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The Branding of Hailey & Justin Bieber

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Start with the signal

8 min read

Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Skim
  • Core thesis: The Biebers’ brands work as a coordinated media-and-commerce system: Justin’s Skylark uses tightly controlled niche visual DNA, Hailey’s Rhode uses repeatable mass-market scroll-stopping creative, and their relationship/friend network supplies the attention and narrative that make both systems stronger.
  • Why it matters: It provides a practical framework for separating product-world design, top-of-funnel distribution, cultural collaboration, and recurring narrative—useful beyond celebrity brands, although celebrity attention is an unusually large advantage.
  • Best use: Use it as a creative-strategy reference: extract the visual-DNA, sensory-creative, squad-content, and event-based launch patterns; skip the repeated sections and sponsorship unless evaluating Claude/MCP marketing workflows.

Executive Summary

The speaker frames Hailey and Justin Bieber not as two celebrities with side products, but as an interconnected stack: each has a core career and personal brand, each has a consumer brand, and the couple’s shared appearances, content, collaborators, and products connect those commercial worlds. The key strategic point is that the value and attention do not flow in only one direction; Hailey’s presence can now be as valuable to Justin’s Skylark as Justin’s support is to Rhode.

Skylark is presented as a niche-brand art-direction playbook. Its distinctive asset is consistent visual DNA: repeating grain, blur, motion, color treatments, and product-centered photography across releases, while allowing specific color periods such as purple, red/blue, or black-and-white. The speaker argues that strong visual coherence is necessary but insufficient for a non-celebrity brand; it also needs a deliberate top-of-funnel engine such as styling content, creators, UGC, paid amplification, or design-history explainers.

Rhode is presented as the mass-market alternative: simple creative principles executed relentlessly rather than a highly niche aesthetic. Its campaigns make products sensory through frozen/dripping/tactile imagery, use food as an attention hook, employ culturally current muses, and use oversized or surreal product proportions to interrupt scrolling. The transferable lesson is to make a product image physically imaginable and culturally situated, not merely visually clean.

The final argument is that audience growth increasingly behaves like reality television: value and entertainment are no longer enough without a continuing human storyline. Creators and brands should build a cast, recurring settings, events, collaborations, and product crossovers. The transcript substantially repeats its main sections, so the source is more useful as a skim than a full watch.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: A modern creator-led commerce brand is a stack of career, personal brand, consumer product, and collaborative distribution—not a standalone product line. | Evidence: The speaker describes Justin’s Skylark and Hailey’s Rhode as extensions of their personal brands, with reciprocal appearances and crossovers: Justin attends Rhode launches, Hailey models for Skylark, and the couple creates content together. | Implication: For any founder-led brand, map which assets create attention, which convert demand into product sales, and which partnerships or adjacent brands can credibly connect the ecosystems. | Caveat: The scale and ease of this flywheel depend heavily on celebrity attention and cultural relevance; smaller operators need substitutes for that distribution advantage.
  • Claim: Skylark’s core strength is planned visual DNA: repeated aesthetic rules make ordinary commerce imagery recognizable across time. | Evidence: The speaker cites recurring color, grain/noise, blur, motion, and art-directed flat lays across Skylark’s social feed; individual drops shift through purple, red/blue, or black-and-white periods while retaining the same photographic treatment. Similar emphasis reportedly appeared in Justin’s Coachella set. | Implication: Define a durable set of visual constraints—palette logic, texture, movement, backgrounds, portrait treatment—and apply them to routine e-commerce assets rather than reserving them for campaign work.
  • Claim: Product-centered art direction can preserve a celebrity association without making the celebrity the content’s constant hero. | Evidence: The speaker says Justin appears relatively rarely in Skylark’s core showcase; products are central, while portraits emphasize the wearer and are still rendered with the brand’s consistent motion and grain. | Implication: Use founder or celebrity appearances as selective attention spikes, but ensure the product world can stand independently enough to build recognizable brand equity.
  • Claim: Visual identity alone does not create demand; non-celebrity niche brands need an explicit top-of-funnel content and paid-distribution system. | Evidence: A review of Skylark slides reportedly received 350,000 views largely because of existing interest in Justin Bieber, not exceptional production. As alternatives, the speaker points to Represent and Elwood using continuous styling content, creators in aspirational environments, UGC, and paid boosts; he also cites Ken Sakata’s design-history explainers as conversion-supporting craft content. | Implication: Do not mistake cohesive branding for acquisition strategy: pair product-world creative with a measurable content portfolio, creator seeding, paid amplification, and/or educational authority content. | Caveat: The cited view count is anecdotal, and the speaker does not provide comparable conversion or revenue data for the recommended tactics.
  • Claim: Rhode’s scalable creative system relies on repeatable sensory and surreal cues rather than niche fashion-world signaling. | Evidence: The speaker identifies four recurring devices: frozen or dripping imagery that suggests touch/taste, food cues such as croissants, fruit, and milk, timely 'it-girl' muses including Addison Rae, and oversized Rhode objects that manipulate proportion. | Implication: For broader-market products, build a reusable creative grammar around sensoriality, scale, recognizable human characters, and a consistent product universe—then execute it repeatedly rather than reinventing campaigns. | Caveat: These are creative heuristics rather than demonstrated causal evidence; food and oversized-object motifs can become generic if they are not connected to the product’s own category and positioning.
  • Claim: The emerging content advantage is a 'squad' and storyline model: audiences follow relationships, recurring characters, and events alongside value and entertainment. | Evidence: The speaker characterizes the progression as value or entertainment in 2023, value plus entertainment in 2024–2025, and those elements plus a personal storyline into 2026. Examples include the Biebers’ friend network at Coachella, Kylie Jenner wearing a Justin shirt at Hailey’s request, and the speaker’s own collaborations with Ashwin and Jordan Rogers. | Implication: Treat collaborators, customers, team members, locations, rituals, and industry events as a recurring cast and set of episodes—not isolated influencer posts. | Caveat: The stated year-by-year evolution is the speaker’s trend interpretation, not substantiated by platform-level data; forced personal drama could damage trust or distract from the product.
  • Claim: Cross-brand products and event-based launches turn a relationship narrative into concrete commercial touchpoints. | Evidence: The speaker references Rhode’s iPhone case, Skylark’s tactile/fidget-oriented phone case, Justin’s version designed to hold a cigarette, and pimple-patch collaboration iconography and Coachella billboards aligned with Justin’s performance. He also highlights a Rhode launch appearance where Hailey’s red dress and Justin’s deliberately casual look visually made her the focal point. | Implication: Coordinate product collaborations, campaign imagery, public appearances, and major calendar moments so each reinforces a shared narrative while preserving which brand or person is meant to lead that particular moment.

Detailed Brief

AI marketing-research workflow: Particle through Claude MCP

  • Claims: The sponsored workflow positions Claude as a marketer’s command center, with connected operational and market-intelligence sources available through conversational prompts.; Particle is presented as a source for estimated e-commerce product volume, discounts, historical changes, homepage changes, SMS/email activity, and search trends.
  • Evidence: The speaker demonstrates prompts for Rhode’s top-selling products, saying Claude can return estimated units and top products and flag that Glazing Milk is overperforming in volume.; He suggests using the combined data to investigate pre-order promotion at Coachella or category signals such as Vuori’s best-selling bottom colors.; The described setup is to add Particle’s MCP server URL as a custom Claude connector alongside systems such as Notion, Slack, Asana, and Ahrefs.
  • Caveats: This segment is sponsored by Particle.; The transcript does not validate data accuracy, coverage, permissions, cost, or whether the cited sales figures are directly observed rather than modeled estimates.
  • Implications: For an AI-ops workflow, the relevant pattern is not Particle specifically but exposing specialized market data to an LLM through MCP so strategy questions can be asked in operational context.; Any deployment should distinguish modeled competitive intelligence from first-party facts before using it for inventory, pricing, or investment decisions.

Scaling the celebrity playbook down to ordinary brands

  • Claims: The speaker argues that the same narrative architecture works at multiple scales, from accounts with roughly 10,000 followers to celebrity-scale audiences.; A brand’s recurring 'sets'—such as an office, warehouse, apartment, vehicle, trade show, or local market—can become recognizable storytelling assets.
  • Evidence: Instead of Coachella, the speaker proposes a trade show in an operator’s industry or a local farmer’s market as an equivalent event anchor.; He says his creator group chats became powerful after he encouraged friends to create content, with several allegedly reaching hundreds of thousands of followers.
  • Caveats: The video gives no operating cadence, production budget, attribution framework, or criteria for selecting collaborators; these concepts require adaptation to audience appetite and brand risk.
  • Implications: The useful unit of planning is an ongoing content world: cast, settings, calendar, collaborations, and product beats—not an isolated social-post calendar.; Smaller brands can seek local or niche figures who are entering a relevant cultural moment rather than attempting unattainable celebrity partnerships.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Brand stack: The layered system of career, personal brand, consumer product, and collaborative distribution that the speaker uses to explain the Biebers’ commercial power.
  • Visual DNA: A persistent set of aesthetic rules—color, texture, blur, grain, motion, backgrounds, and photographic treatment—that makes releases recognizable over time.
  • Sensory minimalism: Rhode’s use of simple images that imply physical sensation, such as frozen, dripping, edible-looking, or tactile product compositions.
  • Form and proportion: Using oversized, miniature, or otherwise surreal objects to create immediate visual interruption in social feeds.
  • Squad content: A creator strategy built around friend groups, collaborations, shared events, and relationship dynamics rather than a single isolated personality.
  • Content plus reality TV: The speaker’s label for content that combines informational or entertainment value with ongoing personal lore, relationships, and episodic narrative.
  • Top of funnel: The attention-acquisition layer that celebrity interest supplies for Skylark and that ordinary brands must build through creators, UGC, paid content, or explainers.
  • MCP: Model Context Protocol; described here as the connector mechanism that makes sources such as Particle available inside Claude conversations.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • Create a one-page visual-DNA specification for any consumer-facing project: palette families, texture, motion, background logic, product-to-human ratio, and rules for how each release can vary without losing recognition.
  • Audit whether current growth plans rely on brand polish without a separate, owned top-of-funnel engine; assign tests across creator-led demos, UGC, educational explainers, and paid amplification.
  • For partnership-led launches, design a joint calendar that explicitly names the lead character, supporting characters, event anchor, shared visual motif, product crossover, and post-event content sequence.
  • If evaluating Claude-based market research, pilot MCP-connected sources in a bounded workflow and require provenance labels for first-party, web-derived, and estimated competitive data.
  • Avoid importing celebrity-style personal drama as a tactic; use recurring collaborators, behind-the-scenes operating settings, and real industry moments to create narrative continuity without trust risk.

Source/Metadata

  • Title: The Branding of Hailey & Justin Bieber
  • Transcript words: 7457
  • Duration seconds: 929
  • Timestamp note: No timestamps or chapter markers were provided. The transcript contains substantial duplicated passages, particularly the Skylark, Rhode, Particle, and squad-content sections.
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Full transcript 3762 words · 33 min read
0:00

In this video, we're going to talk about the art direction and branding of Justin and Haley Bieber. Justin is currently on a bit of a redemption arc, or perhaps a full circle, as the headliner on the main stage of Coachella. In this video, I'm going to break down the stack of how their brands operate. We're going to talk about the art direction of Skylark. We are going to talk a bit about the art direction of Road and how those are different, as one is more niche and one is more mass market. How you would have to play in those markets to operate differently if you didn't have that level of fame. This idea of content creation as a squad and a group project in a form of reality TV now, all the way to how they are rolling out products and how it's a real map for how to interact with modern media. Let's lock in.

0:04

So first, let's break down the stack because this is really relevant for anyone who makes content on the internet and wants to think about influence or personal brand today. Each of both Haley and Justin had a career. Granted, in the arts, one was a singer, one was a model. But on top of that career, and as part of it, they have personal brands as extension of the career. That's something where the majority of us are at now, especially if you're watching this video or tuning into my channel. We talk a lot about it. If you're in a creative field in particular, or a business field, the audience and the distribution of content make a huge difference in where you can go. And it's not just about making money from it. It's about being able to tell your story and reach your fans. And this is the pinnacle of being able to do that. Pop superstardom, etc.

0:08

But then they have consumer brands that are extensions of their personal brands. Justin has Skylark, where he is selling clothing and accessories. Haley has her beauty business with Rode that recently sold for an outrageous amount of money, but warranted. But then they have collaborations between the personal brands and the consumer brands of each other. For instance, they make content together. He is present at her debut of a new Rode product, ensuring to help its virality. She's a model for Skylark, a much smaller brand, helping give it attention and notoriety. All of this intertwines, not just them separately building their brands, but them as a couple as well. And the power dynamic works as it shifts. At one point, him showing up to the launch of her beauty product was a big boost for the Rode brand. Today, her even being present inside of his brand is just as important. The dynamic has shifted.

0:13

And what's interesting for both of these, as we're going to dive into the actual art direction tactics, is the art direction of these brands is a perfect extension of their identities. Let's dive into Justin's brand. Those who've been around for a while remember Drew House, a brand he is no longer a part of. He angrily rejected it as he went into this new era, probably a bad business deal. But Drew House, for merchandise for Justin Bieber, was actually pretty good. The designs weren't bad. The lookbooks were pretty solid. It was relatively popular. Pricing was okay. As far as that era of pop artistry participating in streetwear, it was pretty well done. It makes sense. It was in collaboration with a stylist. It was well representative of his overall vibe.

0:17

But as that brand fell apart, we saw Skylark. They do a couple things well I want to call out to think about as you are looking at visual representations of any brand you might work on. The first is their color theory. This brand excellently, inside its art direction, picks its color combinations, picks both of the products and of the visual media with which they showcase it. This was then reflected inside what you saw in his Coachella set. It has that same emphasis on color, on motion, on blur. The brands tie together. But you'll notice this color is a through line through time. If you scroll through the Skylark social media feed, you'll notice that all of these different drops have the same DNA. You see the same grain and noise and motion and color of the core product photos, whether it's a portrait or whether it's just a flat lay. But it moves in period. A whole drop that's all in and around purple and its extensions, one that's a little more in red or blue, one that's in black and white, and is moving over time to create that artistic through line that's done purely through its color selection, as well as the treatments it's giving to the photos.

0:21

It feels cohesive. It feels unique in a relatively busy world today. But this had a plan from the start. They were thinking about this over time. We're going to use this art direction through line through a year, two years, or more of our brand. And we're going to think about the colors of the releases and the colors of the designs in tandem. This is a great example of visual DNA for a brand. And if you're a brand who's doing flat lays, taking every piece of this seriously, a lot of brands will just do those shots on white backgrounds. But can you put them on top of that color? Can you develop whatever your theory is for how the products meld into their background or have their surreal presentation? Taking the everyday photos, what you have to have, the e-commerce shots, and making them interesting. All of this comes back to visual DNA.

0:25

And a couple other big callouts here are that the product is the hero. You see people relatively rarely. You see Justin also very rarely inside the brand's core showcase. The product is always the primary, and it's presented within that artistic vision. And then when they do portraits, they're really portraits of the user. They're showing the sunglass. They're showing the wearer. But they're presented as art. It uses that same motion, that same grain. There's a through line through this that is really well done. Maybe not the most unique out of the box, but a good template for what are the basics of standout visual DNA.

0:29

But this is a good model for most brands for the core. The difference between Justin Bieber's brand and your streetwear brand is that a brand cannot survive without attention at the top. That attention, when you have an influencer, comes from them. Skylark's attention comes from Justin Bieber and the ecosystem around them. I made a video about buying some of their slides. It got 350,000 views. And it wasn't an incredible video. It's not because I made some amazing piece of art. It was a totally okay video. But because the consumption and excitement for what he's doing at his pop stardom is there. People want to know what his brand is doing, and they want to see it reviewed.

0:35

So if you were putting something like this together and you had your visual DNA and your basics, you were elevating your flat lays, you had your own structure for how you were going to do portraits, and you thought through the through lines, what that looks like over time, that's an amazing foundation, especially for a more niche brand. But since he's driving top-of-funnel content, you need to think about what you're going to do there. Are you an influencer? Do you have a personal brand? Are you able to drive that, or are you doing it through content? You'll see a lot of brands today are doing relentless styling content. Whenever I look at who's doing stuff best in class, I typically look at Represent. I also love looking at Elwood, people that are doing really well online and in e-commerce and who are really operating at scale. They're doing real numbers, not doing 100, 200 on a drop. It's very different. And you'll see that if you look at the ads that they're running or you look at the people that are promoting them, they have lots of guys who have a great fashion sense and interesting apartments, going interesting places, styling their clothes. And that becomes top of funnel. And they support that, not just with organic content, but they boost a lot of that content as ads.

0:39

And so if you're building something like that today, that is a way to look at it. I can drive that attention through styling content, influencers, UGC, and ads based on that, or doing that myself. And also what's really popular right now is historical reference content and explainer content. One of my favorite creators, Ken Sakata, does a great job at this. If he's designing a jacket or he's working on something, he'll go into why the indigo wash exists or why a specific item comes from a specific way. People are really interested in the background of fashion and design. You can develop a top of funnel there for people to go buy the garments. I have seen how much Ken cares about his craft, so much so that I've bought items from him because I know he's really caring about the thought and intention put into their design.

0:42

But Rode's playbook for art direction is very different. I did a whole video on this if you want to deep dive into the beauty space. But their playbook for art and creative direction is meant to scale to mass markets. Skylark is a streetwear brand. It's only going to go so far. Maybe you can build it up into a huge menswear brand over time, but it's niche. That's a very different playbook than what needs to scale.

0:48

he's designing a jacket or he's working on something, he'll go into why the indigo wash exists or why a specific item comes from a specific way. People are really interested in the background of fashion and design. You can develop a top of funnel there for people to go buy the garments. I have seen how much Ken cares about his craft, so much so that I've bought items from him because I know he's really caring about the thought and intention put into their design. But Rode's playbook for art direction is very different. I did a whole video on this if you want to deep dive into the beauty space. But their playbook for art and creative direction is meant to scale to mass markets. Skylark is a streetwear brand. It's only going to go so far. Maybe you can build it up into a huge menswear brand over time, but it's niche. That's a very different playbook than what needs to scale.

0:52

And Rode executed excellently on a very straightforward playbook to help leverage, again, that level of attention she's able to give it and the popularity of their actual products with a repeatable playbook that they have stuck to relentlessly. It starts with sensory minimalism. So you will always see something frozen, something dripping, something that you can feel or almost taste as a through line of the art direction. And you have food as a hook. They are trying to stop the scroll. And this is not groundbreaking. It's just executed excellently with a croissant, a piece of fruit, milk. That works because we as humans love to look at food. There's a reason that content does so well. Then they have a third pillar of the right it-girl muses at the right time. Whether it's Addison Rae or whether it's the right model, they are picking people that are relevant in the culture and getting them in campaigns at the right times and executing those campaigns inside the existing Rode world.

0:56

But something comes from being able to leverage that fame and pick those right people. And what I encourage people to think about, because they're always, well, I can't act like that. Yeah, obviously you can't get Addison Rae. But if you are operating as a brand or a personal brand or whatever it is, and you have people in your niche or in your world or in your city who are having their moment, collaborating with them in those times and being a part of that cycle is a really important thing to think about. We'll talk about that a bit when I get to this content-is-squads concept. It's so important for personal brands now. We'll hit that later in the video. And then Rode also has that viral vehicle of form and proportion, oversized things. When you see these girls in these campaigns, they're obviously often interacting with some oversized Rode object. They play with proportion a lot.

0:59

And look, this is the straightforward, this is the ABCs of good art direction. Is it sensory? Can you feel it, smell it, taste it, touch it? That makes it more than a single image. Proportion and scale, whether really small or really large, surrealism in general, is something that immediately stops the scroll. The character and who you choose, they are just taking, again, the basics of this playbook and just executing it as well as they can consistently. Now, I want to quickly tap into some tactical workflows before I get to the premium brands squads collaboration portion of this. So many of you who follow my content know about Particle. Particle is a piece of software that lets you explore what companies are selling on their e-commerce. It will actually show you data in time periods of what products are moving volume, what their average discounts are, how that changes year over year. And they also cover things like how their homepages change, what announcements did they make, what are they doing in SMS and email, the ability to hunt down trends of how product searches or brand name searches have changed over time. You can see I Am Gia's big bump for festival season, all within this great dashboard.

1:04

What I'm going to talk about today is it's actually more accessible than ever. So more and more marketers are using Claude as a command center. You can tie your apps into these, so these integrations are called MCPs, making data available within Claude that you can just ask for in chat and it will show up. And so it will be really common now for a lot of marketers to have something like all their SEO data or their Facebook ads data, results from their campaigns, or their Slacks tied into Claude so they can just reference that within one chat. Well, now Particle is available there too. So you can see here, I was able to search for what are Rode's top-selling products online this week, and it just answers in Claude and it's telling me, here's estimated units, here's the top 10 products by what they're doing, and then summarizing key takeaways. And since it knows me and knows my context and knows what I'm looking for, it will tell me things like Glazing Milk is punching above its weight in volume. And then I can go ask something, what do they do to promote the pre-order of the new pimple patches at Coachella? And it will tell me, oh, they got spotware, here's assets they're pulling in from the Particle data, here's other stuff they're pulling in from the web.

1:08

So all that Particle data and information is just brought into the place where you're chatting and functioning anyway. And you can actually back it up with what are the trends that are happening in activewear right now? What are Vuori's best-selling colors that they have in bottoms? So if you're planning lines or planning product or planning to integrate anything, that Particle data is now directly available in Claude. And to do that, you just go to settings, you go to connectors, and you'll see I'm connected to Notion, Slack, Asana, Ahrefs. You add a custom connector and you can get the name and MCP server URL from your Particle account and just add it. And then it is just immediately available. You don't even have to ask it to go to Particle. It will know. So, super useful tool if you are in brand building, and shout out to Particle, as always, for sponsoring this video.

1:13

Now you've probably heard from me and others that the content theme of this year is the squad. It's not the solo creator. It's the friend group. Who's dating who? The collab posts. People working together, where you don't just follow the one guy who runs the run club. You see multiple of them working together. And then they have their own little group. It's the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives effect. And it plays out in collaboration posts, in group trips, et cetera. It's content plus reality TV, which was inevitable. We were in this era of value or entertainment content. That's where we were in 2023, where if you made really valuable content, then I made marketing how-tos and tutorials specifically, and we were ultra valuable. There's no other content out there like that. And some people could just do skits or entertainment or just be hot, and you could work with either of those.

1:18

Then 2024, 2025, it was value plus entertainment. So you had to be able to wrap something educational in a great story. And if you were just producing content that was funny or looked good and didn't have any substance behind it, that began to fall off too. And then now, going into 2026, it's those things plus the storyline. People want to know you a bit as a human being. They want to get in a little bit of your tea or your drama or where you're going for your family trip. They want to see, oh, you're actually friends with those other influencers and you guys hang out together. Oh, and you make content together. Oh, you guys are all going to be in France for Cannes. That's how the social media experience functions right now. It's really important to think about for creators of all types, because this is an amazing time to do it with your friends.

1:23

And I'm one of those guys where I've convinced so many of my friends to become content creators, many of them now in the hundreds of thousands. This is such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be able to leverage that attention, either to make money or for your career. And really, the barrier to entry is just doing it. But if you do it together, it's always easier. I was begging my friends a lot at the beginning because I wanted people to relate to who were also doing it. And then those group chats ended up becoming really powerful. And then Justin, Hailey is the top example, right? And it plays out not just with the two of them, but their friend group. Kylie Jenner this week is wearing a shirt with Justin's face on it at Hailey's behest at Coachella while they're all making mass content. Now, that's this happening at the top level, but it works just as well down below. People know that since Ashwin and Jordan Rogers and I have a podcast and collab, they may learn about those creators because they're fans of me and vice versa. They may experience the podcast, they'll see us at an event, they'll watch those, begin to build the lore around it. And that's probably the least interesting example, right?

1:27

I was begging my friends a lot at the beginning because I wanted people to relate who are also doing it. And then those group chats ended up becoming really powerful. And then Justin Haley is the top example, right? And it plays out not just with the two of them, but their friend group.

1:32

Kylie Jenner this week is wearing a shirt with Justin's face on it at Haley's behest at Coachella while they're all making mass content. Now, that's this happening at the top level, but it works just as well down below. People know that since Ashwin and Jordan Rogers and I have a podcast and collab, they may learn about those creators because they're fans of me and vice versa. They may experience the podcast, they'll see us at an event, they'll watch those, begin to build the lore around it. And that's probably the least interesting example, right? We're marketing creators. We don't have drama. We don't have tea. We're dads. There's not some huge storyline. But if you do have the ability to play within that, there's a lot that comes from building those narrative arcs. Because those same narrative arcs are always how I encourage brands to think about their marketing. Who are the characters in your story? What are the events that they're going to? What are the sets people see you in on a recurring basis? Your office, your warehouse. It's the same thing with a personal brand. All of your story, your apartment, your car, where you're going, or your trips, this is an arc that plays out like a TV show. And all the other people that can interact with it are characters. And guess what? If that show is only about one person, it's probably not that exciting. And in a world where content gets more and more competitive, think like that to stay on the edge. And they've played this up a lot, right? One of the most famous circumstances of this is when Haley and Justin showed up to when she launched the donut glaze product, right? They played up the presentation, the magnetism, and the opposites of her in that red dress and him looking like a slob, both representative of their brands. But they knew what they were doing. They are calling out, bringing attention to that moment, representing them separately, this being really him playing the background, and it's her moment. That visual dichotomy presented her as the focus, as the star in that moment. But they play this even further. There's collab products between the brands. Obviously, one of her most prolific products is the Rode iPhone case. And he's done the same. I have, this is actually one of the Skylark iPhone cases. It's a sensory case. You put your hand in and around it, which I absolutely love. You can press the bubble. As someone who fidgets with stuff all the time, having my phone be like this has been great. And then he launched his variation where you can put basically a Lucy within the case. They're collaborating on products between brands, attaching the universes, and now on the pimple patch collab, the iconography that's more associated with him, the billboards at Coachella around his performance, the announcements that play into that, the arcs aligning together. This is just the execution at the highest, best level of what everyone who's working through premium brands and brands on shelves should be thinking about. Who are those characters? What are those events? It doesn't have to be Coachella. It can be the trade show in your industry. It can be the local farmer's market. Content is all about the scale to which you operate. It's the locality of the region you're in or in terms of the industry that you focus on. It all scales on multiple levels from 10,000 followers to 10 million followers.

1:36

So if you want to dive deeper into art direction playbooks, I'm linking the road playbook here. And in one of my next few videos, I'm going to be getting into the art of yapping and talking online and how people are building these more organic presences. There's more content coming there soon. If you want to see any other of these art or creative direction breakdowns around other personalities or brands, let me know below. Some of my best videos come from those recommendations. And as always, thank you all so much for watching. All of this intertwines, not just them separately building their brands, but them as couples as well.

1:46

And the power dynamic works as it shifts. At one point, him showing up to the launch of her beauty product was a big boost for the Rode brand. Today, her even being present inside of his brand is just as important. The dynamic has shifted. And what's interesting for both of these, we're going to dive into the actual R-direction tactics, is the R-direction of these brands are perfect extensions of their identities. Let's dive into Justin's brand. So those who've run around for a while, you remember Drew House, a brand he is no longer a part of. He angrily rejected as he went into this

2:12

new era, probably a bad business deal. But Drew House for merchandise for Justin Bieber was actually pretty good. The designs weren't bad. The lookbooks were pretty solid. He was relatively popular. Pricing was okay. As far as that era of pop artistry participating in streetwear, it was pretty well done. It makes sense. It was in the collaboration with a stylist. It was well representative of his overall vibe. But as that brand fell apart, we saw Skylark. They do a couple things well I want to call out to think about as you are looking at visual representations of any brand you might work on.

2:40

The first is their color theory. This brand excellently inside its R-direction picks its color combinations, picks both of the products and of the visual medias with which they showcase it. This was then reflected inside what you saw inside his Coachella set. It has that same emphasis on color, on motion, on blur. The brands tied together. But you'll notice this color is a through line through time. If you scroll through the Skylark social media feed, you'll notice that all of these different drops have the same DNA, right? You see the same grain and noise and motion and color of the

3:09

core product photos, whether it's a portrait or whether it's just a flat lay. But it moves in period. A whole drop that's all in and around purple and it's extensions, one that's a little more in red or blue, one that's in black and white, and is moving over time to create that artistic through line that's doing purely through its color selection, as well as the treatments it's giving to the photos. It feels cohesive. It feels unique in a relatively busy world of today. But this had a plan from the start. They were thinking about this over time. We're going to use this art direction through line

3:37

through a year, two years, or more of our brand. And we're going to think about the colors of the releases and the colors of the designs in tandem. This is a great example of visual DNA for a brand. And if you're a brand who's doing flat lays, taking every piece of this seriously, a lot of brands will just do those shots on white backgrounds. But can you put them on top of that color? Can you develop whatever your theory is for how the products meld into their background or have their surreal presentation? Taking the everyday photos, what you have to have, the e-commerce shots,

4:04

and making them interesting. All of this comes back to visual DNA. And a couple other big callouts here is the product is the hero. You see people relatively rarely. You see Justin also very rarely inside the brand's core showcase. The product is always the primary and it's presented within that artistic vision. And then when they do do portraits, they're really portraits of the user. They're showing the sunglass. They're showing the wearer. But they're presented as art. It uses that same motion, that same grain. There's a through line through this that is really well done. Maybe not

4:30

the most unique out of the box, but a good template for what are the basics of standout visual DNA. But this is a good model for most brands for the core. The difference between Justin Bieber's brand and your streetwear brand is that a brand cannot survive without attention at the top. That attention, when you have an influencer, comes from them. Skylark's attention comes from Justin Bieber and the ecosystem around them. I made a video about buying some of their slides. It got 350,000 views. And it wasn't an incredible video. It's not because I made some amazing piece of art. It was a totally

4:57

okay video. But because the consumption and excitement for what he's doing at his pop stardom is there. People want to know what his brand is doing and they want to see it reviewed. So if you were putting something like this together and you had your visual DNA and your basics, you were elevating your flat lays, you had your own structure for how you were going to do portraits and you thought through the through lines, what that looks like over time, that's an amazing foundation, especially for a more niche brand. But since he's driving top of funnel content, you need to think about what

5:21

you're going to do there. Are you an influencer? Do you have a personal brand? Are you able to drive that? Or are you doing it through content? You'll see a lot of brands today are doing relentless styling content. Whenever I look at who's doing stuff best in class, I typically look at represent. I also love looking at Elwood. People that you know are doing really well online and in e-commerce and who are really operating at scale. They're doing real numbers, not doing 100, 200 on a drop. It's very different. And you'll see that if you look at the ads that they're running or you look at the people that are promoting them, they have lots of guys who have a

5:48

great fashion sense and interesting apartments going interesting places, styling their clothes. And that becomes top of funnel. And they support that, not just organic content, but they boost a lot of those content as ads. And so if you're building something like that today, that is a way to look at it. I can drive that attention through styling content, influencers, UGC, and ads based on that or doing that myself. And also what's really popular right now is historical reference content and explainer content. One of my favorite creators, Ken Sakata, does a great job at this. If

6:14

he's designing a jacket or he's working on something, he'll go into why the indigo wash exists or why a specific item comes from a specific way. People are really interested in the background of fashion and design. You can develop a top of funnel there for people to go buy the garments. I have seen how much Ken cares about his craft so much so that I've bought items from him because I know he's really caring about the thought and intention put into their design. But Rode's playbook for art direction is very different. I did a whole video on this if you want to deep dive into the beauty space.

6:40

But their playbook for art and creative direction is meant to scale to mass markets. Skylark is a streetwear brand. It's only going to go so far. Maybe you can build it up into a huge menswear brand over time, but it's niche. That's a very different playbook than what needs to scale. And Rode executed excellently on a very straightforward playbook to help leverage, again, that level of attention she's able to give it and the popularity of their actual products with a repeatable playbook that they have stuck to relentlessly. It starts with sensory minimalism. So you will always see something

7:07

frozen, something dripping, something that you can feel or almost taste as a through line of the art direction. And you have food as a hook. They are trying to stop the scroll. And this is not groundbreaking. It's just executed excellently with a croissant, a piece of fruit, milk. That works because we as humans love to look at food. There's a reason that content does so well. Then they have a third pillar of the right it girl muses at the right time. Whether it's Addison Rae or whether it's the right model, they are picking people that are relevant in the culture and getting them in

7:34

campaigns at the right times and executing those campaigns inside the existing Rode world. But something comes from being able to leverage that fame and pick those right people. And what I encourage people to think about, because they're always like, well, I can't act like that. Yeah, obviously you can't get Addison Rae. But if you are operating as a brand or a personal brand or whatever it is, and you have people in your niche or in your world or in your city who are having their moment, collaborating with them in those times and being a part of that cycle is a really important

8:00

thing to think about. We'll talk about that a bit when I get to this content is squads concept. It's so important for personal brands now. We'll hit that later in the video. And then Rode also has that viral vehicle of form and proportion, oversized things. When you see these girls in these campaigns, they're obviously often interacting with some oversized Rode object. They play with proportion a lot. And look, this is the straightforward, this is the ABCs of good art direction. Is it sensory? Can you feel it, smell it, taste it, touch it? That makes it more than a single image. Proportion in scale, whether

8:28

really small or really large, surrealism in general, is something that immediately stops the scroll. The character and who you choose it, they are just taking, again, the basics of this playbook and just executing it as well as they can consistently. Now, I want to quickly tap into some tactical workflows before I get to the premium brands squads collaboration portion of this. So many of you who follow my content know about Particle. Particle is a piece of software that lets you explore what companies are selling on their e-commerce. It will actually show you data in time periods of what

8:56

products are moving volume, what their average discounts are, how that changes year over year. And they also cover things like how their homepages change, what announcements did they make, what are they doing in SMS and email, the ability to hunt down trends of how product searches or brand name searches have changed over time. Like you can see, I am Gia's big bump for festival season, all within this great dashboard. What I'm going to talk about today is it's actually more accessible than ever. So more and more marketers are basically using Claude as a command center. You can tie your

9:23

apps into these, so these integrations, integrations are called MCPs, making data available within Claude that you can just ask for in chat and it will show up. And so it will be really common now for a lot of marketers to have something like all their SEO data or their Facebook ads data, results from their campaigns or their slacks tied into Claude so they can just reference that within one chat. Well, now Particle is available there too. So you can see here, I was able to search for what are Rhodes' top selling products online this week and it just answers in Claude and it's telling me here's estimated units,

9:52

here's the top 10 products by what they're doing, and then summarizing key takeaways. And since it knows me and knows my context and knows what I'm looking for, it will tell me things like glazing milk is punching above its weight and volume. And then I can go ask something, what do they do to promote the pre-order of the new pimple patches at Coachella? And it will tell me, oh, they got spotware, here's assets they're pulling in from the particle data, here's other stuff they're pulling in from the web. So basically all that particle data and information is just brought into the place where you're

10:15

chatting and functioning anyway. And you can actually back it up with what is the trends that are happening in activewear right now? What are VWARI's most best-selling colors that they have in bottoms? So if you're planning lines or planning product or planning to integrate anything, that particle data is now directly available in Claude. And to do that, you just go to settings, you go to connectors, and you'll see I'm already, I'm connected to Notion, Slack, Asana, Ahrefs. You add a custom connector and you can get the name and MCP server URL from your particle account and just add it. And then it is just immediately

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available. You don't even have to ask it to go to particle. It will know. So super useful tool if you are in brand building and shout out to particle as always for sponsoring this video. Now you've probably heard from me and others that the content theme of this year is the squad. It's not the solo creator. It's the friend group. Who's dating who? The collab posts. People working together where you don't just follow the one guy who runs the run club. You see multiple of them working together. And then they have their own little group. It's the secret lives of Mormon wives effect. And it plays out in

11:14

collaboration posts, in group trips, et cetera. It's content plus reality TV, which was inevitable. We were in this era of value or entertainment content. That's where we were in like 2023, where if you made really valuable content, like then I made marketing, how-tos, and tutorials specifically. And we were ultra valuable. There's no other content out there like that. And some people could just do skits or entertainment or just be hot. And you could work with either of those. Then 2024, 2025, it was value plus entertainment. So you had to be able to rap being something educational in a great story. And if you were just producing content that was funny or look good

11:45

and didn't have any substance behind it, that began to fall off too. And then now going into 2026, it's those things plus the storyline. People want to know you a bit as a human being. They want to get in a little bit of your tea or your drama or where you're going for your family trip. They want to see, oh, you're actually friends with those other influencers and you guys hang out together. Oh, and you make content together. Oh, you guys are all going to be in France for con. That's how the social media experience functions right now. It's really important to think about for creators of all types, because this is an amazing time to do it with your friends.

12:12

And I'm one of those guys where I've convinced so many of my friends to become content creators, many of them now in the hundreds of thousands. This is such a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to leverage that attention, either to make money or for your career. And really, the barrier to entry is just doing it. But if you do it together, it's always easier. I was begging my friends a lot at the beginning is because I wanted people to relate to who are also doing it. And then those group chats ended up becoming really powerful. And then Justin Haley is the top example, right? And it plays out not just with the two of them, but their friend group.

12:37

Kylie Jenner this week is wearing a shirt with Justin's face on it at Haley's behest at Coachella while they're all making mass content. Now, that's this happening at the top level, but it works just as well down below. People know that since Ashwin and Jordan Rogers and I have a podcast and collab, they may learn about those creators because they're fans of me and vice versa. They may experience the podcast, they'll see us in an event, they'll watch those, begin to build the lore around it. And that's probably the least interesting example, right? We're marketing creators. We don't have drama. We don't have tea. We're dads. There's not some huge

13:04

storyline. But if you do have the ability to play within that, there's a lot that comes from building those narrative arcs. Because those same narrative arcs is always how I encourage brands to think about their marketing. Who are the characters in your story? What are the events that they're going? What are the sets people see you in on a recurring basis? Your office, your warehouse. It's the same thing with a personal brand. All of your story, your apartment, your car, where you're going or your trips, this is an arc that plays out like a TV show. And all the other people that can interact with it are characters. And guess what? If that show is

13:31

only about one person, it's probably not that exciting. And in a world where content gets more and more competitive, think like that to stay on the edge. And they've played this up a lot, right? One of the most famous circumstances of this is when Haley and Justin showed up to when she launched the donut glaze product, right? They played up the presentation, the magnetism and the opposites of her in that red dress and him looking like a slob, both representative of their brands. But they knew what they were doing. They are calling out, bringing attention to that moment, representing

13:58

them separately. This being really him playing the background and it's her moment. That visual dichotomy presented her as the focus, as the star in that moment. But they play this even further. There's collab products between the brands. Obviously, one of her most prolific products is the Rode iPhone case. And he's done the same. I have, this is actually one of the Skylark iPhone cases. It's a sensory case. You put your hand in and around it, which I absolutely love. You can press the bubble. As someone who fidgets with stuff all the time, having my phone be like, this has been great. And then

14:23

he launched his variation where you can put basically like a Lucy within the case. They're collaborating on products between brands, attaching the universes and now on the pimple patch collab, the iconography that's more associated with him, the billboards at Coachella around his performance, the announcements that play into that, the arcs aligning together. This is just the execution at the highest, best level of what everyone who's working through premium brands and brands on shelves should be thinking about. Who are those characters? What are those events? It doesn't have to be Coachella. It

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can be the trade show in your industry. It can be the local farmer's market. Content is all about the scale to which you operate at. It's the locality of the region you're in or in terms of the industry that you focus on. It all scales on multiple levels from 10,000 followers to 10 million followers. So if you want to dive deeper into art direction playbooks, I'm linking the road playbook here. And in one of my next few videos, I'm going to be getting into the art of yapping and talking online and how people are building these kind of more organic presences. There's more content coming there

15:18

soon. If you want to see any other of these art or creative direction breakdowns around other personalities or brands, let me know below. Some of my best videos come from those recommendations. And as always, thank you all so much for watching.

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