Hitmakers, Season 2

There are four basic tastes — sweet, salty, sour, bitter.
There’s actually a fifth one. It’s called umami. It’s the flavor that lingers. The one chefs chase because it stays with you after everything else fades.
A few years ago, cultural strategist Emily Segal borrowed that idea for her “Umami Theory of Value,” describing a certain kind of savory cultural work — the kind that feels familiar and surprising at the same time. Not just catchy… but sticky.
And right now, that kind of work is getting harder to find.
Our feeds are full of speed. Shock. Endless novelty. Everything hits fast and disappears faster.
So what does it take to make something linger?
In this episode, we’re talking about what we’re calling neo-umami — cultural work that turns attention into legibility. By unfolding. By deepening. By resisting the algorithm.
Listen to the Episode 10 of Hitmakers, Season 2, the show that tracks how culture moves margins, multiples, and market cap.



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Dame Vivienne Westwood once said, “Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it’s popular, it’s not culture.”
In the 1980s, we had Air Jordans and Back to the Future.
In the 1990s, it was grunge, Pretty Woman, Britney Spears.
Iconic things have always been products of their moment.
When the media was mass, culture was mass. When distribution was centralized, symbols were shared.
That’s no longer true.
Today, influence is fragmented. Taste is fragmented. Communities are fragmented.
The geography of culture has collapsed—from mass movements to millions of micro-scenes.
So how does culture move now?
In this episode, we explore how algorithms reward both scale and specificity—and why pop culture is just a backdrop now.



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Is Millionaire Speedy a luxury bag or merch? What about the Balenciaga Maxi Pack?
The term “merch” originally referred to items made for music fans, where items like t-shirts were sold on a band’s and musician’s tour. From music, merch spread to sports, film, gaming, art, fashion, design, travel, and entertainment. Merch’s original value has never been in the physical item itself–after all, a band shirt is just a tshirt, but in the social and cultural capital associated with it. Partly this stemmed from the fact that originally one could buy merch at concerts, thus signaling true allegiance to a cultural artifact. Thus, unintentionally, merch also operated on the concept of scarcity.
This social and cultural capital made merch the opposite of a commodity. Commodities are interchangeable (who can tell the difference between a Polo and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt if it wasn’t for the logo?); merch was a unique expression of a specific time, place, community, and context. First streetwear brands, often run by music enthusiasts in the pre-e-ecommerce age, also operated on the same principle.
The nature of merch changed as merch became commoditized in the early 1990s by Hot Topic, a chain store that gave access to band t-shirts to teenage mall rats. At the same time as streetwear became more important, it also turned merch into a commodity, which became even more ubiquitous with the rise of e-commerce. These developments removed the necessary friction that made merch a valuable cultural symbol. In the past, a person wearing a Nirvana t-shirt was probably a fan of the band’s music, today no such guarantee exists (and many more shirts are sold). This often precludes one of the original purposes of merch, a signaling of belonging to a certain subculture.
Still, the meaning of merch has not disappeared, but merely shifted. A person wearing a logoed Balenciaga tee is also signaling some kind of meaning, as is the person wearing one with the logo of A24, the trendy film production company or H&M’s infamous “Dimes Square” tshirt. The need for signaling through one’s possessions has not gone away, but, in the world of social media, increased.
Recently, we’ve heard:
Merch is a status symbol.
Merch is a subgenre.
Merch is a style statement.
Merch is an identity marker.
Merch is past its peak.
But all those takes miss the reality that merch has become big business.
What used to live on the edges of culture has moved to the center of the retail economy. The side show has become the main act.
In this episode, we explore what happens when consumers learn to buy everything as merch — and why the future of merch is niche, secret and indecipherable to the mainstream.
Listen to our conversation above, or on iTunes, Spotify or YouTube.



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Iconic brands are built on products people obsess over.Think Levi’s 501s. Ray-Ban sunglasses. Nike Air Force 1. The Big Mac.
Each of these products is a creative expression first—a shape, a taste, a texture, a ritual. Their form and function don’t just sell units; they influence culture, spark subcultures, and create fandoms.
This is where real brand creativity lives.
Not in messaging—but in the product itself.
When products are designed with cultural intent, innovation becomes identity. The product stops being what you sell and starts becoming what you stand for.
In this episode, we explore how products become iconic.
Listen to our conversation above, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.



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How many people actually saw It Was Just an Accident, this year’s winner at the Cannes Film Festival?
And how many people even heard of it?
That gap tells you something important about culture today.
Culture fragments faster than it consolidates. Mass attention is gone. Cultural currency no longer comes from scale—it comes from attention. And attention is scarce, fleeting, and brutally competitive.
So how do you earn attention in a fragmented world?
It’s captured by friction—inversions, oddities, contradictions, and coincidences already simmering in society. The brands that win don’t smooth edges over. They sharpen them.
In this episode, we explore how to use friction to capture attention.
Listen on above, or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.



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