#148. Logos and personal branding

Groundhog Day, 2025; 15 min read

We’re social animals, we’re part of a multiplicity of tribes, and therefore we’re always sniffing around for clues. Some of these memberships were hard-earned (Phi Beta Kappa, Nobel Prize winners); some of them are just groups with which we choose to affiliate ourselves (New York Yankees, Louis Vuitton). Because we’re making first impressions all the time, and visuals are a large part of any first impression, what we wear and what we carry can often have a disproportionate impact — or so the marketers would like us to think.

I was at an upscale bar in Beijing in the early 2000s, when Chinese GDP was about 1/15th of what it is now, and asked a girl what were the ways she evaluated a guy with whom she might want to interact. She replied ‘watches and shoes, of course!’ When asked which watch brands she looked for, she looked at me as if I was an idiot (I am), and duly recited the Big 3: Patek Philippe (#1), followed by Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet (no particular order, just secondary to Patek). I casually hid the (non-Big 3 brand) watch I had on at the time; I was expecting her to mention more broadly available names like Rolex or Cartier, but she went straight for the Himalayas. Even if China then was far from the sophisticated place it has since become, I found this a useful indication of the level of ambition then present in the country.

Once upon a time, I played tennis for my public Indiana high school, during the time of Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe. I was a devoted Borg fan; I bought Donnay racquets because he endorsed them, even if my brand of tennis was far from that of the lanky blonde Swede; I wanted to buy some of his Fila gear as well, but it wasn’t available anywhere nearby. So I did the obvious thing, I copied the Fila logo from an advertisement, color matched as best I could, and made (pirated) Fila shirts for our whole tennis team (replete with nicknames), hoping it would psych out our opponents, who no doubt wondered how an obscure Indiana high school managed an endorsement deal so far from Italy.

Around the same time, I managed to score a Brooks Brothers polo shirt on a visit to New York. Rather than the silly Ralph Lauren polo player logo which was all the rage at the time, the golden fleece logo of the quintessential preppy brand was hardly ever seen in the deep wilderness where I went to high school. I suppose it was an overt sign that I yearned for a different world (indeed I went to New York City for university). But in Indiana, hardly anyone recognized the Brooks Brothers logo, so it was more a reflection of my state of mind than any real branding, especially since it was obvious that I was pretty far away from a New England preppie with a mid-Atlantic accent.

Fashion logos usually have a simple gating mechanism (a topic I’ve written about before) — the willingness to pay for the privilege of owning the product — although in some well known cases (the Hermes Birkin or Kelly bags, for instance), they are limited in supply and thus reserved for only the ‘best’ customers (which is a higher level willingness to pay). Sporting a Louis Vuitton logo suggests that you both admire the brand and have the financial means to afford it, that you find it valuable in terms of function, as well as a personal statement. If you have one of the hard to get items, that places you in an even more exclusive stratum.

Mass luxury is fascinating, because it seems to contradict the Groucho Marx adage that he’d never want to be a member of a club which would accept him as a member — the logos and products of mass luxury are widely seen, i.e. they are clearly no longer rare, and yet people still plunk down large chunks of their disposable income to purchase and show them off. Because I am a closet Grouchonian, I was once attracted by the Goyard brand (est. 1792), back in the days when their products were rare because they only operated out of the original store on the Rue St-Honore in Paris. It did not escape my attention that to someone with fuzzy eyesight, “Goyard” could be mistaken for “Eoyang” as well. Since 1998, under new direction, they expanded globally to the point where their interlocked chevron totes are seen, malhereusement, partout. It has been ages since I had the courage to use my one custom piece (shown above); it has proved more useful to me as a shared cautionary image than as a piece of high use luxury luggage.

Speaking of which, as I came home the other day, I passed a queue of about 15 people waiting for a public bus in downtown Hong Kong; two of the people waiting had (what looked like) Goyard Artois tote bags, which retail for around US$2000 each. Maybe the mental tradeoff is that taking the bus for three years is what allows you to blow two large on a tote bag. For my one and only Goyard purchase, my pathetic defense is one of pure retro aesthetic lust, combined with a whiff of exclusivity.

Faux logeaux psychology

Mass luxury is a seductive area for fakes of course, and they are so prevalent for popular marquee products that there’s always a question of whether a luxury article is genuine. Nowadays most fakes are rather good quality, so a cursory examination is unlikely to decisively determine its genuine nature, other than the ones that are badly misspelled.

When carried or worn by people accompanied by less counterfeitable items (like cars, for instance) the prevailing presumption is the article is real; for people who dress or conduct themselves in a manner not entirely consistent with that level of consumption, the assumption is that the article is fake. So if fakes are deemed to be prevalent around more modest lifestyles and ensembles, then someone at that level who buys a genuine article to ‘co-brand’ themselves cannot be surprised when many people assume they are carrying a counterfeit article instead — making the exercise somewhat pointless. No doubt they will emphasize the genuine nature of their purchase to their inner circle, but to the random passersby, the effect will be lost. However, the joke is very much on me: the mass luxury business has perhaps never done so well, ambitious consumers around the world are snapping up genuine pieces as must-haves to the point that their rarity has disappeared. The luxury marketers have threaded the needle — their brands are well known enough to create widespread desire, without having diluted their exclusive cachet to dampen demand.

Further, although malls in general are in decline, many malls often want to ‘brand’ themselves with the top luxury marques, under the assumption that a mall anchored by Louis Vuitton will be more attractive to other tenants and customers, than a mall anchored by a Cheesecake Factory or a supermarket. The prestige marques know and take advantage of this; LV in particular receives uniquely sweetheart deals for agreeing to be an anchor tenant, further increasing their competitive advantage.

College affiliations

When I went to college, I noticed a phenomenon whereby many of my classmates wore logos of other (usually more prestigious) universities, rather than the logo of our university (Columbia), as if to say, “I would have rather gone to Harvard, but I only got into my safe school (Columbia).” At the Harvard or Princeton campuses, I noticed that people tended to wear the logo of their school, for added emphasis I suppose — especially in remote Princeton, it’s pretty clear that someone who looks like a student is attending Princeton, and one doesn’t need to further clarify that fact by wearing a Princeton sweatshirt. There is more logic to wearing the same sweatshirt in their rural home town, far from the ivory towers of Princeton, because it says “even if I’m here in this dinky place, my real life lies elsewhere.”

Sports brands

New York Yankees and LA Dodgers caps can be seen everywhere — their logos are readily identifiable, they are not expensive to purchase, and they brand the wearer as a probable fan of that team or at least the city. A sports jersey is a larger commitment — it adds the number and name of an athlete so it associates both the athlete and the team (and sometimes an era); plus jerseys are far more expensive than caps or ordinary t-shirts. The primary use case for a jersey is really going to, or watching one of their games/matches; it’s not like you can wear one to a cocktail party.

Until I went to a few football games, I didn’t realize there was an embedded value system within the cap hierarchy — older vintage caps are “better”, because they mark you as a long time fan, as opposed to those losers who start to like/follow a team once they become dominant. I went to a game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, with the intention of buying some team merchandise — but it was almost embarrassing to purchase a new cap because it signaled that I might be one of those “now that they’re winning” losers. I bought it anyway, but since then I’ve been online a few times looking for a Kansas City cap from the Len Dawson era which would be a more appropriate symbol of the length and depth of my affiliation, even if I didn’t buy it 40 years ago.

Red cap, blue cap

My red Kansas City Chiefs cap is a nice segue to another phenomenon in the US, the association of red with Republican and blue with Democrat — this seems to have partial relevance even if the cap’s logo has nothing to do with politics on either side. When I was road tripping across the country during the pandemic period, I carried a complement of both red and blue caps. Even though I didn’t have a MAGA hat, when I was in MAGA country I naturally wore red caps (like my Chiefs cap) rather than caps in the blue part of the spectrum, lest the RAM truck locals identify me, in a white convertible BMW with California plates, as a “lib-tard”. I wonder if anyone has looked into a correlation of cap color and voting preference, perhaps AI could use satellite imagery to determine how the country was going to vote just by doing a cap color analysis (maybe Elon thought of that first).

Startup swag

I lived in California for 9 years (half in SF, half in LA) — during a period where startups appeared at the pinnacle of cool because tech companies were at the center of the West Coast value system, and because some of these companies generated life-changing wealth. Even as I write this, I’m wearing a SpaceX sweatshirt, which I proudly wear because of a) what I think the company represents, and where it is going (last issue); and b) I have a loose affiliation to SpaceX so if someone asks me about it, I have a story to tell. For most of the last decade I have proudly worn my Boom Supersonic jacket, and on multiple occasions have had people approach me (in a positive way) because of it; our little company was widely known because we had a mission which many people found exciting and inspiring. Now that Boom has flown the first civilian aircraft at supersonic speeds, it makes me a little bit prouder to wear.

In the San Francisco Bay area, and increasingly in Los Angeles, wearing the logo jacket or vest of your fast rising company is definitely a normal flex, in a way that it is not in places where startup culture is minimal (Hong Kong, for instance). If I worked for high fliers like SpaceX, or Stripe, or Databricks, I would routinely wear logoed merchandise. I wonder what the arc was for employees of once-high-fliers like WeWork or Theranos — how quickly did they cease wearing their company logos, for fear that the press would get worse? There were a few times when Facebook employees were cautioned not to wear items with their logo, out of an abundance of caution; this messaging is strange, when it comes from the company itself.

For most startups, logo jackets and their ilk are available primarily to employees, investors, and related parties, therefore presenting a high barrier to acquisition. As an angel investor, I have sometimes asked for startup logo goods, so I can wear them and luxuriate in my association with their exciting journey. That said, since most startups don’t succeed, I have not devised a strategy for what to do with the logo items of my increasing pool of failed startups (I wish I had a Webvan vest though). But I guess the larger point is simply that startup logos have higher gating functions than mass luxury, because it usually takes time and commitment to be in a position to sport those relatively niche but potentially meaningful (and often meaningless) logos.

Logo-less luxury and stealth wealth

Above the mass luxury stratum, there is the rarified space of upper crust luxury, where wearing logos is not really ‘done’ — the understated luxury category inhabited by Loro Piana, Bruno Cucinelli, and a variety of brands which only care to be known by their clients rather than the masses. Swerving away from the logo, the focus is on design, materials, and exclusivity, and the knowledge that only true aficionados can identify these pieces, like sharing a secret handshake. One of the brands I like in this space is Thom Browne, a quirky American designer whose accessories are punctuated by a tiny red/white/blue accent.

The value proposition for these brands is counter positioned to mass luxury – without logos they need to rely on superlative fabrics and materials, like Loro Piana’s baby cashmere or vicuna ($4875 for a vicuna crew neck anyone?), or Bruno Cucinelli’s craftsmanship, and ethical business approach. One of my favorite stealth luxury menswear brands was A. Sulka, where the old school appeal of supplying six-ply cashmere sweaters and paisley scarves to European royalty fell out of sync with the times.

Although understated design and a certain timelessness is part of the stealth luxury cachet, I’ve always thought of this category primarily as “must touch” because their value is essentially tactile, generating the ‘a-ha’ epiphanies justifying their prices. One life hack: most of the Loro Piana fabrics are accessible by well-connected tailors, and it is possible to create similar products while paying far less than the fully branded versions.

Logoless branding

Even more than logoless luxury fabrics, there is a method of personal branding which cannot bear any logos, and yet can be even more memorable and enchanting: fragrance. Although there is much effort given over to creating celebrity associations and unique packaging for fragrances / perfumes / colognes, the product itself stands (wafts), somewhat uniquely, on its own. Of all the luxuries, fragrance is perhaps the one that has a short cut to the Proustian moment because of our unconscious associative memory – how many of us have had conflicted feelings when catching a whiff of the once-favored fragrance of an estranged ex-girlfriend?

That Chanel No. 5 is recognizable by a wide variety of people for its actual scent is a marketing coup — partly explaining those annoying scented inserts which used to proliferate in any magazine with a remotely fashion oriented audience. Heaven knows what they’re doing in the remote work doom-scrolling Internet age, where scent has eluded digitization (so far).

Since fragrance appeals to a non-visual sense, it is a more intimate form of branding, because the proper effect is limited to the immediate proximity (I’m not counting Americans who baste themselves in cheap perfume). A great fragrance multiplies other features, like a sprinkling of umami, and because of the proximity effect, can almost be conspiratorial in nature, like a secret which can only be shared if you are allowed to approach into the literal inner circle.

Sometimes you just wear a fragrance that makes you happy; sometimes you wear something to make someone else happy, but figuring out what works is difficult, because the feedback process is heavily weighted towards mostly positive feedback, and there may be no consensus. Sadly, few people will tell you they dislike your cologne.

Achievement identities

Later in life, some people characterize themselves by a previous job/company (check their LinkedIn blurb), as opposed to their current engagement, because it brands them as someone (who was once) serious. Past glories can be a crutch, an invitation for atrophy of the muscles that led to past success. One of my entertainment friends only looks at the last two roles of an actor’s CV, for a clean “what have you done lately?” methodology. In a few minutes of conversation, I hope I can convince someone that I’m worth talking to, without mentioning my history; conversely, I take it as a small win if they are intrigued enough to ask. There are few logos in conversation, although name-dropping does come to mind as an annoying version – similar to stealth luxury, refraining from mentioning famous associations is far cooler than hopping from one name to another.

Similarly, athletic achievements or pursuits can be a powerful form of branding: compared to a mere tri-athlete or marathoner – completing an Ironman (triathlon), Iditarod (8+ day sled dog race), or the Pacific Crest Trail (2653 mile hike), for instance, carries better branding.

Final words

Although the how and why we brand ourselves can be a fascinating topic, I’m not sure we give it that much thought, outside of fashion bloggers or media personalities. For many like me, the daily selection of wardrobe and accessories is largely a function of what’s on top of the pile or ready at hand, rather than a carefully curated OOTD. The process of figuring out what to own is even less systematic, a pursuit which consumes very little time – I spend far more time obsessing on what’s in my wine cellars than what’s in my closets. A motley combination of impulse buys, online purchases of certain brands which have appealed to us historically, and sentimental gifts means many of the first impressions we make can be quite random, perhaps more a function of the weather or bad planning, than a well-planned ensemble calculated for maximum effect. In any case, it makes me think I should pay a little more attention about how people try to brand themselves.