officially sold out for next weekend (!!), but the waitlist is open for the next one.
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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.

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.

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