Short observations on brands, pricing, and design. Updated irregularly.
Byzantium made Tyrian purple illegal for anyone below the emperor. The dye was expensive, but the law is what made it priceless. You could not buy your way into it at any price, and that impossibility was the entire product.
Hermès runs the same mechanism without needing a legal code. The Birkin waitlist is a sumptuary law administered by sales associates. The lesson from both: scarcity is most valuable when it cannot be resolved with money alone.
Doing business development calls this year, I learned that the first five seconds are not about what you say. They are about whether you sound like a script. People decide to keep listening based on cadence before they process a single word of content.
Most marketing works the same way. Audiences filter for the texture of the message before the message itself. Sounding human is not a style choice, it is a distribution strategy.
Aritzia calls itself everyday luxury, which sounds like ad copy but is actually a precise economic claim. The brand borrows luxury codes, the boutique lighting, the unbranded restraint, the sales associate attention, and attaches them to a price point where purchase frequency stays high.
Real luxury sells infrequency. Aritzia sells the feeling of infrequency at a frequency that builds a habit. That gap between perceived and actual exclusivity is where the margin lives.
The hemline index, the idea that skirts get shorter in booms and longer in busts, has been debunked repeatedly. Economists have run the data. The correlation barely exists. It remains the most cited fashion economics idea anyway.
Bad indicators survive when they are good stories. A theory that lets you read the economy off a runway photo will always outcompete a regression table, which says something uncomfortable about how economic ideas actually spread.
The first version of this site had color, more pages, and a list of every tool I know how to use. Each revision removed something. What is left is one typeface family, black on white, and only the work I would defend in a room.
Editing a website turns out to be the same discipline as editing an outfit or a portfolio thesis. The strength of what remains is set by what you were willing to take out.