There will never be another Martha Stewart. First, Martha is Martha. However, she is not a unicorn, just a function of her time. Her trajectory from caterer to author to licensee extraordinaire to media mogul was all based on limited distribution and information flow available when she started. Simply, everything she did was amplified so much more than it would be today. Choice and information has exploded so that trusting the quality of a Martha towel at Kmart is not nearly as valuable when your phone can give you all that you need for a quality comparison.
So who will be the next Martha? Yes, designers of any kind (food, fashion, event, interior) will always seek to leverage their name through a combination of influence and license, but I am not sure that will be the path to being a mega brand.
Truly, I think it will be about who can build the most loyal community based on shared values and connection. For instance, look at Shop My Porch, built and owned by my great and truly brilliant friend, Phyllis Cheung. The concept is straightforward — think Etsy at the neighborhood level. Makers create for their community and literally people shop their neighbor’s porches. Yes, it was born out of COVID and the desire to connect with each other. I am an advisor to SMP and am thrilled to know what is coming. My hope is that it will be the medium for those who seek community to find it and build a following that will find its own life.
The real question is whether a single creative will ever seek to build the depth of relationship brick by brick, neighborhood by neighborhood until there is regional (or digital) density. The allure of mega still lives though I think it is beyond elusive. The average podcast has less than a hundred listeners, ealbum less than one hundred downloads on Spotify.
We are seeing the leverage in NFT’s and artists wanting to serve a following in new and powerful ways. I am not yet a fan of NFT’s for a whole host of reasons, environmental and artificial scarcity that reminds me so very much of Collateralized Debt Obligations that blew up the financial world in 2008. When you cannot explain something to a fifth grader, you know you are in an economic mental minefield that always has a huge trap door.
If the only thing that makes something unique is that I say it is unique and can prove it, then I can always make a second version of it, call it unique and on and on. It is like those photo games at the end of People magazine where it says spot the difference between the two photos. Now imagine each was “unique” and had its own NFT. How exactly does that create value? I know, I know, I just do not get it and I am missing the underlying opportunity NFTs represent to artists.
Maybe.
What I am definitely not missing is that the function of community and connection is pervasive today and we will all seek to leverage it as much as we can. I am simply hoping that, rather than seeking to peddle influence and product, the next mega brand focuses on community and connection.
Rather than speaking from on high as all mega brands do, it would be about fostering interweaving knowledge, anticipating micro desires and discovering how to nurture relationships at the most human and intimate level. Simply, how can my work make your life better and how can we find a network together that will, collectively, improve members lives?
No doubt, we will always seek validators, influencers and celebrity. We all understand and desire status. It is just that we can do it from a place of inclusion and opt in, rather than exclusion and cancellation.
How about this? What if designers who live and breathe on social media decided to make all of their accounts private? To require that those who are accepted participate in making the work better? Not just likes and platitudes, but real suggestions that would lead to different opportunities. Instead of, “love the flowers”, more like “how did your choose the mix, the design, what look and feeling were you going for?”. Then again, if you are thrilled with your 200,000 followers, you are probably not interested in the voices of the hundred people that matter.
If COVID has taught us anything, it is the power of exponential growth. Yes, a penny that doubles every day for a month (30 days) is $5.37million. Yes, the next mega brand might be the designer next door if only she embraces the power of being your neighbor. Go Phyllis.
