At the end of the day, brands need just two strategies: image creation and value capture. Everything else is execution.
It’s one of those statements that sounds deceptively simple — almost like a design principle. But as I’ve sat with it, it feels more like a diagnostic tool. You can hold any brand up to this frame and see, quite clearly, whether they’re generating real momentum or just creating noise.
We’ve spent the last decade obsessed with image creation: likes, aesthetics, drops, hype. We’ve perfected the theatre of brand. But value capture, which we are defining as actually owning the upside of the attention a brand generates, remains a relative blind spot for the current generation.
This piece explores examples from fashion's most successful new-generation brands like On, Casablanca, and Rains, and examines how the best brands are able to collapse the false binary between creativity and commerce, building interconnected ecosystems where attention doesn't just spike but compounds over time.
But before we get into this, some definitions...
Image creation is the act of generating meaning, desire, and cultural relevance around a brand: the process of building perception, identity, and emotional connection in the minds of people.
Value capture is the system through which a brand retains and compounds the value it creates: financially, culturally, and strategically. It’s everything that ensures who benefits when your brand grows. Brands became exceptional at creating cultural value, but poor at capturing it, allowing intermediaries, platforms, or resellers to extract the upside.
Put together, these two forces form the engine of modern brand building. One generates meaning. The other retains it. One draws people in. The other keeps them inside the universe you’ve built.
Here's how the two map out:
The Image Creation Era
Fashion, especially, has been the great lab for image creation. Brands like Casablanca, House of Errors, or Our Legacy have shown that when image is anchored in a coherent worldview or authentic cultural corner, it can feel expansive and alive.
But the inverse is equally visible. We’ve arrived at a saturation point where image has been industrialized… the same campaigns, the same pseudo-ethereal storytelling, the same 20-something models smiling in soft light. All of this is problematic. It means that the industry works with the same photographers, stylists and production companies who are squeezing out any hope of an opportunity for younger creatives. But perhaps more crucially, it’s not a meaningful contribution. Jockum Hallin of https://www.ourlegacy.com/ once said to us, “If everyone’s chasing the same aesthetic, you’re not building brand equity, you’re building background noise.” And background noise is a problem.
That’s what’s happened and continues to happen in the “content-first” brand landscape. The playbook got open-sourced, templated, rinsed and repeated which allows the ‘easy sell’ creative idea over genuine creativity to dominate. The result is a brand economy where every brand is endlessly broadcasting, with little to no retention to speak of.
The Value Capture Recession
Brands are lazy about value capture. Social platforms extracted most of the commercial and cultural value of the 2010s by playing host to brands, creators and the audience themselves. And the business model is effective: any system where the customer provides the inventory is a very good business.
In an interview we did with Brice Partouche around a year ago, Brice said: “We built the culture; they built the platform. That’s the problem.”
Brands like On is an exception precisely because they’ve treated product innovation as value capture. Alex Griffin, the brand’s CMO, described it as “owning our performance story at every touchpoint” which sees the brand build IP-led innovation so every marketing story reinforces proprietary technology. On doesn’t just generate image through athletes and aesthetics, it builds intellectual property, community loyalty, and an owned ecosystem that translates attention into long-term equity.
Contrast that with brands who mistake reach for retention. The hype cycle of 2018–2021 streetwear was a masterclass in how not to capture value. Many of those brands still had lines around the block but the value went to StockX and resellers. When the heat cooled, the brand equity wasn’t there.
The Rise of Brand Universes
A concept we coined and reported on in 2024. Value capture happens inside Brand Universes, where a brand exists as an interconnected ecosystem in which products, content, and community reinforce each other.
A Brand Universe is a harmonious and interlinked ecosystem of internal (image, attitude, and argot) and external (narrative, entertainment, and product) touchpoints that combine to make a brand or individual distinctive, sought-after, and influential amongst its target audience.
What makes it different to the long famed brand world is that it goes beyond creating a sense of the familiar which can be achieved via clever messaging and lifestyle marketing. Instead, a Brand Universe looks to expand it’s footprint across multiple cultural domains, and views them as genuine opportunities to forge connections and share real experiences. It therefore forges deep emotional bonds with today’s universally, multi-faceted consumer market.
In this framework, image creation is no longer a top-down broadcast but a gravitational force that draws people in. Value capture, then, is what happens when that energy stays inside the system rather than leaking out to middlemen.
This works when brands design not just for the shelf but for the system. Everything brands make should contribute back to the community, not just the company. That’s value capture as mutual benefit rather than extraction.
And yet, many brands still operate like tenants in someone else’s universe. They rent an audience from Instagram, lease credibility from collaborations, and outsource distribution to wholesalers. In doing so, they surrender control of both the message and the margin.
The False Binary
It’s tempting to frame image creation and value capture as opposites: creativity versus commerce, soul versus spreadsheet. But the best brands collapse that distinction.
Stories need to be designed so that they can travel, meaning every creative decision has a commercial logic baked into it. Likewise, if your ideas don’t translate into tangible experiences, you’ve just built a moodboard, not a brand.
The most successful new-generation brands have found a rhythm where image creates value and value funds image. They’re not chasing virality; they’re building systems of meaning that people want to stay inside.
The Cost of Leaking Value
When you lose focus on value capture, a brand loses leverage and becomes dependent.
The fashion industry’s popular pivot to beauty, homeware, and lifestyle categories is, in many ways, a scramble to capture more of the customer’s wallet and attention. But as recent consumer studies show, people are becoming more discerning: they’ll buy non-fashion products from fashion brands only if the values, design, and storytelling align authentically. When done well (like Loewe’s home line), it deepens the universe. When done poorly, it’s just merch.
Not every brand can (or should) do both at once. Some need to sequence the work. Early-stage brands often start with image creation — building a world that people care about — before architecting mechanisms for capture. That’s the Our Legacy model.
Others invert the order. Shein, for example, mastered value capture first through hyper-efficient data loops and supply chain control, then layered image and community on top. The sequencing matters. Get it wrong, and you either burn out your story or never monetise your momentum.
Closing Thoughts
We’re entering a new era where attention is abundant but trust is scarce. Brands can no longer rely on being seen; they have to be held onto, sticky and stubborn.
The challenge for all of us in this next chapter of brand building is to design for both: to create the kind of image that pulls people in, and the kind of system that keeps them there. Because the brands that master both won’t just look good, they’ll last.