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My wife has been telling me to get Birkenstocks for two years. I resisted — like many, I'd been in Havaianas since 2014 and didn't see the problem whatsoever. Then I threw my back out on holiday and suddenly had very different opinions about arch support.

Four pairs in. She has not let me forget it.

Now with summer in full force here in Barcelona, the Birkenstocks are out to play. It only felt right to write about their rise this week — two and a half centuries of making the same shoe and letting fashion come crawling back on its own schedule.

I'm also excited to share our latest internal branding project. We created a brand called VERVE for the GLP-1 industry — a drug that is genuinely changing lives, but comes with a cost nobody has built properly for yet. That's what we set out to fix.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

GLP-1s have been the biggest story in wellness for a few years now, and the numbers have stopped being abstract. Roughly one in eight American adults is on one — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, whatever's next. Serena Williams is injecting herself on camera in a Super Bowl ad. And for the first time in a generation, the US obesity rate has actually started to come down. Whatever you think of the drugs, something real is happening.

So when we sat down to pick this quarter's internal project, the GLP-1 boom was the obvious place to look.

Every quarter, the team and I pick a category, give ourselves a deadline, and build a full brand for no one — strategy, identity, product, campaign, the film, the whole thing. It runs like client work, minus the client: a real brief, a real ship date, the lot. It's one of the most fun things we do, and we always learn something along the way.

The point isn't freedom for its own sake. The point is pressure-testing. Can we take an underserved category, build something that belongs on the shelf, and ship it in a month? If we can't do it for ourselves, we've got no business saying we can do it for you.

The other part, which matters more than the portfolio line: client work can quietly sand down your taste. You stop pitching the thing you actually want to make and start pitching the thing you know will clear seven stakeholders. You can do that for years before you notice. Internal projects are the thing that reminds us what our work looks like when we're the ones deciding.

This one's called VERVE. A GLP-1 brand for no one — except the longer we spent on it, the more we caught ourselves wondering whether we should just build the thing for real.

👉 Read the full piece

It took my wife two years to get me out of my Havaianas. I'd been wearing the same pair of Brazilian flip-flops to every beach, poolside, and summer occasion for the better part of a decade, and I had absolutely no intention of changing.

Then I threw my back out on holiday, the specific kind of injury that turns every footstep into a negotiation. When we got home, she handed me a pair of Birkenstocks with the quiet authority of someone who'd been right all along.

I put them on. Immediately understood the assignment. My long-running fashion faux pas was over. Fast forward to today and I own four pairs. I've gone from loyal Havaianas devotee to Birkenstock evangelist, fully embracing the Australian belief that footwear is, at best, optional.

The sandal category in the 1990s had made a quiet arrangement with irrelevance. Teva had the river guides. REEF had the beach towns. And Birkenstock — broad cork footbed, strap-and-buckle silhouette, the approximate aesthetic of something you'd find in a German pharmacy — had the granola crowd, the college campus, and a reputation for being the shoe you wore when you'd stopped caring about how you looked.

Fashion critics were writing Birkenstock off. The mainstream was laughing. Serious money was flowing into sneaker culture. And the German company founded in 1774 was, by all visible measures, the punchline at the end of a joke about what happens when you refuse to evolve.

What came next — the Rick Owens collaboration, the Dior collab, the Céline moment, the $8.6 billion IPO — is usually told as a story about a brand finding its moment. That framing misses the lesson. Birkenstock did not find its moment, it built something solid enough that the moment eventually had to come to it. As I always say to the team, product always wins.

👉 Read the full piece

I don't follow Formula 1. I'll say it without much guilt: for years the engines struck me as exactly what they sound like, noise. But last weekend the championship came to my city, and there's something about the whole circus pitching its tents on the edge of Barcelona that makes you want to look, even if you can't tell a fast lap from a bad one. So I put the race on. Partly, if we're being honest, to see whether Kim Kardashian was in Lewis Hamilton's box, whether the sport and the gossip were going to share a screen.

The first thing I noticed wasn't Hamilton, or Kardashian. It was the clock. The familiar green, the classic Rolex green that has timed Formula 1 my whole adult life, was gone. In its place, another name: TAG Heuer. Since when? Why? And off I went to find the story behind a defeat so quiet almost nobody had mentioned it. What I found was much bigger than a change of watches.

👉 Read the full breakdown

Space creatures in silver spacesuits following you around a café. Apple's "Clingers" makes data trackers visible — not as a legal warning, not as a statistic, but as socially unbearable presences clinging to strangers' shoulders. Fewer than one in four Americans feel in control of their personal data. Cookie consent banners never fixed that. Ninety seconds of discomfort might.

Why it matters: Privacy has always been Apple's structural advantage — they don't sell your data because they don't need to. The problem was that advantage was never made visceral. Clingers changes that by translating something abstract and technical into something you feel. There's a meaningful difference between knowing trackers exist and watching one mimic your every move in public. The first is information. The second changes behaviour. For brand builders, that's the lesson: people don't act on facts. They act on feelings.

👉 Watch the campaign