What Brands Should Build Next...
Introducing MOON SHOT. Dot Dot Dot's new breathtaking series...
Story time…
A few months ago, Edmond Lau, the terrific Australia-based strategist and straight-A meme-ology student (who you may know from his LinkedIn graph-style depictions of micro cultural trends) and I met.
We started talking about the rise of “thought-fluencers” and asked a simple question: how can we get out of the constant rut of analyzing what is current?
We weren’t interested in another round of clever brand reporting or culture-chasing analysis, the kind you can find everywhere nowadays. What we were circling instead was something stranger and riskier: properly scoping out blue sky ideas that sound implausible at first. Blockbuster fantasies with no neat case studies or historical proof to lean on.
The kind of big thinking that might feel nonsensical or delusional, right up until the moment you realize they actually make perfect sense. For instance…
What if IKEA made furniture designed to be split up after a breakup?
Why isn’t Aesop, a stalwart of tastemaker bathrooms everywhere, creating bathroom furniture?
What if clean-girl favorite, Rhode, started selling injectable peptides that renew from outside in?
Or what if Equinox, the king of luxury gyms, created a hotel? (Oh wait, they already did. Well… then our thinking is heading in the right direction)
That’s because brands are already expanding their ‘Brand Universes’ at speed in a bid to remain culturally legible to audiences who no longer experience culture in neat, single-channel ways. Attention is won through ecosystems and places people can step into, return to, and participate in.
It’s why we’re seeing brands tackling food, film, art, and fashion simultaneously, seeing these fields as true extensions of their universe-building exercise. Every great brand, sooner or later, stops behaving like a product and starts behaving like a universe.
Brands in general now expand in layers, moving from cultural experiments and hype moments to fully institutional, capital-intensive businesses. What starts as marketing can evolve into infrastructure. What begins as a product can become a place, a movement, an expansion of any kind. Read from smallest to largest and most entrenched, the hierarchy looks something like this:
1. Shock Objects (smallest / attention-first): Meme-ready or unexpected drops designed for cultural discourse rather than monetizable scale (i.e. Supreme brick, MSCHF’s viral stunt products, Liquid Death “coffin cooler”).
2. Community as Product (fastest-growing layer): Run clubs, creator collectives, Discord groups, live events and membership ecosystems where belonging drives retention and revenue (Nike Run Club, Patta Running Team, Duolingo Discord groups, The North Face XPLR Pass, Gymshark meet-ups).
3. Lifestyle Extensions (category expansion): Brands moving beyond their core product into adjacent verticals like cafés, homeware, media or wellness (Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, Prada Caffè, Goop wellness summits, Apple Fitness+, Versace dogwear, Jacquemus beach club takeovers).
4. Cultural Institutions (influence and legitimacy): Foundations, museums, educational platforms or large-scale cultural programming that shape discourse (Fondazione Prada, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Red Bull Music Academy, Stone Island SOUND).
5. Legacy Infrastructure (largest / capital-heavy): Permanent, high-investment environments that embed the brand into physical space and long-term revenue streams (Armani, Bulgari and Louis Vuitton Hotels, Starbucks Reserve Roasteries, Tesla charging networks).
Together, these layers show how modern brands are no longer confined to products. They operate as ecosystems when they start to build moments, then communities, then spaces, and eventually institutions that shape how people gather, consume and identify.
But what happens when a brand’s universe expands beyond its “safe” orbit and stops being incremental, becoming something more radical in both scale and intent?
That inflection point is what we call a MOONSHOT.
MOONSHOT asks a question Edmond and us at Dot Dot Dot are keen to answer: what happens when that universe is allowed to grow faster and stranger, freed from quarterly logic, inherited precedent, or the pressure to make immediate sense? What brands would build if they stopped living within the constraints they’ve accepted.
That’s what MOONSHOT is: a bi-monthly series dedicated to speculative strategy that could actually work.
Each edition begins with a cultural shift or signal that’s piqued our interest, and pairs it with a brand sitting on untapped potential. From there, we dig deeper, interrogating what kind of brand or business extension would genuinely fit, why it makes strategic and brand sense, and how it could realistically come to life. We explore the model, the positioning, the ecosystem implications, and the early blueprint for execution.
The goal is to make bold expansion tangible enough to evaluate, pressure-test, and ultimately build.
Because when ambition is articulated with clarity, it stops feeling impossible and all of a sudden could become viable. Or maybe we’re just daydreaming.
Curious? Listen to what Edmond had to say ahead of next week’s debut MOONSHOT:
Edmond Lau is a cultural strategist, writer, meme artist, and creative technologist whose work explores internet aesthetics, emerging trends, and the politics of taste. His viral essay “The Dark Mode Shift” was cited in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Atlantic. Formerly an intellectual property and technology lawyer, he also consults brands across luxury, tech, and media. Lau is currently sitting in quiet resignation, waiting for Frank Ocean to reappear and release an album.
Pssssssssstttt….
can’t wait