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The Brand Boardroom

Thinking thatmoves brandsforward.

Latest edition

Edition 19 | The Brand Boardroom

The Hardest Year

Australia's most famous startup just had the worst year in its history, but how it was handled tells us more about the brand than 13 years of growth ever could.

All editions

Edition 18 | The Brand Boardroom

The Imperfect Advantage

Polaroid’s business died twice, but the brand never did. Now, in the age of AI, the very thing that made it obsolete has become the most valuable thing it owns.

Edition 17 | The Brand Boardroom

The Wrong Lever

Two of the biggest fashion houses made exactly the same decision within months of each other. One became the hottest brand in the world. The other watched its parent company's share price fall the day it was announced. And, it has nothing to do with the people they hired.

Edition 16 | THE BRAND BOARDROOM

The Quiet Radical

Jaguar's rebrand looked like an explosion, but structurally it changed almost nothing. McLaren's looks like nothing happened, yet it quietly rebuilt the entire business. Most of us are judging these things on the wrong measure.

Edition 15 | The Brand Boardroom

The Problem That Never Expired

Most hundred-year-old products only survive as nostalgia, something you inherit rather than actually want. The Oyster case is still the thing people save for, insure, and pass down. That's worth understanding, because it never had to invent a story to stay wanted. It just kept solving a problem that never stopped being true.

Edition 14 | THE BRAND BOARDROOM

The Prada Girl

People describe themselves as a “Prada girl” all the time, and that idea is worth understanding, because it's the whole reason luxury brands build worlds instead of just campaigns.

Edition 13 | THE BRAND BOARDROOM

The Handover

Everyone tells this story as an influencer who used her following to launch a brand. But the part nobody talks about is what she did next, which was quietly spend years making sure the brand didn't need her at all.

Edition 12 | The Brand Boardroom

The Power of Not Changing

Coca-Cola just went through what everyone is calling a rebrand. Here's the strange part: they barely changed a thing. And that restraint, in a year when every other brand is reinventing itself, is the most valuable lesson of all.

Edition 11 | The Brand Boardroom

The System Underneath

An Australian activewear brand with a genuine cult following, celebrity fans and $30 million in sales collapsed last month. The love was real. This is about what the love couldn't carry.

Edition 10 | The Brand Boardroom

The Second Act

How a 65-year-old with $105 and a pressure cooker built the second biggest restaurant chain on earth, and what founders can steal from the KFC playbook.

Edition 09 | The Brand Boardroom

The Mother's Cut

Why the edit is where the brand lives — and what founders get wrong about subtraction.

Edition 08 | The Brand Boardroom

The Category Flip

How a Texas mum mixing apple cider vinegar in her kitchen built the fastest-rising soda brand in America, nearly lost it to a bad first brand, and sold it to Pepsi for $1.95 billion.

Edition 07 | The Brand Boardroom

The Community Compound

How a 19-year-old pizza delivery driver in Birmingham built a £600 million brand without spending a pound on traditional advertising, and what every founder can learn from the way Gymshark turned community into the most defensible moat in modern retail.

Edition 06 | The Brand Boardroom

The Status Premium

How a 60-year-old organic grocery store turned a $20 smoothie into the most aspirational retail experience in America, and built one of the most profitable grocery brands in the country by refusing to act like a grocery store at all.

Edition 05 | The Brand Boardroom

The Discipline of No

Saying yes to everything is a positioning strategy. Just not a good one.

Edition 04 | The Brand Boardroom

The Compounding Can

How Celsius survived delisting, a decade of obscurity, and its own positioning to become the fastest-growing energy brand of the past decade.

Edition 01 | The Brand Boardroom

The Dad Shoe Doctrine

Here's something that shouldn't be possible. A brand that was the butt of every sneaker joke, the shoe your dad wore to the farmers market, the default footwear of suburban orthodontists, just grew its revenue by 136% in four years. It now sits alongside Nike and Adidas as one of the most culturally relevant shoe companies on the planet. And here's the part that should really make you put down your coffee: it did almost none of the things the marketing playbook says you should do.

Edition 02 | The Brand Boardroom

The Subtraction Strategy

Everyone wants to tell you the Loewe story is about genius. About a 29-year-old Northern Irish designer named Jonathan Anderson who arrived at a sleepy Spanish leather house in 2013 and willed it into relevance through sheer creative vision. About surrealist bags shaped like tomatoes and pigeons. That version is true. But it's also incomplete.

Edition 03 | The Brand Boardroom

The Chaos Theory

On February 11th 2025, Duolingo posted a statement announcing that Duo (the small green owl who had spent years guilt-tripping 500 million registered users into doing their Spanish homework) was dead. Hit by a Cybertruck. Gone. Tongue out, eyes crossed, coffin ordered. The internet absolutely lost its mind.

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