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The Art Direction Playbook for New Luxury (Jacquemus case study)

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Start with the signal

9 min read

Summary

At-a-Glance

  • Verdict: Skim
  • Core thesis: Jacquemus rapidly acquired the perception of a heritage luxury house by consistently combining craft storytelling, symbolic iconography, aspirational settings, short visual vignettes, exaggerated proportion, and French whimsy—but its lack of an exceptional signature product limits how durable that status can become.
  • Why it matters: The case shows how a newer company can use coherent world-building to compress decades of brand perception, while also demonstrating why attention and aesthetic prestige cannot substitute indefinitely for product quality and repeat ownership.
  • Best use: Use the six-part framework as a brand and campaign-planning checklist; skim past the promotional interlude, repeated transcript sections, and Paris travel recommendations.

Executive Summary

The speaker distinguishes traditional luxury, accumulated through decades of craft and history, from “created luxury,” in which a newer brand deliberately constructs the signals of heritage, prestige, and cultural importance. Jacquemus, founded in 2009, is presented as an unusually successful example: after roughly a decade of development, its tiny bags, destination shows, oversized objects, celebrity moments, and collaborations generated attention comparable to much older fashion houses.

Its art-direction system rests on six connected principles. Craft content supplies evidence that the products deserve premium treatment, while oversized thimbles, scissors, thread, and similar iconography make craftsmanship memorable. Place and setting let the brand absorb the associations of destinations such as the south of France, Brazil, Bond Street, Selfridges, and Italy. Short vignettes then turn that world into feed-native stories, while exaggerated proportion and whimsy provide immediate visual hooks.

The critical limitation is product. The speaker argues that Jacquemus has generated far more conversation than ownership and has not yet established a universally recognized, exceptional artifact that creates repeat purchase, pride, and long-term loyalty. Its creative foundation could support a lasting luxury house if such a product emerges, but without that layer, the brand remains an unusually effective simulation of luxury rather than a fully resolved luxury proposition.

A sponsored tangent argues that AI-mediated discovery is changing SEO: Ahrefs reports that “Best X” listicles account for 43.8% of page types cited by ChatGPT, YouTube mentions have a 0.737 correlation with AI brand visibility, and AI overviews have reduced clicks to the first search result by 58%. The relevant operating point is to optimize for inclusion in generated answers and to consider agent-assisted search workflows, although the figures and product recommendation come from a sponsor segment.

Key Takeaways

  • Claim: A new brand can compress the perception-building timeline of luxury through disciplined art direction, but even a seemingly sudden breakout generally rests on years of prior work. | Evidence: Jacquemus was founded in 2009 and began its rapid ascent around 2018, meaning the supposed overnight success followed roughly a decade of development. | Implication: Ken should treat coherent creative systems as a way to accelerate trust and category positioning, not as a shortcut that makes operational substance unnecessary. | Caveat: Art direction can accelerate perceived prestige, not eliminate the need for time, craft, product development, or cultural consistency.
  • Claim: Showing craft—and repeatedly encoding it in recognizable symbols—helps justify premium pricing by creating both evidence and memory. | Evidence: Jacquemus shows looms, craftspeople, sewing, and construction processes, then turns thimbles, thread, and scissors into oversized campaign objects carried through a town. The speaker compares this with Loewe publishing bag-making processes and patterns on YouTube. | Implication: Premium positioning should pair verifiable process proof with a small, repeatable icon system rather than relying on abstract claims of quality. | Caveat: The perception of quality can support pricing only if the actual product is meaningfully better than cheaper alternatives.
  • Claim: Locations function as borrowed brand equity: a campaign can absorb the cultural meaning, status, and lifestyle associations of the place in which it is staged. | Evidence: Jacquemus builds launches and pop-ups around destinations including Brazil, the south of France, Bond Street, Selfridges, and Italy, sometimes publishing 10–12 posts around one location. | Implication: Campaign planning should begin with a defined map of settings that express the desired customer identity, not merely with a list of visually attractive venues. | Caveat: Borrowed prestige becomes superficial if the location has no credible relationship to the audience, product, or brand identity.
  • Claim: The most effective social creative behaves like a vignette: a compact, cinematic scene that communicates an entire brand world in approximately 15 seconds. | Evidence: Examples include a giant CGI bag moving through France, people in boat scenarios, and figures carrying an enormous thimble. The speaker also cites a vintage-car and gas-station shoot for his own brand and Understated Leather’s “In Her Element” modern-cowgirl campaign with a Clydesdale. | Implication: A content system should be organized around repeatable micro-stories with a recognizable character, setting, and tension rather than disconnected product shots.
  • Claim: Exaggerated proportion and whimsy are Jacquemus’s primary feed-level hooks: scale interrupts attention, while playfulness distinguishes the brand from formal luxury conventions. | Evidence: The speaker points to tiny bags, giant craft tools, logos carved into butter, playful illustrations, cheeky copy, and odd visual moments. He notes that Rhode continues to use exaggerated scale effectively even after the device has become common. | Implication: Visual hooks should be selected for both stopping power and proprietary fit; copying a familiar scale gimmick without a distinctive brand attitude will produce reach but little memory. | Caveat: Oversized or miniature objects are now heavily imitated, so the tactic still attracts attention but no longer guarantees distinctiveness.
  • Claim: Attention does not complete the luxury equation; an enduring luxury house also needs a signature product that customers value, repurchase, and treat as an artifact. | Evidence: The speaker observes that Jacquemus appears ubiquitous in conversation but that few people seem to own more than one bag, suit, dress, sneaker, or collaboration item, and he argues that the brand lacks a core product associated with exceptional ownership experiences. | Implication: Ken should separate attention metrics from product-market durability and look for repeat ownership, advocacy, and signature-use cases before concluding that a prestige brand has defensible value. | Caveat: This is the speaker’s qualitative assessment rather than sales, retention, or customer-satisfaction data, and he allows that the defining product could emerge over the next decade.
  • Claim: AI-generated answers are shifting discovery value from ranking and clicks toward being cited or summarized, with YouTube potentially serving as an important visibility input. | Evidence: In the sponsored Ahrefs segment, the speaker reports that “Best X” listicles represent 43.8% of page types cited by ChatGPT, YouTube mentions have a 0.737 correlation with AI brand visibility, and AI overviews have reduced clicks to the first result by 58%, up 34.5% over ten months. | Implication: Ken’s GTM systems should monitor answer-engine citations, third-party YouTube mentions, and inclusion in category comparisons alongside conventional rankings and click traffic. | Caveat: These statistics are supplied in a paid Ahrefs promotion; the transcript does not explain the study methodology, sample, causality, or applicability by category.

Detailed Brief

Two ways to manufacture the appearance of heritage

  • Claims: Created luxury can either revive and borrow from genuine historical material or build a new mythology through contemporary cultural execution.; The speaker presents Buly 1803 as the heritage-revival model: a modern company uses the history and visual codes of an older perfume house to make a relatively new operation feel centuries old.
  • Evidence: The transcript says the current Buly business was founded in 2014 and acquired by LVMH in 2021.; Its ornate objects, engraved combs, scents, soaps, retail environment, and long French emails detailing travel and product origins reinforce the impression of age and ceremony.
  • Caveats: The video treats successful acquisition by LVMH as validation of luxury creation but does not provide revenue, margin, customer-retention, or acquisition-value evidence.
  • Implications: A credible premium narrative needs an explicit source of legitimacy: authentic inherited history, demonstrated expertise, or a newly built cultural world strong enough to perform the same trust function.

Creative direction requires an execution network, not just taste

  • Claims: Advanced creative direction includes defining the world, articulating it clearly enough to commission production, and assembling the people and logistics needed to realize it.; The speaker treats the ability to locate settings, coordinate models, and produce campaigns as part of creative direction rather than as downstream project management.
  • Evidence: He recommends listing the farms, streets, cities, regions, and social environments that embody the brand, then defining the stories that could occur within each.; His examples span vintage vehicles and gas stations for a niche valuables customer, plus country, bar, and apartment scenes for Understated Leather’s modern-cowgirl identity.
  • Caveats: The video does not address budgets, rights clearance, production timelines, attribution, testing methodology, or how to maintain consistency across multiple creative teams.
  • Implications: The practical moat in creative work may lie as much in briefs, production systems, talent relationships, and repeatable execution as in the originality of an initial concept.

Luxury as national soft power

  • Claims: Brands participate in cultural soft power by projecting a country’s taste, music, fashion, and worldview beyond its economic or geographic scale.; The speaker argues that French cultural influence once benefited from a connected ecosystem of music, street culture, fashion, and luxury but has diminished as other cultural centers have risen.
  • Evidence: He references Justice, Ed Banger Records, Daft Punk, Pigalle basketball activations with Nike, and Louis Vuitton’s appointment of Virgil Abloh as components of an earlier French cultural moment.; He contrasts that period with American influence through hip-hop and YouTube and Korea’s growing global impact through beauty, fashion, and music.
  • Caveats: The claim that Jacquemus is effectively what remains of recent French cultural influence is rhetorical and is not supported by comparative market or cultural-impact data.
  • Implications: Category leaders should be evaluated within broader cultural ecosystems: shifts in music, creators, cities, and national imagery can alter which brand codes feel globally aspirational.

Notable Concepts & Terms

  • Created luxury: A newer brand’s deliberate construction of heritage, prestige, and cultural legitimacy through design, narrative, retail, and content rather than through many decades of accumulated history.
  • Traditional luxury: Luxury authority built over long periods through craft, provenance, product excellence, institutional continuity, and inherited cultural recognition.
  • Iconography of craft: The repeated use of tools and symbols such as thimbles, thread, scissors, looms, and makers to make craftsmanship immediately legible and memorable.
  • Place and setting: The strategy of staging a brand in environments whose cultural meaning and status transfer to the brand’s perceived identity.
  • Vignette: A short, cinematic, feed-native scene that implies a larger customer lifestyle or brand world without requiring extended exposition.
  • Proportion: The use of extreme scale—very large or very small objects—as an immediate visual interruption and social-content hook.
  • Whimsy: Cheeky, playful, or absurd creative details that make a formal luxury presentation feel distinctive, human, and culturally French.
  • Soft power: The ability of a country or cultural ecosystem to gain global influence through desirable music, fashion, beauty, media, and brand imagery rather than direct political or economic force.

Operator Notes / Why Ken Should Care

  • Require premium-brand dashboards to distinguish awareness, first purchase, repeat purchase, product advocacy, and signature-product concentration.
  • Create a campaign brief template with mandatory fields for customer character, setting, 15-second narrative, visual hook, proof of quality, and intended memory association.
  • Audit whether each proposed spectacle reinforces a durable brand code or merely borrows a current social-media gimmick.
  • Build an approved location and production-partner database so creative concepts can move from pitch to execution without rebuilding the network for every campaign.
  • Add answer-engine citation share, third-party YouTube mentions, and inclusion in “Best X” comparisons to search reporting, but validate the sponsored Ahrefs benchmarks independently.
  • Avoid scaling paid attention around a prestige narrative until customer evidence confirms that the underlying product experience supports the promised price and status.

Source/Metadata

  • Title: The Art Direction Playbook for New Luxury (Jacquemus case study)
  • Transcript words: 6503
  • Duration seconds: 1048
  • Timestamp note: No timestamps or chapter markers were provided. The transcript contains substantial duplicated passages, including the sponsor segment and much of the second half.
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Full transcript 4141 words · 29 min read
0:00

SPEAKER_01

In 2018, a tiny bag suddenly appeared everywhere. And all of a sudden, a new luxury brand appeared in our lives. Its logo carved into butter. Beach clubs, lavish displays of French wealth. Whimsy, oversized thimbles, boats, celebrity. Perhaps one of the best attention-getting moments in history. Jacquemus. The hype continued. Sold out Nike collabs, bags, shoes. The brand seemed to be everywhere. But even in the most luxury of places, with people consuming fashion, no one you knew actually owned it. Maybe one piece. Maybe. All of the conversation, all of the attention, for what? This is the art direction of French luxury. The creative direction of Jacquemus. And an excuse for me to talk in depth about traditional versus created luxury. Soft power culturally in the world. How Jacquemus actually pulled luxury without having to have the time and history behind it using the power of art direction. We're going to break that down into six art direction and creative direction principles you can learn from. And end with a quick guide if you're ever in Paris. The marketing of luxury, the prestige and prestige price points, are something I've spent my entire career working on. I have a super in-depth new luxury ebook I put together with Van Group, who've done things like the Rode and Jacob & Co. websites you can get for free down below. And it's apt timing to do this video. Because I'm 24 hours from arriving in Cannes, myself to begin the summer lock-in from the south of France. I'm so excited to talk to you about this topic. It's both fun and educational and pertinent for how we consume in the modern times. Let's lock in. So I was in Paris the other week. As many of you know, I do workshops around the world. I have been speaking in London at the Vervant Pulse conference prior about creators. But I was in Paris specifically to work with a brand on content. And in particular, luxury content. That's always the question, right? How do you succeed on social media while keeping the allure of luxury? And I will take any excuse to spend time in Paris, a city that I love. And as I was there, I was having this conversation with people I was with and having these moments actually inside the city about this idea of traditional versus created luxury. So inside one of my favorite department stores there, Les Bon Marche, and I'm going to butcher pronunciation this whole time. I apologize for my American-ness. I was at the 1803 Bully counter. 1803 Bully is a very interesting brand. At first glance, they look like they have been around for centuries. But in reality, it's only been a few decades. The brand was actually founded in 2014 and acquired by LVMH in 2021. A pretty quick route to a luxury creation to massive luxury exit. But it is based on the heritage of something that existed far before. An old perfume house that faded into history. And they play into that hard. You would not know from looking at their ornate objects or the beautiful setup of the place that I was in to pick up a souvenir for my wife with their engraved combs and various scents and soaps. Their emails that go out extremely lengthily in French, detailing all the wherewithal and travels behind a new product. It feels like something that's been around for a hundred years. And it borrows pretty lengthily from the history of those things. But it is most certainly not. It is new. Borrowing from the concepts of traditional luxury to sell something traditional. You buy from 1803 Bully. You buy it as a tourist. You buy it as a souvenir or a gift. To feel you are partaking in this old ancient piece of luxury that really is something new designed to sell. So much so, it's been embraced by the largest of the French luxury houses. And this concept, the idea of French luxury overall, plays into the soft power of the world. What do I mean by that? So the culture that a place creates, whether that's a state, a city, a country, impacts its power on the world stage. When I was young and first moved to New York, some of the biggest bands in the world were Justice. Ed Banger Records was incredibly popular. Daft Punk had crossed over with Kanye and of their own volition into this powerhouse of culture. The Pagai basketball courts were Nike's hottest activation, one of the most social media dominant experiential things of that time. Louis Vuitton attacked Virgil Abloh shortly thereafter, entering into a new era of what French luxury meant in the modern hypebeast movement and executing it impeccably. And with that, you would see the country of France, the idea of French luxury, the idea of French interpretation of culture in music, in fashion, had an outsized influence compared to the size of the country. Compared to anything else that the country was doing in the world, the culture permeated. And interestingly enough, the majority of that has faded away because these things change. Hip-hop music was that for the U.S. for a long time. Now when I travel, it's a lot more of how many people learn about the world in America through YouTube and American YouTubers. We see Korea's rise in the global stage with beauty, with fashion, with music influencing the world in an outsized way, far more so than whatever that French impact had been in the previous era. All of these are part of shifting global landscapes to change how we consume, how brands are put together and are fascinating to think about, probably its own video. But for now, for France in particular, that's all faded. And what there is left is really the last six or eight years, Jacquemus. It's the beginning of an apt metaphor of where the French luxury is now. Now on one hand, someone you can easily admire, someone who built a luxury house out of thin air, we'll talk about in a moment. But on the other hand, a good metaphor for the complicated state of old luxury inside the world we adopt today. So why I always love to look at this example isn't just the fact it's so viral, everyone has appreciated it, you've seen it as a brand come across your feed. It's that the brand started in 2009 and in about a decade in 2018 began an extremely rapid ascent to being considered on par with the largest fashion brands in the world. With its shows generating as much attention, a global name associated with luxury with nothing that has probably ever moved that fast in our history. One of the only other examples you can talk about is 1803 Bully, which did that on a much smaller scale and a very different category. And they did that by executing an art direction and creative direction playbook impeccably.

0:03

SPEAKER_01

So why I always love to look at this example isn't just the fact it's so viral, everyone has appreciated it, you've seen it as a brand come across your feed. It's that the brand started in 2009 and in about a decade in 2018 began an extremely rapid ascent to being considered on par with the largest fashion brands in the world. With its shows generating as much attention, a global name associated with luxury with nothing that has probably ever moved that fast in our history. One of the only other examples you can talk about is 1803 Bully, which did that on a much smaller scale and a very different category.

0:14

SPEAKER_01

And they did that by executing an art direction and creative direction playbook impeccably. There's a formula for emulating luxury in the modern era. I do always love to call out this, it wasn't overnight, it wasn't started in 2016 and then 2018 had the big moment. It was 10 years of working through this. Because I do think there's a lot of perception that if you want to start a premium brand now, a luxury brand, begin building that, you can do it in a handful of years. And even this that seemed like an overnight rise was a decade in. But the reality of real luxury is it's over the course of decades and decades in craft. Some of these things we'll touch on in a moment.

0:30

SPEAKER_01

But what you found is because of the visual world that we were in in that 2018 to 2026 timeframe, aesthetics play an outsized role in the establishment of luxury. Same thing with the execution of social media. And they did a playbook that was as good as any brand has ever done. Let's start with the core, the two things that really defined this. They helped it associate itself with old luxury as a newer brand. The first is craft. So you will note when you go through the social media, you will see that the brand is showcasing the craft that goes into the product.

0:47

SPEAKER_01

Whether you're seeing these ornate looms or craftsmen working on things, they are taking the time to show that it is a luxury creation. And when you look at the pillars of what makes someone want to spend a lot of money on a thing, quality is one of the non-negotiables. You need to have a thing that equals to at least somewhat near where the price point of what you're doing is and at least be significantly better than what is significantly cheaper. Now, you have the actual quality of the product itself, and we'll talk about Jacques Mus' quality in a bit.

0:55

SPEAKER_01

But even the perception of quality, the showcasing of the process, the details that you care about the craft, you employ a certain level of designer, of art director, of the time it takes to design and build and sew and architect all these things. That storytelling establishes the prestige necessary and should be a pillar for any one of these brands' content. You've seen this in my video on Loewe when I talked about how they actually show the complete process and the patterns of their bags on their YouTube. And videos that are designed purely to show you why they cost so much. It helps establish a brand as something worth its money.

1:10

SPEAKER_01

And Jacques Mus' did this in a beautiful, artful way. But it also took the iconography and the symbolism of craft into its visuals. That's the second pillar we're going to talk about here. It's not just showing the craft, but how to use iconography. And in this case, the iconography of craft. You may have seen the iconic video, where Jacques Mus' is using scale and oversized, which we'll get to in a moment, in the whimsy of its art direction, to attract attention by having people carrying the elements, the iconography of craft, through a town.

1:24

SPEAKER_01

They were carrying the thimble, the thread, the scissors, these large items that are immediately associated in your mind with what it takes to create something, being carried around as symbols of the brand, as the campaign for the brand. They are using the repetition of iconography to associate themselves with craft and craftsmanship. And they're doing this in this very overt way. But overt works in the social media world. You want someone to remember something about your brand, make it big. Make it viral. Continue that association over time. It becomes a creative direction tactic that a brand can have.

1:48

SPEAKER_01

And that combination of craft and the iconography of craft, and then how that places into content, which we'll get to in a moment, becomes the foundation for why a brand can be regarded at a higher price point. Why people can feel that it might be worth it to embrace it. Before we get into the content strategy there, I want to get tactical for a moment. If you have a business with traffic or sales that's based on legacy Google search, or you're building a brand or media business where you want to leverage SEO, I have some exact data for how this is changing put together by my partners at Ahrefs.

1:58

SPEAKER_01

So first, Best X blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. So if you're selling something where people might be searching for the category, whether that's a luxury bag or best made suit or whatever you sell, these Best X listicles make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT. Make sure you are featured on these as a priority and you're creating these. Related, YouTube mentions have the highest correlation, 0.737, with AI brand visibility out of all the factors Ahrefs studied, both with ChatGPT and Gemini. So what does that mean? People don't search just within chatbots. People search Google all the time.

2:19

SPEAKER_01

But Gemini now does the overview you see at the top of almost every search. And those overviews have reduced clicks to the first link by 58%. That's up 34.5% from just 10 months earlier. This trend is accelerating. You need to care about being summarized in the answer, not just having something that shows up on the page. And it's a new opportunity to skip that whole old system with all its entrenched money and time spent if you're a new brand. The internet is losing page traffic at an insane rate. If you want to be in the results, every brand needs a plan for their YouTube or being featured on others. So how do you do all this? How do you actually make a plan?

2:51

SPEAKER_01

Ahrefs has launched Agent A. It's a team member to work on new age SEO with you. It has unrestricted access to Ahrefs. You can chat with it and it will build workflows and take action. One of my personal SEO goals is to be more cited in search. Leverage my YouTube platform, my newsletter, etc. So Agent A analyzed my presence with my multiple websites. It built a plan. It actually found some spammy links to my substack and then built a disavow file itself that I could then upload into Google. And it made a dashboard for ongoing visibility I can monitor in minutes. Ahrefs has launched Agent A. It's a team member to work on new age SEO with you.

3:34

SPEAKER_01

It has unrestricted access to Ahrefs. You can chat with it and it will build workflows and take action. One of my personal SEO goals is to be more cited in search. Leverage my YouTube platform, my newsletter, etc. So Agent A analyzed my presence with my multiple websites. It built a plan. It actually found some spammy links to my Substack and then built a disavow file itself that I could then upload into Google. And it may be a dashboard for ongoing visibility I can monitor in minutes. And if you listen to anything that I have to say here, I would have it be this. Think about your marketing team of the future.

4:34

SPEAKER_01

As you have your team members, your human team, and then their agent team. Agent A would serve as an SEO strategist or agency. And someone on your team spends an hour or two a week managing. You can learn more about Agent A in the description. And thank you so much to Ahrefs for sponsoring this video. Now to content. We talked about craft and the iconography and those big elements. But what Jacques really executed was a content strategy based around two core things that every brand should think about. It was based around place, setting, and what we call the vignette. So what do we mean by place and setting?

5:26

SPEAKER_01

You will notice when they begin to launch collections or launch pop-ups in stores, they would do profiles, lookbooks, campaigns in certain places. Whether they were going to Brazil, whether this was in the south of France. It was a new city and they begin to document the luxury of that city. So when you are a brand creating content, the places you show, you become a parasite, for lack of a better term. Taking what that place has to say about itself and say about the identity of the people that like it or enjoy it or consume around it or live there. And applying that to your own brand and what people think of it.

5:55

SPEAKER_01

So Jemus doing that same thing and saying, hey, we're in this luxury destination. We're opening a pop-up on Bond Street or in Selfridges or in Italy. It begins to associate that luxury with the brand. They're able to use that place around it. And you'll see they will do these rollouts of content 10, 12 posts around the place, bringing its DNA into the brand, associating it with luxury. And this ties really well with what we call the vignette. How do you, within a short vlog that keeps attention, that hooks with what it shows visually, tell the story of the brand and that luxury association?

6:19

SPEAKER_01

So you will see this whether it was a giant CGI bag training its way through France, whether it was people in these boat scenarios riding around or carrying the massive thimble. These are all vignettes. How in a brief glimpse, a single shot of a movie scene, can you tell a story that is eye-catching enough to hook and proportion? Is a tool that Jemus uses extremely well inside of all this. Set off a whole trend we've seen brands use to death. What is the 15-second stories your brands can tell that will immerse yourself in them?

6:55

SPEAKER_01

And I would encourage you, if you have a brand, you're thinking about this, whether it's your vision as an art director or a creative director, or it's your vision for the brand you work with, what are those places? Are you associated with the farms of Texas, Hollywood Boulevard, New York, places in Europe, in Africa, and Latin America? What are those scenes, moments, that capture the identity of a brand? Your audience would be like, I love this. I want to participate in this. This speaks to me. List those locations out. That's part of the setting your world exists in.

7:22

SPEAKER_01

And when you begin to think of art direction or creative direction at a higher level, your job is to be able to articulate that world, both from how you would describe it to be able to get a campaign produced, but then also to be able to actually go to those places, know where they are, find and coordinate with the models. That's how you get advanced in this, is you both have the ideas, you have the ability to present the ideas, and the networks to execute them. And if you build your career and your thoughts around how you begin to execute that, you begin to think a lot more like a true creative director. And I would do that homework for you or whatever brand you work on.

7:45

SPEAKER_01

What are those places that make sense for your brand or for you personally that would embody those things that you care about? And then what would be those vignettes? What are stories that you could tell underneath them? In the second collection I released from my little experimental valuables brand, we thought about this a lot. We had one of our models in the car. We've been shooting with a lot of vintage cars. We would basically have the vignette of our customer, someone who would appreciate it, go out of their way to live and have to take the time and energy that goes into maintaining an older vehicle.

8:03

SPEAKER_01

And then we had shot him with an oversized dog inside a gas station, living this kind of life that appeals to our very specific customer. Same thing with the brand Understated Leather. I've worked for the marketing for a long time. Some of our best performing ads were from a lookbook the founder Jen had concepted called In Her Element, where we had a modern cowgirl, for lack of a better term, riding her Clydesdale in the country of Texas. And then in the bars, the apartment, the places that she would occupy. It was a fun exercise to think through to begin putting those practices of place and vignette into your toolkit.

8:24

SPEAKER_01

And then to get tactical, you need to think in terms of hooks. So the two elements of French luxury that Jacques Mousse has pulled are proportion and whimsy. So we see proportion. It's one of the easiest things ever. You make something really big, you make something really small, it immediately catches people's eyes on feed. Is that played out now? Yes. Does it still work? Also yes.

8:59

SPEAKER_01

It was a fun exercise to think through to begin putting those practices of place and vignette into your toolkit. And then to get tactical, you need to think in terms of hooks. So the two that are the elements of French luxury that Jacques Mousse has pulled are proportion and whimsy. So we see proportion. It's one of the easiest things ever. You make something really big, you make something really small, it immediately catches people's eyes on feed. Is that played out now? Yes. Does it still work? Also yes. One of the easiest solutions you have to just make something big to know that it can work on social media. And being early to one of these tactics or trends that can work on feed goes a long way. People can associate this trend, know that Jacques Mousse was part of pushing that forward when it first did it. But then also being able to ride it the way Rode is in the follow-up of this still uses it to this day and it works. You don't always have to be first if your customer doesn't necessarily first. But whimsy is another. Whimsy is at the heart of everything related to French luxury. And I think an understated element here where everything just has that fun. Yes, of course it's in butter. Yes, of course there's a little illustration. There's fun, it's cheeky, it's odd. That's the underrated X factor in a world where everything's so serious and luxury is so buttoned up. There's something distinctly French about the fun little illustration or the brief moment or the saying something snarky at the exact right time that ties all of these campaigns and moments together. But when you talk about is this whole world that we see here, is it a true luxury world? Is this a luxury brand? And one of the biggest conversations you'll find is that it's missing the product. To achieve this true modern luxury where you can justify top dollar, you're popular, and people believe it's worth it, you have to have all of these things. The craft, the history, the content, the execution, and also the product. And that's where Junk Moose has fallen short. Most people who've bought have bought maybe one thing, and if they did, most of them probably didn't have a great experience with it. Maybe one suit, maybe a dress, maybe a bag, and it's all right. There isn't that signature, that amazingness. There may be, oh, I bought this one hype sneaker, I did whatever they worked on, I had this one tangential experience with the brand, but there isn't that core product that keeps everyone going back the way you know you need your throw a piano sweater, your botega bag, the things that people purchase and are proud of and pass around like an artifact. And you can have all the other things and not have that, and it's just not quite right. But this is all a game of time. With all of this foundation, if that thing comes in a decade or another decade, all of the rest of the setting is there, and you'll watch everything click into place. And if you're interested more in these principles and these tactics, we talk a lot about this on websites and in Art Direction inside that Modern Luxury ebook that you can grab down below if you want to get some reading in on this, that's free as well. And if you are ever in Paris and want to explore some of this or just be inspired by some of the creative direction or moments around there, a few recommendations. So first, you'll see a lot of content on TikTok. Let's go to Sabra or Mercy. Those are, in my mind, traps. Products being created to sell you an idea of something Parisian. I would highly recommend the Grand Depisserie, which is an upscale supermarket full of, from whether it's brands to wine to truffles to drinks to chocolates, it's an incredible experience. Les Bon Marche, which is across the street, which is a department store, has alternating seasonal displays. Ex Libris is inside there that will make you a crest for your family or brand. It's a more fun keepsake than some of the other options you may see. Rousse Saint-Henor, and again, I'm destroying these pronunciations I already know, is a street all of perfumeries. And if you are into fragrance, it's an excellent place to go experiment. Your nose may never recover. Force de Commerce is a gorgeous museum and gallery that I highly, highly recommend. Las Maritans is another department store, I believe one of the oldest ones in Paris that has, again, just their own branding for their own establishment. The seasonal campaigns that alternate the way these brands present, you can go see Jacquemus's display in there and see.

9:01

SPEAKER_01

Your nose may never recover. Force de Commerce is a gorgeous museum and gallery that I highly, highly recommend. Las Maritans is another department store, I believe one of the oldest ones in Paris that has, again, just their own branding for their own establishment. The seasonal campaigns that alternate the way these brands present, you can go see Jacquemus's display in there and see this weird half world that it operates in. If you're into cookware at all, D'Ellerin. Can't wait for the pronunciation corrections down below. [SPEAKER_00] His name? [SPEAKER_00] What's his name? [SPEAKER_00] I got nothing on a name. [SPEAKER_00] Come on, baby. [SPEAKER_00] What's the name?

9:27

SPEAKER_01

Is from the source cookware for copper and pots and knives and actual cooking equipment and cutrements if you're into that the way I am. But I am here for the next weeks in France. I'm in the south of France hosting at our house for Cannes. We are going to Monaco. I'm doing a workshop with some personal brands there. I will be inside the luxury industry for a good chunk of the summer. We have more content coming about some of these topics which I love to explore and talk about. Thank you all so much for watching. Leverage my YouTube platform, my newsletter, etc. So Agent A analyzed my presence with my multiple websites. It built a plan.

9:50

SPEAKER_01

It actually found some spammy links to my substack and then built a disavow file itself that I could then upload into Google. And it may be a dashboard for ongoing visibility I can monitor in minutes. And if you listen to anything that I have to say here, I would have it be this. Think about your marketing team of the future. As you have your team members, your human team, and then their agent team. Agent A would serve as an SEO strategist or agency. And someone on your team spends an hour or two a week managing. You can learn more about Agent A in the description. And thank you so much to Ahrefs for sponsoring this video. Now to content.

10:17

SPEAKER_01

We talked about craft and the iconography and those big elements. But what Jacques was really executed was a content strategy based around two core things that every brand should think about. It was based around place, setting, and what we call the vignette. So what do we mean by place and setting? You will notice when they begin to launch collections or launch pop-ups in stores, they would do profiles, lookbooks, campaigns in certain places. Whether they were going to Brazil, whether this was in the south of France. It was a new city and they begin to document the luxury of that city. So when you are a brand creating content, the places you show,

10:46

SPEAKER_01

you become a parasite, for lack of a better term. Taking what that place has to say about itself and say about the identity of the people that like it or enjoy it or consume around it or live there. And applying that to your own brand and what people think of it. So Jemus doing that same thing and saying, hey, we're in this luxury destination. We're opening a pop-up on Bond Street or in Selfridges or in Italy. It begins to associate that luxury with the brand. They're able to use that place around it. And you'll see they will do these rollouts of content 10, 12 posts around the place, bringing its DNA into the brand, associating it with luxury.

11:16

SPEAKER_01

And this ties really well with what we call the vignette. How do you, within a short vlog that keeps attention, that hooks with what it shows visually, tell the story of the brand and that luxury association? So you will see this whether it was a giant CGI bag training its way through France, whether it was people in these boat scenarios riding around or carrying the massive thimble. These are all vignettes. How in a brief glimpse, a single shot of a movie scene, can you tell a story that is eye-catching enough to hook and proportion? Is a tool that Jemus uses extremely well inside of all this. Set off a whole trend we've seen brands use to death.

11:48

SPEAKER_01

What is the 15-second stories your brands can tell that will immerse yourself in them? And I would encourage you, if you have a brand, you're thinking about this, whether it's your vision as an art director or a creative director, or it's your vision for the brand you work with, what are those places? Are you associated with the farms of Texas, Hollywood Boulevard, New York, places in Europe, in Africa, and Latin America? What are those scenes, moments, that capture the identity of a brand? Your audience would be like, I love this. I want to participate in this. This speaks to me. List those locations out. That's part of the setting your world exists in.

12:20

SPEAKER_01

And when you begin to think of art direction or creative direction at a higher level, your job is to be able to articulate that world, both from how you would describe it to be able to get a campaign produced, but then also to be able to actually go to those places, know where they are, find and coordinate with the models. That's how you get advanced in this, is you both have the ideas, you have the ability to present the ideas, and the networks to execute them. And if you build your career and your thoughts around how you begin to execute that, you begin to think a lot more like a true creative director. And I would do that homework for you or whatever brand you work on.

12:48

SPEAKER_01

What are those places that make sense for your brand or for you personally that would embody those things that you care about? And then what would be those vignettes? What are stories that you could tell underneath them? In the second collection I released from my little experimental valuables brand, we thought about this a lot. We had one of our models in the car. We've been shooting with a lot of vintage cars. We would basically have the vignette of our customer, someone who would appreciate it, go out of their way to live and have to take the time and energy that goes into maintaining an older vehicle.

13:11

SPEAKER_01

And then we had shot him with an oversized dog inside a gas station, living this kind of life that appeals to our very specific customer. Same thing with the brand Understated Leather. I've worked for the marketing for for a long time. Some of our best performing ads were from a lookbook the founder Jen had concepted called In Her Element, where we had kind of like the modern cowgirl, for lack of a better term, riding her Clydesdale in the country of Texas. And then in the bars, the apartment, the places that she would occupy. It was a fun exercise to think through to begin putting those practices of place and vignette into your toolkit. And then to get tactical,

13:41

SPEAKER_01

you need to think in terms of hooks. So the two that are the elements of French luxury that Jacques Mousse has pulled are proportion and whimsy. So we see proportion. It's one of the easiest things ever. You make something really big, you make something really small, it immediately catches people's eyes on feed. Is that played out now? Yes. Does it still work? Also yes. One of the easiest solutions you have to just make something big to know that it can work on social media. And being early to one of these tactics or trends that can work on feed goes a long way. People can associate this trend, know that Jacques Mousse was part of pushing that forward

14:08

SPEAKER_01

when it first did it. But then also being able to ride it the way Rode is kind of in the follow-up of this still uses it to this day and it works. You don't always have to be first if your customer doesn't necessarily first. But whimsy is another. Whimsy is at the heart of everything related to French luxury. And I think an understated element here where everything just has that fun. Yes, of course it's in butter. Yes, of course there's a little illustration. There's fun, it's cheeky, it's odd. That's the underrated X factor in a world where everything's so serious and luxury is so buttoned up. There's something distinctly French about the fun little illustration

14:35

SPEAKER_01

or the brief moment or the saying something snarky at the exact right time that ties all of these campaigns and moments together. But when you talk about is this whole world that we see here, is it a true luxury world? Is this a luxury brand? And one of the biggest conversations you'll find is that it's missing the product. To achieve this true modern luxury where you can justify top dollar, you're popular, and people believe it's worth it, you have to have all of these things. The craft, the history, the content, the execution, and also the product. And that's where Junk Moose has fallen short. Most people who've bought have bought maybe one thing, and if they did,

15:03

SPEAKER_01

most of them probably didn't have a great experience with it. Maybe one suit, maybe a dress, maybe a bag, and it's all right. There isn't that signature, that amazingness. There may be, oh, I bought this one hype sneaker, I did whatever they worked on, I had this one tangential experience with the brand, but there isn't that core product that keeps everyone going back the way you know you need your throw a piano sweater, your botega bag, the things that people purchase and are proud of and pass around like an artifact. And you can have all the other things and not have that, and it's just not quite right. But this is all a game of time. With all of this foundation,

15:30

SPEAKER_01

if that thing comes in a decade or another decade, all of the rest of the setting is there, and you'll watch everything click into place. And if you're interested more in these principles and these tactics, we talk a lot about this on websites and in Art Direction inside that Modern Luxury ebook that you can grab down below if you want to get some reading in on this, that's free as well. And if you are ever in Paris and want to explore some of this or just be inspired by some of the creative direction or moments around there, a few recommendations. So first, you'll see a lot of content on TikTok. Let's go to like Sabra or Mercy. Those are, in my mind, just kind of traps.

15:58

SPEAKER_01

Products being created to sell you an idea of something Parisian. I would highly recommend the Grand Depisserie, which is a upscale supermarket full of, from whether it's brands to wine to truffles to drinks to chocolates, it's an incredible experience. Les Bon Marche, which is across the street, which is a department store, kind of has alternating seasonal displays. Ex Libris is inside there that will make you a crest for your family or brand. It's a more fun keepsake than some of the other options you may see. Rousse Saint-Henor, and again, I'm destroying these pronunciations I already know, is a street all of perfumeries. And if you are into fragrance,

16:28

SPEAKER_01

it's an excellent place to go experiment. Your nose may never recover. Force de Commerce is a gorgeous museum and gallery that I highly, highly recommend. Las Maritans is another department store, I believe one of the oldest ones in Paris that has, again, just their own branding for their own establishment. The seasonal campaigns that alternate the way these brands present, you can go see Jacquemus's display in there and kind of see this kind of weird half world that it operates in. If you're into cookware at all, D'Ellerin. Can't wait for the pronunciation corrections down below.

16:54

SPEAKER_00

His name? What's his name? I got nothing on a name. Come on, baby. What's the name?

16:59

SPEAKER_01

Is a kind of from the source cookware for copper and pots and knives and actual cooking equipment and cutrements if you're into that the way I am. But I am here for the next weeks in France. I'm in the south of France hosting at our House for Cannes. We are going to Monaco. I'm doing a workshop with some personal brands there. I will be inside the luxury industry for a good chunk of the summer. We have more content coming about some of these topics which I love to explore and talk about. Thank you all so much for watching.

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