Craft Feels Indulgent Until It Becomes Your Moat

There’s a corner in Soho that always brightens my day.

At Spring & Mercer, photorealistic advertisements are painted by hand. Even in this week’s crazy heat wave, artists are replacing Jacob Elordi and Bleu de Chanel with a Coach bag on a stack of books.

It amazes me to see them paint (I stopped for pictures even in this heat 🥵) and after a morning of tough phone calls with portfolio founders, it felt validating too.

Turning down mass manufacturing (eg billboard printing) is hard. Compared to handcrafting, it’s quicker, cheaper, easier, less risky, and the results are often ‘good enough.’ The feedback loop is accelerated, but it also sets a ceiling on quality and makes you ‘average’.

Real craft takes sacrifice, patience and a focus on the long game vs. quick wins. It’s more stressful (a paint brush will make more mistakes than a printer). And because the feedback loop is slower, it leaves so much more room for self doubt to creep in. Was the extra budget worth it? Are my competitors racing past me while I slow down? Am I trying to fix something that wasn’t broken?

But when you get it right, craft is always worth the investment. Hand-painted ads scream luxury, aspiration, taste (the word of 2026 for a reason ;), and confidence in who the brand is and who the buyer is. If these were printed billboards, I would have glanced and moved on. Now here I am, writing about Coach and Chanel for free.

“Craft is king” is easy to say and agree with in theory. I know it’s harder when you’re in the trenches with people shouting at you from every direction to take the shortcut – license the solution/ hire the average engineer/ outsource your marketing. Forging ahead through the chaos is a muscle built with time and experience.

Some of the best founders look indulgent and petulant at the outset, fixated on their ‘vision’. Doubters mention the copycats and imitators, but they know their product will be better and different. They know they have to balance the need for speed with the art of craft.

Tradeoffs are real:

• Delaying a feature launch so you can make the UI more delightful or improve the design
• Curating a distinctive brand personality that turns some customers off, but lights up your ICP
• Skipping Alpha for a hardware launch while your VCs are pushing you to scale faster (guilty… sometimes 😉)

Every decision is situation and customer dependent, and sometimes speed to market is the deciding factor in who wins. But over the long haul, brand matters and tiny incremental decisions can dilute. Brand and trust can be the moat! (Let’s be honest – most handbags and perfumes are made of the same stuff, but can have vastly different prices regardless of the inputs.)

The painters’ sign says “Danger – Trust the Process.” It’s a good lesson for company-building too.