Weekly Highlights
Highlight from this weeks articles, conversations and creative inspirations from Rosie Lee and our community. Opening the lid on topics, news and inspirations that affect our thinking and our work.
This week is a big one for us as Rosie Lee celebrates its 26th birthday. All of us met in Amsterdam for a couple of days to connect, explore and discuss our future. For those of us who have followed our story you’ll know that the pandemic impacted our work significantly and we’ve taken a long time to fully recover. 2026 feels like the final year of our recovery so we spent a lot of time talking about our own personal journeys and what we’ll do next.
While we’ve been doing that we haven’t slowed down our Unorthodox Blend work - Russell’s article on Brand Position, a Q&A with Ela (Kiosk) and editing our latest podcast with Luca (for next week) have been some of our highlights but you can find out more about what’s happened this week below…
Unorthodox Blend
UBA138 - Choosing Your Brand’s Position
Positioning isn’t about magically finding the answer, it’s about actually choosing your answer.
In our latest article, we explore how brands move from observing the marketplace to making deliberate, strategic choices about where they stand.
Without choosing a position, your brand risks drifting between possibilities - and often ends up shaped more by circumstance than design.
Friends
Friends - Ela Barić
We first met Ela when she reached out to us to talk at KIOSK branding conference earlier this year. After a few calls we were in. Speaking to her more it was clear that she has an abundance of drive, passion and her dedication to celebrate, support and amplify the local creative industry is impressive. We loved spending time with her, hearing her mission and seeing the resilience it takes to make it all come to life, bringing together an amazing mix of speakers, brands and audience.
Rosie Lee News
Rosie Lee Creative
It’s our 26th birthday & the team met in Amsterdam to celebrate. To mark the occasion we printed a crewneck for all of our team, which was also an opportunity for James to redesign the Rosie Lee logo.
The new logo keeps what worked from the previous version, adding bespoke letterforms and improved legibility. The line “Often advertised, seldom seen” comes from an old rave flyer, referencing things that were hyped but rarely delivered. We’ve reworked it as a nod to the projects we can’t talk about but are out in the world, experienced by people without our name attached.
The eye, now forming the “O”, started as part of a team merch workshop using abstract letterforms we created at the time.
Cultural Voices
In this episode, Leila invites Mark into an open conversation. They cover his early life growing up in Birmingham and how that shaped his independence, curiosity and sensitivity to culture.
They also explore the evolution of marketing, the role of cultural tribalism in shaping identity, and his approach to leadership, particularly how he navigates team dynamics, communication and different working styles within creative environments.
Inspirations
Mud, Sweat & Tears
Ben Rayner’s Mud, Sweat & Tears is a limited edition 58-page zine documenting the 2025 Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Oregon, America’s premier high school cross country championship, shot entirely on film and built around a simple but quietly devastating premise: the real story isn’t on the podium. It’s in the several hundred athletes who converge on Portland knowing full well they won’t win.
Voice of the Street
Between 1980 and 1985, Keith Haring drew on blank black advertising panels inside New York City subway stations. Voice of the Street at Moco Museum London gathers those drawings together now, the space itself dressed in subway tiles and brickwork that puts you somewhere close to the right headspace. He could produce a complete image in seconds.
The Antwerp Six
London, 1986. Six unknown graduates from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp cram into a van and drive to the British Designer Show with no money, no infrastructure and no blueprint just the work. Within three days, Ann Demeulemeester, Marina Yee, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene and Walter Van Beirendonck are stocked at Barneys, Bergdorf and Liberty of London, launched into the media stratosphere as the Antwerp Six.
If you have any inspirations that you’d like featured on UB, then please share them with us.
News from our friends
Ghostwrite marks a StockX decade
Ghostwrite marks a StockX decade with a figure by choosing a 400% figure to celebrate StockX's tenth anniversary, because StockX has always been about scale - taking something chaotic and emotionally irrational and making it legible, efficient and eventually enormous. When they launched in February 2016 with the audacious idea of applying stock market bid/ask mechanics to sneaker resale, they didn't just disrupt a market; they rewrote the underlying logic of how collector culture could operate. The rest followed: streetwear, watches, handbags, a catalogue that now makes the Nike Dunk colourway count look restrained.
The StockX "10" Ghost drops Tuesday 4/7 at 9am ET
Work with us
Moving into our 27th year its all about looking forward and taking the organisation to new places. If you think you might be a part of that future then get in touch and lets see where it goes!