One8 Branding Co - Brand Threads , Branded Debrief

Issue #6 | Week of July 13, 2026

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:24:24 -0500

THE BRIEF

This week had actual brand decisions, made by real people, that tell you something about what a company believes. A Detroit watchmaker honored a comedian who died 37 years ago and made you feel it. A coffee chain used a pink cup to reward their best customers before anyone else got one. A movie studio accidentally turned crew merch into a marketing strategy. And one of the most-talked-about AI companies in the world filed a lawsuit against a client spending $10 million a year with them, over a logo, without picking up the phone first.

Let’s go…

ON THE AGENDA

Shinola honors Gilda Radner and shows everyone how it’s done
Starbucks drops a Pink Drink merch collection with a loyalty mechanic buried inside it
Marvel’s crew merch became the biggest Avengers: Doomsday story of the week
Anthropic sues its biggest customer. We need to talk about that.

THE LEAD

Shinola Put Gilda Radner’s Name on a Watch and Earned It

The watch has an open heart in the dial.

That detail matters. Shinola didn’t just put Gilda Radner’s name on a timepiece and call it a tribute. They made a watch with a literal open heart and wrote, in the copy, that it was “a fitting tribute to a woman who always wore her heart on her sleeve.”

The Runwell Automatic is limited to 400 units. The Runabout, with its Red Jasper dial and pavé diamonds, is capped at 300. A portion of every sale goes to the Metro Detroit chapter of Gilda’s Club, the nonprofit she founded that supports people and families living with cancer. She died of ovarian cancer in 1989.

This is the latest installment of Shinola’s Great Americana series, which has honored figures connected to Detroit and American culture. What makes this one land isn’t the price point ($1,995 to $2,500) or the limited run. It’s the specificity. Red Jasper because red was her favorite color. An open heart because of how she lived. A charity connection that closes the loop between the product and the person it honors.

Most brands that slap a celebrity name on a product are doing it for the association. Shinola is doing something different. They’re building a physical object that requires you to know the story before you fully understand the object. That’s not just a product drop, it’s a story told in leather and steel.

If you want to know what it looks like to turn branded merchandise into a legacy play, this is the case study. There’s no logo-forward, no mass production, no “limited while supplies last” pressure. Just a brand that knows what it stands for and built something worthy of the name it put on it.

↗ Detroit News | JCK

THE RUNDOWN

Starbucks Dropped a Pink Drink Merch Collection. The Real Story Is Who Got It First.

We love the collection. Miir bottles, an Owala collab, glass cold cups, hair clips, a belt bag, baseball hats that say “Starbies.” Arrived in U.S. coffeehouses on July 7th, online at Starbucks Shop while supplies last.

Starbucks Rewards Reserve members got early access to the Bearista Cup on July 9th, four days before it hit shelves. That’s a loyalty activation using branded merch as the reward. Most brands don’t think about their merchandise program and their loyalty program in the same sentence. Starbucks just showed you why they should be the same sentence.

The Thing To Remember: Merch is not just a product. It’s a currency. Starbucks spent it on their best customers first. That’s not a small decision. That’s a relationship strategy.

↗ Starbucks Newsroom

Marvel Turned Crew Merch Into an Intelligence Drop.

Crew merch is supposed to stay on set. It’s a thank-you to the people who made the movie. But when Avengers: Doomsday production gear started surfacing online, fans got Doctor Doom’s official symbol, the Avengers logo, the X-Men logo, the Fantastic Four logo, and looks at 28 character costumes before a single trailer dropped.

Marvel also debuted a green-tinted version of its signature Studios logo, swapping its iconic red for a Doom-coded green, at a Shanghai Expo installation.

Whether the crew merch “leaks” were planned or not doesn’t really matter. The result was the same: a global audience analyzed every stitch. Branded merchandise built for an internal audience became the week’s biggest marketing story. That should make every brand rethink what they put on crew gear.

The Thing To Remember: Every piece of branded merch you produce is a press release waiting to happen. Design your internal gear like someone outside the building is going to see it, because they will.

↗ The Direct | SuperHeroHype

Sporting CP Got a New Badge. It’s What They Removed That Makes It Work.

Portuguese football club Sporting CP brought in Jones Knowles Ritchie for a 120th anniversary rebrand. The outer shield is gone. The lion, previously yellow, is now white. The tail curves into an S. The mane flows a little more. That’s it. No overhaul, no modernization manifesto, no full identity system teardown. Just a tighter version of what was already there, with one nod to the name built into the animal itself.

Anniversary rebrands fail when brands treat them as permission to start over. This one treated it as an obligation to get more precise. The result looks like it was always supposed to be this.

The Thing To Remember: The best rebrand is the one where nobody can tell exactly what changed, but everyone agrees it’s better. Restraint is a design decision.

↗ Dezee

BRETT’S TAKE

Anthropic Sued Its Own Customer Over a Logo.

On July 1, Anthropic filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Abnormal AI. The accusation is that Abnormal’s 2025 rebrand adopted fluid motion graphics, a geometric slash-based logo, and animated sequences that Anthropic claims constitute an unlawful appropriation of its entire brand system.

Abnormal’s responded that their slash wordmark was designed in April 2021 by agency ALINE, before Claude existed. They’ve used it for five years. They were founded in 2018, three years before Anthropic.

The crazy part is Abnormal CEO Evan Reiser found out about the lawsuit from a reporter. Not a phone call. Not a legal notice sent ahead of time. He also disclosed that Abnormal spends over $10 million per year on Anthropic services and has rolled Claude out to 100% of its employees.

The brand identity question is worth having. Can you trademark visual grammar? Can you own a slash? Can a motion system be protected IP? Legal scholars will argue that for years, and the answer probably depends on how similar the specific executions really are.

But I’m not focusing on that part of the story.

The real story is that a company decided to open a legal action against one of its largest customers without picking up the phone first. That tells you something about how Anthropic thinks about relationships. It tells you something about what the word “partner” means inside that organization. And it tells you that brand identity protection, taken past a certain point, stops being about protecting the brand and starts being about protecting the ego.

A logo is a signal. What you do to the people around you is the brand. Anthropic’s logo looks fine. What they did here doesn’t.

↗ Bank Info Security | Abnormal AI

THE PITCH

Three things from this week worth acting on.

The Starbucks story is a blueprint. If you have a loyalty or rewards program and you’re not using branded merch as an exclusive early-access vehicle, you’re leaving a relationship moment on the table. We can help you design that mechanic.
The Shinola story is the case for premium over volume. One intentional item at the right quantity beats a thousand forgettable ones. If your current merch program is built around “how many can we get for the budget,” we should talk about what you’re actually getting for that money.
The Marvel crew merch story is a reminder that internal branded merchandise is external marketing. What you put on a shirt for your team is what gets photographed, shared, and analyzed. Design it like it’ll be seen, because it will.

If any of these hit, let’s have a fifteen minute conversation. It won’t be a sales pitch…promise.

That’s it for this week…

Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.

P.S.

The World Cup semifinals kick off Tuesday…two matches away from a final nobody outside of the four remaining countries will care about with anything resembling genuine investment. Americans have pretended they always cared about the USMNT. The tournament wraps July 19. By July 20, the app gets deleted and we go back to our regularly scheduled programming. See you in 2030. It’s been fun.

See you next week.

Issue #5 | Week of July 6, 2026

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:18:00 -0500

THE BRIEF

You know that feeling when you say yes to something before you actually know what it is. I’ve done that more times than I want to admit. This week gave me a fresh reminder of how fast that habit gets expensive, and how much faster the smart people get out once they figure out what they actually agreed to.

Let’s go…

ON THE AGENDA

A pickle company’s fast exit
Curry’s new logo, and what Under Armour actually lost
Starbucks caps a frenzy it built on purpose
Brett’s Take: a jury just gutted UGG’s boot patent

THE LEAD

The pickle company that read the room

The America 250 Fair on the National Mall had a North Carolina exhibit, sponsored in part by Mt. Olive Pickles, a company that has been putting its name on jars since 1926. Somewhere inside that exhibit, a video showed the Confederate flag and nobody at the company knew it was there.

Once they saw it, Mt. Olive didn’t wait on a crisis team to build a strategy deck. It posted a plain statement, said it was unaware, said the flag didn’t fit within their values and withdrew. Done in a matter of days.

Everybody is going to talk about the flag itself, who put it there and why. That’s the loud part. The quiet part is that Mt. Olive said yes to an exhibit it hadn’t fully vetted, found out what it had actually signed up for, and got out before the story became about them instead of the flag.

With event sponsorships you’re not just buying a logo placement. You’re buying whatever else shows up next to your logo, and you don’t get to pick that part. Plenty of brands don’t move as fast as Mt. Olive, and by the time they do, the apology reads like damage control instead of a decision already made.

↗ The Hill

THE RUNDOWN

Curry kept the logo. Under Armour lost the athlete.

After seven months of sneaker free agency, Steph Curry signed with Li-Ning and kept his own logo. The splash fingers, the halo, all of it carried over, just with a new name stamped on top. Under Armour didn’t just lose a shoe deal. It also lost the version of Steph Curry it spent a decade building, because it turns out he built that mark for himself the whole time.

The Thing to Remember: Most athlete deals hand the brand mark to the shoe company, not the player. Curry structured his differently years ago, which is exactly why he could walk into the Li-Ning deal with his own identity.

↗ Sole Retriever

Two per customer won’t save Starbucks from itself

The Starbucks Pink Bearista cup drops July 9th for Reserve members, then wider on July 13th, capped at two per customer. Last year’s version caused shoving matches and $800 resale listings. Limiting the number you can purchase sounds like the fix. Actually, it just delays the resale flip by a few hours and moves the chaos from the counter to the eBay.

The Thing to Remember: The resale frenzy functions as free marketing for Starbucks. A two-cup limit mostly gives the company a tidy line about fairness for the next time cups vanish in ten minutes. Real scarcity control would mean smaller, less frequent drops, not a purchase cap nobody enforces at the register.

↗ ABC News

IKEA turned an April Fools’ joke into a real product

IKEA teased a giant meatball as an April Fools’ joke, then found out people actually wanted it. A million units are shipping to stores worldwide this summer for the meatball’s 40th anniversary, built off a joke that doubled as a free demand test. Most brands pay research firms for that kind of data. IKEA just posted a joke and watched what happened.

The Thing to Remember: Most brand teams kill ideas like this before they ever see daylight, because a joke carries real reputational risk if it flops in public. IKEA let the joke run, measured the reaction, and only then spent real production money on it. That’s a cheaper and more honest research process than most agencies charge for.

↗ The GO Network

BRETT’S TAKE

A jury just told UGG its boot design was never really its own

UGG won its case and lost the thing that mattered.

A federal jury ruled that Quince’s Australian Shearling Mini Boot copied UGG’s Classic Ultra Mini. At the same time, that jury also invalidated the design patent UGG used to bring the case in the first place. They proved the copy happened but they left with nothing to enforce it.

The dupe conversation always gets framed as a pricing story with some scrappy brand undercutting a legacy label by forty percent for customers who can’t tell the difference or don’t care. A jury in Delaware just showed that the bigger problem sitting underneath it is that the silhouette UGG built a hundred million dollar brand around was too generic to legally own.

This touches every brand whose entire identity lives in a shape, a stitch pattern, a proportion, something you’d recognize across a room before you ever saw the logo. If a court can decide that shape was never protectable, the design itself was never the asset everyone assumed it was. The logo was.

I’d rather see brands spend less time suing dupes and more time asking whether their design actually holds up as intellectual property in the first place. UGG just found out the hard way that it didn’t. That’s a boardroom conversation, not a legal footnote, and most brands haven’t had it.

↗ Erise IP

THE FORECAST

First issue of the month, so it’s time to look ahead instead of back.

San Diego Comic-Con runs July 22nd through 26th, and the real story every year isn’t the panels, it’s the exhibit hall. Watch which exclusives show up on resale sites before the doors even open. That’s the merch story.

The NFL Hall of Fame Game opens preseason on August 6th, and the season opener is September 9th with the Seahawks hosting the Patriots, a Super Bowl rematch on opening night. That storyline is going to move a lot of jerseys.

Labor Day falls on September 7. After that, the calendar belongs to Black Friday planning whether you’re ready or not.

September 11th marks 25 years since the towers fell. This is not a merchandise opportunity. Any brand that treats it like one is tone-deaf and deserves any flack it gets.

Fashion month runs September 11th through October 4th in New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Watch for capsule collabs timed to the runway shows.

Shoptalk Fall hits Nashville September 29th through October 1st. Good place to watch what the big retailers are planning for holiday branded merchandise before the rest of us find out.

THE PITCH

This issue was basically one long case study in finding out too late what you’d already agreed to. That’s exactly the gap our Brand Friction Audit is built to close, before the sponsorship, before the campaign, before the merch program goes out the door.

We look at where your brand’s name is already attached to things you haven’t fully vetted: sponsorships, licensing deals, co-branded programs, and flag the friction points before they become someone else’s headline.
We pressure-test any new branded merchandise program against what your brand actually stands for, not just what fits the budget.

If you want a second set of eyes on something you’re about to say yes to, let’s have a fifteen minute conversation. It won’t be a sales pitch…promise.

That’s it for this week…

Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.

P.S.

This recent heat wave was brutal. I don’t think I left the house or the pool most of the weekend. Why do I think it won’t be the last one we experience this summer. Stay cool out there!

See you next week.

Issue #4 | Week of June 29, 2026

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:12:15 -0500

THE BRIEF

Cannes wrapped Friday and July 4th is Saturday. I’ve been thinking about the fact that they’re happening at the same time. The biggest creative awards show on the planet and the biggest brand opportunity in 250 years, back to back.

Let’s go…

ON THE AGENDA

What every Cannes Grand Prix winner had in common this year, and why it matters more than the trophy
Why Coke might be the only brand that actually earned its America250 campaign
What good commemorative branded merchandise looks like
“America Made Us”

THE LEAD

The Cannes Winners Knew Who They Were Before Anyone Was Watching

Cannes Lions wrapped Friday. Nearly 20,000 entries, five days, a lot of rosé, and $13 million less in entry fees than last year.

Also 7,000 fewer submissions compared to last year. The official explanation involves tighter criteria. The industry’s quieter answer is that a lot of agencies ran the math and decided the festival wasn’t worth it anymore.

Adidas took the Grand Prix in Entertainment for “Original Forever,” a film built around the Oasis reunion that’s been three decades in the making.
Columbia Sportswear’s CEO challenged flat-earthers to find the edge of the Earth in exchange for the whole company, and walked out with a Titanium.
Oreo took Titanium for cows in Mexico whose natural markings looked exactly like Oreo cookies.
Mother London won the Grand Prix in Film for two spots for Claude that debuted at the Super Bowl.

What connects all of it: none of these brands needed Cannes to tell them who they were. Adidas and Oasis have been a story since 1993. Columbia’s “Engineered for Whatever” isn’t a campaign, it’s a conviction. Oreo’s visual identity is so locked in that nature plagiarized it. And Anthropic knew exactly what it wanted to say about Claude before anyone wrote a brief.

The Lion is the recognition. The identity is the prerequisite. Most brands have one. The ones that win have both.

THE RUNDOWN

Coke Might Be the Only Brand That Actually Earned This

Coca-Cola is running a year-long America250 campaign called “Drink in America,” anchored by the brand’s first-ever collectible mini cans and state-branded commemorative packaging. The campaign runs through the PGA Tour Championship, music festivals, and sporting events for the rest of 2026. Nearly 140 years of being part of the American story backs the whole claim up.

The Thing to Remember: Most brands running an America250 campaign this summer have a few years of patriotic messaging behind them, not 140. Coke has been in American kitchens and at American ballparks longer than most of our grandparents were alive. That’s the permission that makes the collectible cans work.

↗ Little Black Book

A South Carolina Ironware Company Put an Eagle and 13 Stars on a Cast Iron Skillet

Smithey Ironware of South Carolina released a limited-edition No. 11 American Anniversary Skillet for the 250th. Cast in the U.S., free of chemical coatings, with a bald eagle in flight and 13 stars cast into the bottom of the pan. No red packaging. No flag on the label. The object does the commemorating.

The Thing To Remember: Walk through any store this week and you’ll find a hundred products dressed up for the 250th. Most of them are existing products with a sticker. Smithey made a new thing, designed specifically for this moment, with an image cast permanently into the iron. That’s the difference between commemorating something and exploiting a date on the calendar.

↗ Alliance for American Manufacturing

The Official America250 Merch Store Is Actually Worth Looking At

The official America250 merchandise store launched a “Nation Series”: state-by-state branded merch celebrating every U.S. state and territory and the people who call them home. Limited-edition artist collaborations. Officially licensed commemorative pieces. American-made products throughout. It’s a rare case of an official commemorative merchandise program that actually made decisions about what things should look like and why.

The Thing To Remember: Most official event merchandise is an afterthought. Somebody puts a logo on a tote and calls it done. The Nation Series organizes around places and people, not the organization behind the event, and that’s the reason it actually works.

↗ America250

“America Made Us.” Chrysler Went Bankrupt in 2009.

Stellantis, parent company to Dodge, Jeep, Ram, and Chrysler, launched an America250 campaign with the tagline “America Made Us.” The campaign includes wrapping the Chrysler Technology Center in Auburn Hills in anniversary signage. The company’s CMO called it “a privilege and a promise.” Chrysler received a $12.5 billion U.S. government bailout in 2009.

The Thing To Remember: “America Made Us” is true in more ways than the campaign probably intended. America bailed Chrysler out, kept the brand alive, and gave it a second chance to build cars people actually wanted. The line is more interesting when you know the history.

↗ Brand Innovators

BRETT’S TAKE

The Festival That Built Itself on Ideas Is Running Out of Them

Cannes Lion entries were down 25% this year. Nearly 7,000 fewer submissions. About $12 million less in entry fees.

The official story is that stricter criteria kept weak work out is probably partly true. The less comfortable story is that the industry looked at the entry cost, the flight cost, the hotel cost, and the week of yacht parties and brand activations and tech company panels, and decided the math didn’t add up anymore.

The festival started as a place where the work was the point. The best campaigns in the world, judged by the best people in the business, with a lion that meant something when you put it on the shelf.

At some point it became something else. The work is still there, and this year it was really good. But the festival around it has metastasized into something the work can barely compete with. There are 15,000 badge holders and another 85,000 people showing up for the parties, the panels, and the access. Google, Meta, and every other tech company that’s spent the last decade replacing the creative work being celebrated there now sponsors the beach where you go to celebrate it.

Seven thousand fewer entries. The official story blames the criteria. The more plausible story is that a lot of people ran the numbers and decided the festival isn’t worth it anymore.

Creativity is a business value. It deserves a festival that acts like one. Cannes used to be that place.

THE PITCH

This week’s issue is full of brands asking whether they’ve earned what they’re claiming. The Cannes winners had. Most of the America250 campaigns don’t. The gap between those two situations is a place where what a brand says it is and what the brand experience actually delivers are two different things.

If you’re not sure which side of that line your branded merchandise program is on, that’s what our Brand Friction Audit exists to find. It’s a discovery process we run to identify exactly where your physical brand expression conflicts with your brand promise, and what to do about it. Every audit is specific to the brand we’re looking at. We don’t issue a generic report.

If that sounds relevant to where you are right now, reach out. I’ll walk you through what we look at and how it works.

That’s it for this week…

Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.

P.S.

Sat on the dais at Mahwah High School's graduation this week as a member of the Board of Education. Didn't have to say anything, which was fine by me. Just watched a 190+ kids collect a diploma. One of the better ways I've spent a Thursday in a long time.

See you next week.

Issue #3 | Week of June 22, 2026

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:05:00 -0500

THE BRIEF

Cannes week does something to me every year. Twenty-four years in this business and the festival still makes me equal parts proud and embarrassed, sometimes in the same afternoon. This week handed me both feelings before the opening ceremony even started.

Let’s go…

ON THE AGENDA

Cannes Lions promised accountability this year.
A Buc-ee’s video beats World Cup ad budgets.
Every snack aisle in America finds its patriotism on the same day.
Apple and Target split on Pride.
The agency that finally killed the conference tote bag.

THE LEAD

Cannes Lions got caught cheating last year.

The ad industry’s biggest scandal got a bigger beach.

Cannes Lions opens today with mandatory AI disclosure, content detection tools, an actual ethics committee, and the authority to strip a trophy after the fact, including a three-year ban for agencies caught submitting false work. All of it exists because last year a Grand Prix winner got pulled after officials found AI-faked CNN footage baked into the case study, and the agency’s chief creative officer resigned over it. So this is the redemption tour. Integrity is the official theme for 15,000 delegates from 90 countries.

Then you look at what’s actually waiting on the Croisette. Yahoo built a purple submarine. Meta took over a beach for four straight days. UTA flew in Paris Hilton, Janelle Monáe, and a creator named Bran Flakezz for its biggest activation yet. The festival tightened the rules on what counts as a winning idea and loosened nothing about what counts as a winning week.

One agency found the gap and used it. DEPT skipped the giveaway table entirely this year and built a streetwear drop instead, invite-only, limited quantities, no logos slapped on anything. More on that below. It’s the best branded merchandise story to come out of Cannes in years.

Everyone covering this week will write about who wins a Lion. The actual story is what brands are willing to spend to be seen winning one, rules or no rules.

↗ Full programme: Famous Campaigns

↗ Beach activations: EventMarketer

↗ The AI integrity reckoning: Campaign Asia

THE RUNDOWN

A Scottish vlogger’s Buc-ee’s video just outperformed the tournament’s ad budgets

Shaun Alexander flew in for Scotland’s first World Cup appearance in 28 years and filmed himself losing it over a Buc-ee’s ice machine. The clip pulled 150,000 likes in days. Sonic signed him for a corndog taste test before the week was out, and the offers haven’t stopped since, including one from an IV drip company after his wife came down with food poisoning on the road.

The thing to remember: This is the best kind of marketing because nobody marketed it. Buc-ee’s didn’t write a brief, didn’t pay an influencer, didn’t sit in a meeting about ice machines. The second a brand tries to manufacture this exact moment on purpose, it’ll feel exactly as fake as it is.

↗ Modern Retail

Every snack aisle in America found its patriotism on the same day

General Mills put patriotic packaging on 79 products. Chobani’s La Colombe rolled out a commemorative 1776 tin. Xochitl rereleased red, white, and blue chips it already made last year, now with an official America250 partnership stamp on top. All of it timed to the country’s 250th birthday, all of it sitting on the same shelves at the same Walmarts at the same time.

The thing to remember: I don’t buy the nonpartisan framing for a second. A flag on a bag of chips is a bet that profiting off a moment beats picking a side, and that bet only holds until somebody calls it out. Seventy-nine SKUs of the same idea reads like volume standing in for an actual point of view.

↗ Modern Retail

Apple went all in on Pride. Target went quiet. Both made a choice.

Apple rolled out a full Pride collection this year: a new watch face, a Pride Edition Sport Loop, matching wallpaper across every device. Target scaled back again, the third straight year of smaller displays and lower visibility following the backlash and security concerns that hit its earlier collections.

The thing to remember: Target’s getting the headlines here, but Apple’s the one that should make people a little uncomfortable. Going big costs Apple almost nothing, they can absorb whatever backlash shows up overnight. Target has actual stores that get targeted and employees that get threatened, which makes their caution a lot harder to mock from the outside.

↗ Storyboard18

DEPT skipped the tote bags and built a streetwear drop instead

DEPT’s Secret Garden has quietly been one of Cannes’ best invites for two years running. This year the agency added a Souvenir Shop next door: reserve a slot, show up, find out what you’re taking home. Raffia totes, leather travel tags, ping pong paddles, postcards, all limited capsule pieces, none of it stamped with a logo. No browsing, no bins, no leftover boxes shipped back to the office.

The thing to remember: This is the first Cannes activation in years I’d actually want an invite to, and I don’t say that about agency stunts often. Most exclusive branded merchandise is just regular merchandise with a velvet rope in front of it. DEPT built the scarcity into the product itself, which is the part everybody else skips.

↗ LBBOnline

BRETT’S TAKE

The conference giveaway is dead. Nobody sent the memo.

I’ve watched companies hand out branded merchandise at trade shows and conferences for decades. Tote bags. Stress balls. The pen nobody picks up off the table. The math never changes: order in bulk, drop the cost per unit, hope somebody keeps it past the parking lot.

DEPT just proved that math was always backwards. The agency capped its Cannes drop at a fixed quantity, made guests reserve a slot, and let them discover what they got only when they showed up. No logo plastered across the front. No bin of leftovers shipped home. People will be talking about a ping pong paddle long after the event.

Compare that to the America 250 packaging rush sitting two stories up. Same instinct, opposite execution. Brands raced to put red, white, and blue on as many SKUs as possible, betting that more shelf space equals more relevance. It’s the conference tote bag logic wearing a different outfit.

The lesson isn’t complicated. A branded item everyone gets stops being a gift the moment it ships. It becomes inventory. The item somebody had to reserve a slot for, the one they couldn’t just grab on the way out, that’s the one that gets a story attached to it. Stories get repeated. Inventory gets thrown in a drawer.

If your branded merchandise budget is measured in units ordered instead of stories generated, you’re funding the tote bag pile, not the ping pong paddle.

THE PITCH

If your branded merchandise spend is still measured in units ordered instead of stories generated, that’s exactly the gap ourBrand Friction Audit is built to find. It looks at where your program actually lives, the trade show table, the new-hire kit, the client gift box, and tells you honestly whether it’s producing something somebody keeps or something somebody pitches the moment they get home.

Decades of watching both outcomes happen taught us the difference is almost never the budget. It’s whether anyone designed the experience before ordering the inventory.

That’s it for this week…

Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.

P.S.

Didn’t make the games. Didn’t make the parade either, if I’m being honest, thought about it, thought about the crowds, stayed home instead. Watched the whole thing from my couch and loved every second of it. I still wasn’t sure I believed it until the confetti actually came down. Go New York Go.

See you next week.

Issue #2 | Week of June 15, 2026

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:55:00 -0500

THE BRIEF

The World Cup opening ceremony shared its biggest moment with a stuffed monster. A fried chicken chain figured out the collectible toy game better than most toy companies have in years. And two brands told us exactly who they are, in opposite directions. One nailed it. One didn’t.

Let’s go…

ON THE AGENDA

A $150 plush monster just out-marketed FIFA’s opening ceremony.
Cracker Barrel’s stock jumped 30%. The real problem’s still there.
KFC put a mystery toy in a $30 bucket of chicken, and it’s smarter than it looks.
Coca-Cola’s AI ad got slammed again.
Etsy’s “be human” campaign has a marketplace problem.

THE LEAD

A Nine-Figure World Cup Budget Just Lost to a Toy.

FIFA lined up nine-figure sponsors for the 2026 World Cup. Adidas, Coca-Cola, Visa, Budweiser, names you’d expect from a tournament this size.

The opening ceremony was in Mexico City on June 11, and the moment everyone’s talking about is a stuffed monster. Two Labubu figures, dressed in World Cup jerseys, walked out during the ceremony as part of an official partnership between FIFA and Pop Mart. Labubu also shows up in the tournament’s official theme song video, and there’s a “Copa Labubu” collection now, with figures running around $150 each.

Most people see this as a fun crossover and move on.

They’re missing that Pop Mart’s stock is down 40% from its peak. The brand’s spent the last year fielding questions about whether Labubu was a one-hit wonder. The World Cup opening ceremony put Pop Mart’s biggest character on the biggest stage in sports, in front of a global audience.

This is Pop Mart writing its next chapter on FIFA’s stage. The toy’s the headline. The timing is the real story.

↗ CGTN

THE RUNDOWN

Cracker Barrel’s Stock Jumped 30%. The Real Problem Didn’t Change.

Cracker Barrel’s Q3 numbers beat Wall Street’s lowered expectations this week, and the stock jumped close to 30% on the news. Revenue was still down 2.9% year over year, but after a year of logo headlines and a reversed rebrand, “better than feared” was enough to send shares to their highest point since before the whole mess started.

The thing to remember: Traffic is still down almost 7% since the logo flip-flop. The stock recovered. The customers didn’t.

↗ Restaurant Business

KFC Put a Mystery Toy in a $30 Bucket of Chicken.

KFC’s Supergirl tie-in launched this week with a $29.99 “Krypto Collectible Bucket” and a set of blind-bagged keychains, the kind where you don’t know which character you got until you open the bag. It’s the first collectible push at this scale KFC’s done in 20 years.

The thing to remember: The blind bag is the same trick that built Pop Mart’s whole business, and it just landed in a bucket of fried chicken.

↗ Fantasy Land News

Coca-Cola’s AI World Cup Ad Got Slammed, Again.

Coca-Cola’s new World Cup spot, “Uncanned Emotions,” leans on AI-generated visuals of cans tumbling, opening, and spilling. Critics called it flat and generic, with nothing that actually shows the game or the fans.

The thing to remember: This is the third year running Coke’s put AI front and center in a major campaign and caught backlash for it. Three times stops being a misstep and starts being a habit.

↗ Creative Bloq

Etsy’s New Ad Says Choose Human. Its Marketplace Says Good Luck.

Etsy launched “Celebrate Being Human” this spring, a campaign built around the idea that in a world of automation and algorithm-fed sameness, handmade and personal still matters. The timing lines up with two straight years of Etsy losing active shoppers.

The thing to remember: Etsy’s own sellers have been saying for years that the platform’s filling up with the same dropshipped goods from the same overseas suppliers as everywhere else. The ad is selling an Etsy a lot of people on Etsy don’t think exists anymore.

↗ Marketing Brew

BRETT’S TAKE

The Logo Was Never The Problem.

Cracker Barrel flipped-flopped on its logo back in August. This week the company posted a stock jump on better-than-feared earnings. Traffic is still down almost 7% since the whole logo fiasco.

Etsy launched a campaign built around being human and handmade in a world of sameness, the same season its own sellers keep saying the platform is full of dropshipped crappy goods from the same overseas suppliers as everywhere else.

Both companies treated the visible thing as the problem. Cracker Barrel changed a logo, then changed it back. Etsy ran an ad about its values. Neither move touches what’s actually driving the numbers underneath. The food and shopping experience at Cracker Barrel, or the actual mix of what’s for sale on Etsy.

A stock gain and a nice ad both look like progress. Attention and sentiment do matter. They just don’t show up the same way in a same-store sales report six months later.

If the thing driving customers away is the product itself, no logo change, no reversal, and no campaign will fix anything. It just buys another quarter of good headlines before the same number shows back up.

Fix what customers feel before you touch what they see. Lead with that, and the logo, the campaign, the branded merch, lands a lot harder.

THE PITCH

A rebrand that doesn’t fix what’s actually driving people away is an expensive new coat of paint. Cracker Barrel just proved it again and the traffic problem is sitting exactly where it was before any of it started.

Before a logo, a tagline, or a deck gets touched, it’s worth knowing whether the thing customers are reacting to is even visible from the brand side in the first place. That’s what a Brand Friction Audit is for, find the real problem first, so the rebrand isn’t just a nicer-looking version of the same mistake.

Reach out. We’ll put one together for you.

That’s it for this week…

Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.

P.S.

Last week I gave out $6,000 in scholarships to six graduating Mahwah High School seniors (I’m the President of two non-profits). Been doing this for several years now, and it never stops being one of my favorite things all year. Whatever these six do next, I hope they remember that they have a whole community rooting for them.

See you next week.

Issue #1 | Week of June 8, 2026

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:41:00 -0500

THE BRIEF

I’m just going to say it.

Most of the branded merchandise you’ve ever bought did absolutely nothing. It went from a box to a table to a drawer. Probably sitting next to a hotel keycard from 2019 and some dead batteries.

Nobody asked whether it was working. Nobody tracked it. The budget was approved, the event happened, and everybody just did it again the next year. Same stuff. Same results. Same questions never asked.

That’s what this newsletter is about. I cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of the branding world every week using my experiences with branded merchandise. Real brands, real decisions, real verdicts. No trade publication stuff. No press releases. No pretending everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

I’m Brett Coplin. I’ve been in this business since 2002. I’ve seen what happens when brands actually get this right. I’ve also watched a lot of very expensive stuff end up in a landfill. This is where I talk about the difference, and I don’t pull punches doing it.

Welcome to Issue #1. Let’s go...

ON THE AGENDA

Patagonia literally gave away the whole company to fight climate change. Then turned around and sued a climate activist. Can’t make this up.
Adidas made one five-minute film. Nike built a whole content machine. The World Cup hasn’t even started and one of them is already losing.
Liquid Death just finished three years of the smartest brand collab anyone’s done lately. Worth understanding what they actually built.
Target dropped Pokémon…again. Sold out again.

THE LEAD

The Brand That Gave Itself Away Just Sued an Activist.

In 2022, Yvon Chouinard gave Patagonia away. The whole thing. To a nonprofit. Every dollar of profit goes to fighting climate change. It was a genuinely remarkable move. Nobody does that. The brand credit was enormous and completely deserved.

Then January 2026 showed up.

Patagonia filed a federal trademark lawsuit against Wyn Wiley, a drag queen who performs as Pattie Gonia. Wiley has raised around $4 million for environmental nonprofits and hikes 100 miles in full costume to get people excited about the outdoors. Wiley has two million followers and is doing, almost word for word, what Patagonia says it exists to do.

The lawsuit asks for $1 in damages. But Wiley says the legal fees could run seven figures. On June 2nd, Patagonia published settlement terms: kill the trademark applications, stop using our logos, stop selling clothes under the Pattie Gonia name. Wiley’s response that same day was pretty simple. “No deal, Patagonia.”

Patagonia’s actual products aren’t jackets and bags. It’s the idea that they care more than everyone else does. Every repair program, every land donation, every product they’ve ever made has been proof of that idea. So when you threaten a climate activist with seven figures in legal fees, you’re not just making bad PR. You’re contradicting the only thing that makes you Patagonia and not just another jacket company.

Should they protect their trademark? Of course. I’m not arguing that. But the comments on their settlement post were calling it “the most tone-deaf corporate response of 2026.” That’s attached to them now.

You can’t spend your way out of that story.

↗ ABC News, Time, LGBTQ Nation — June 2, 2026

THE RUNDOWN

Adidas Made a Five-Minute Film. Nike Built a Content Calendar. One of Those Is Winning the World Cup Before It Starts.

Adidas dropped “Backyard Legends” on May 7th. Five minutes with Messi, Chalamet, Bellingham, and younger versions of Beckham and Zidane. Fifty-six million Instagram views in four days.

Nike came back with 42 celebrities, Polaroid drops, and a 12-week content rollout. The World Cup opens Thursday. Adidas already owns the conversation. Nike is still teasing.

The thing to remember: One clear story told well beats a system designed to stay busy. It’s not even close.

↗ Inc. / WWD

FIFA Had the Biggest Merch Moment in Years and Blew It Completely.

Levi’s dropped 13-country ringer tees. Puma did a football culture capsule with Salehe Bembury. Kith and Adidas dropped a Messi collab. Official FIFA city merch right now? Unisex hoodies. Block letters. “FIFA 26 Dallas.” A hundred bucks. Six and a half million visitors. Six billion viewers. The biggest physical brand moment of the decade and the official gear looks like it was approved by someone who’s never bought a t-shirt they actually wanted to wear.

The thing to remember: Every fashion brand in the market saw this coming. The one running the event apparently didn’t.

↗ TheStreet / Brand Innovators

Liquid Death Just Finished Something Most Brands Won’t Even Attempt to Start.

Season one: The Deep from The Boys as an environmental spokesperson.
Season two: The Deep burns plastic next to children, the whole partnership falls apart on purpose.
Season three: Ashley Barrett gets promoted to VP, takes the slot.

Three years. Three acts. One consistent creative direction the whole way through. When they launched the Sparkling Energy line alongside it, the story was already there to support it. The audience had been following along.

The thing to remember: Most brands run campaigns. Liquid Death built something people actually followed. Not the same thing.

↗ Campaign US / Muse by Clios

Target Did the Pokémon Drop Again. Sold Out Again. Still Not an Accident.

Target launched Pokémon x Target Drop 2 on June 6th. Over 40 products. Apparel, accessories, collectibles, summer stuff. All exclusive. All loaded with details that casual shoppers miss and collectors specifically hunt for.

Drop 1 went almost instantly in May. Drop 2 the samething. Target is the only mass retailer in the U.S. doing co-created, limited franchise drops at this scale, and they’re doing it on purpose.

The thing to remember: A big-box store using drop mechanics to feel like a boutique. The merch is the whole marketing strategy.

↗ Target Corporate / Game Rant / Siliconera

BRETT’S TAKE

The Brands Winning Right Now Are Telling Stories.

Adidas didn’t come up with “Backyard Legends” last month. They started building toward it at the 2024 Paris Olympics with the “You Got This” platform. By the time this film dropped, the audience already knew the language. The payoff felt earned because the setup had been running for two years.

Liquid Death didn’t create a brand story this week either. They wrapped one up. Three years, three acts, one consistent voice. The Sparkling Energy launch works because there was already a mythology in place to hold it.

Nike has 42 celebrities and a 12-week calendar and is losing the cultural moment to a company that just told one story and committed to it. FIFA has the biggest sporting event on the planet and is selling block-letter hoodies because branded merch got treated as a procurement decision instead of a brand decision, and nobody had the juice to push back on that.

A merch program built around an actual story gives people something to follow. They can feel like they’re in on something. That’s worth more than any single drop, no matter how good the product is. The drop is a chapter. The story is the brand. Two different investments with two very different returns.

Before the next quarterly brief, ask: What story is the brand in the middle of right now? Does anybody outside the building actually know it exists?

THE PITCH

Does your branded merchandise match the story you’re telling them?

Generic branded gear gets distributed every day at events. Most of it hits a drawer or a donation bin within a week. A merch program built around a real brand story produces a different result. You see it in what people actually do with the item after they get it.

We work with brand leaders who want the merch layer to match the story the brand is already telling. If your merch program feels like a line item and not a brand decision, let’s talk.

That’s it for this week…

Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.

P.S.

I’ve been in this industry since 2002 and I’ve seen a lot of product end up in a junk drawer or, worse, trash cans. I started this newsletter because I’m tired of pretending that’s OK.

Glad you’re here for Issue #1. See you next week.