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The team were talking about Madhappy this week and I had to look it up. A plain hoodie, $200, sold to Gen Z, with mental health as the reason it costs that.

I'm suspicious of it and I'm not sure I've earned the right to be. Every premium brand charges for something other than the fabric — that's the game, and nobody objects when it's heritage or craft or a French surname on the label. Madhappy picked wellbeing. The difference is that heritage doesn't need you to feel bad first.

What makes it hard to dismiss is that the demographic buying it grew up with brands doing the opposite. A decade of aspirational advertising built on making you feel short of something, and then a company arrives that talks about anxiety on the label. If the alternative is being sold an unattainable life by people who don't mention it, $200 for a brand that says the quiet part out loud starts to look like a reasonable trade. It's still $200 for a hoodie.

We run a wellness program here and I care about it, which is exactly why this one won't leave me alone. There's a difference between a company spending money on the wellbeing of the people inside it and a company selling wellbeing to the people outside it and reading this week's piece, I couldn't work out which side of that line Madhappy sits on. See if you do better than me!

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

I spent nine years inside the wellness industry — yoga, plant medicine, meditation retreats — and I went in for real reasons. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice the whole thing rests on one premise, which is that you are not enough yet. Open Headspace and before you've heard a minute of content it asks what brought you here: sleeping better, less stress, managing anxiety. It's well made and I don't think anyone there designed it cynically. You just get sorted by your deficit before the product starts, and once you've accepted the sorting, the subscription makes sense.

Which leaves out the person who wakes up on an ordinary Tuesday, feels the ordinary weight of being a human being, and goes to work anyway. Madhappy is the only brand I've found that was built for him. The name existed before the company did, texted between friends during a bad stretch mentally, and the Classic Midweight Fleece Hoodie now sells for $175. Headspace is $12.99 a month. Madhappy never had to win that fight, because they were in streetwear, and the mental health conversation was the reason the streetwear meant something.

Look at who has agreed to stand next to them since. Columbia, Gap, lululemon, Vans, Salomon, UGG, Marni, Converse, Pixar, Roscoe's, the Lakers, the Dodgers, the Yankees. Not one wellness brand in the list. LVMH Luxury Ventures wrote the first cheque back in 2019, and nobody in that building was taking a view on the mental health market.

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I was sure Drake was finished. Not as a person or a brand, but as the artist he'd been, because you don't get taken apart that publicly by someone that much better at it and come back the same. Then he put out three albums at midnight with no warning, onto a stream half a million people were already sitting on waiting. Iceman became the most-streamed album in a single day on Spotify this year, and a track off it gave him a fourteenth number one, breaking a record Michael Jackson had held since before most of the audience was born.

That's the man who lost. He lost so comprehensively that the song used to beat him swept the Grammys and got performed at the Super Bowl, and Kendrick took around 87% of the $15.4 million those diss tracks generated in the eight months to November 2024. It still didn't finish Drake, because when attention is the raw material, the winner and the loser both walk off with volume.

Which is the part that's actually changed since 1996, when Tupac and Biggie were both dead inside eighteen months and the men escalating the fight were the same men profiting from it. The money now sits further back and there's a great deal more of it — labels with cash riding on both artists, lawyers billing to convert a grievance into a filing, platforms with no view on who's right so long as the argument keeps people pressing play. The industry didn't learn restraint.

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On 16 August thousands of paper lanterns go onto the Katsura River in Kyoto from the east end of Togetsukyo Bridge, each one carrying a name, while monks hold a memorial service on the bank. Anyone can register on the day and it costs about a thousand yen. A few hours later, staff go out and collect every one of them, to keep the river clean.

Which is one of the stranger briefs in design. Beautiful enough to justify the making, cheap enough to produce in thousands, and seaworthy for the two hours before somebody fishes it out. Most objects are designed to last, and this one is designed to stop on a schedule, which is harder than it sounds and invisible to everyone watching.

Also on the list this month: 75,000 hand-built bamboo and paper kites hanging across SFMOMA's street-facing gallery, Kapoor's Vantablack voids at the Hayward giving the eye nothing at all to hold onto, and the Barbican turning its own concrete into 23 pieces of furniture with MADE.

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A kickoff has a job that isn't on the agenda: the client needs to leave feeling heard, the agency needs to leave feeling trusted. You can feel the moment it turns. Notes get shorter, people start saying "yeah, exactly," someone uses the word aligned and then someone else uses it too, because that's how that word works.

Three weeks later the work goes up, the client says it isn't quite what they had in mind, and nobody in the chain has done anything wrong. Premium but accessible is the usual evidence. Premium is the founder, thinking about margin and the brands they'd like to be shelved beside. Accessible is whoever owns the numbers, thinking about the buyer they'd lose. Both read it and see themselves in it, and neither has ever had to say their half out loud with the other one in the room.

The retro, when it comes, is thorough about weeks three, five and seven. The answer is nearly always week one.

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