Hitmakers, Season 2

A product’s life doesn’t end at the point of sale.
In fashion, it may be just getting started.
There’s a strong connection between people who buy a lot on resale… and people who buy a lot of new clothing, too. They shop more. They turn over items faster. They return more. They discard perfectly good pieces. Which means resale isn’t replacing the primary market. It’s amplifying it.
That’s a new game.
Brands now aren’t just designing for this season. They’re designing for the afterlife of the product — for how it will circulate, hold value, signal status, and show up again in the market months or years later.
That has consequences for everything: design, merchandising, distribution, supply chain, even financial planning. Growth is no longer just about volume. It’s about durability, recognizability, inventory quality, and unit economics over time.
In this episode, we explore resale as the stock market for brands — and how the secondary market shapes value in the primary one.
Listen to our conversation here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.



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Oscar Wilde said a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
He might as well have been talking about luxury today.
Because something is off. The industry spent years raising prices — and for a while, it worked. The higher price was the draw. But then consumers stopped buying it–literally and figuratively. The whole model crumbled like the house of cards.
What replaced it is more interesting. The most coveted things today aren’t the most expensive — they’re the most obscure. A run so limited that no one knows about it. An AI ad that pissed off almost everybody. Or, in the words of Matthew Blazy, “Craft as technology.”
When the currency changes, so does the trade.
In this episode, we’re asking: where is the value in an industry known for taste, craft, and story once it got addicted to growth at scale and high price?
Listen here or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.



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There are four basic tastes — sweet, salty, sour, bitter.
There’s actually a fifth one. It’s called umami. It’s the flavor that lingers. The one chefs chase because it stays with you after everything else fades.
A few years ago, cultural strategist Emily Segal borrowed that idea for her “Umami Theory of Value,” describing a certain kind of savory cultural work — the kind that feels familiar and surprising at the same time. Not just catchy… but sticky.
And right now, that kind of work is getting harder to find.
Our feeds are full of speed. Shock. Endless novelty. Everything hits fast and disappears faster.
So what does it take to make something linger?
In this episode, we’re talking about what we’re calling neo-umami — cultural work that turns attention into legibility. By unfolding. By deepening. By resisting the algorithm.
Listen to the Episode 10 of Hitmakers, Season 2, the show that tracks how culture moves margins, multiples, and market cap.



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Dame Vivienne Westwood once said, “Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it’s popular, it’s not culture.”
In the 1980s, we had Air Jordans and Back to the Future.
In the 1990s, it was grunge, Pretty Woman, Britney Spears.
Iconic things have always been products of their moment.
When the media was mass, culture was mass. When distribution was centralized, symbols were shared.
That’s no longer true.
Today, influence is fragmented. Taste is fragmented. Communities are fragmented.
The geography of culture has collapsed—from mass movements to millions of micro-scenes.
So how does culture move now?
In this episode, we explore how algorithms reward both scale and specificity—and why pop culture is just a backdrop now.



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Is Millionaire Speedy a luxury bag or merch? What about the Balenciaga Maxi Pack?
The term “merch” originally referred to items made for music fans, where items like t-shirts were sold on a band’s and musician’s tour. From music, merch spread to sports, film, gaming, art, fashion, design, travel, and entertainment. Merch’s original value has never been in the physical item itself–after all, a band shirt is just a tshirt, but in the social and cultural capital associated with it. Partly this stemmed from the fact that originally one could buy merch at concerts, thus signaling true allegiance to a cultural artifact. Thus, unintentionally, merch also operated on the concept of scarcity.
This social and cultural capital made merch the opposite of a commodity. Commodities are interchangeable (who can tell the difference between a Polo and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt if it wasn’t for the logo?); merch was a unique expression of a specific time, place, community, and context. First streetwear brands, often run by music enthusiasts in the pre-e-ecommerce age, also operated on the same principle.
The nature of merch changed as merch became commoditized in the early 1990s by Hot Topic, a chain store that gave access to band t-shirts to teenage mall rats. At the same time as streetwear became more important, it also turned merch into a commodity, which became even more ubiquitous with the rise of e-commerce. These developments removed the necessary friction that made merch a valuable cultural symbol. In the past, a person wearing a Nirvana t-shirt was probably a fan of the band’s music, today no such guarantee exists (and many more shirts are sold). This often precludes one of the original purposes of merch, a signaling of belonging to a certain subculture.
Still, the meaning of merch has not disappeared, but merely shifted. A person wearing a logoed Balenciaga tee is also signaling some kind of meaning, as is the person wearing one with the logo of A24, the trendy film production company or H&M’s infamous “Dimes Square” tshirt. The need for signaling through one’s possessions has not gone away, but, in the world of social media, increased.
Recently, we’ve heard:
Merch is a status symbol.
Merch is a subgenre.
Merch is a style statement.
Merch is an identity marker.
Merch is past its peak.
But all those takes miss the reality that merch has become big business.
What used to live on the edges of culture has moved to the center of the retail economy. The side show has become the main act.
In this episode, we explore what happens when consumers learn to buy everything as merch — and why the future of merch is niche, secret and indecipherable to the mainstream.
Listen to our conversation above, or on iTunes, Spotify or YouTube.



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