Loewe's creative playbook, and a guide to retaining your customers

Plus the changing nature of value content

Last week, Oren’s documenting luxury manufacturing tradeshows in Milan and Clayton’s documenting what yuppies like to buy. And in this HYPER, we’re focused on giving you raw brand strategy value, in one of our most thorough editions to date.

We cover

• the changing nature of value creator content

• a new free 3 Day content challenge

• Loewe’s creative direction playbook

• a retention guide for maximizing your existing customers

Excited for this one, let’s dive in!

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The Idea Content Era Is Peaking

This year creators we’re dominating by shifting from “how to do things” content to scenario based “this is what I would do” content

A Quick Timeline of Resonating Value Content

• 2023: “This thing happened.”
  This is where short form video began replacing traditional media, you would get your news in a niche from creators explaining it (this is now dominated by IG carousels)

• 2024: “This thing was good, and here’s how to do it.”
  This gen improved on traditional media. Educational, value-packed content, brand breakdowns, the “playbook” format Oren was hammering on short form. This was faster, better content than could get consumed in other mediums, and part of why value creators rose to prominence

• 2025: “If I were doing ___, this is how I’d do it.”
  This was the shift to creator as strategist. Anyone could do a breakdown whether they were an expert or not, and it became commodified. Now resonance was on the power of the idea, and this took off for a lot of creators.

Each wave got a little closer to the creator, a little less “news anchor,” and more “smart friend”.

Now What?

We’re reaching the end of that arc. Audience fatigue is real, and we are now inundated with “if I was launching a ___ brand” or “if I was doing social media for a ____” content

Two big shifts are happening:

1. Pure Lifestyle Influence
   It’s back. Not in the overly aesthetic, curated sense. But in the raw, casual, “just yapping” sense. People are watching creators talk, and creators are posting on TikTok a LOT just pure to camera conversation - multiple times a day. If advice or tactics come inside that, great, but they don’t need huge packaging. Personality and lifestyle comes first. The era of the “zesty” creator.

2. Idea → Action → Proof
   Throughout this entire time documentation content never stopped working. Not “build in public” (thats another email) but “I had this idea and I designed it, made it” etc. Now we’re going to see more than “Here’s the idea.” But “Here’s the idea, and here’s me actually doing it.” but beyond a mockup or AI, full blown tests and collaborations.

I think its worth it to document these shifts, because it ripples into brand content, how we consume, and how we consume in a large part influences how we think, and this will drive an insane amount of brand action. Not just sharing the links to cool short form videos in slack, but rapidly acting on them. Buckle up, because productivity is going to rise, and standards along with it.

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3 Day Challenge

This week, Oren is doing a new free content challenge starting this Tuesday.

3 days, the goal is to get you or your brand your first 10k views (and give you some new ideas and formats to try if you already create)

You'll make three short form IG/TikTok videos with Oren, Alex and Colin, following our exact frameworks for videos that require no speaking on cam or voiceover

We’ll have office hours and training every day with the Cut30 team.

Sign Up (free)

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Loewe

What You Can Learn from Loewe’s Art Direction

Loewe has been one of the most consistently creative luxury brands of the last decade. They dominated social media, carved their own lane, and brought a brand without clear differentiation into the highest level of cultural conversation. With Jonathan Anderson stepping away to Dior, it’s the perfect time to break down what made the visual world of Loewe work — and how you can apply the same thinking to your own brand.

The playbook:

RECURRING IDEAS

The best brands pick a few strong visual motifs and repeat them until they become recognizable. For Loewe, that includes:

• Nature — most of their shoots happen outdoors. Not in cities, not in front of concrete. Just greenery, sun, landscape. It softens the brand and gives it a timeless feel.

• Fruit — fruit is everywhere in their campaigns. On packaging, in editorials, blown up as props. It’s weird, playful, and now completely associated with them (see: the tomato).

• Product as Sculpture — their bags and shoes always get a set of images that treat them like standalone objects, white background images mirror art galleries more than ecom

• Craft — they actually show the making-of, and not just for them. Tools, process, materials, factories in Spain, but also longform deep dives into crafted techniques across the world

• Spain — their identity as a Spanish brand runs through the brands content and creative.

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FOUNDATIONS TO BORROW

If you want to build a strong brand world, here’s a basis:

• Every drop includes editorial AND still life. Not just one or the other. This lets them show products in a high-fashion context and also as design objects.

• Behind-the-scenes content. Every signature product gets a making-of video. Real designers walking you through patterns, texture, stitching.

• Signature sets. They used MM Paris for years to create full visual sets for each campaign. Not just a white backdrop with props — actual built environments that look like gallery installations that would form the core of the shoot interest

• Repeatable structure. Editorial + still life + BTS + annual location-based campaign. You know what you’re going to get from Loewe, and it’s never boring, and they have a construct to work around yearly.

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CONCEPTS THAT MAKE IT FEEL DIFFERENT

Here’s where the brand’s tone really locks in:

1. Surrealism & Displacement
   Odd object pairings, unexpected props.

2. Art & Sculpture References
   Everything looks and is lit/positioned like it could be in a museum. Even the campaign sets are installation-level.

3. Humor & Absurdity
   With a luxury background they’re not afraid to be weird. There’s a sense of humor and absurdity running through everything, that gets pulled back to luxury by sharing the same timeline as craft (and with excellent execution)

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SOCIAL STRATEGY NOTES

Their TikTok is one of the best examples of how to mix absurdist content with luxury positioning:

• They remake viral formats. They bring in influencers. They don’t overthink production. A giant tomato balloon shot on an iPhone still feels high-concept because the brand world is strong.

• They let creators be themselves. One example is letting a creator who does fashion explainers tell Loewe’s story on Loewe’s own account — not his.

I break this all down with visual examples in the Youtube here.

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A Guide to Retention Marketing

As everything online gets more competitive — more products, more noise, more options — profitability is shifting. It’s not just about acquiring new customers. It’s about keeping the ones you’ve already earned.

Most brands treat new customers like royalty and basically ignore the existing beyond email blasts or a welcome automation. Big offers, discounts, and shiny landing pages go to the front of the funnel.

Here’s how to flip that. A retention playbook for building loyalty, increasing lifetime value, and making sure customers actually come back.

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First: The Experience Has to Work

Retention doesn’t start with marketing. It starts with the product arriving on time, with clean tracking updates, and issues being resolved quickly. If a customer starts a chat, the AI shouldn’t make them want to throw their phone through a wall. Communication should feel personal and kind, be fast and have real people involved. If the experience is frustrating or sterile, all your follow-up campaigns are wasted.

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Then: Build Smarter Automations

A few email marketing flows to prioritize:

• Welcome Sequence
  Don’t make it a discount factory. Instead, share your best content. Show the mission, give value, entertain. Train customers to actually want to open your emails.

• High Engagement Tracks
  If someone opens every email, don’t throttle them. Build a high-consumption path with more value, more sneak peeks, more personality.

• New Customer Journeys
  After a first purchase, keep the relationship going. Celebrate order anniversaries. Teach them how to use, style, or care for the product. Add reminders, recipes, playlists — whatever makes the product part of their life.

• Segmentation by Interest
  If you have a broad catalog, stop sending everyone the same thing. Group by interest or behavior and tailor the message in automation

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What to Watch

A few key metrics that matter more than followers or likes:

• Repurchase rate

• Customer lifetime value (CLV)

• Time between orders

• New vs. returning customer revenue

You can track all of these in Shopify. These tell you how strong your actual relationship is, not just how good you are at ads.

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Tactics That Work

• Add Personality
  Especially in SMS. Give customers a consistent voice or character they recognize. Someone they’d text back. We haven’t seen the Reformation of SMS yet.

• Make It Personal
  For your top customers, go further. Direct outreach, handwritten notes. Invites to HQ, dinners, or events.

• Use Physical Mail
  For big moments — anniversaries, birthdays, product milestones — direct mail still hits. A postcard or mini catalog at the right time can do more than another 20% off via email.

• Early Access
  Let your existing customers shop first on releases and sales. Even better, reward them for inviting others or offering feedback. Loyalty should come with perks.

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Initiatives to Consider

• Loyalty Programs
  The good ones are rare, it’s hard to even point to great models, but Kith’s rollout where they backdated loyalty points for existing customer purchases was a great way to show retention priority.

• Customer Research
  Find your most influential customers, the ones posting about you already, and build them into seeding, influencer efforts and brand initiatives. There is no better influencer than someone who already organically loves the product

• Content With Real Value
  YouTube videos, Instagram tips, long-form guides, build content that teaches or entertains, and then use email to push it, not just on social media. If you take one thing from this not every email has to sell, engage your lists with value.

If you are looking for a platform that can do email automation, SMS and more, I recommend Omnisend. You can save money versus bigger email platforms (and this is significant at scale), and they have the full automation toolkit. This segment isn’t sponsored by them by we do get an affiliate reward when you signup, which helps support our work here.

Learn more about Omnisend for email marketing.

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Hyper Reports

Check out our market reports. We spend many hours researching markets, categories, and brands & products within the consumer space so you don’t have to.

• The guide to making great Merchandise — HERE — a guide to finding and producing your own merch

• Reports on Running, Golf, and Tennis — HERE — a guide to each sport, the market opportunities, and how to launch your own brand