The Beautiful Chaos of Brands

An appreciation for all a brand represents.

Picture a brand as that friend who's simultaneously the most put-together and messiest person you know. They’re this type—perfect taste, immaculate social skills, but also regularly losing track of time, and face uncertainty where next month’s rent money will come from. They’re at the balance of existential crisis about their purpose in life but keep trucking on because they have a belief in what they release has value. Somewhere in the middle they also have to ensure they’re fed and there’s a roof over their head. That's basically what modern brands are: carefully curated chaos trying to make sense of our collective culture.

In my early days at HYPEBEAST, I think I couldn’t quite articulate why I appreciated brands until after the fact. I was young, not jaded by marketing, and well the brands did what they were supposed to do: bottle a feeling and perspective, and sell me on it. They had done their job to an impressionable kid looking for identity through fashion.

But as I became more involved in the complexities of brand-building and running a business, it became clear how utterly difficult this was. I’ve worked with billion-dollar brands, only to come to the stark realization that “success” in traditional metrics don’t even remotely mean that things are all smooth and efficient.

Underneath there’s a lot of messy wires. It’s a coordinated chaos where balancing the operations and business, need to align on key pillars of trust, creativity and cultural resonance. Let's break down this beautiful mess:

TRUST

First, there's trust, an increasingly rare form of currency in a post-social media world, where we're all on the backfoot of questioning the validity of something. Brands are essentially making promises to strangers, which if you think about it, is both wildly optimistic and slightly unhinged. When Nike says "Just Do It," they're not just selling shoes; they're selling the idea that you can overcome your 6 AM snooze button addiction. Trust is built through consistently showing up, keeping promises, and admitting failure when warranted. The moment that trust breaks is when the foundation of a brand/consumer contract breaks and you lose something you worked so hard to earn and foster.

CREATIVITY

Brands sit in this fascinating creativity paradox. They need to be creative enough to stand out in our scroll-through world, but not so “creative” that the message is so cerebral and conceptually it doesn’t achieve its intended goal of well, sustaining themselves. It's like trying to teach your students something that they fundamentally don’t have a foundation for, in hopes they latch on and dive deep. At its core I’m not opposed to complexities, in fact I wish we spent more time diving into them and unpacking them. But it’s a fascinating challenge to adopt the ol’ MAYA approach which has come to dominate the world of creative output. MAYA for those unfamiliar, stands for the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle, coined by Raymond Loewy. It represents the belief that creative success is a balance of innovation and familiarity. RIP to Virgil, cause he practiced this to a tee.

CULTURAL RESONANCE

What I find so fascinating is how brands have become these living, breathing cultural artifacts that take on lives of their own. Crocs became ironic, then post-ironic, then cool. Sure there were really great strategies and tactics. But it takes two to dance and a counterpart to pick up what you’re putting down. I liken it to at times, a cultural Hail Mary, turned movement. Brand builders ultimately try their best to control the narrative around a brand, yet the uncertainty of how brands interact with the outside world is of legitimate excitement. Nobody wants their brands co-opted by an unsavory group, but the reality is that brands create a symbiotic relationship between the creators/operators and the audience/customers.

Over time, brands grow into something their creators never imagined. Like how Dr. Martens went from practical work boots to punk rock symbols to fashion staples. Or how Patagonia became less about fleece vests and more about environmental activism to become a finance bro staple.

Brands have this incredible power to be filters and binders. Allegiance and consumption of a brand forge relationships in an uncanny way (like wearing Stussy in 1995, to represent a certain cultural participation), just as much as repelling those who don’t align with your personal ethos (like buying a Tesla in 2025).

Having worked with start-ups and massive companies, they’re all essentially trying to create cultural and creatively resonant work while making it financially sustainable. These two aren’t always complementary in that their interests differ. In fact running a brand is full of contradictions. They're attempting to be authentic in an artificial construct, to be consistent while constantly evolving, to be profitable while being purposeful. It's an impossible task to get right every single time, which is exactly what makes it so interesting when they pull it off.

And maybe that's the beautiful chaos of it all. In trying to be these perfect, polished entities, brands end up being remarkably human: messy, contradictory, and also brilliant. They're mirrors reflecting our collective desires, anxieties, and aspirations and a barometer for the current state of culture and society. It’s true that superficially, we don’t need another brand in this world but to think of it purely as a commercial outcome is perhaps selling it short. Think of brands as storytellers of belief systems. They take our deepest convictions and transform them into something people can touch, wear, or experience. They're not just selling products; they're creating touchpoints for people to connect with ideas that are reflections of their own truth.