Do you remember Livestrong bracelets? 🟡
What a yellow rubber brand can teach us about trends and what's "cool".
Happy Tuesday!
I was reminded this past week of the infamous Livestrong bracelet.
The year or two in my life where every photo you see of me probably includes a combo of colored rubber bracelets around my wrist.
This week is a quick exploration of where do these fads come from and how do things become “cool”.
Anyways, Let’s Ramble.
The Yellow Bracelet We All Wore
Think back to where you were in 2004.
Leading up to the Tour de France that year, Nike (and you can’t really talk about Nike without their partner agency Wieden+Kennedy) pitched the idea to Lance Armstrong and the Livestrong foundation of a yellow rubber bracelet.
The yellow was to represent the jersey the leader of the race wears and they were going to do a production run of 5 million, sell them each for $1, and all the money would go to the Livestrong foundation.
The idea was met with a lukewarm response to say the most.
“First and foremost, we thought it was a terrible idea–a horrible idea,” — Doug Ulman (CEO of Livestrong)
“What are we going to do with the 4.9 million that we don’t sell?” — Lance Armstrong
But I think we all know where the story goes from there.
Nike sells out the first run of 5 million by the fall, we even see a secondary market of these bracelets pop up selling for 25x the cost, Nike continues to produce these bands and they end up selling somewhere near 82,000,000 bracelets….
A way to belong
Livestrong bracelets were one of the earliest memories I have around needing an item to simply not feel left out.
Or in other terms, belong.
When they started really taking off and Nike ran out of the first 5 million, they were actually really hard to get (of course scarcity can definitely help hype whether it’s planned or not).
I remember bringing money in to school to try to get one from one of the parents who somehow got their hands on a pack of them.
There was a moment in time where every wrist in the entire school had that yellow band on it.
It was a sign of unity but also that you belonged to a community.
As a 10 year old kid, it was deemed “cool” and if you wanted to be a part of the cool club, you needed one.
Was it more about what I had than who I was in order to feel like I belonged, or what is just that this object signified something about me that made me feel like I belonged?
What do my things say about me
Fast forward to college when I got to meet an iconic product designer Craig Dubitsky who told me “We write our narrative with the objects we buy”.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
We buy things that resonate with the lifestyle we have or desire.
We want to associate ourselves with these brands and the people we believe also buy them. We believe in what we think having these things says about us a person.
Some of us do it way more consciously than others (I can geek out on some very mundane products) but we all do it on some level.
Often these are smaller communities we want to belong to or attributes we identify with, but I’m sure we all can think of the giant ones we see all around us.
Think about the iPhone.
Do you remember when people around you started to get iPhones? Do you remember the feeling of getting your first iPhone? Or are you still facing green bubble shame?
Whether it was exclusive apps or group messages, as the trend grew and grew you started to need an iPhone more and more to feel apart of everything.
The iPhone was a rocketship.
*A couple years ago Apple launched the Apple Watch Ultra, a much bigger and blockier watch with these unique specialized straps, that visually set itself apart from any apple watch we had seen before. My favorite take on it was that because the iPhone had become so ubiquitous, they were testing finding a new “status” item that was so visually distinct so that you simply wanted to be seen with it and apart of the group of people who had it.
Another recent one, that I’ll come back to later, is Stanley Cups. A fascinating story how a company over 100 years old went from $70 million to more than $750 million a year in revenue with just a water bottle.
How does something even become “cool”?
In the case of Livestrong it wasn’t an instant craze right out of the gate.
Lance recalls after the Tour de France, when they still hadn’t sold all the initial run of 5 million, watching the summer olympics and seeing the Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj win the 1500m and as he crosses the finish line, a picture is displayed to the world…a yellow rubber bracelet around his left wrist.
This moment in time and culture is when Lance believed this was actually going to be much larger than he thought.
As we all know now, he was (now) right, they hadn’t even gotten started.
So was Hicham El Guerrouj actually the one who made this cool and set off the craze?
Maybe it leads to a bigger question though of who creates trends. Who makes things “cool”?
Not just anyone can go make something “cool”.
It makes me think about my marketing friends every time I hear an executive ask for a “viral” piece of content…
There’s an art to this science.
Finding cool’s path 🔍
There’s a path that all information flows through media and culture.
The path of attention.
If you’re able to figure out one of these paths, you suddenly are able to see things coming from way further upstream and sometimes you even have the chance to influence it.
Let’s look at media quickly.
In “Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator” Ryan Holiday talks a lot about this path and how he took advantage of it for marketing.
Ryan goes into a lot of detail about this but a lot boils down to ”bigger blogs often get their stories from smaller blogs and Twitter, and the mainstream media takes its cue from all of them.”.
In one story instead of pitching and paying the largest publications, Ryan decides to put up a billboard, in the middle of the night he defaces that billboard himself, then takes a photo of the defaced billboard from his car driving by, and leaks it to a small LA blogger he knows is at the start of this path.
Almost instantly this story trickles all the way up and is in all the major publications.
We see this not only in media but culture too, and of course how to the two influence each other.
I won’t sit here pretending I know this path, but I do have my list of friends I go to, to ask what’s cool in different areas.
The people who seem to really understand both the art and science to it.
The people who can spot trends from way before the average person. Sometimes so far in advance they seem psychic.
Trendsetters finders
These people are really good at understanding the path trends take and where to look to be able to recognize them before they come to be.
There’s even entire industries and companies within trend spotting.
Everyone in Fashion and Retail will know WGSN. A company that has established itself as one of the leading experts when it comes to consumer trends. They have hundreds of people looking at sources studying patterns to predict what the next trends will be in culture.
Almost every single retailer you can think of probably has a large contract with WGSN for access to reports on what they think are the next big things.
*It’s worth mentioning that once you become an authority on “what’s going to be cool” you probably also start getting some power to influence it too.
While a company of hundreds of people who study this full time is interesting, there’s also sole individual people within industries that seem to be able to do this on their own and have their finger on the pulse of what’s cool.
One example is Brendon Babenzien. Around 2021 after J.Crew had been spending years struggling to find it’s footing in culture again, they hired Babenzien as their new Men’s Creative Director.
Brendon is one these people who has shown before he knows “cool”.
Brendon is credited playing a major part in turning Supreme from a skate brand to one of the top known streetwear brands in the world. There’s no question Brendon understands building hype. (For fun here are some of the wild things Supreme launched… I’m now waiting for the J.Crew Crowbar.)
And if we go back to Stanley Cups, a lot of that rise was attributed to their new president Terence Reilly. Reilly was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Crocs (and just announced his return), another brand that especially through collabs tapped into trends better than maybe anyone else. Reilly has built credibility around being someone who understands these paths.
A lot of trends we participate in as consumers can be traced back to people like this.
These are actually the people I want to hear ramble about marketing, trends, and culture.
The people that can pull us further upstream and help us fulfill our desire to say “I knew about it before it was cool”.
Who do you go to for what’s “cool”? What do people come to you for?
Also, I want to hear your wildest predictions of a future trend, send them in!
If you know anyone who would enjoy this conversation please share this post with them.
If you have suggestions for things you want rambles on, or you just want to let me know what’s been kicking around in your mind recently, shoot me an email at jessereichenstein@gmail.com.
Enjoy the week,
J