Don’t be the “Walmart” of your industry just because it’s Trendy…. like seriously, don’t.

Oct 19

Lesson of the Day:

Stick to the Strategy.

The last few months of my business have been interesting.

Some changes in my personal life had me reviewing my systems. Or, more honestly, my lack of them. So I did what I always do when I need to think clearly: I called up a plethora of business friends, mentors, and acquaintances at various stages of their own businesses to talk through my next planning steps.

More often than I wanted, I got the same recommendation. Be an AI-first business. Look at the other creative studios doing it, the ones “making it big,” and follow suit. Otherwise, I was told, my little branding and creative studio would get swallowed whole by the Goliaths of AI-integrated everything.

Then I talked to a retired businessman. Exceptional reputation, decades of output, a genuine love for his craft, and one of the most stellar humans I know. Stellar, but also he is my father-in-law.

After all the meetings on my business I had, he was the last one I spoke to. I lamented on my choices of either being with the AI-trend or watch my business die.

He listened to my tirade and when I needed to gasp for hair, he said simply, “don’t be the Walmart of your industry.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, pointedly curious.

He explained. In his career, he watched businesses chase whatever trendy tooling made them look cutting edge. They chased it, because they all wanted to be the first adopters, the first to control and lead the market, and the first to be seen as the trusted and sought out experts of this new shinny object. And for a moment, it worked. Then as time went by, as the market got familiar with the new shinny object, and others adopted it hoping to also jump on the same train, something interesting happened: all of those businesses started to feel the same. Common. Interchangeable. Not only to the market, but even between themselves. Because they were all doing the same “cutting edge” thing at the same time. Same offers, same product, different colors, different marketing - but not always.

Eventually, buyers split into two groups. Some chose the handful of prestigious businesses that stayed anchored to their values, their quality, their mission. The rest went bargain hunting among the trendy ones, because if they all look alike, why not fight them on price? Those businesses became the “Walmart” of their industry. A catch-all phrase for common, plentiful, and cheap. They’d get their boom, then get stuck fighting everyone else at the bottom.

As famous investor and business man, Alex Hormozi, puts it “If you have a ‘commodity’ offer, you will compete on price. Your Grand Slam Offer establishes you as your own category.” These guys ended up fighting at the bottom for a then-common commodity.

That landed. Right after I’d been gently (and not always so gently) nudged toward going AI-first, this felt like the correction I needed to hear. I am building a unique combination of skills to service the type of client who seeks me to solve it - from brand foundations to design submissions. I enjoyed it and realized I was okay with waiting out this wave, use the parts I felt worked as a tool for my workflow, but kept the actual work - my real passion- for me and the client.

I’ve always seen AI as a tool

Not a co-founder. Not a replacement. A tool. And most people who say “AI” don’t even mean the full field of robotics and artificial intelligence research. They mean: put my business on autopilot. Let the LLM check its own work, post my content, answer my emails, and let me go dance in the Texas sun while it handles the rest.

I didn’t agree. But I wondered if my sturdy little viewpoint, that AI is a tool like any skill set and YOU are still the quality product, was about to get me left behind.

I felt like David with a tiny little slingshot facing the AI-giant, Goliath.

I’ve seen this movie playout before

I watched AI hit the art world in 2022. Painters and sculptors who’d spent 10,000-plus hours becoming excellent at their craft were told it was all a bit silly now. Train a model on their style, and anyone could conjure their own Picasso, their own Michelangelo, their own Yayoi Kusama.

Game designer Greg Rutkowski became the most infamous case. His style was requested in AI generators more than legends like Picasso or Da Vinci, all without his consent, to the point that he struggled to tell his own real work apart from the AI knockoffs, according to Decrypt. He and other artists ended up building tools just to help people identify what was actually theirs.

The art world revolted. Every timeline was full of artists watching a decade of dedication get treated like a prompt away from irrelevant.

I was building an art book publishing venture at the time. I remember the total futility. “No one’s going to want our books. We were already told no one wants physical books except the fuddy-duddies who collect them. And now this?”

We had a meeting. My co-founders, older and wiser than me, some of them deep in Web3 excitement, felt like something was shifting. Nobody could say exactly what. Somehow, out of all our worried meetings, one founder’s optimism refused to quit. I was 24. He was in his 40s. He’d clearly seen something I hadn’t yet.

So we kept going. Here’s how it actually played out:

2020 — The idea for the book publishing venture began. I helped where I could, thrilled, though I wouldn’t become a co-founder until later.

2021 — People were obsessed. We posted, we talked, we recruited more artists, we negotiated with partners.

2022 — Nobody wanted fine art anymore. AI had “solved” it.

2023 — Fatigue set in. No matter how many times people prompted Midjourney or DALL-E, real life kept getting in the way of getting the hand right, the head angle right, the lighting right, the thousand tiny decisions an artist spends decades learning to make invisible. Even the “wins” had a weird scribble to them. A tell.

2024 — Artists were wanted again. More than ever. The speed of AI still couldn’t touch the mastery of something hand-drawn, hand-painted, hand-considered. Artists got their halo back, the way Renaissance painters once carried it. Michelangelo said the true work of art is but a shadow of divine perfection. That reverence returned.

That reverence has only grown. Hermès built a campaign around hand-drawn illustrations by French illustrator Lida Merad, animating their website to tie the luxury brand back to its foundation: quality, artisanship, the human hand.

I understood, finally, why my co-founder was so calm back in 2022. He’d lived through other technology waves in the 1990s. He knew there would always be a gap only real artistry could fill. He believed it about physical books despite the eulogies, and he was right about that too.

Now we’re doing it again, at a bigger scale

By 2024, the second AI wave hit business the way it hit art in 2022. Tech companies promised investors and owners a cheaper, more efficient alternative. A 24/7 employee with no salary, no needs, no complaints.

OpenAI positioned itself as everyone’s helpful best friend, trained on the internet’s collective voice. Claude positioned itself as the professional’s tool, built for the engineer, leaning into the pride of expertise. Two giants, two completely different brands, and now half of social media is sorted into “team ChatGPT” or “team Claude” camps. (That’s a branding conversation for another day.)

So businesses implemented it. And by 2026, accessibility turned into ubiquity, and ubiquity started to look cheap. People noticed the breakage. They noticed that when the AI-generated code failed, no human on the team fully understood why. The “helpful helper” started to feel like a liability with a monthly invoice.

But the sobering up has started. Companies are rehiring the engineers they let go, because it turns out category-of-one professionals are hard to replace with an average. The hype is cooling. The bill is coming due. Businesses are remembering they sell to humans, and humans still need humans to build that bridge.

Look at Duolingo, Klarna, Ford, IBM, Shopify, and many more giants of industry who are backtracking from it’s AI-first and re-hiring for the positions they fired.

If these giants are doing it, what about the companies that are not making their revenue numbers?

Next, add in the cost of tokens, the cost of fixing what breaks (see: AWS’s own AI tooling taking down a huge swath of the internet in late 2025 and early 2026), and the human hand is regaining its prestige. Maybe even faster than it did for the artists, because now the whole business world got to watch it happen in real time.

The cracks in AI-first businesses are showing. Even where they’re not showing yet, the market is tired of squinting to find them. People are looking for what’s real, tangible, and human again. “No AI, made with my own two hands” content is quietly having a moment on social media, while overall social usage keeps sliding as people burn out on a feed that’s half bot. Long-form content, reading, and digital detoxing are all trending back up.

The businesses that made an early shift, from AI-first to AI-as-a-tool-alongside-real-people, are the ones weathering this correction. The ones leaning hardest into their humanity, their hard-earned skill, their non-outsourceable taste, are doing well.

Averages will never make you scarce

Here’s the part I keep coming back to. AI, like anything cheap and everywhere, starts to read as cheap and everywhere, even if it isn’t. This wave is the 2022 Art World Crisis, just wearing a business suit and playing out at a much bigger scale.

AI isn’t as magic as we were sold. It’s genuinely useful as a tool in the hand of an artist or a business owner who already knows what they’re doing. But we don’t buy tools. We buy the judgment, the values, the quality control, the mission behind the brand we’ve come to trust over time.

There’s a mechanical reason for this, too. AI is built to give you the best solution out of an average of everything it’s seen. That’s its whole design. Which means if you want to be unique, if you want to stand out, you cannot lean on a tool built for averages to define who you are. You can use it. You cannot outsource your point of view to it.

A lot of businesses won’t survive this shakeout, same as a lot of employees didn’t survive the first one. But the ones with real skill, real taste, and a real point of view have more leverage than they’ve had in years. In a market flooded with AI “slop,” being one of one is worth more than it’s been in a long time. Even the forensic financial world has started circling back around some AI companies, quietly checking whether the impact and business model they promised investors was ever as real as the pitch deck. Everyone got sold a little bit of magic. Now investors, owners, and employees are all paying the bill in some form. Everyone, that is, except the artists who never sold out their hand in the first place. They’re the ones getting hired by Hermès.

So what do we do with all of this?

Crimson Creates Studio is an end-to-end branding and creative studio, and I built it on purpose, not by accident. I trained as a fine artist at the Art Students League of New York and studied illustration at SVA. I built my design chops the long way, as an intern at a non-profit that worked with celebrities to bring their message forward. I ran businesses and sat across the table from C-suite stakeholders in corporate before I ever called myself a founder. Every one of those skills was aimed, deliberately, at this studio.

Clients work with me directly. I’ve recently brought someone on to help build out more robust systems and run the financial side, and another to help with marketing. Everything else, I do myself, and I take real pride in that. The hubris of a business owner is always figuring out when to delegate. I’m happy doing what I love, with the people I love doing it for. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.

So when the world tells businesses like mine to just follow the trend, here’s my counter-advice. Talk to a lot of people. The ecomm bros with their playbooks, the seasoned operators, the retired ones who’ve actually lived through a few of these cycles and can tell you which parts repeat. Then sit down with your own values and vision. Look honestly at your bottlenecks, your real demands, your real capacity. Plan from there.

Don’t let anyone shift you because of hype. And don’t shift yourself because of hype, either, unless the trendy tool actually serves your vision without asking you to trade away your values or your quality control.

That’s the whole game. Vision, values, visuals, in that order. Not the other way around.

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If you’re a business owner or creative trying to figure out your own values, vision, and mission before you let a trend decide it for you, that’s exactly the work we do together at Crimson Creates Studio. Reply to this or come find me, I’d love to hear where you’re at.

Let’s Work Together: crimsoncreates.com

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