This week had actual brand decisions, made by real people, that tell you something about what a company believes. A Detroit watchmaker honored a comedian who died 37 years ago and made you feel it. A coffee chain used a pink cup to reward their best customers before anyone else got one. A movie studio accidentally turned crew merch into a marketing strategy. And one of the most-talked-about AI companies in the world filed a lawsuit against a client spending $10 million a year with them, over a logo, without picking up the phone first.
Let’s go…
ON THE AGENDA
Shinola honors Gilda Radner and shows everyone how it’s done
Starbucks drops a Pink Drink merch collection with a loyalty mechanic buried inside it
Marvel’s crew merch became the biggest Avengers: Doomsday story of the week
Anthropic sues its biggest customer. We need to talk about that.
THE LEAD
Shinola Put Gilda Radner’s Name on a Watch and Earned It
The watch has an open heart in the dial.
That detail matters. Shinola didn’t just put Gilda Radner’s name on a timepiece and call it a tribute. They made a watch with a literal open heart and wrote, in the copy, that it was “a fitting tribute to a woman who always wore her heart on her sleeve.”
The Runwell Automatic is limited to 400 units. The Runabout, with its Red Jasper dial and pavé diamonds, is capped at 300. A portion of every sale goes to the Metro Detroit chapter of Gilda’s Club, the nonprofit she founded that supports people and families living with cancer. She died of ovarian cancer in 1989.
This is the latest installment of Shinola’s Great Americana series, which has honored figures connected to Detroit and American culture. What makes this one land isn’t the price point ($1,995 to $2,500) or the limited run. It’s the specificity. Red Jasper because red was her favorite color. An open heart because of how she lived. A charity connection that closes the loop between the product and the person it honors.
Most brands that slap a celebrity name on a product are doing it for the association. Shinola is doing something different. They’re building a physical object that requires you to know the story before you fully understand the object. That’s not just a product drop, it’s a story told in leather and steel.
If you want to know what it looks like to turn branded merchandise into a legacy play, this is the case study. There’s no logo-forward, no mass production, no “limited while supplies last” pressure. Just a brand that knows what it stands for and built something worthy of the name it put on it.
↗ Detroit News | JCK
THE RUNDOWN
Starbucks Dropped a Pink Drink Merch Collection. The Real Story Is Who Got It First.
We love the collection. Miir bottles, an Owala collab, glass cold cups, hair clips, a belt bag, baseball hats that say “Starbies.” Arrived in U.S. coffeehouses on July 7th, online at Starbucks Shop while supplies last.
Starbucks Rewards Reserve members got early access to the Bearista Cup on July 9th, four days before it hit shelves. That’s a loyalty activation using branded merch as the reward. Most brands don’t think about their merchandise program and their loyalty program in the same sentence. Starbucks just showed you why they should be the same sentence.
The Thing To Remember: Merch is not just a product. It’s a currency. Starbucks spent it on their best customers first. That’s not a small decision. That’s a relationship strategy.
Marvel Turned Crew Merch Into an Intelligence Drop.
Crew merch is supposed to stay on set. It’s a thank-you to the people who made the movie. But when Avengers: Doomsday production gear started surfacing online, fans got Doctor Doom’s official symbol, the Avengers logo, the X-Men logo, the Fantastic Four logo, and looks at 28 character costumes before a single trailer dropped.
Marvel also debuted a green-tinted version of its signature Studios logo, swapping its iconic red for a Doom-coded green, at a Shanghai Expo installation.
Whether the crew merch “leaks” were planned or not doesn’t really matter. The result was the same: a global audience analyzed every stitch. Branded merchandise built for an internal audience became the week’s biggest marketing story. That should make every brand rethink what they put on crew gear.
The Thing To Remember: Every piece of branded merch you produce is a press release waiting to happen. Design your internal gear like someone outside the building is going to see it, because they will.
Sporting CP Got a New Badge. It’s What They Removed That Makes It Work.
Portuguese football club Sporting CP brought in Jones Knowles Ritchie for a 120th anniversary rebrand. The outer shield is gone. The lion, previously yellow, is now white. The tail curves into an S. The mane flows a little more. That’s it. No overhaul, no modernization manifesto, no full identity system teardown. Just a tighter version of what was already there, with one nod to the name built into the animal itself.
Anniversary rebrands fail when brands treat them as permission to start over. This one treated it as an obligation to get more precise. The result looks like it was always supposed to be this.
The Thing To Remember: The best rebrand is the one where nobody can tell exactly what changed, but everyone agrees it’s better. Restraint is a design decision.
↗ Dezee
BRETT’S TAKE
Anthropic Sued Its Own Customer Over a Logo.
On July 1, Anthropic filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Abnormal AI. The accusation is that Abnormal’s 2025 rebrand adopted fluid motion graphics, a geometric slash-based logo, and animated sequences that Anthropic claims constitute an unlawful appropriation of its entire brand system.
Abnormal’s responded that their slash wordmark was designed in April 2021 by agency ALINE, before Claude existed. They’ve used it for five years. They were founded in 2018, three years before Anthropic.
The crazy part is Abnormal CEO Evan Reiser found out about the lawsuit from a reporter. Not a phone call. Not a legal notice sent ahead of time. He also disclosed that Abnormal spends over $10 million per year on Anthropic services and has rolled Claude out to 100% of its employees.
The brand identity question is worth having. Can you trademark visual grammar? Can you own a slash? Can a motion system be protected IP? Legal scholars will argue that for years, and the answer probably depends on how similar the specific executions really are.
But I’m not focusing on that part of the story.
The real story is that a company decided to open a legal action against one of its largest customers without picking up the phone first. That tells you something about how Anthropic thinks about relationships. It tells you something about what the word “partner” means inside that organization. And it tells you that brand identity protection, taken past a certain point, stops being about protecting the brand and starts being about protecting the ego.
A logo is a signal. What you do to the people around you is the brand. Anthropic’s logo looks fine. What they did here doesn’t.
↗ Bank Info Security | Abnormal AI
THE PITCH
Three things from this week worth acting on.
The Starbucks story is a blueprint. If you have a loyalty or rewards program and you’re not using branded merch as an exclusive early-access vehicle, you’re leaving a relationship moment on the table. We can help you design that mechanic.
The Shinola story is the case for premium over volume. One intentional item at the right quantity beats a thousand forgettable ones. If your current merch program is built around “how many can we get for the budget,” we should talk about what you’re actually getting for that money.
The Marvel crew merch story is a reminder that internal branded merchandise is external marketing. What you put on a shirt for your team is what gets photographed, shared, and analyzed. Design it like it’ll be seen, because it will.
If any of these hit, let’s have a fifteen minute conversation. It won’t be a sales pitch…promise.
That’s it for this week…
Thanks for reading. Comment below and share far and wide.
P.S.
The World Cup semifinals kick off Tuesday…two matches away from a final nobody outside of the four remaining countries will care about with anything resembling genuine investment. Americans have pretended they always cared about the USMNT. The tournament wraps July 19. By July 20, the app gets deleted and we go back to our regularly scheduled programming. See you in 2030. It’s been fun.
See you next week.
