Hey starter! Read on for…

1. Starters, why do we knock down old industrial buildings when we can transform them? The absolute joy of stumbling upon odd (+oddly-shaped) retail and hospitality locations like this former railway signal box in Nantes, France, which is now a kiosk-bar-restaurant called L’Aiguilleuse (‘The Signalwoman’). The proud new owners, Agathe Mariot & Bertille Violain, answered a call from the city to revitalize the building. The result: 🤌🤌🤌

2. Boise, Idaho, I was not familiar with your starter game: “First person in my bloodline to sell mechanical pencils out of a Japanese van.”

3. “In 1994, Kulwinder ‘Jani’ Singh opened the Punjabi Deli as a welcome stop for New York’s overworked taxi drivers, many of them South Asians and Sikhs like him.” Now there’s a beautiful new film about that NYC institution, which has been “a welcoming, joyful constant for locals and tourists alike for over 30 years.” Watch it here.

4. Elsewhere, check out this film about Northampton, the shoemaking capital of the UK. Shot at the Tricker’s factory, director Jack Orton “captures the meditative, repetitive, and skilled art of shoemaking, tracing the labor that shaped his family.”

5. And one for the road: Whenever you doubt yourself in your biz journey, whenever you question whether you can build something real and useful and valuable and profitable, whenever you look at other people’s biz success and think you don’t have it in you, just ask yourself:

The other day I met up for coffee with my friend Ayo Fagbemi, co-founder of the very good design and strategy studio Explorers Club.

Ayo and I got to talking about these questions…

I realized our convo could be useful for starters, so we ended up recording it. (Not even my social catchups are safe from sticking a mic in your face…)

Let’s go →

💬 Hey man, so what do you mean by timeless and timely?

By timeless, the main focus is: How do you build a foundation that can be enduring? We all know that great brands are built over time.

But the conditions of building a business in the real world also mean that you have to build a brand that performs in real time as well. And that’s what we mean when we say timely.

Often our industry focuses on the timeless nature of brands – the idea of long-term brand building. Of course we believe in that principle, but how do we also help marketing leaders perform in the short term as well? Whether that’s how their brand shows up in paid ads or social media, or the context in which the brand lives in today.

💬 It’s the whole ‘the long and the short of it’ thing, the balance of long-term brand and short-term performance marketing.

Right. Here’s a football analogy, because I love football. Often when new football managers join a club, they’ll say, “I’m here for the project and it’s going to take time.” And then they end up getting sacked because they didn’t get results in the short term!

Branding has almost become like that, in the sense that we’re often so focused on the long term that we’re not thinking about building brands that work for today’s day and age as well. My team and I think about both in conjunction.

💬 From a starter’s perspective, maybe someone who’s bootstrapping a biz with a team of one, they’re usually thinking about how to get their first client or survive until tomorrow, not building a timeless brand. Is that fair?

The thing is, it’s important to think about both. It’s important to think: Who are we? What do we stand for? This advice is as useful for those starting as it is for bigger brands who have to learn to how to bring their consistent message to new platforms and ways of brand building.

If I’m a starter or a business of one and I’m trying to get my first client, and someone comes to me with a presentation focused on how my brand should show up in an out-of-home campaign, well, that’s not really useful.

What is useful is how you communicate your brand and strategy in a LinkedIn post or in email marketing. It’s useful to think about the context in which your brand shows up and where your audience lives today. How do you communicate that message in a consistent way through short-form content, for example, so that every time your brand shows up in that content it’s not only clear who you are, but it’s also communicated in the context of that specific platform?

💬 I always like to think that, for a biz owner in the thick of the day-to-day, the small decisions you make every day compound over time, and that ultimately determines if you’re timeless.

Yes, at the beginning it’s about small decisions in a number of areas. But what you don’t want to do is put yourself in a box that you can’t grow out of.

💬 What are examples of businesses building timeless brands?

Take the Chobani rebrand. A transformational moment for that brand. Leland Maschmeyer, Lisa Smith and others showed how our industry can shift a business to becoming a category leader by standing out. They reframed the Chobani brand around a world of magic, and it’s so clear how different they are to the rest of the market now.

Another timeless example is Who Gives A Crap…

💬 The Australian toilet paper brand? Interesting.

Yeah, they launched through crowdfunding in 2012 and the timeless nature is they’ve taken what is quite a boring category and injected it with a lot of personality.

The lesson for small biz owners and starters is clear: choose something people already need, then give them a brand they can easily remember. Take a really clear point of view that differentiates yourself from all the other brands.

Don’t look at a market and say, “These are the codes of convention for this market and we need to follow them all.” Instead, take some of those codes but try to flip others. The name, packaging and humour of Who Gives A Crap reinforce that idea.

💬 Any others?

Let me ask my co-founder Aaron Skipper... [Aaron steps in]: LEGO! Few brands have built as much iconic equity into the product itself. LEGO’s timelessness actually gives it permission to be timely. It can move naturally through culture, entertainment and collaborations while always remaining unmistakably LEGO. Rather than standing still, it continually evolves that equity. It finds new expressions for the same fundamental idea of creativity and play.

💬 How about some examples of timely brands?

First I’d say look at Source Material, the new weekly series by Figma. It’s a series where designers and creatives shaping culture share references that shaped them. The lesson is that always-on content puts Figma at the centre of human-led taste in an AI-saturated era.

And another example I’d say is A24’s brand.

💬 The omnipresent A24! So if I’m a starter, what should I take away from the timeliness of the A24 brand?

They were very smart in the sense that a lot of entertainment brands try to sit in the background, but A24 have put their brand at the forefront. They celebrate their properties, so that when you see an A24 film or a piece of A24 content, you know it’s a marker of quality. They’ve invested in building their own brand, but they’ve done so in a way that’s very flexible. It can adapt to the needs of today, rather than sticking to very rigid brand guidelines.

It’s basically a very modern approach to brand-building: consistency comes through taste, DNA and approach, rather than some rigid visual rules. That gives them the flexibility to lean deeply into different films, communities and cultural moments, while everything still feels unmistakably part of the same A24 world. ☼

Juniper lattes, pine sodas 🌲 → It’s a good year to have forest ingredients in your product. Brb rebranding this newsletter to Fir Starters.

And it’s a good week to be… 🤷‍♀ → …a Slovenian website owner.

Stability stacking 🧑‍🏭 → Millennials are “layering multiple sources of security – such as skills, options, income, and networks – to ensure that no single job, boss, or industry disruption can knock you flat.”

Pigeons 🐦 → They’re now chic: “In the age of AI, the humble bird has become a symbol of slower communication and our forgotten connection with nature.” As the former editor of a magazine with a pigeon logo, I’ve been on this train for years.

Micro-nerdery 🤓 → How typeface designer Sara Soskolne describes her craft: “I’ve always been a total generalist, so it’s bizarre that I’ve wound up in one of the most specialized vocations you could choose.”

The 20-5-3 rule 🏕 → You should aim for 20 minutes outside 3 times a week; 5 hours in semi-wild spaces each month; and 3 days fully off-grid per year.

Design manifestos → A reference collection of 300+ design manifestos. God bless Tom Nelson for putting in the work here.

How to unclench → This is very cool: “I’ve spent the better part of a decade teaching nervous system regulation to thousands of people, and I’ve realized that most of what I teach distills down to one word: unclench.”

Ones to Watch 2026 → Just dropped: It’s Nice That’s annual list of “the most exciting emerging graphic designers, illustrators, animators, artists, filmmakers and photographers from around the world.”

The opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhood. The White Pages

Can affordable ethical fashion scale up? Positive News

Fitzcarraldo – inside the chicest publisher on earth. FT

Now entering: the era of bleh. Airbrain, AI and the homogenization of knowledge work. Noema

You are not the exception to the arc. Rome, Kodak, and Newtonian physics all peaked. Whatever you’re building will too. Westenberg

Why we like things. What Silicon Valley gets wrong about taste. Asterisk

A guy who actually ‘makes clothes’. Nolan Daniel White

72% → The proportion of Americans who are willing to make slower progress on financial goals to “show up for family, take vacations and prioritize meaningful memories.”

In a Japanese forest, this private village designed for “gathering, hospitality, and the enjoyment of art” can be yours for $10m.

Destroy any website. (This shouldn’t be so much fun…)

Here at For Starters HQ we love books, magazines, and all things print. So when FS subscriber Chaz Hutton told me he’s got 2 (!) new books coming out, my ears perked up…

It’s a cool format. The publisher, The Pound Project, does small print runs and titles called ‘tear and share’, featuring little postcard pages you can pull out. → Chaz’s books are here and here. Go grab ’em!

Tell your friends. Thousands of biz-builders around the world read For Starters every week. Thanks for being one of them. Know a starter who might enjoy it? I’d love it if you forwarded this email to them!

Brand partnerships. Want to talk to the next generation of small biz owners? There are a limited number of sponsorship slots available for 2027 → Let’s talk

What are you working on? I love featuring subscribers, so get in touch and tell me your biz dreams → [email protected]

—DG