By Caitlin Condy | Director of Project Management

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As an industry it seems we’ve optimized for speed and performance. And we end up in a world where nothing lands.

Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in brands doing the opposite. They slow things down and speak to moments that moved me on a deeply personal level.  

On the surface, these stories have an old school feel. Real sets. Original music. Hand-illustrated websites. On-location shoots in actual weather. No AI.  

What looked like restraint was actually a bet: that in a world of infinite generated content, the most disruptive thing a brand could do was make something true.  

Three brands are doing it right in a powerful way. Here’s what they did, why it worked, and what it feels like when it reaches you.

Burberry had lost itself.

Years of overcorrection, repositioning, trying to mean everything to everyone. The fix didn’t come from a new brief. It came from going outside and staying there.

There’s a film where Olivia Colman and Tyson Beckford – two strangers – sit on a park bench watching cricket. They eat Flake soft serves. They wear the same coat. He asks if this is in fact cricket. Birds. You can hear the crinkle of their classic trenches as they settle back after standing up to cheer. No cell phones. The music from the ice cream truck.  

It’s a living postcard from London.  

I live for moments like this, park benches, bar stools, trains, those collisions with strangers where nothing is required, and so much is briefly shared. This ad gets that. It reminds me of a subway ride years ago, sitting next to a girl in the same camo coat. We agreed that the best part was that no one could see us. We were best friends for two minutes.

I loved this spot and...

...Nothing is sold. The clothes exist the way they exist in life – worn by people doing things in the English weather.

I’ve worked in fashion. I know what on-location production costs. I know what it means to bet that resource on a scene with no product moment. And I’ve owned a Burberry trench coat for twenty years. That sound the trench makes as you sit back down on a park bench –I know and love that sound.

When a brand has lost coherence, authenticity of place does what messaging cannot. Someone fought to get back to the rich soil of their heritage. You can feel the humanity in it.

Hermès got me before I knew it was them.

Something stopped me scrolling – a small illustration. Slightly imperfect. Clearly a hand had made it. I didn’t register a brand. I just thought: that is beautiful. Then I looked closer. It was Hermès, but it wasn’t an ad. Of all things, the brand had created a fully illustrated ecommerce site with the work of an actual human artist. It’s quite the world. Sea creatures that wobble. A loafer holding a pelican like a boat. Paper grain on every screen.

The brief, as artist Linda Merad described it: Make the viewer feel the materiality of the drawing.

This, after all, is what Hermès actually sells. Objects made slowly, by hand, by people who trained for years to make them. In the moment everyone else is AI generating, they hired someone to draw.

Most brands treat the website as infrastructure, but Hermès saw it as a gallery. I’m not in the market for the bag. But I’ve thought about that illustration every week since. That’s what happens when craft reaches the places nobody expects it.

Ffern is the smallest of the three and doing very sophisticated and emotionally resonant work.

One fragrance per season. Waitlist only. Each release does something I thought was impossible: Make scent tangible even through a screen.  

Summer 2025’s spot Pink Sky at Night feels like an idyllic memory. This short follows aspiring ice cream makers Finn and Ruby who cruise their truck along the ocean through a lavender field and stop for a peach in the grass. When Bill Nighy tastes the finished formulation and states, “pink grapefruit, blood orange, and marigold,”  I could smell what he was saying.  

Winter 2026 has an equally incredible feature spot, but I keep going back to the way they adapted it into a 30-second social video. In a voice note about a beach day, one friend recalls the unexpected winter sun. This post put me right back to a place and time I hadn’t visited in years, cruising on a bike along the Welsh coast during college, my friend riding beside me. The cold, the sea, the specific quality of that light came back to me in that moment.

To say it stopped my scroll would be an understatement.

I put my name on the waitlist. Then I called my friend. Then I thought about my grandmother and Jones Beach in the winter.

I’ve watched those 42 seconds back many times.

That’s much more valuable than a conversion. By giving me their world, and letting my experience close the gap, I invited Ffern into my memories. No media budget manufactures intimacy like that. Conviction does.

Find the scarcity and channel it.

Each of these brands found a central scarcity around which to orient their product: presence. The feeling that what you’re looking at was costly and time-consuming to make. That it wasn’t just generated for a transaction. Each piece feels like a gift from the brand.  

Burberry made space for presence. The unscheduled afternoon. The coat you’ve owned for twenty years. The stillness to hear it rustle.

Hermès made space for attention. The hand that drew something slightly imperfect in a world of frictionless and mandated “perfection.”

Ffern made space for memory. The coastline you hadn’t visited in years. The friend you called after. This is what fragrance is meant to do.

Each decided what they believed and found the discipline, and conviction, to share it everywhere.

You could be fooled into thinking the throughline is aesthetic. It’s the decision to protect something slow in a doomscroll world designed to disregard or even punish it.

The feeling is the proof. The strategy is what made room for it.