Oren Meets World: rick owens' world building playbook: a creative's guide to brand & design

Today we are going to go through the world building playbook for creatives. This is going to be a case study of Rick Owens. Rick Owens takes an approach to designing, to creativity, to his brand that is so unique and tasteful and beautiful and has broken through so many molds of what people would consider a brand to be. And the magic of this is he's created a world that whenever you interact with it, it's almost like it's alien. Like you're not on earth, you're transported somewhere else while still somehow being commercially approachable. So I'm going to distill this into terms and frameworks that are applicable for any creative, whether you're an art direction, creative direction, a designer, have your own brand, or just looking to find your own visual style. And this won't do justice to a fraction of the world that Rick has created, but hopefully spark something beautiful in your vision of what you can do along the way. In this video, we're going to cover spectacle, trademarks that designers have, the product funnel, muses and characters, the designers' lore, aesthetics creating their own worlds, and how that all comes together into the world building of a brand. Let's lock in. I want to start with a goal. I feel like every creative or designer should have their own version of, and that's to build a world completely of your own vision. If you have aspirations that you want to be someone important in the visual or aesthetic field, you need to have an actual aesthetic ideal that when someone enters your space, whether it's your home or your retail store, goes to one of your shows, even sees the cars you drive, a party you throw, they're taken out of the common world and immersed into your world, into something that is unexpected, that is completely designed and created to be an extension of your vision. And if you can build a world that's that big, where all these different creative ideas you have are pulled into the reality, then you are one of those like magnetic creatives as the ability to like shift the way we feel and understand and resonate with the world around us. And it's so intrinsically powerful. We've broken all of our creativity down now into design this webpage, create this 30-second video, launch this like single capsule collection, and less into these massive worlds that people like Rick Owens built. Now I'm going to talk about the funnel of creative here, because at the end of the day, this does tie back to commerce. I think many people who would have been artists in prior generations now are clothing designers, product designers, content creators. And so this is art and commerce kind of fully intertwined. And by that nature, these things have to make money. It's all going to come back to a funnel. What do I mean by a funnel? If you've watched any of my marketing videos, you know the kind of top of funnel means you need things that draw attention, that get attention to your brand and your vision. The middle of funnel is about education, about nurturing, about turning people from just being aware of it into advocates of it. And the bottom of funnel is what people actually convert. They buy, they become leads, they do the action that you're looking for. And all marketing comes down eventually to a funnel. And looking at a brand the same way is a really interesting proposition, particularly a brand like Rick Owens. So at the top of funnel for Rick is art and spectacle. I think he's one of the core kind of pioneers in this world we've seen of product as marketing, right? You can go on your social media feed nowadays and you can see a massive oversized bag being hauled around by someone like Fugazi. Or you can see some crazy product that was made purely to succeed on social media. Like I look at the Gentle Monster Bratz dolls, right? That is made to be a social media product. Now, Rick has been doing this generationally, right? And whether it was art he created like tables of himself or inside the shows that they were doing where models were wearing each other as backpacks, like down the runway. This is being created for one goal and that is to create art in the name of spectacle to bring awareness to the brand and world that he is creating. And many people who aren't deep in, what are you gonna buy from a fashion perspective only know Rick Owens from these crazy shows, from all these visuals we're showing here on screen that are just wild things. If you were asking who would ever wear this, what is the proportion of this? And all of this is just to gain awareness into the world that this brand and this identity exists. And in the modern era, this is increasingly important. And people do this in different ways. Shaq Moose might do it in a cute and playful way. People might do it by having a founder or a key celebrity. But doing it from a pure artistic vision perspective and then doing that as an entry point into a larger weird world that the brand has is something that I feel Rick has done an incredibly powerful job with. But then right below that in the middle of funnel, what actually brings people awareness? What makes it into a trademark? What becomes a thing that people are familiar with, that they consume more of, that they can start to see themselves doing that becomes that middle of funnel territory of what the brand looks like. And this is why trademarks are really important for brands. Rick Owens has been a great example of this, where you actually see these things in different ways coming to the clothes that are uniquely and signaturally Rick. The first is the shoulders that we'll show here. It's almost bat wing style design that shows up on all this different clothing that when you see somebody wearing, no matter what kind of celebrity they are, you go, me, that's a Rick Owens piece. He has taken shape. One of the core things that goes into any fashion design or any product design and turned it into one of the signatures. And you see as a through line between years and between collections. So you begin with that idea of spectacle we have, drawing in attention. And you bring that down to signature. What are these things that are rememberable trademarks of the brand that when you see, you begin to associate with? And it becomes a signaler to people that know. If you go one step down, he also did this with strings and laces, both in all the pants, the long strings that they have in the shorts, which became a very simple thing, but it was very connotative of the brand. To then updating that and saying, hey, I'm actually doing these mega lace versions. And all the shoes and a bunch of the collaborations now feature these extremely complicated lace designs. And so you begin to see trademarks emerge that are signature for design. And what I like to call out about this is every designer has these, right? This is the core thing that we do every season after season. They'll have their things that are uniquely them. But doing them in such a visually impactful way that is so different from what else is out there, that is so separate that it can only really be from one designer, is what separates making something that's good from making something that is really resonant. So going back to the start, we have our spectacle that brings in attention. We have our middle of funnel, the more trademark things that occur frequently that people are into. And then we'll have what I'm gonna call the bottom of funnel here, which is what people most often choose to buy from the brand. And this is a really interesting concept. I think every designer and every creator should think about is what is your take on entry-level products? What is your take on classics? This is something that is a foundation of the Rick Owens brand. Part of one of the reasons that he's a controversial designer, and there'll be a bunch of people in the comments here being like, Rick Owens is torched, because there is so many takes on these known things. So if you were to look at footwear, for instance, you can see the Rick Owens footwear and be like, there's the Ramon, which is a direct Rick Owens version of a Converse. There's the Geobasket, which is their version of a Nike basketball shoe. And also typical things like a short, a pant, a cargo pant. You will see he has his unique take on all of those. Some of them more inspired than others, but basically he's crafted enough of a worldview to be able to have a take on them. That's a really useful exercise for any creative. If someone was to hand you some Vans and say, you have to make these uniquely yours, so unique that someone will be able to recognize that they are yours from your signatures, that's a good signal around if you've developed a unique enough style for yourself. And then the same thing with a short or a pant. What are those signatures? Whether it's with Rick, with the pod shorts, you have a drop crotch, you have those same strings then applied across others. It changes and moves over time, but they're able to take a signature style and apply it to any given item. And then this ends up being what the majority of people purchase. Because no matter what high fashion and spectacle you have, people buy in at the entry level. CDG isn't held together by the highest end fashion it does. It's held together by the converse with the heart on them. All of these brands succeed off of their entry-level products. And the more wide a swath and the more adoptable it is, while still remaining a vision that also is basically a walking billboard for yourself, the more successful a brand world becomes, the more interesting and spectacle and things you can do on the top of it. But that Rick Owens empire is an empire built on Ramones shoes and pod shorts. And so I encourage any designer, any person working at a brand, it's gonna be clothing or not, to be able to think about, what are the things that are drawing an attention for me? And they may not even have to sell. Their idea is to bring in attention. What are the signatures that you have on a brand you can see recurring underneath it? And then what would your take on entry-level things be? Because more often than not, when you establish your own design world, you're gonna be entering into your collaborations with Adidas or Nike or Vans or New Balance or Converse. And that's what questions you're gonna have to be asked. They're actually gonna provide pretty deep implications as to whether or not you're gonna be commercially viable. Does your world you've created translate into those more common items? But now let's move away from products. Let's talk about characters in the world-building story. If you see any of my brand strategy exercises, I always encourage brands to look at their content, to look at, and content mean everything, from lookbooks to websites to social media to what you run in your advertisements to runway shows. As a TV show, sets, characters, et cetera. And the characters that represent your brand tell you a lot about the brand. And Rick Owens has taken this world and basically continued to make almost an otherworldly segment. You can watch a Rick Owens show and you're watching essentially like a sci-fi horror concoction from a lot of the choice being the characters that are involved. Because to his, in his own wording, is a cast of freaks. The characters in the story, in every one of these runway shows and the models they have on there are designed to take you out of the world of reality. Whether they are hyper-beautiful or seem like some sort of fictional godlike character or whether they are repulsive and would make people think twice about what is happening there or is this person even real? Am I in a horror movie? Are they made up to look like that? And in one of my previous videos on a similar topic, we talked about Stussy and the idea of the homie lookbook. And basically the opposite of this where they're saying, hey, our friends and collaborators and the people that we know and skate with and write graffiti with are the people that are in our lookbooks. This is a very popular strategy that Stussy has had with the Stussy tribe for decades that we see a lot of people and brands do now. The common person has become a part of the brand story. It's an awesome way to feel community with your brand. Then there's the opposite approach. Let's take your brand and put you into a fantasy world. And that is what Rick does. And that is a difference between something that, a brand that's a community and a brand that is art. And they can both resonate in their own ways. But the art one is the opportunity to really bring a design and artistic vision to life for people to have that vision more than any other way. And in a world of about blank and represent and ALD, having models and shoots that all look very similar and their knockoffs and spinoffs all having their own shoots even look more similar. The passion to hunt down the freaks of the world to make them the stars of your show, to find the correct visualization of your brand is completely unique or completely its own story no matter what that may be, is increasingly powerful as the algorithms center more and more brands around looking the same. All right, so if you've ever looked at brands like this and wonder how much do they actually sell and how are they tying all their marketing together in one place, we're gonna take a moment here to go through Particle, who I'm super excited that sponsored this video, and show you how their competitive analysis software works. So starting here on a brand many of us know, you can actually go and click into all the best-selling products and see how much volume it is. So for instance, in this last time period, they're selling 76 of this hat, 33 of this hoodie, 13 of this belt. You can go inside any of the companies that they have inside the database and actually check out what level of volume they're really doing. And this is great if you're planning a brand to see what a brand has done over time and to see what their current promotions look like. So for instance, if I go over here to Cole Buxton, I click over to the Events tab, I can actually see a summary of what they launched and when that is basically auto put together by the Particle platform. And then over here on the Assets page, I can actually see this little note when they've updated their homepage, new meta ads that they've launched, Instagram posts that they've put together. And for a lot of brands, their email will be in here as well that you could look at. The homepage swaps will actually show you campaigns and other things that might be hard to dig up when you're looking for a brand competitively. You can look at the rate sold per day. You can look at the average discount, see if a brand is discounting. You can see when they do their sales and when they have their peaks and valleys throughout the year. Say I need some email inspiration, I could go over here into Represent. I could go down, I could select Email, filter it. And it's actually gonna show me a bunch of the recent email campaigns and the dates that they were done. The last thing I'll show you in here is there's also trends of what's actually rising in search over time. You can look at to evaluate new products. I like to look at it on a two-year timeline so you can see seasonality because some products might just be popular because of the holidays. You can look and see things like bookshelves, rising in macro level popularity, Balenciaga having a bit of a resurgence. Obviously they have brought some new talent and things have moved around. And it'll show you this by a combo of brands, keywords and ideas. You can integrate your own search as well. So if you're looking to understand more of what's happening in your niche, who's actually selling what, put things together by price or color as to what you could sell and also evaluate some of the trends happening in e-commerce products, you should check out Particle at the link in the description of this video. Thank you so much to them for sponsoring. That brings me to my next thought in the characters, which is this idea of the designer as lore. We have a generation of influencer designers. Sometimes they have a lifestyle involved with it, but they are telling their story of their brand as it comes together on the internet. And this is something that Rick is doing as well, but completely on his own terms because when you see content with him and it doesn't look like anyone else's content, maybe it's being shared by one of his muses. Maybe it's on an account, but the music is weird. The ratios are off. Things aren't made to look like other content in terms of how they succeed because a full world is built around it. And contrasting writing that completely unique world and that world around you versus being completely normal is a choice people have to make. What do I mean by completely normal? I mean, people are copying each other's content. You basically see a couple different classes of builders. You have like the workout influencer brand owner where it's like, hey, I design clothes. I have this brand and all my content is around doing those things and being fit. That is like bucket one. And we have enough of that. Then we have bucket two, people that are building their brand in public and sharing a lot along the way. And we have a lot of that too. I did all these vlogs and videos where I went to China and showed all these places where people make their brands. And then this year there's like 40 people making the exact same videos. Then I could go back, I make some of the same similar content. It doesn't do as well because people are continuing to kind of distill these things that happened. And I feel like that same area is also just uniquely as basically done as the first. And there are plenty of people that do it amazingly. There's always gonna be the first people. If you look at like George from Represent, look at Marcus from Minted, people that have done that influencer athlete like at a high level and continue to are, you know, they're the pinnacle of that. And you have a community built up underneath it that is just based off these same ideas isn't gonna go as far. Same way with people that are sharing the blueprint as they go. But then what they're always just room for is someone doing it from a completely new artistic perspective based on their unique vision. And this is the hardest one, right? This is the one where you can't just go copy the same videos where you have to have original aesthetic ideas in your head. Honestly, a lot of people don't because it's extremely complicated. But hopefully this playbook begins to identify a bit of that world where you say like, what is my spectacle? What are my visual motifs? You'll see everything that Rick does from the naming of the runways and the collections to the set pieces they have on there where there's this, these combinations of like ancient Egypt and, you know, far off gods, near sci-fi, pieces of horror, all this brought together and clashed into a world. And I encourage people to sit down and think of what does your world look like from that perspective? Because that's what the world needs right now. It needs more Ricks because the bar for that is higher. Another brand owner sharing their workouts as part of how they build their brand is taking from the same market share of people interested in that one thing. And there's a lot more people out there who are interested in other subcultures and ideas and who frankly are looking to be inspired because right now more and more people make content. More things are on our feed. It looks more and more the same. It's harder to take apart and to be pulled from that which everyone wants. Everyone wants to be pulled out and find something that makes them feel something. It has to be unique. Now I'm going to talk about aesthetics and how they move through a world beyond simply like the core category you're in. Because one of the important things that we've seen from Rick Owens' world is that it can move in how it collaborates and how it moves through different categories. So he is a recurring collaborator with Moncler. They have all the Moncler genius stuff with Rick that's spanned out from just clothing. It was easy enough to say what is his motifs of fur and oversize and logos and iconography, laces. Let's apply that to cold weather gear. Easy enough to figure out. Popular in its own right. But then adding to that, moving into all these different realms whether it's vehicles, whatever it is. And then seeing the same thing of like he developed his own system for interiors, the Glade system. And then having that then be Travis Scott's traveling studio is like a tech Glade version of his architectural world. There's furniture that comes from that. It can all live off of these same things. That's the other piece to ask yourself as a designer. When you are going and playing in these different realms, what are those visual things and how do they actually translate? And do you care enough to submerge yourself into all these items in a way that makes you love and be interested and resonate inside of all of that? And another designer who many of you know who's done a very good job building their world across things in a unique way without having it be as wild as Rick is Samuel Ross, what he did with a cold wall. What he's doing now with his own label, what he's done with his collaborations where it's applying this more technical design world into all of these areas that he touches. But the exercise for that for a designer now is if you begin to think of your motifs and your brand and your design, begin to ask like, how would I apply this to furniture? How would I apply this to a vehicle? What would those things look like? It begins to take you outside of that world you're in of just what am I gonna make this t-shirt look like? What am I gonna make this product look like? And begin to understand a world not just by the characters and the styles that are in it, but by its application and application to things that people use and engage with more so than the statement of what they wear. So anyway, I hope this video sparked some ideas and thought as to how you think about what you design and what your vision and potential could be like. And I would encourage you to go back and look at some of those exercises. Be like, how would you approach or develop enough signatures to be able to design a pair of vans that people recognize them as your own? To be able to apply your visual world, what do those characters look like? What do those muses look like? To be able to have your own unique content style. To be able to say, hey, when I make furniture, it would look like that. And beginning to open your creative mind a bit more to what those worlds look like than surely into that world of short form content or the things we're kind of boxed into now. It feels a really useful exercise for any creative. Now, I would just encourage you to also not have any restrictions in your vision. If you really have an interesting aesthetic idea or an idea of what the world could be, this is now the time to be able to create it. We have the ability to bring visuals to life cheaper and easier than ever, put content on the internet, to see things resonate, to make any product in any category. If you have the strongest division or the most unique of ideas, you are in the best generation in the history of the world. To be able to do that, bring it to life, monetize it, create something interesting that resonates with people. I would encourage you very, very highly to actually go do that. That was my guide. Like I mentioned, I'm not beginning to touch on the full world of Rick Owens and do justice to all the things he's created, but hopefully spark some ideas to what you can do yourselves. Thank you all so much for watching. Please like, subscribe, all the above, and I will be back in the next one.