As a brand + product designer, I’m often brought into projects when founders can’t quite articulate what they need, but they’ve noticed somethings missing. They’ll almost always say “we want to build a culture around this product/service” or “make this a world people want to belong to.” What they’re really asking for is the American model of community-leveraged brand building: cult-loyalty, brunch-table relevance, unpaid brand evangelism, tote-baggery, and in rare cases, brands that resonate so deeply they become nouns on Instagram bios. (#CrossFitters).
These founders often reference Lululemon, Glossier, Supreme. Brands that became movements and they want that for their app or their CPG brand. They want to create culture. And increasingly, that’s exactly what designers are being hired to do.
The brief has changed. We’re no longer just being asked to design logos, websites, or packaging. We’re being asked to architect belonging. To create the conditions for strangers to become community. To build systems where consumption becomes identity. This is culture contracting, and it’s become the core of what brand and product design actually means in 2025.
Culture contracting isn’t about making things look good. It’s about understanding how people form groups, what rituals bind them, what myths they tell themselves, and how brands can become the scaffolding for all of it. It requires mapping social infrastructure, identifying where connection is already possible, and designing the nudges, touchpoints, and experiences that turn customers into communities. It’s why I spend as much time studying sociology and anthropology as I do learning design tools. Because the work isn’t in Figma, it’s in understanding how culture actually operates.
But here’s the problem: when founders ask for this, they’re almost always asking for the American version. And that version doesn’t travel.
The American gold-standard of brand building doesn’t succeed at community because the visual design is better. It succeeds because of an invisible socio-cultural infrastructure most countries don’t have. For those building outside the U.S., the real question is whether it’s even possible to follow the American model, and for American ventures chasing relevance abroad, whether their playbook even translates.
American brands thrive on the myth of classlessness. The system assumes, or at least pretends, that class is flexible, even nonexistent. This allows people from vastly different economic backgrounds to buy into the same aspiration, to form community, and to be comfortable in proximity with other brand patrons regardless of their background. This nurtures a kind of brand-belonging not possible in other socio-economic systems.
In America, you don’t need wealth to consume, just desire. Credit cards, buy-now-pay-later, secondary marketplaces. There’s always a way in. Apple proves it best. The skater, the mom, the consultant. Everyone belongs. Belonging is the product. The brand doesn’t segment by class because American mythology says class doesn’t exist. A teenager saving up and a CEO can both be “iPhone people” without cognitive dissonance.
The clothing label Supreme works the same way. A $38 T-shirt becomes a $300 resale item, but the brand doesn’t police who gets in. The hype is democratized. The kid camping outside the store and the collector bidding online occupy the same cultural space. Class isn’t the barrier. Access is the game.
But you don’t even need to buy anything to participate in American brand community. Run clubs are the bread and butter of American wellness brand communities. Nike Run Club, November Project, local crew meetups. They’re free, they’re branded, and they work because Americans will show up to run with strangers across income brackets without it feeling strange. The hedge fund lawyer and the barista both wear their running shoes, both post the same route on Strava, both grab the same post-run coffee. The ritual erases the gap. Try to export that model and watch it collapse.
In most other cultures, informal gatherings are class-sorted by default. Who you exercise with, where you meet, what you wear after, it all signals belonging to a specific social tier.
It often baffles friends from overseas visiting NYC when they see Carhartt, a blue-collar workwear brand, adopted by the 1% of Williamsburg residents. That kind of class crossing through consumption feels alien, even transgressive, outside America. The infrastructure for strangers to meet as equals around a branded activity simply doesn’t exist. Running stays personal or becomes formally organized by clubs with membership fees and vetting. The spontaneous, open-door community that makes American run clubs work can’t take root.
Outside the U.S., that equation breaks everywhere. Most societies are organized around visible class identity. Consumption is limited by affordability in ways that are socially acknowledged, not papered over. Not everyone can buy into every product, and more importantly, not everyone is supposed to.
Understanding and building the architecture of American-style community-leveraged branding requires equal parts Bourdieu and Figma. Unfortunately, most design training focuses on artifacts: bold logos, tight layouts, amusing website animations, novel packaging. But brands that become movements aren’t static artifacts. They’re entities people orbit. They occupy behavior, ritual, group identity. They create new norms and culture.
This is why culture contracting requires a fundamentally different skill set. It means understanding class structure, social mythology, and infrastructure. It means knowing when to design for aspiration versus authenticity, when to create exclusivity versus accessibility, when to build top-down versus bottom-up. It means recognizing that a run club in Brooklyn and a run club in Dubai require entirely different approaches, not because one culture is better, but because the social physics are different.
This take requires acknowledging what most design discourse avoids: that culture work is inherently political. I came into the field through the back door. My early peer group was aspiring political scientists, cultural anthropologists, and consumption theory obsessed nerds (I say this with love). My work experiences have required me to be both thought partner and venture builder, delivering narratives that seed belonging. In an industry where designers are rarely schooled in cultural fluency, they’re not asked to consider class structure, social mythology, or infrastructure. That’s what culture contracting actually requires: understanding that culture isn’t borrowed, it’s built. It can’t be a wrapper. It has to be the core.
Through projects across continents, I’ve seen culture treated as styling, not strategy. Branding as translation, not negotiation. But if culture is a living system made of power, memory, and desire, the brief has to change.
And for most of the world, the American playbook doesn’t translate. Because the myth that makes it work doesn’t exist anywhere else.
So where do we go from here? Stop trying to export (or import) the American model wholesale. Start by mapping the actual social infrastructure where you’re building. What are the existing rituals? Where do strangers already gather? What myths does your society tell itself about belonging? In Japan, for instance, brand loyalty often forms through curated scarcity and insider knowledge rather than open-access hype. In parts of Europe, heritage and longevity signal authenticity more than disruption ever could. The work isn’t to fake classlessness where it doesn’t exist. It’s to find the seams in your culture where connection is already possible and build there. Culture contracting means working with the grain of a society, not against it. That requires honesty about what’s possible and creativity about form. The movement you want might not look like anything coming out of Brooklyn. And that’s exactly the point.