What's This? Why Now?
Introducing ourselves and our big upcoming research report on how brands can survive and thrive in 2024.
In 2024, more brands and creative projects will fail than ever before.
Now let us explain. Over the past 10 years, we’ve witnessed an excruciating number of brilliant projects by exceptional visionaries fail unnecessarily. In part due to a lack of understanding of the pace at which an audience’s taste and behaviour is evolving. But increasingly due to slowing reactivity, copycat culture, choice paralysis, and an inability to convert creative practice into meaningful growth. We’ve now hit a peak and unfortunately see too few solutions being offered by the usual suspects on the agency and research circuits, whose own structures and methods are stuck in the past.
We’re making it our mission to change this.
Launching Two Projects in Free Wifi Zones
The two of us are experienced brand builders and strategists who met in 2018 in Berlin at the global culture platform, Highsnobiety where we spent a combined 12 years departing as Head of Strategy and Editorial Director respectively. In our careers, we’ve consulted, and built strategies for some of the world’s most influential brands in fashion, music, sports, retail, and media.
In early 2023, we would meet at the Barbican, London, and discuss the current state of the creative industries and why a new approach is so desperately needed to support emerging creative talent and ideas across all cultural disciplines. By July, we were ready to join forces and begin work on launching two projects.
The first, edition+partners, is our creative growth company. edition+partners is on the mission to design up-to-date strategic blueprints to help distinctively original creative projects launch, survive, and thrive. Our second, SOTA (State of the Art), is edition+partners’ adolescent younger sibling; a no frills, thought platform that lives and breathes here on Substack.
Across our op-eds, unfiltered conversations with creative leaders, quick take industry analysis, and private discussion threads with our community, SOTA lifts the veil on the inner workings of the ever-evolving, multi-trillion dollar creative industries and the dynamic world of brand. From where it’s happening in real time, straight to your inbox.
Mission and Vision
To be clear, our work doesn’t mean strictly helping the biggest brands in the world get bigger. Instead, our MO is to challenge industry gatekeeping and find new solutions to growth driven by creativity, not just economies of scale. Otherwise, we believe that true independent artists, designers, authors, and others like them will see their opportunity to contribute to creative innovation wane into insignificance. And that’s a dangerous thought.
And that’s just year one. Long term, we take great inspiration from A24 and XL recordings from the film and music industries respectively and how they have built businesses in service of the artist. Both have looked at the gatekeepers and conglomerates that came before them and defied any predetermined path, building cult-like followings in the process. Instead, they share a unwavering commitment to bold storytelling, remain genre-less, are curation obsessed, and will always prioritise art and creativity over any Oscar or Grammy award.
Distinctive Originality Over Everything
This means we strive to collaborate with uncompromising artists, brands, and visionaries who are willing to take risks to make incredible things. These include the leaders who understand the power of distinctive originality, conscious systems, and have an appetite for unconventional ways to create, inspire, and entertain.
Our current partners are the embodiment of this ethos. Whether it’s helping position a Lagos-based culture festival on the global stage, launch a Swedish tailoring house in new markets, concept and design a new retail vision for one of the world’s largest fashion groups, cast the lead ambassador for an iconic denim brand, relaunch a 1960s boutique as a circular fashion house, or market a creator economy tech solution, the relentless desire to expand into uncharted territories is the common thread linking them all.
In sum, we’ve set out to merge the taste and integrity of an independent group with the ability to get stories and products to global audiences like the major corporations. edition+partners therefore specialises in conceptualising and developing products and experiences that bridge creative and commerce, forge genuine connections, and leave a meaningful imprint on real people.
Straight From the Source
To back up our claims, we’ve spent the last 6 months interviewing over 50 brand founders and leaders and will be publishing our findings over the next 9 weeks on SOTA under the title "The Next Big Bang: The Brand Universe Solution to Growth,” edition+partners’ inaugural research thesis.
This isn’t another youth culture report but a brand study as told by brand leaders with a focus on fashion and its global impact on adjacent creative industries. We set out to determine the answers to three simple questions: What do brands need to stop doing? (what has, but no longer, works?), What do they need to continue doing? (what’s currently driving growth and innovation?) and What do they need to start doing? (what new creative practices must they implement to thrive).
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond our 12–part research thesis exploring Brand Universes, edition+partners has developed a behind the scenes night sky of growth strategies. Each star represents a potential tactic for a different project, product or category leaving us with the role of astrologers for hire, ready to navigate the road ahead.
Tom Garland and Christopher Morency
Founders of edition+partners