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The Winter Olympics does something to me every time. There is genuinely no other sporting event where you can go from watching someone hurl themselves down a mountain at 140km/h, one edge away from catastrophe, to being completely hypnotised by a figure skater doing something that shouldn't be physically possible. The range of human skill and courage on display is simply next level. And that includes the wolfdog who escaped from home, found the cross-country track, and briefly led the field before anyone could do anything about it. It was the most joyful thirty seconds of television this year and nobody planned a single frame of it.

What struck me most about this Games wasn't just the sport though — it was how the smartest brands stopped interrupting the moments and became part of them. Not logo placements, not hero spots, but real presence in the recovery lounges, on the mountain, in the in-between spaces nobody usually thinks about.

The brands worth talking about this week were the ones who'd shown up before anyone knew how the story would end, which is exactly the kind of scarcity most brands still can't figure out how to build — because what people actually want isn't the product, it's the feeling that they got there before everyone else did. This week we got into exactly that, through one of the most instructive brand collapses of the last decade.

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

When Rosalía announced the LUX Tour, my wife — her superfan, the woman who's played MOTOMAMI on every road trip since 2022 — turned to me with the look. The one that means this isn't optional, this is happening, clear your schedule.

Barcelona tickets went live at 10 AM. Four shows at Palau Sant Jordi. Sold out in minutes. All four nights, gone before I'd even loaded the page. Meanwhile, my wife sat next to me on the couch, phone in both hands, laptop on her lap, refreshing with an intensity I've never seen her bring to anything else in our marriage.

We didn't get Barcelona. The defeat was physical — a tight chest, that specific disappointment that hits when you've failed someone you love. So we pivoted. Searched every European date. Found Amsterdam. Bought two tickets at a price I won't disclose to my accountant.

When the confirmation came through, the relief was so overwhelming it felt like we'd won something, not spent something. The anxiety was real. The urgency was real. The dopamine hit when that confirmation landed — that was victory, not a transaction.

Scarcity doesn't care if you know how it works.

But not all scarcity works the same way, and the brands that understand the difference are compounding value in ways the drop model never could.

You know the Supreme story — Lafayette Street, Thursday drops, box logo hoodies, the Louis Vuitton collab that broke the internet. For two decades, it was the purest expression of manufactured scarcity ever built. Produce less than demand. Make "sold out" permanent. Let the resale market do your advertising. A $158 hoodie moving for $2,000 on StockX communicates desirability more effectively than any ad campaign.

Looking back, it reminds me of those classic Persian rug “Closing Down” sales that have been running since my fifth birthday.

Then VF Corporation bought it for $2.1 billion in 2020 and did what corporations always do with counterculture — tried to scale it. Production became more predictable. The drops kept coming, but the surprise didn't. The brand didn't get worse. It got expected. And expected is the opposite of scarce.

Box logo hoodies that once commanded $2,000 started selling for $300–$600. Gen Z drifted toward vintage and newer streetwear like Corteiz that still had the raw energy Supreme had lost. In mid-2024, VF offloaded Supreme to EssilorLuxottica for $1.5 billion — the most culturally significant streetwear brand of the past three decades, sold at a $600 million loss to the company that makes your optician's reading glasses.

Supreme's own fans on Reddit greeted the news of potential Supreme x Meta smart glasses with responses like "I'm so glad my love for the hype died in 2019." The product still moves — as of late 2024, Supreme holds the #2 spot for most-traded apparel on StockX. But cultural cachet and commercial relevance are different animals, and the gap between them is where $600 million went to die.

This is what happens when you manufacture scarcity through panic. It works brilliantly until it doesn't, and when it stops, it stops fast. The model depends entirely on cultural relevance — and cultural relevance is the one thing you can't schedule a production run for.

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A Czechoslovakian wolfdog escaped from home, ran onto the cross-country skiing track in Cortina, and briefly joined the competition. His owner recognized him on live television. The cameras caught everything. Every major pet food brand presumably spent that exact moment finalizing their Q2 strategy deck.

It was the funniest possible illustration of a pattern running through the entire Milan-Cortina Games. Lucas Pinheiro Braathen won Brazil's first ever Winter Olympic medal and celebrated by dancing samba on the snow — and Visa Brasil had signed him before any of that happened, when the story was still being written and nobody knew the ending. Most sponsorship logic works backwards from outcomes. Visa worked forward from meaning. There's a difference, and Milan-Cortina made it impossible to ignore.

The brands paying attention at these Games weren't waiting for the podium. They were learning to read a story while it was still unfolding — which is the only moment you can actually become part of it rather than just renting someone else's narrative for a fortnight.

The gold is the medal. The story that stays is always the one that was never supposed to happen.

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Clean white bathroom. Warm lighting. A woman's hands reaching for product. The ASMR rhythm of something dispensing. Then the product names appear on screen: carbon monoxide, benzene, ozone, nitrogen dioxide, PM2.5 particulate matter. The hands keep going, applying each one with the same practiced calm you'd bring to a vitamin C serum. The film never breaks. No horror sting, no dramatic cut. Just the beauty tutorial format playing out with city air as the ingredient list, and the slow realization that this is what's already seeping into your face every morning on the commute.

Uncommon's campaign for NIOD's Superoxide Dismutase 3 Enzyme Mist doesn't explain the problem — it performs it. The horror isn't manufactured through special effects or dramatic music. It comes from the gap between what the beauty tutorial format promises and what it actually delivers. You expected hyaluronic acid. You got industrial exhaust. Air pollutants found in cities can increase pigmentation by more than 20%, and NIOD is in the process of becoming the first cosmetic company to register the unique INCI for Superoxide Dismutase 3. The ingredient is genuinely novel. Without that data, this campaign would be anxiety-bait. With it, the anxiety is proportionate.

Why it matters: Uncommon didn't subvert the beauty tutorial format for the sake of a clever idea — they used the format's own credibility against it. The audience's expectation became the weapon. That's a harder trick than it looks, and it only works when the science underneath is real enough to justify the discomfort. Half a million pounds of earned media is a nice outcome. Making people feel something they can't scroll past, because the format itself won't let them, is the actual craft.

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Walk past any freezer aisle and you're looking at thirty years of the same visual language: bright blues, gingham, sunshine yellows. A category built on a single moment—ice cream as a childhood summer memory, eaten outdoors in daylight. Nobody actually eats ice cream that way anymore.

60% of ice cream is consumed after 6pm, late at night, alone, in front of a screen. That number should have changed everything about how the category looked. It didn't.

How&How stripped away everything the category had conditioned us to expect. No warm tones, no yellow, no gingham, no memory of summer. Instead, they borrowed the visual language of sleep itself: muted palettes from Pukka's nighttime tea packaging, a wordmark with eclipsed moons embedded directly into the letterforms, photography shot in actual darkness. Motion design that drifts like zero gravity. Every choice was a refusal to play the category's game.

Why it matters: Category conventions calcify because they go unquestioned. A single data point—60%—gave How&How permission to ignore three decades of visual language. They didn't improve the category. They built something the freezer aisle had never seen because they were willing to design for the actual moment of consumption instead of the mythologized one. That's the difference between working within a category and dismantling it entirely.

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