I've Become a Lore Whore

a deeper cut into why this is the one thing ai can't do for you

If you read this week’s email, you already know I’ve gone full lore whore.

But I want to go deeper here because I think there’s a conversation worth having that goes beyond “lore is important” and into why I think it’s the only thing that’s going to separate the brands that matter from the brands that get scrolled on.

I’ve restructured the entire way I take on work at REBEL Studio around this one idea, but first, a little more context on where my head’s at.

I’ve been paying attention to the brands that stop me. I’m talking about the brands that make me feel something before I can even articulate what they do.

Le Labo, Aesop, Fellow, Death to Stock. and one of my faves, Flamingo State.

They make home and body products but calling them that makes me want to punt my laptop because it completely misses the point. It’s just so beyond products.

They have a candle that smells like a fresh tomato. Not tomato-scented in that Bath & Body Works choking-on-the-fumes-sort-of-way where it vaguely reminds you of something a tomato smell like, if it was made in a lab under neon lights and poked by tiny robot needles.

This Flamingo Estate candle smells like you just walked through a garden in July and brushed past the vine and got hit with that green, sun-warm, almost savory thing right in the fucking nostril.

And the reason it smells like that is because someone cared enough to figure out how to make a candle actually smell like the real thing.

Not an approximation. Not a “ok version.”

The real thing.

That kind of obsessive, borderline unreasonable attention to detail isn’t a product decision.

It’s a lore decision.

It tells you everything about the people behind this brand without them saying a single word.

You can feel the philosophy in the wax as it burns a hole in your atmosphere (and wallet).

Lore isn’t a story you tell.

It’s the thing people feel in the details of what you make and how you make it. It’s the care underneath the care. The reason behind the reason. The unreasonable hospitality that keeps you locked and wanting more.

And I keep coming back to this idea that the brands doing this kind of work, the ones that feel like a world you can step into rather than a product you can buy, they all share a depth that wasn’t manufactured.

It was accumulated.

Decision by decision, conviction by conviction, weird obsessive detail by weird obsessive detail, until the whole thing started to feel like it could only exist because these specific humans built it.

That’s what I want to build. That’s what I want REBEL Studio to be known for.

When I decided to open the studio, I made a commitment that we would only take on projects I was a full-body yes on. Not because I wanted to be precious about it, but because the kind of work I’m talking about, the lore-thick, culturally rich, grab-you-by-the-balls kind of brand building, you can’t do that on autopilot. You can’t phone that in. You have to actually give a shit, deeply and specifically, about the thing you’re building and the humans behind it.

So I started baking lore into every scope.

Not as an add-on. Not as a “Phase 3 if we have room.”

As the foundation.

Because I’ve seen enough brands now to know that without it, you’re just building a pretty shell and praying no one lifts the hood up.

Here’s what I mean by that.

When I’m working with a client, I’m not just asking the standard discovery questions. Not just “what do you do” and “who do you serve” and “what are your brand values” because honestly, most of the time those questions produce the same vanilla answers from everyone.

We value authenticity and community and blah blah blah. Cool, so does literally every other ‘ok’ brand on the internet.

I want to know the stuff underneath that. The conviction that existed before the business did. The thing that happened, the specific moment or experience or realization, that made this founder incapable of doing anything else with their life. The belief that’s so baked into how they operate that they don’t even think to mention it because it’s just how they are.

That’s the lore. And it’s almost never on the surface. You have to dig for it.

Sometimes the founder doesn’t even know it’s there because they’ve been so busy building the business that they forgot to pay attention to why this business and not some other one.

When we find it, everything changes. The whole brand clicks.

The messaging stops feeling like marketing and starts feeling like a point of view.

The visual identity stops being a mood board and starts being an atmosphere.

The customer experience stops being a funnel and starts being a world.

And the thing I’ve noticed that keeps reinforcing my lore whore tendencies, is that the brands we build with this depth don’t have to work as hard.

They don’t have to constantly market themselves or chase trends or hack algorithms or manufacture urgency. People just... gravitate, because when something has real depth, people want to be near it.

I think the reason this matters more right now than it ever has is because we’re drowning in AI-generated e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

And I’m not saying that from a soapbox, I’m saying it as someone who uses AI every single day in my business and genuinely loves what it can do. But there’s a difference between using a tool and letting the tool use you, and right now a lot of brands are doing the later.

The result is this ocean of content and branding that looks fine, sounds fine, reads fine, and feels like absolutely luke warm milk.

It’s all surface. No weight. No roots. No lactose. No lore.

And you can tell.

Maybe not consciously, but something in the gut registers the difference between a brand that was assembled from traditional best practices and a brand that was built from lived conviction.

One feels like a catalog and the other feels like a zine.

I keep thinking about this in terms of what I want my own legacy to be.

Not just as a business owner, but as someone who builds things for other people. I don’t want to be known as someone who made pretty brands. I want to be known as someone who built brands with weight. Brands where you could feel my fingerprints on every single detail. Brands where the candle smells like the juicy tomato because someone refused to settle for synthetic.

That’s the thread I’m pulling on.

And the more I tug, the more convinced I am that lore isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the whole game.

One more thing and then I’ll let you go.

You can’t manufacture lore, but you can create the conditions for it to form.

You can be specific instead of generic.

You can be honest about the mess instead of curating it away.

You can build on your own history instead of pretending each piece of content exists in a vacuum.

You can create language around your ideas that gives people words to navigate your world.

You can let things evolve in public instead of disappearing and coming back fully formed.

And you can care about the details to a degree that feels almost unreasonable.

Because unreasonable care is what creates the kind of texture that people can feel.

I didn’t set out to build lore with The Passive Rebel or A.N.T.I.

I set out to build a business.

But somewhere between the thief who stole my workshop, the bots that ate my only viral post, and the coaching program that proved to me that people are selling you snake oil, something accumulated.

Layers formed.

Ididn’t build it on purpose. I let it build me.

That’s the part I think most people miss.

You don’t create lore by sitting down and deciding what your mythology is going to be.

You create it by living and working and making decisions with enough conviction and specificity that the mythology forms around you.

xo

Jess, your self-proclaimed, badge proudly worn, Lore Whore.

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