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Brand Matters started as something I wrote for myself, on top of running Lento, with no real plan beyond finishing the next issue. Somewhere past 70,000 of you, I realised I'd become exactly the kind of founder I've been writing about, the one who is expected to show up in public as well as do the actual work, and I've been asking myself why I keep doing it.

The honest answer is that I believe founders should be present, because a company with a person behind it is easier to trust than one without. I'd be lying, though, if I said it didn't bring its own pressure, and some weeks a fair bit of anxiety along with it. On those weeks I envy the founders who simply run their business in private and let the work speak for itself, which is a strange thing to confess in a newsletter.

What I can say for certain is that I'm excited about what's coming. The last quarter of the year is when things actually get made, while most people are already winding down for January, and we have a lot planned for and I can't wait to start rolling it out.

In today's issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

A cramped office above his father's liquor store in Springfield, New Jersey, a few bottles on the desk and a New York Jets bucket to spit into. Gary Vaynerchuk tasted, talked too fast, and told whoever was watching what to buy. Almost every weekday for five years, and the whole point of it was shifting the wine stacked downstairs.

Then episode 58 opened with an apology nobody had asked for. He'd missed a few days of filming because two television networks had offered him a show and he'd turned both down, and he explained himself on camera, quickly and a bit defensively, like a man finishing an argument with someone who wasn't in the room. He called the episode "I'm Not Pissed", which was only partly true.

What made that audience worth keeping was the thing he'd been doing for years before anyone was watching properly. He panned popular wines on camera, including ones his own store needed to sell, so anyone could buy the bottle and find out whether he was right. Two decades on he's the loudest voice telling founders to post daily, document everything and put their face on it. He built his own audience telling people not to buy what he was selling.

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Ask JYT where the name comes from and the answer is half joke, half business plan. Just Your Type: there are five of them, all different, so one of them should be yours. Anyone who ever taped a poster above a bed knows the music was only ever part of it, and the real ritual was choosing.

Gap has signed a multi-year deal with the five of them, assembled by the producer Freddy Wexler and signed to Republic last December. The company will co-produce their docuseries, take them round the country performing inside its own stores, dress them on stage and sell a collection they designed. It's the first deal under Fashiontainment, run by a former Paramount executive who arrived in February as chief entertainment officer, which is now a job a chinos company has.

The reason is last August, when Gap put KATSEYE in a white room in low-rise jeans and collected 400 million views inside ten days, with a quarter of a million people filming themselves doing the choreography. Those fans had been made somewhere else, by a competition series and a Netflix documentary, and Gap rented the attachment for a season. JYT had half a million followers before releasing a single song. When the fandom arrives before the music, the fandom is the product.

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Klim's Epicene is baroque in the strict sense: hairlines thin enough to vanish at small sizes, heavy sculptural drops against them, terminals that come to a knife edge rather than a polite bracket. Set it large with tight line-height and it stops reading as a font and starts reading as custom lettering. Bodoni and Didot have been the answer to "make it look expensive" for so long that they've stopped meaning anything, and this one carries the same history with the hand-carved tension still in it.

The other three: Canela, which sits in the gap between serif and sans and gets Optima's sculptural warmth without the spa brochure associations. PP Mori, for anyone who has had enough of Inter and SF Pro, which are what a grid looks like when nobody made a decision. And ABC Prophet from Dinamo, every joint sliced through, for agencies who've noticed Ogg is now on everyone's portfolio site.

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In 2021, warming up for her Super Bowl LV pregame set, Miley Cyrus posted herself running on a Peloton treadmill singing Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" at full volume without missing a note. Nobody had paid her to do that.

Four years on she's the face of Let Yourself Run, shot in a retro studio with wooden floors and mirrors to the walls, Saint Laurent leather over a Norma Kamali bodysuit, the title track from her tenth album underneath it, and Peloton's first foldable treadmill making its debut in the middle of it all. A Miley Artist Series arrives on the platform in October so the thing outlives the media spend. The 2021 video is still the better advert.

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