Sathish:
“Culture moves at a very fast pace now. How are brands adapting to that?”
Stephanie:
This taps into one of the things I do. I am chair of a brand transformation agency called Invisible Dynamics, and our tagline is moving at the speed of culture. That is really an operating system for how we think about what is needed in the industry now. It reflects a deep evolution in the consumer, and specifically in fashion and luxury. The world of media, audiences, and social platforms has completely changed in the last 20 years. Before, brands put themselves out to the world within four walls: your retail store, your billboards, TV, and print magazines. It was one-dimensional and one-directional. Brands told the consumer what they wanted to tell them. With the iPhone, e-commerce, and social platforms, that conversation started being had by many other groups, and increasingly so now with TikTok and Reddit. In the old world you could have a strategy deck, run it through the teams, bring in a consultancy, and eventually sign off a campaign, but the world stayed still during that time. The world is moving consistently now. So the gap Invisible Dynamics fills is a much more immediate and continuous combination of strategy consulting, the left brain, and creative emotional connection, the right brain, interacting back and forth at the speed of culture. I joined as chair because I appreciated it from the client side. At businesses like The Outnet and Farfetch, I could not find agencies that reflected both the commercial needs, the deep understanding of the business, product, and pricing, and could translate that into creativity.
Sathish:
“Which brands are adapting to this cultural change well and genuinely combining that left-brain and right-brain approach?”
Stephanie:
It really is about which brands are internally aligned. One risk is pinpointing brands that are always in culture, because that may not last. It might work once or twice, like the clock that is right twice a day. Unless a brand has deeply understood its DNA and is internally aligned across product, commercial, retail, merchandising, manufacturing, the whole end to end, the culture piece is just an add-on. The brands that work on their fundamentals are the ones that get culture right. The ones that get it wrong just ask for an advertising campaign on top. That is the difference. This work is a culmination of the guiding thread of my career, which is the combination of customer and innovation. Over time it is deeply understanding the customer, whatever the audience, sometimes because I am that customer and sometimes because I look with fresh eyes, and the innovation piece is asking where the customer is heading, or what we can give them that they do not even know they want yet. Very early on I was part of the founding team of Portero, the first pre-owned marketplace for luxury, back in 2005, before brands were comfortable with digital. The insight was that the customer selling pre-owned luxury was not a bargain hunter but often a very wealthy woman selling her bags to buy more. That set the blueprint for the secondary market that followed.
Sathish:
“If a new brand wants to work in a way that matches the culture, how do they do that without chasing trends and losing their identity?”
Stephanie:
It goes back to internal alignment. I am a great believer that brands should go back to their DNA, back to the reason they existed in the first place, whether that was a founder or the early team, and the problem they were trying to solve. Over the years brands often lose that. They forget why they came to exist and stop talking about it, other players come in and eat chunks of their positioning, and they end up lost. Gap is an example where no one quite knew who it was for. The team did a big piece of work going back to Gap’s DNA, its early history in San Francisco, almost a multi-brand retailer, its roots in dance and music, and brought that back. It resonated because it is consistent with what Gap stands for. But that only worked because there was also work on the product, the store, the merchandising, and the commercials. A brand that is really aligned understands which trends it should chase and which it should stay back from.
Sathish:
“You launched The Outnet and helped brands like Farfetch and Moncler scale. What would you do differently today?”
Stephanie:
The world has continually changed. Portero was simply too early for its time. In 2005 the customer did not understand how to shop that way. We had to upload photographs with a digital camera and a cable. The infrastructure was not there for the innovation we were trying to do. The biggest change is that many of these businesses, Portero, The Outnet, Farfetch, were essentially the online reflection of the offline world. They were retail stores online, and the innovation was often just being online. The Outnet innovated by curating and beautifully merchandising off-price for the first time, which attracted an elevated, high-household-income customer that the brands loved. Farfetch innovated as a marketplace, bringing offline boutiques online. Within that context I would not do much differently, but the context is so different now. You can build an e-commerce site with two people. You do not have to create bespoke platforms. You can vibe code a website and understand it very quickly. Technology has changed literally in the last two years, and things we wanted to do years ago, like content and commerce with rich imagery, once required PDF pages and developers coding images to match each week’s upload. That sounds like the Stone Age, but it was five years ago, and now AI can do it, so you can create so much faster and give a more diversified customer experience.
Sathish:
“Luxury relies on storytelling and exclusivity, but social media means a lot gets posted outside the brand’s control. Does that hurt these brands?”
Stephanie:
They lost control a while ago. It used to be a one-sided conversation, the brand pushing its message within four walls, a magazine, a TV screen. Social media made it two-way, and that is now amplified to the nth degree because of the sheer volume. Thanks to that digitalization you even have new distribution channels that barely existed five or ten years ago, like affiliate channels that became creator platforms. Creators are now considered by brands to be a new distribution channel, so platforms like ShopMy and LTK are part of the distribution model. For a long time luxury brands did not handle this, which is why they relied on Net-a-Porter, which pioneered luxury e-commerce, and Farfetch, which could put their product in a marketplace. They have become savvy, but they realize they cannot control the message. They work with these platforms and creators, but the customer is much more in control than ever. So a brand has to stay really innovative, really relevant, and create that sense of friction that gets people to stop in a world of endless content.
Sathish:
“In recent years marketing teams focused heavily on conversion and acquisition cost rather than brand building. Was that a mistake?”
Stephanie:
Yes, I think it was a mistake. For a time the answer was to build a direct-to-consumer brand online, leverage Google paid search and Meta, and build your brand through performance marketing. Marketers became very good at it, the platforms created the metrics, and for a long time it worked, partly because online was not yet saturated. But suddenly there were so many brands chasing the same keywords and the same customers that cost per acquisition became prohibitive. The business model did not work, margins were eaten by performance marketing, and you do not own the customer because they keep going back to Google and Meta, and you never built an emotional connection. So the pendulum swings. Old-school marketing was out of vogue and is very much back in, because in a world of so much online noise, you actually speak to the customer and build a brand connection so they come back to you directly. We are even seeing events go fully offline with no social media connection at all, because that is the new luxury.
Sathish:
“When growth slows, should leaders treat it as a brand penetration problem rather than a marketing problem?”
Stephanie:
They should go back and really understand their business and whether they are aligned internally, saying the same thing end to end across all their channels. It is often a matter of allocation of spend, and often that allocation does not lean heavily enough into upper-funnel and brand marketing, because it is not as easy to measure. But over time the best brands realize this. Luxury brands have always understood it, which is how they have been able to own the customer and gain a customer who is essentially paying a hefty premium for something discretionary.
Sathish:
“How should a two or three year old brand balance brand building against hitting their quarterly numbers?”
Stephanie:
It is the hardest thing to do. We had a fifty-fifty split at The Outnet and we kept to it, even though our ROAS on performance would have told us to invest more there. We absolutely ring-fenced that 50 percent into brand marketing. Sometimes the quarterly numbers pressure you, but do you want a problem now or a problem later? If you have that problem later, it is because you squeezed the lemon to the point where there is nowhere else to go and you never built the deeper emotional connection. For commoditized products it is a different matter, you just need to be absolutely findable. But when you are selling discretionary, high-price-point product, it is not just about convenience or price, it is about selling something different, and you can only do that through storytelling, which can take many shapes and does not have to be a billboard.
Sathish:
“How is AI in the customer journey, with people discovering products through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, going to affect brands and brand building?”
Stephanie:
It is fascinating, and there are really two questions: how AI will change the shopping experience online, and findability. On findability, customers are moving to the LLMs as their go-to agents, their lifestyle concierge, in a way their search engine. Going back to innovation as my career thread, one of my earliest advisory projects was Operator in San Francisco in 2016, a shopping agent funded by the founder of Uber’s incubator, where you input in natural language what you wanted and it shopped for you. We were doing AI before AI. I learned how customers genuinely think about interacting with an agent through natural language. Fast forward, and findability is now GEO and SEO but on steroids. It is not just backlinks and having enough content to index. It is genuinely structuring the metadata on your site so the LLMs can read it and trust the brand. And this goes back to brand: the more brand work you do, the more trustworthy your brand is, unlike a commoditized business that is just pipes through Google search.
Sathish:
“We built a product called ConversionBox specifically for AEO, and we agree trust is critical because LLMs only cite sites they trust. Where do you see this going?”
Stephanie:
We are saying the same thing. It will be very interesting to see which brands do that well and which basically exist in a world of LLMs. I am looking at an interesting business called Ara that thinks about how to rank and stack-rank brands through geo intelligence. Brands will really have to think about that for findability and visibility. The other topic, and my favorite, is what the e-commerce site of the future will look like. I invested early in a business called Parfumery, a discovery platform for fragrance. Fragrance is a fascinating category because you can build a real taxonomy around base notes and olfactive scents, and the market is very fragmented, so one discovery platform makes sense. What excites me is that the founders have been through version 2.0 and understand where it is heading. This is not the e-commerce catalog as it looks now, which in some ways is already legacy. To sell high-value discretionary product you have to meet the customer where they are, so the site, currently in beta, has incredible personalization, breaks down fragrances based on what you already own, uses generative content seamlessly, and is built on top of Google but with its own IP. It is moving in the direction I think e-commerce is heading.
Sathish:
“AI makes content generation much easier, so any brand can create a brand story fast. Where does brand distinctiveness stick when it is a level playing field?”
Stephanie:
I think we are going to find a lot of slop online, just from the sheer quantity of generated content. So brands have to be even sharper about their message and even more creative. Similar to the marketing conversation, the pendulum swings back to creativity, craftsmanship, and investment, the things that are not the icing on top or the bow on the side, but truly what makes a brand unique and why a customer should trust it because of what the brand is made of. Marketing, brand, and content will be essential but not enough, in a way that for 20 years many brands built themselves believing marketing is king and telling the story well enough was enough. Brands will really have to stand out. In luxury, which has had a hard time recently for many reasons, fallen Chinese demand, a lost aspirational customer, the economic situation, brands are betting on creativity to stand out again. A recent winner is Chanel, which went through tough years and bet everything on creativity and its creative director, and it has paid off because it stands out in a world where so many are doing the same.
Sathish:
“As an advisor and board member, how do you identify a real, enduring consumer brand versus one that is simply selling well right now?”
Stephanie:
I would not say I am the person who does that as an investor. I am an advisor, I sit on boards, and I have deep operational and customer knowledge, but deciding how to invest is something I am still learning. I think it is about understanding the macro trends. There is less investment going into fashion as a category, quite simply because of where the exits are: who will buy a fashion brand, and how do you get the return that warrants the original investment when the exit is uncertain. So fashion is trickier, but you follow the money and follow the customers. People are spending in hospitality, wellness, and health, which are very big categories. They say when times are tough, beauty does well, and beauty is still relatively strong though down from its highs. So look at category, understand where the customer is, and understand the micro trends within the customer. My experience understanding the customer over the years is where all of that comes in handy.
Sathish:
“How does a brand realize it is losing control of its brand idea, given sales can dip for many reasons?”
Stephanie:
Nike is an interesting brand in the news right now, having fallen below a major brand index for the first time in 18 years. That is a tale of a business that maybe let the commercial and operational side lead over what truly mattered from a brand perspective. They went too direct to consumer and pulled out of wholesale shelves, losing ground to competitors like Adidas and Puma. When you go direct to consumer, it can be great for margins, but you have to really invest in your brand, and they had a lot of new players come in and eat up that incumbent space. Did they realize soon enough and pull the emergency valve in time? Maybe not. We have been talking about Nike’s difficulties for quite some time.
Sathish:
“You served as chairman of the British Fashion Council for nearly five years. What did that teach you about the intersection of industry, creativity, and commerce?”
Stephanie:
It is probably the most different and unique role I have done, and one I loved despite very difficult circumstances. The British Fashion Council is the trade body for the UK fashion industry, worth close to 35 billion to the UK economy. I was appointed in 2018, just as government had to start delivering Brexit, and suddenly trade, exports, and imports loomed very large for an industry that had not had to think about them that way. Government had rather forgotten the nuances of fashion compared to other industries. Then COVID hit in 2020, stores closed, brands had to rethink their models, and we stepped in as the industry body to keep a floor under the industry. My biggest learning is that, particularly in the UK, creativity is at the center of what makes British fashion incredible and is a huge pipeline of talent for the global industry. The creative arts, fashion, film, music, are as important as the hard industries and a major source of soft power, and I hope Brexit and COVID moved the needle in getting government to understand that.
Sathish:
“Final advice for retailers and manufacturers listening who want to build a brand that moves at the speed of culture?”
Stephanie:
Go back internally and think about the reason for your brand to exist, the why. Then the how, the method by which you put it out to the world, can change. But when you have gone down to the why and reflected it internally through your product, pricing, merchandising, stores, and salespeople, the how, in other words the speed, can change all the time. You will not have to keep relitigating the strategy every time things move at the speed of culture. You will be able to be there, if you choose, in the right way, rather than constantly playing catch-up.
