Architects of Wonder
Most brand advice is artless.
It's the same recycled frameworks dressed up in different fonts. The same vague promises about "standing out" that somehow sound exactly like everyone else. Lackluster templates. Useless checklists. Fill-in-the-blank exercises designed to make you feel productive while producing nothing memorable.
The agencies and consultants churning out this stuff treat branding like a transaction. They hand you a logo and a color palette and call it done, as if the soul of your business could be captured in a single deliverable and then never revisited.
But the brands that actually mean something to people weren't created through templates and one-and-done projects. They built universes. They were Architects of Wonder. They understood that human beings are wired for story and myth and meaning, and they gave people a world worth inhabiting. Every purchase becomes a small act of faith in someone else's vision. Every moment of attention becomes a choice to believe. The brands we tattoo on our bodies and evangelize to strangers and mourn when they disappear earned that devotion by treating us like pilgrims, not customers.
Branding is as close to real magic as business gets. It illuminates the throughlines that connect mythology to marketing and ritual to retail. It reveals why certain messages land while others dissolve into noise. I use it as a lens to understand history, politics, culture, power, desire, and everything else worth examining.
My shelves hold over 2,000 books. Octavia Butler lives next to David Aaker. D.H. Lawrence next to Marty Neumeier. Dita Von Teese's Your Beauty Mark sits three feet from Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. I've spent years pulling threads between these worlds because that's where the real insights hide, in the unexpected connections, in the places no one else is looking.
That's what Stratagems x Artifice is for. It's a publication for entrepreneurs brave enough to brand themselves like they have nothing to lose. I write about my philosophy on what makes brands feel like something worth believing in. Strategy that doesn't sacrifice beauty. Substance that fascinates.
This is the first in a series called Architects of Wonder. It's about what it actually takes to build a brand that means something. The throughlines between mythology and marketing. The work of creating worlds people want to inhabit. The craft behind the magic.
More soon.
Stay Curious,
