Published
thinking,
not content marketing.
We publish essays because case studies lie by omission.
A case study tells you what worked. It does not tell you what we got wrong before the work, what the client tried before they hired us, or which parts of the strategy we stole from someone else's category. The writing section exists to publish the parts an agency would normally cut.
Fourteen people in Brooklyn, working on challenger brands from Series A through Series C. We started writing down our point of view in 2019 because the deck format had stopped being honest. Essays are slower to read, harder to fake, and easier to argue with — which is the point. If you disagree with something here, the reply button works.
— The partners, Amoral LLC
Permissionless Brands: why challenger companies keep launching without permission, and why the agencies serving them still need to ask.
The essay that argued challenger brands no longer wait for category consent before they launch — and that the agency model built to gate-keep that consent is now structurally obsolete. Published on the firm site in September 2023. Reprinted in part by The Drum, quoted in Contagious's Q1 2024 trend report, and cited twice in the Forbes CMO Network long-read on post-acquisition brand collapse.
Across 4,200 words we examine four launches — Glow Bar, Rook Coffee, Fieldlab, and one we cannot yet name — and trace how each bypassed the usual category gatekeepers (trade press, distribution incumbents, incumbent agency research decks) and went straight to a small, defined audience with a position strong enough to be argued with. The argument is not that permission is dead. It is that it has moved from the category to the consumer, and most agency strategy decks are still being written for the old geography.
Four more essays, with the read counts in line.
Published between 2022 and 2024. All written by one of the four founding partners. Sorted newest first.
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June 2024
The 11-Day Strategy: what we cut to make brand work move at the speed of a founder's calendar.
A long internal memo turned public — on the structural reasons a brand strategy engagement should not take 67 days, and the specific cuts we make to ship in 11.
38,400 reads -
February 2024
No junior staff on client work, and what that line on our website actually costs us.
An honest margin breakdown — what a founder-led engagement looks like in billable hours, why we cap headcount at 14, and the three growth levers we have decided not to pull.
22,100 reads -
November 2023
Flat-fee, line-item, no markups: a transparent pricing post-mortem across 87 engagements.
We publish the line items. Every freelance hour, every stock-license, every printer surcharge — across 87 client engagements since 2017. With the numbers that made us uncomfortable.
51,800 reads -
April 2022
A category is a verb: why we stopped writing positioning decks in the noun tense.
The original 2022 essay that pre-figured the Permissionless Brands argument — on why "we are the X for Y" positioning is structurally weak and what to write instead.
18,700 reads
The agencies still asking for permission are not being careful. They are being outflanked by founders who already shipped.— from "Permissionless Brands," September 2023