Why every luxury brand suddenly needs a beach club

Here's the part nobody tells you when they show you the Riviera photos: you don't need any of that budget to run this exact same play. You just need to understand the mechanism. In this issue of The Unschool News & Pod, we're breaking down how you can create the "beach club" feeling no matter what budget you have or where you are in the brand building process.

I just got back from four weeks across four countries, and I kept seeing the same thing everywhere I landed — a version of the same brand move, dressed differently depending on the postal code.

Monte Carlo had it.

Antibes had it.

It's not a coincidence when you see it that many times in that short a window. It's a category shift, and it's one you can use at any budget.

Real quick, catching you up: when we launched Casa Noon we created beach club merch. And not surprisingly, it sold out quickly. The tote, the bucket hat, all of it — gone before we'd even launched Sabbatical Serum. Why? Because people want to show they’re in. In what exactly? A brand’s world.

We didn't plan that as a strategy lesson, but here we are, because it's basically the entire thesis of this issue.

And a reminder while I have you: on Tuesday I'm hosting the Cult Brand Blueprint workshop one more time — free, and built for personal brands, CPG brands, service businesses, and agencies alike, using our trademarked Cult Brand Blueprint framework. Register here.

So let's get into it. But first, some context if brand beach clubs are new to you:

Gucci has a beach club in Saint-Tropez. Dolce & Gabbana has one in Portofino. Burberry's in Antibes, Armani's in Cannes. Vilebrequin just opened their first U.S. location on a rooftop in Miami. This isn't one brand doing one weird activation — it's an entire category of luxury houses making the same move at the same time, and that's never an accident.

Here's what they've figured out.

A store is a warehouse with a logo on it now. You go in, you buy the thing, you leave. There's no reason to linger, nothing to post, no story to tell your friends about later.

Retail used to be an experience. Somewhere along the way it became a transaction with better lighting.

But the desire for a third space didn't go anywhere; people still want somewhere to belong that isn't home or work, so the brands went and took that need for themselves. A beach club isn't a store. It's a full day of someone's life with your name on it: the chair, the towel, the spritz, the sunset. Nobody leaves with a shopping bag. They leave with a memory that has your brand's fingerprints all over it.

Steal this: ask what the "day" version of your product looks like, not just the transaction version.

What's the experience someone would tell a friend about, completely separate from whether they bought anything?

This always starts at the luxury level and trickles down — it's the cerulean speech from The Devil Wears Prada, playing out in real time.

Miranda Priestly wasn't wrong: the idea gets chosen in a room most people never see, and by the time it reaches a department store bargain bin, it's already been decided for everyone. The luxury houses are likely not the first to have the idea (hi, Casa Noon beach club merch, ahem). They're just the first to have the budget to prove it works on a larger scale.

Which means the smartest move available to any of us building brands is to pay attention to what the top of any category is doing right now, because it is coming for the rest of the market, whether we're ready or not.

Steal this: stop looking at your direct competitors for signs of what to do next. Look one or two tiers above you instead. That's where the next 18 months of your category actually gets decided.

And here's how far this idea has already gone. There's a brand called The Rochambeau Club — presented as a French Riviera racquet club, complete with a restaurant, a coaching program, and a full membership world.

But here’s the thing: it doesn't exist as a physical place. It's a rosé label. They built an entire club out of nothing but branding, down to a careers page hiring an oyster shucker, and the wine itself barely shows up on their own feed.

That's a brand understanding, at a level most founders never get to, that the world around a product can carry more weight than the product itself.

Steal this: before you obsess over the next SKU, ask whether you've actually built the world that SKU is supposed to live in. Most brands are so focused on the product they skip the part that makes anyone want it.

My friend and client Brandie Freely has been throwing an event called Beach Bums on a public beach in Long Beach for over a year — no sponsor, no activation budget, just a consistent, well-hosted gathering that's become its own small institution. Nobody needs a rooftop in Miami for an event like this to work.

The mechanism is identical to what Gucci and Armani are doing. The scale is just different.

Steal this: you already have access to a beach, a backyard, a group chat, a rooftop, whatever your version of "the room" is. The brands with real budgets are proving the model works. You're allowed to run the same play smaller.

Every one of these comes back to the same idea: the product is rarely the point anymore. The world around it is doing the actual work — deciding who wants in, who feels like they belong, who tells their friends about it before they've bought a single thing.

At Casa Noon, we’re popping up at an actual beach club in Montauk next weekend. We’ll be at Barlume Beach for pilates and brunch, and if you’ll be out east I’d love to see you there, reply to this email and I’ll put you on the waitlist.

The cost for our brand? The price of brunch, a flight, and an Airbnb I’m sharing with 5 friends of the brand.

The luxury houses have the money to build the whole beach. Most of us don't, and we don't need to. We need the version of the world our audience actually wants an invitation to, built at whatever scale we can actually pull off right now.

That's the whole job of a cult brand, every time: not selling the thing, but building the thing people want in on.

1. Cult Brand Accelerator — Summer Cohort Begins in July. This is where founders do the actual brand infrastructure work together — structured, specific, and in community. If you've been thinking about it, this is the cohort to do it in. → Register here

2. Content Weekend New York — September 19-20 Open now. A focused weekend for founders who want to get their visual story right in a room full of other creators building cult brands. → Register here

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.

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.

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