This month I kept coming back to one question: who is this for?

Not in a brief-filling way. In the way where you can feel that a brand sat down, drew a circle around a specific person, and made everything inside that circle instead of trying to reach outside it. Every campaign worth adding to your team's swipe file this month felt narrow in the best possible sense. Not trying to be everything to everyone. Trying to be exactly right for someone.

Five campaigns. Here's what caught my eye.

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It turns out there are over 5,000 sellers named Jeff on Etsy. Jeff Brown has been making pottery by hand since 1977. Jeff Zabriskie learned woodworking from his father and builds furniture from sustainably sourced hardwoods. Jeff Risinger turned a lamp-making hobby into a business that ships handcrafted lighting fixtures around the world. None of them are billionaires. All of them answer your messages. "Shop Other Jeffs" launched June 15, right before Father's Day, when the loudest voices in shopping are speed and price. The tagline is: "Because one Jeff should not rule commerce." And of course, they dropped a limited-edition merch line: hats, tees, keychains, all made by Etsy sellers, available at etsy.com/shopotherjeffs. They're not just saying handmade things are nice. They're asking you to think about who you're making rich, and know that the people who care about Other Jeffs will show up.

Meet the other Jeffs →

The Knicks just won their first NBA championship in 53 years. And if you ask Karl-Anthony Towns, some of the credit goes to his fiancée's orange clutch. Woods by Jordyn has been quietly building for a while: apparel, footwear that launched with an inclusive sizing run in 2025, and accessories. The Tux Clutch Mini in Summer Citrus, a $125 orange ostrich print bag, first showed up in Jordyn's "get ready with me" videos before it became a fixture at every Knicks game. Then the Knicks started winning. Then fans noticed. Then the bag became a superstition. The moment it went fully viral: Trump attended Game 3 of the Finals at MSG, bags were banned from the building, Jordyn couldn't get it in through KAT, and the Knicks lost, snapping a 13-game winning streak. The internet lost its mind. She and the brand announced a workaround: a matching pair of ankle-cuff sandals in the same orange ostrich print, which she wore courtside for the remaining games. The Knicks won the next two and took the championship in a sweep. KAT went on Good Morning America afterward and said: "That bag is undoubtedly one of the greatest articles of clothing New York has ever seen." The brand said they were selling "a few bags a minute." There's no campaign to screengrab here. No art director, no brief, no media buy. Jordyn wore her own brand to her fiancé's games and let New York fall in love with it. The matching sandals are dropping soon. The clutch is still basically sold out.

See the OOH campaign →

Olamide Olowe launched Topicals in 2020. It became one of Sephora's fastest-selling skincare brands. Then she acquired Bread Beauty Supply, launched a new edge control gel called Slick Hold in early June, and it flopped. "Like almost no sales," she said.

Her response was to get in her car, open TikTok, tell her community exactly what happened, and ask for help.

She walked through the product: Slick Hold Gel, for 4C hair, slick bun, 12 hours, no flaking, no white residue, and said she did everything she'd done at Topicals, and it didn't work. "I think I've felt so much pressure to be successful because Topicals was successful," she said on camera, "and I'm excited to learn again."

The video went viral. Thousands of replies. People offered honest criticism, marketing breakdowns, product feedback, naming suggestions. One person pointed out that the psychological trigger to buy a hair gel is completely different from the trigger to buy a hyperpigmentation serum, even if the customer is the same person. Another noted that Bread's identity is minimalist, luxury self-care, and it needs to live there rather than borrow Topicals' energy. Olamide said she wasn't expecting that level of response, or that quality.

She also surfaced the harder question underneath it all: how do you preserve a founding vision when the community that loved it won't let you change it, but what they loved isn't commercially working? She caught backlash when she first relaunched Bread after acquiring it because fans felt the brand was losing its essence. So she held back. Then the launch flopped. Now she's asking the community to help her find the line.

There is no finished campaign here yet, and that's kind of the point. She made the failure the content, invited the community in, and started a rebuild in public. But! A brand trip to Bermuda for two community members is already in the works.

The lesson isn't "admit when things go wrong." It's narrower and more useful: when your community trusts you enough to give you their real feedback, the research and development phase doesn't have to happen behind closed doors.

Watch the TikTok that started it all →

A week before the World Cup kicked off, Nike brought a group of women to its New York headquarters for a walk and talk, a stretch session, and a vintage outfit change sourced by Rummage Stretch. Then they walked outside to a tricked-out old minivan filled with soccer balls and covered in bumper stickers that said "Honk If You're Late to Practice" and "Soccer Moms Know Best." Snacks were sandwiches in baggies, clementines, and gummy candy. The activation was hosted with Spread the Jelly, a mom blog and media company, and led by Nike Global Trainer Betina Gozo Shimonek, who is pregnant with her fourth. Krissy Jones, the Sky Ting co-founder and Nike trainer, was there with her first on the way. Designer Martine Ali came. Fashion writer Liana Satenstein got into Rummage-sourced coral lace-up Nike pedal pushers and did not take them off. The day ended with a private screening of "Rip the Script," Nike's six-minute World Cup film. The film's surprise center: Kim Kardashian, framed specifically as a soccer mom. She's there because of her son Saint. She's not an OG football fan and doesn't pretend to be. Nike cast her as a mirror for everyone coming to the game sideways through a kid, through a cultural moment, through curiosity rather than lifelong fandom. The film also stars Ronaldo and LeBron and Channing Tatum, but the casting logic is the same: football culture is community, and the community is bigger than the pitch. The activation didn't try to be the six-minute film. It didn't need to be. It was 15 people at Nike HQ getting fed sandwiches from baggies and being told that the person who drives to every practice and cheers from the sideline and cuts the oranges at halftime is actually the center of the story, not the footnote. Nike made a giant anthem. They also did this. Both things at once.

Read the Spread the Jelly recap →

UGG has been showing up to Brooklyn Museum's First Saturdays for a while now. That's the real story.

First Saturdays is free, monthly, and community-first. Almost every month, the museum spotlights a different neighborhood: Caribbean heritage, LGBTQ+ Brooklyn, local artists. No velvet ropes, no ticket tiers. The whole premise is access.

For June's edition, the 30th anniversary of Brooklyn Pride, UGG curated a photobooth for portraits of attendees traditional and chosen families, both specifically named in the framing. The NYC Gay Men's Chorus performed. There was a Drag and Draw. A pop-up market. UGG didn't headline any of it. They just kept showing up and being useful.

That consistency is the campaign. Not a launch. Not a collab. A brand deciding that this room, this community, this institution, is where they belong. And then coming back to prove it.

See the activation →

Want more inspo and creative ephemera? There's more campaigns we watched in our monthly moodboard.

I started something new. Taste Buds is my newsletter where I interview creative directors to find out where they got their good taste. What they read. What they watched. What they couldn't stop looking at before they knew why. If that sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe here.

These brands didn't win by going everywhere. They won by going exactly somewhere.

Etsy knew who’d care. WOODS poured into an energetic fan base. BREAD asked the right people “why?”. Nike put the effort into niche local influencer activation. UGG poured into community again and again.

The sharpest creative work this month was built for a specific person, in a specific place, at a specific moment. Not broad. Precise.

See you next month,

Lou

Content + Campaign Manager, Air

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