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MEMO: THE BUSINESS OF FEST

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Recent Memos

Deep Dive: The Business of Fest

On Friday night in September, a famed rapper, producer, designer, and provocateur closed a two-night stand at Soldier Field with a set that ran past three hours: sixty songs, fifteen guests, seventy thousand people, sold out. Billboard’s description was that he “threw his own festival.” There was no presenting sponsor on the poster. There was… Continue reading →

September 5, 2026September 6, 2026

Web Smith

Memo: Who Wears Rowing Blazers?

The honest answer is that almost nobody who rows wears Rowing Blazers, and the brand was never designed for them anyway. It was not an athletic label in the sense that Tracksmith is an athletic label, built by runners for the people who run with them; it was a brand about the costume of belonging,… Continue reading →

August 22, 2026

Web Smith

Memo: The License

A consumer marketplace became a military target this summer. The precedent will outlast the war that set it, it is already crossing into NATO airspace, and the country least prepared for what comes next is the one that invented the fulfillment center. Let me position this correctly. For decades, the idea of dual-use companies (consumer… Continue reading →

August 17, 2026August 17, 2026

Web Smith

NATSEC Roundtable No. 16: The Magazine Problem

The Pentagon gave the defense industry 21 days to fix a supply chain it spent thirty years hollowing out. The memo calls it a production problem. It is a demand problem, and commerce solved that one a decade ago. On August 5, Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg sent the primes a letter with a clock… Continue reading →

August 16, 2026August 17, 2026

Web Smith

New to 2PM? Here is place to start.

The Early Library

Recent Member Briefs

Member Brief: The Warehouse Roof Is The New Perimeter

The premise of this memo: this summer, a Russian national eCommerce logistics network was systematically destroyed by cheap drones, the Kremlin’s own state bank booked the damage as a macroeconomic constraint, and the doctrine is now public. American warehouse operators sit on the same architecture with fewer legal defenses to prevent the same from occurring.… Continue reading →

August 20, 2026August 20, 2026

Web Smith

NATSEC Roundtable No. 15 (Members): A Working Example

Rogue processes about 150,000 pounds of American steel a day in Columbus, Ohio, and is in the middle of an expansion toward a million square feet under one roof. For a manufacturer of that size, in this moment, it has been written about almost not at all. The silence is the story. A manufacturer of… Continue reading →

July 4, 2026

Web Smith

Member Brief: Everlane and The Edge of Fashion DTC

In 1969, Donald Fisher opened a small store on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco that sold Levi’s denim alongside a curated rack of records. He called it The Gap, named for the generation he intended to dress. Forty-two years later, in 2011, Michael Preysman and Jesse Farmer launched Everlane from a small office in SoMa,… Continue reading →

May 17, 2026

Web Smith

Member Brief: Monitoring The Situation

There is a meme, and then there is what the meme actually marks. This member brief is designed exclusively for Executive Members, to make membership easy, you can click below and gain access to hundreds of reports, our DTC Power List, and other tools to help you make high level decisions. Join Here

May 8, 2026May 8, 2026

Web Smith

The Monday letter. Join your colleagues.

COMMERCE SYSTEMS THINKING