Imitation, Flattery, and When the Big Brands Get It Wrong

There’s a line that rarely gets drawn clearly enough in the creative world, and yet it makes all the difference: the one between support and authorship. Between being the architect and being the investor.

And yet, we keep seeing it crossed.

Take the recent launch of Under Armour's "Birdie Watching & Golf Society," a campaign that mirrors, too closely, the thoughtfully developed world of Gumtree Golf and Nature. A brand rooted in upcycling, nature, and emotion, now echoed without context by a corporation that didn't live the process. It's a pattern: Like the case of Louis Vuitton and Werner Bronkhorst, or Nike and Joshua Vides. Nobody seems to have figured out the sweet spot of offering a take without fully honoring the story that came before it.

These aren’t isolated moments. They’re symptoms of a system that sees creativity as something to acquire, not something to understand. Too often, we see the larger companies try to blur that line. They mistake funding for vision. Infrastructure for insight. But here’s the truth:

Corporate is not the architect. It’s the investor.

Real creativity, the kind that moves people, shifts culture, and builds worlds, is born in the real world, in the friction of lived experience. It stems from the way someone views the world after loss, after love, after years of noticing what others overlook. It comes from neighborhoods, memories, subcultures, language, and tension. Creativity is human. It’s emotional. It’s layered. And it cannot be systemized.

That’s where the big guy gets it wrong.

Because it’s not always malice. Sometimes it starts with a well-intentioned brainstorm, a room full of people who have lived experiences, who care, who are curious. But in large organizations, even a spark of inspiration can quickly get passed up the ladder, diluted through decks, timelines, and approvals. The further it travels, the easier it becomes to lose sight of where it came from—or who it came from. All it takes is one suggestion in a meeting, one slide in a strategy session, and an idea rooted in someone else's soul ends up on a T-shirt without context.

That’s how independent brands get erased. Not always in the moment of ideation, but in what happens after: the silence, the oversight, the speed. And when it slips through, whether by accident or not, how a company responds becomes everything. Accountability isn’t just damage control—it’s a signal. Of who they are. Of what they value. Of whether they really see the people doing the soul work beneath the surface.

We’ve built systems that aim to manufacture what can only be felt. Brainstorming sessions on tight timelines with big expectations. Optimizing for speed and scalability. We're left as consumers to wonder why the work feels hollow. Why it sounds like something else.

Because the systems we’ve built were never meant to hold soul.

The entities that lead these misguided inspiration are excellent at process, at protection, at platforming. But the moment they confuse themselves with the creator, it sparks extraction instead of empowerment. It yields decks around what once was a deeply personal idea. It packages up someone's lived experience into seasonal campaigns. It runs through the ranks and makes its way into production. And it does all of this while forgetting the one essential truth:

Raw creativity doesn’t come from systems. It comes from someone.

That someone probably didn’t learn their style from a "what if we" meeting. They didn’t develop their voice in a quarterly review. They lived. They made mistakes. They grew up around things that taught them how to see. And when they create, they’re not pulling from moodboards, they’re pulling from memory.

The big guy should never claim that. It should protect it. It should fund it. It should be the scaffolding around the vision, not the one trying to hold the pen.

Because when a company tries to lead the creative process, it almost always skips the part where soul gets developed. It doesn’t know how to sit in uncertainty long enough to find something original. It wants answers. But the most meaningful creative work rarely starts with answers. It starts with questions. With risk. With a gut feeling no one else understands until they see it.

And yes, this requires a shift in power.

It asks the big guy to humble itself. To recognize that the best thing it can do is not lead, but listen. To not dictate, but invest. That the highest contribution a company can make to creativity is creating the conditions for it to survive the chaos it was born in.

Because creativity isn’t clean. It’s not efficient. It doesn’t care about stakeholder alignment. It cares about truth. About impact. About resonance.

And the creators who carry that weight? They need space. Space to feel, to fail, to be human. Because for creativity to thrive, the big guy must invest not just in ideas—but in the human experience itself. It must give people the time, permission, and trust to live fully, to explore, to be out in the world where inspiration is born. That’s the only soil where originality grows.

So let’s get this straight: Corporate is not the architect. It never was. It’s the investor. And when it embraces that role with humility and clarity, something amazing happens: It stops trying to own the fire and learns how to keep it burning.