The Stardom Factory
The Stardom Factory
No two stories are the same, unless they came from the same agency
What do Telfar’s Bushwick Birkins, Luar’s rowdy NYFW shows, and the Co-Star app notifications have in common? The perfectly chaotic high-low energy, the “sudden” rise to fame, and a place in Gia Kuan’s extended universe alongside Julia Fox, Gustaf Westman, and Starface’s colorful pimple patches.
Gia Kuan runs the type of creative consulting agency whose clients you point at and think “I want that” — that level of buzz, that level of respect and support in all the right circles, and that ability to create real cultural impact while keeping things light. Beyonce’s surprise appearance at Luar’s show in Bushwick that shut down last year’s NYFW and Julia Fox’s Co-Star video that set off lines outside of Iconic Magazines are the perfect examples of how comms, PR, and creative strategists are supposed to work — making subtle connections between friends, contacts, and clients until, like dominos, they fall into an interesting place.
What you see way more often though is brands and executives treating PR and creative agencies, like a stardom factory. The idea is that if you work with the product developers behind your industry’s top sellers, put it in packaging designed by a cult brand studio, hire someone to mail it to the all the right talent, and land a couple of magazine features, you’ve got a hit on your hands. And while working with smart people with a track record at every step of the process is a recipe for success, if you follow the instructions too closely without sprinkling a little extra love here and there, you end up with a bunch of homogenous visuals, stories, and parties, or worse — Frankenstein products and brands that no one needs.
The landscape for success is complicated. The textbook research process for brand projects used to start with looking at competitors in your category, identifying patterns in their messaging, packaging, and products, and looking for ways to stand out among them on store shelves, TV, and in print. But as tech democratized the ability to produce, sell, and market products, the lines between categories and industries got blurry. Specialty sportswear brands, like On and Satisfy, aren’t only competing with Adidas and Nike for a larger market share in their category, they are also competing with the luxury fashion and beauty giants that have been aggressively entering sports through athlete sponsorships and collaborations. And in the broader sense of competition for consumer attention and money, their products are also jumbled together with all kinds of stuff on their target audience’s social feeds - celebrity lip glosses, digestion supplements, and the must-try restaurants in Greenpoint. With everyday exposure to a wide range of amateur content that frames shopping as a pastime activity, consumers are facing a passive choice between a bag, a running shoe, and a night out way more often than an active choice between five pairs of sneakers at a Footlocker.
Projects that drive the most excitement in this business environment come from creatives and brands who are willing to scratch everything they know about what it takes to make it in their industry, and experiment. Media used to broker attention and status, but as access to attention got democratized and content became ubiquitous, publications, like 032c, HommeGirls, Perfect Magazine, and Highsnobiety, started doubling down on brand consulting and bottling up creativity into digestible packages that could be sold to both brands and fans — from print issues with fun collectible covers to capsule drops designed in collaboration with hotels, production studios, and mass clothing brands that are primed for a comeback. And between this Perfect Magazine moment with Bella Hadid and this Troye Sivan photoshoot for HommeGirls, it’s safe to say that creativity still gets people talking and spending.
“Sometimes brands come to us and it’s already been baked, “Here’s the cookie and we just need you to write about the cookie,” the founder of Highsnobiety David Fischer told 1 Granary earlier this year. “More than ever, we’re saying, “You need us to create the dough for you to get it right, because your cookie isn’t the right cookie.” That’s exciting to me. Because we’re moving up in the ladder within those brands, and we’re no longer just a media brand that comes at the end – because that’s usually how it goes, right? Media comes at the end of it all. “Here’s the campaign, here are the pictures.” We’re now coming and saying, “If you want to be authentic for that audience, you have to do it this way.”
Starting real conversations and driving long-lasting cultural impact takes much more effort than a magazine feature or sending gifts to a list of downtown influencers. You have to understand a little bit of everything from art direction and copy to the underlying trends in the broader business and cultural landscape to execute effective campaigns. While a Vogue writeup is validating for emerging brands, like Hodakova and ABRA, a feature from SSENSE is much more exciting to click on because of the sheer amount of resources that SSENSE allocates to the younger, edgier brands. And even for corporate brands, like Coach, the Perfect Magazine cover with Addison Rae drove more impressions and interest than the Camila Mendez cover they commissioned from Vogue Mexico.
As storytelling and brand building got more complex, the timeline for success got shorter. Very few people have the time to seek out emerging talent and the patience to develop long-lasting collaborative relationships. What you see more often are transactional exchanges and access brokerage that drive buzz and lifts in sales but don’t stick long-term. You can fill a room with the hottest people of the moment and cast them in promotional campaigns to create an illusion of a picture-perfect friend group around your brand. And yet, the energy in those rooms and visuals just doesn’t flow the same way it flows through those that pull people together in a true creative synergy. As seasons come and go and popularity fluctuates, the faces in the perfect picture fade, and the work produced with mutual love stays relevant.
If everything and everyone is accessible as long as the right number is on a check, developing a point of view and real relationships with people may be the only advantage that’s not as easy to replicate. While everyone else is still chasing attention, smart creatives are wiping their whiteboards clean to make room for ideas and projects that reflect the way people think, live, and interact with culture today. If there is a perfect path to stardom, it’s doing things you like with the people you respect and love. And if you stick with it for a while, the buzz will come.
IN THE MARGINS:
A couple more notes on attention and creativity:
I made a Busy Corner edit of agencies that I think have done amazing work for their clients in comms, PR, creative strategy, content, talent management and more. No more spending a bunch of money to work with a “star-making” agency and getting disappointed in the quality of their work.
- published a great story about the Kate Spade book Contents that showed the insides of women’s bags before it was a trend. The catch? Far from all the bags featured were made by Kate Spade:
"Well, if we celebrate bags, certainly people will want more of Kate's' It didn't particularly matter that we weren't saying, 'You must carry a medium shopper.' It was more free and more of the idea of 'if people enjoy the stories we're telling, they'll certainly be interested in our brand, and if they're interested in our brand, then they'll be interested in Katie's accessories," says Leach. 'It was more trusting of creativity to do the work, rather than insisting we were trying to sell any one particular product."
Really enjoyed Abra Ortuño Perez’s attitude about building his own brand in this SSENSE feature:
“I love Martin Margiela and he was exactly this. He was doing crazy stuff—but it’s not a joke. We are not trying to make a joke here. It’s not clothes for a video clip. It’s clothing that a normal woman can actually wear. You love the extremeness of the concept, but you don’t want to be in the street feeling uncomfortable.” What a relief to shop, to wear a brand that’s not measured in “heat,” “buzz,” or “virality”—dealing instead in wantable, wearable brilliance.”
